Breaking the Silent Partnership: Businesswomen in Popular Fiction

Abstract

ROM the i 86os through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, American women of the middle class moved in ever increasing numbers from the domestic sphere into the marketplace. The federal census, among other sources, tells us that a good many pursued careers in business-not only as saleswomen and typewriters but also as entrepreneurs, merchants, industrialists, and financiers. The signs of this change begin to emerge as well in fiction. Yet the new character types of the independent careerwoman only appear to reflect their originals in the workplace. A closer look reveals that portraiture of businesswomen is shaped by a characteristic ambivalence on the part of the middle-class writer, as I shall argue in a discussion of two popular novels, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (I 871) and Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman (i9i i). My discussion of the structure and assumptions of these novels depends on their social context, on evidence of predominant ideologies of women's work and woman's sphere. I should like further to suggest how characters in the novels appear when set against biographical portraits of women whose careers both inspired and disturbed Phelps and Deland. The Silent Partner and The Iron Woman encourage us to reconsider women's work in the marketplace through the growth period of American industrialism. They invite us to ask how the doctrine of the separate spheres has not so much described as distorted the lives of female breadwinners, both in and beyond fiction. When Deland sketched the central character of The Iron Woman, she created an anomaly, if not a monster. The masterful owner-operator of the Maitland Works is female. The proof: she has borne a child. But is Sarah Maitland, with her broken