Memoranda and Documents: The Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Paradoxes of Piety in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

DAVID SCHUYLER's Inventing a Feminine Past (NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY, September, 1978), an attack on Ann Douglas' The Feminization of American Culture, was a lively moment in the increasingly heated scholarly controversy about the nineteenth-century American woman. After noting the praise initially lavished on Feminization, Schuyler censured the book as a piece of feminist mythmaking, imprecise historicism, tendentious literary analysis, and pedestrian psychology.1 However, in this corrective to Douglas, Schuyler did not offer an interpretation to replace hers. Nor did he judge Douglas' thesis against the often contradictory arguments made during the past two decades by other commentators on the American woman. More significantly, Schuyler said little about the long-debated topic which is one of Douglas' chief concerns-woman's role in the liberalization of American religion, as manifested in the sentimental-domestic novel and in the larger sphere of culture and popular piety. A brief review of some prominent investigations of this topic reveals two contrasting critical camps: the feminist and the feminine, in or between which most scholars can be placed. Despite Schuyler's judgment that Douglas has a feminist orientation, she can be more properly placed in the feminine camp, since she takes a rather negative view of some of the same women praised by others as heralds of American feminism. According to the feminist interpretation, romantic liberalism