Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

Alison Piepmeier's Out in Public describes the “outing” of women's bodies…[that] carried a range of possible meanings, the deployment of which depended on a network of factors including race, class, the particular historical moment, the context within print culture, and the framing narratives. (pp. 1–2) Piepmeier addresses limitations in interpretation of twentieth-century scholarship of women's history of this era that has spoken less of a range or spectrum of possible meanings of women's public embodiment and has, instead, tended to view nineteenth-century social, political, and gender organization through interlocking sets of binary lenses: the public and private spheres, and agency and victimization. (p. 2) Applying twenty-first-century scholarship and utilizing contemporary feminist thought, she argues that some women eluded confinement in the designated domestic sphere and negotiated development of a public identity that defied the limitations of these lenses while avoiding censure for direct challenge of contemporary gender roles. Her study employs literary critical analysis of selected primary sources by Anna Cora Mowatt (1819–1871), Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), Sojourner Truth (c. 1797–1883), Ida B. Wells (1861–1931), and Sarah Hale (1788–1879) as representations of the experience and contribution of white and black women; a detailed reading of the documents informs Piepmeier's interpretation of “the modalities of embodiment…[that] are multiple, transitional, strategic, playful, contested” (p. 2). Spanning the nineteenth century, the lives and careers of these five women provide the historical perspective necessary to understand how the selected texts “present the publicly enacted female body as a critical component of nineteenth-century culture” (p. 213). A cogent biographical sketch illustrates how each woman developed a “public enactment of the female body” (p. 17). As an able practitioner of third-wave feminist methodology, Piepmeier provides summaries of the scholarship that informs the focus of her text in detailed text notes (pp. 219–54); the inclusive bibliography lists the works of the old and new scholarship as well as fundamental biographical works for each of the five women.