The nature of woman and the development of American folklore

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between women and folklore in America on ideological, social, metaphoric, and disciplinary levels. Initial observations tie women into American folklore studies in three major ways: as a study of women, a study by women, and a womanly study. It goes on to investigate the intellectual climate of the late 19th century, with its focus on sex and gender, and the scientific doctrines, which prescribed social and organizational behavior, which brought this into being. Through analogies and ‘congruities,’ the methodology of late Victorian science, women became connected with others on the lower end of the evolutionary scale: plants, animals, children—and the folk. This resonance between women and the folk explains the numbers of women drawn to the American Folklore Society; it also proposes a feminized identity for the study of Folklore itself. Implications of these connections at the formative stage of the Society are explored.