maybe it really IS feminist?

I just read an article for another class called “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in 19^th Century America,” by Carroll Smith Rosenberg. It really helped me understand why The Wide, Wide, World is considered feminist by some people.

The article says that strict Victorian rules about sexuality created a basically gender-segregated society. While this was repressive because it restricted women’s sphere to the home, Church, and children, it could also be empowering. We talked about this a little in class, but the article helped illustrate it pretty vividly. Smith Rosenberg argues that women formed supportive, loving, inter-generational communities. These were made up of groups of old friends as well as extended family networks. They passed down knowledge to younger women and were there for each other during important life events like births and deaths. Girls and women became extremely close: girls formed close relationships with each other during childhood and adolescence, particularly at boarding school; they had foster mothers who’d grown up with their own mothers. Friendships with women were often intimate and intense. They lasted whole lifetimes, even when the women were separated geographically. They’d go visit each other for long stretches, sometimes months in rural communities. They’d sleep in the same bed and boot the husband out. Some of these friendships evolved into love affairs. We don’t know if they were consummated, but it doesn’t really matter—they were still in love, and they were very open about it. In their letters, they say things like “imagine yourself kissed a thousand times, my beloved.” One woman wrote to her best friend’s new husband saying that she’d loved this friend the way a husband loves a wife, and she knows the friend felt the same. The really interesting thing is, these women wouldn't have been thought of as lesbians, and husbands (from what we can tell) were not threatened by or jealous of romantic friendships. Before Freud, there wasn’t really the idea that being gay or a lesbian was an identity, a way of being that was different from being heterosexual. Choosing to have gay sex was an act that you committed, separate from your identity as a whole. Now we see being gay as a part of who you are, and you can be gay without having had gay sex. Back then, however, they didn’t think of it this way. Also, women were not seen as having sexual urges, just maternal ones. So a husband could potentially read, “imagine yourself kissed a thousand times, my beloved” in a letter from his wife to a female friend, and not feel romantically threatened. A lot of the aspects of female friendships in the 19^th century are the same today—women get very close to each other and form support and advice networks. But we probably wouldn’t classify a romantic relationship between two woman as anything but sexual, or potentially so.

I’m writing about all of this because the article demonstrated how empowering these close friendships were, and how rooted in domesticity. In this light, I can see how The Wide, Wide, World might be called feminist. Ellen’s close relationship with her mom, which totally excludes the father, is a source of happiness and comfort for both of them. Her friendship with Alice and the friendship that I think might be forming with Nancy are—or have the potential to be—very empowering to her. She’s learning to take care of herself, what values she wants to emulate, what kind of woman she wants to become. She gets emotional support from Alice at a very difficult time in her life. There are some important male characters, but the main characters seem to be predominantly female. It’s a book that excludes the male in a lot of ways, and creates its own, feminine space. This book definitely illustrates how intense and necessary friendships between women were in the 19^th century. The supportive community of women in it can be called feminist.