The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

The liberal defense of culture often involved attacks on women writers and lecturers who they feared were dangerously feminizing society. In 1868 when Henry James reviewed Anna Dickinson’s novel What Answer? in the Nation, he was an aspiring novelist. Dickinson was twenty-six, a year older than James, and she was far more famous than he. She had gained notoriety as a flamboyant and popular public speaker on the lyceum circuit. She had addressed Congress and spoken widely on black civil rights, women’s rights, and temperance. In What Answer? she defended interracial marriage. James attacked Dickinson, but his target was not interracial marriage; he instead denied the capacity of Anna Dickinson—and women writers and reformers in general—to have anything worthwhile to say about racial relations or any other serious public subject. He lumped the books of most American women writers into one “earnest,” “sentimental,” and “didactic” heap. These women used good causes as an excuse to produce bad art.