A Jury of Her Peers Quotes

“Frances Watkins Harper (1825-1911) wrote to Brown in prison, stayed with his wife for two weeks before his execution, and made him the subject of her early forays into fiction. Harper was a free black woman raised in Baltimore by an aunt and an evangelistic Methodist uncle who directed a well-known school, the William Wat-kins Academy for Negro Youth. She had studied there until the age of thirteen, and began early to write poems and essays. After 1850, however, her life in Baltimore was threatened by the hostile environment of the Fugitive Slave Act, and she left to become a teacher, first in Ohio and then in Philadelphia, where she began to publish in the abolitionist press. Three of her poems were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and “To Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe” thanked the author herself: For the sisters of our race
Thou'st nobly done thy part
Thou hast won thyself a place
In every human heart.27”
― Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers

“Uncle Tom's Cabin inspired outrage in the proslavery South, and its political message far dominated its literary merits. Some parents forbade their children to read it; “it was not allowed to be even spoken of in our house!” Grace King of New Orleans remembered. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a monster to scare children with, a “hideous, black, dragon-like book that hovered on the horizon of every Southern child.”13 Southern women writers responded with pious self-justification and angry self-defense. Between 1852 and i860, they published nine “anti-Tom” novels, which feature loyal and contented slaves, benevolent plantation owners, pious death scenes of devoted and beloved mammies, dire warnings of the pitfalls of freedom, and an emphasis on the rewards to be found in heavenly mansions where master and slave shall be equal.14 Their emphatic Christianity is actually indoctrination in white supremacy, and behind their glorification of the saintly and powerful planter's wife is a recurring fear of slave insurrections.”
― Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers

“Warren published several plays—The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), and The Group (1775)—in the Boston newspapers under the signature “A Lady from Massachusetts.” The Group, published in book form as well, satirized the Tory governing council that represented the British government in Boston. In her list of dramatis personae, Warren caricatured council members, citizens, and writers under such names as Hum Humbug, Sir Sparrow Spendall, Brigadier Hateall, and Scriblerius Fribble, and noted that they were attended by “a swarm of court sycophants, hungry harpies, and unprincipled danglers, collected from the neighboring villages, hovering over the stage in the form of locusts … the whole supported by a mighty army and navy from Blunderland, for the laudable purpose of enslaving its best friends.” This blunt comic invective shows how forcefully Warren could express her political views in prose.”
― Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers

“Anne Bradstreet happened to be one of the first American women inhabiting a time and place in which heroism was a necessity of life, and men and women were fighting for survival both as individuals and as a community. To find room in that life for any mental activity … was an act of great self-assertion and vitality. To have written poems … while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of the wilderness, was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.”
― Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers