#GAReads | Encouraging Women’s Voices: Part 2
“A Woman’s Plea: Let’s Raise Our Voices!”:
In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.” Although he was referring specifically to sentimental novelists, his letter expressed the larger belief that women’s writing was not worth reading or publishing, that their words and ideas didn’t matter, and that their work was, to use the language of Hawthorne, “trash.”
As a historian, I see this playing out not only in the antebellum period, but also in the postwar era when I read letters to the editor.
Read Kimberly Probolus’ full article at The New York Times here…