Making Hero Strong: Teenage Ambition, Story-Paper Fiction, and the Generational Recasting of American Women's Authorship

During the early 1850s, Mary Gibson, a teenage orphan from Vermont, moved to Massachusetts and became, under the pseudonym Winnie Woodfern, a frequent contributor to several Boston "story papers" (weekly periodicals that mimicked the format of conventional newspapers but were mostly filled with popular fiction). Amid her varied output, she produced a series of tales depicting teenage girls who display masculine traits, violate conventional gender norms, and struggle to fulfill high literary or artistic ambitions. Gibson's early career, and those stories in particular, shed new light on the transformation of women's authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. During the 1860s and 1870s, other scholars have argued, domestic fiction was eclipsed and a new conception of the American woman author as literary artist emerged under the influence of an elite, male-dominated mode of high-cultural production, centered in such exclusive venues as the Atlantic Monthly. The case of Gibson, however, suggests a different account of the transformation of American women's authorship—pushing the new pattern back into the antebellum period and locating its origins in more popular venues. Far from waiting for the elite imprimatur of the Atlantic, young Yankee women such as Gibson rushed to take advantage of the dramatically expanded publishing opportunities provided by Boston story papers of the early 1850s. In doing so, Gibson and her peers not only abandoned many of the inhibitions of "literary domesticity" but also embraced ambitious new models of women's authorship, artistry, and worldly achievement.