Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing (review)

In Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing, Laura Laffrado maps the contested figure of female selfhood by analyzing autobiographical texts that simultaneously violate and reaffirm nineteenth-century gender conventions. Focusing on writers who confess to unorthodox behaviors—from unchaperoned travel to cross-dressing to premarital sex—Laffrado shows that they compensate by aligning themselves with the very prescriptions they challenge. In this double movement of transgression and compliance, she finds a self-conscious negotiation of the gendered limits, risks, and readerly expectations that beset women writers. She argues that these works reveal—and in some cases help to "reconfigure"—the tensions surrounding mid-century conceptions of female selfhood (105).

Laffrado considers seven texts, primarily from the 1860s, and provides detailed biographical and historical context, with special emphasis on the gender dynamics of nineteenth-century print culture, the emerging discourse of sexology, and women's participation in the Civil War. The study begins with Sarah Kemble Knight's travel journal, which was published in the nineteenth century, although written in 1704–1705. Although it remains unclear how Knight's eighteenth-century self-representation should inform our understanding of nineteenth-century publicity, Laffrado uses the Journal's publishing history quite effectively, tracing multiple editions from 1825 to 1865 to explore trends shaping an emerging receptivity to US women's writing. The second chapter examines Fanny Fern's early columns from the Olive Branch and True Flag, written before the revelation of her identity as Sara Payson Willis. Laffrado intriguingly proposes that serial publication enabled Willis to endow Fern with a flexible, fluctuating selfhood that gave access to an unusually diverse range of topics and varied relationships with readers. She argues that this portrait of "mutability" should be understood as Willis's theorization of female identity (74).

The third and fourth chapters, the strongest in the book, build on Elizabeth Young's well-known analysis of the Civil War as a fertile context for challenges to gender norms. Laffrado's reading of Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches is usefully framed by a discussion of women's contested entry into the nursing profession. She argues that Alcott fashions herself, via Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle, as simultaneously sister, brother, mother, and spinster—a combination that allows her to displace sexuality from scenes with male patients. Chapter four looks at Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, the memoir of Emma Edmonds, who cross-dressed to fight for the North. Focusing on Edmonds's representation of gender passing as "natural" to her love of country, Laffrado finds that Edmonds appropriates "a patriotric act" as a new sex-gender category (114). She argues that by challenging midcentury gender norms, women like Alcott and Edmonds helped to bring about the sexology movement, an "emerging sexual science [that] attempted to order, contain, and stabilize ambiguous and contradictory sex-gender constructions" (109).

The book concludes by using Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to explore differences in material and ideological constraints for white and black women writers. This approach to questions about race is both awkward and inadequate and serves to underscore the absence of intersectional analysis in earlier chapters. Moreover, although the discussion examines numerous racially based differences, it does not address the central question: How does race shape that double movement of transgression and compliance? That said, one of the high points of the book is the reading of Jacobs's privileging of gentility as a quality that transcends embodiment and her own limited sexual choices (154–55).

Readers may be disappointed that Uncommon Women doesn't do more to advance the scholarly conversations it engages. Discussions of individual writers and texts tend to focus on synthesizing previous interpretations, and many of the book's larger claims would benefit from a more considered approach. For example, where did nineteenth-century women's "visibility … threaten cultural disruption" and where did it...