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MY WIFE AND I; OR, HARRY HENDERSON’S HISTORY (1871) harriet beecher stowe (1811–1896) While her fame rests securely on her abolitionist sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Stowe was a prolific writer of fiction, sketches, and essays, and her interest in the reform movements of her era was wide-ranging.Her complex relationship with woman’s rights, in particular, is reflected in part in the familial debate that surrounded her. Stowe’s older sister Catharine Beecher was a selfstyled authority on domestic economy and a defender of women’s domestic roles; in 1871 she published an antisuffrage treatise, Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Profession.At the other pole was Stowe’s stepsister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, who helped establish woman suffrage associations in New England and developed close ties to Stanton,Anthony,and the NWSA.Anthony thought highly enough of Stowe’s suffrage sentiments that she invited her to be a corresponding editor of The Revolution, but Stowe declined when Anthony refused to change the journal’s title.26 Stowe’s sentimental novel My Wife and I is narrated by an open-minded male journalist and has a foot in each sister’s camp: though supportive of the principle of woman suffrage, the novel—primarily through the character of Ida—evinces a profound mistrust of radical activism and immediate enfranchisement, arguing instead for a gradual introduction of women to the political process. The stereotyped suffragist characters—the aggressive Audacia Dangyereyes (modeled after the infamous free love advocate, presidential candidate,and newspaper editorVictoriaWoodhull) and the naive Mrs.Cerulean (perhaps a caricature of Hooker)—as well as the narrative’s class discourses, owe as much to antisuffrage as to prosuffrage rhetoric. 51 R Chapter XXIII: I Receive a Moral Shower-Bath [A]s I was sitting in my room, busy writing, I heard a light footstep on the stairs, and a voice saying, “Oh yes! this is Mr. Henderson’s room—thank you,” and the next moment a jaunty, dashing young woman, with bold blue eyes, and curling brown hair, with a little wicked looking cap with nodding cock’s-feather set askew on her head, came marching up and seated herself at my writing-table. I gazed in blank amazement. The apparition burst out laughing, and seizing me frankly by the hand, said— “Look here, Hal! don’t you know me? Well, my dear fellow, if you don’t it’s time you did! I read your last ‘thingumajig’ in the Milky Way, and came round to make your acquaintance.” I gazed in dumb amazement while she went on, “My dear fellow, I have come to enlighten you,”—and as she said this she drew somewhat near to me, and laid her arm confidingly on my shoulder, and looked coaxingly in my face. The look of amazement which I gave, under these circumstances , seemed to cause her great amusement. “Ha! ha!” she said, “didn’t I tell ’em so? You ain’t half out of the shell yet. You ain’t really hatched.You go for the emancipation of woman; but bless you, boy, you haven’t the least idea what it means—not a bit of it, sonny, have you now? Confess!” she said, stroking my shoulder caressingly. “Really, madam—I confess,” I said, hesitatingly,“I haven’t the honor—” “Not the honor of my acquaintance, you was going to say; well, that’s exactly what you’re getting now. I read your piece in the Milky Way, and, said I, that boy’s in heathen darkness yet, and I’m going round to enlighten him. You mean well, Hal! but this is a great subject. You haven’t seen through it. Lord bless you, child! you ain’t a woman, and I am—that’s just the difference.” Now, I ask any of my readers, what is a modest young man, in this nineteenth century,—having been brought up to adore and reverence woman as a goddess— to do, when he finds himself suddenly vis-à-vis with her, in such embarrassing relations as mine were becoming? I had heard before of Miss Audacia Dangyereyes, as a somewhat noted character in New York circles, but did not expect to be brought so unceremoniously, and without the least preparation of mind, into such very intimate relations with her. “Now, look here, bub!” she said, “I’m just a-going to prove to you, in five minutes , that you’ve been writing about what you don’t...

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