"Little" Maida: The Heroine Progresses

While readers of the Quarterly are familiar with the effects of the women's movement on literary study, they may not be conscious of parallel achievements in the field of history. Like feminist studies of literature, women's history seems to have gone through several phases, beginning with the search for female contributors, followed by the documentation of women as victims. Now many practitioners of women's history like myself have reached a third phase, the attempt to understand women's experience on their own terms. In other words, we are in a stage of our study where we are trying to piece together the texture of earlier women's lives. Diaries and letters, quilts and portraits have given us insights into the lives of millions of anonymous women who lived before us.

As Quarterly readers know, one area where American women have been well represented for a long time has been in the reading and writing of children's literature. Since at least the early nineteenth century, women have been charged with the education of children—inside the home and in the schools. Their socially defined role as educators, as well as the belief that women have an intuitive affinity for and knowledge of children, may have led to a fortuitous match between the female writer and the youthful reader. It certainly led many female writers to write books that reveal much of interest to women's historians.

Among the types of young people's literature, series books have long been a staple. The quintessential series of boys' books in the late nineteenth century was, of course, the books by Horatio Alger. It is a commonplace to acknowledge that Alger's books provided heroes who both reflected and encouraged the male values in a society smitten with Social Darwinism. But what of young girl readers? As a practitioner of women's history, I began to wonder where they turned for heroines who reflected and encouraged female values.

Imagine my delight, then, in discovering an ad announcing the reprint of the 1868 juvenile novel, Elsie Dinsmore. "While their brothers read Horatio Alger, Nick Carter and the latest Buffalo Bill adventure, girls had their own special set of heroines, such as Martha Finley's enormously popular Elsie Dinsmore.

As I thought about the potential significance of Elsie and determined to make her acquaintance, I also began to consider the larger picture of the series heroine. Most young people probably read more "popular" fiction than classics. Their favorite characters serve as one of the types of role models girls encounter at an impressionable age. Therefore, I have developed a long-range project tracing the development of the series heroine from Elsie Dinsmore to the contemporary period in terms of what they reveal about the history of women. I have, so far, examined three series—the Elsies, the Patty Fairfield books by Carolyn Wells, and the Maida books by Inez Haynes Irwin. Their books were written over almost a century, between the 1860's and the 1950's.

Critics of children's literature including R. Gordon Kelly and Anne Scott MacLeod have described the value of juvenile books to the cultural historian. Both authors examine codes of behavior that reveal what adults expected from children and that offered prescriptions for socialization into the adult world. Codes of behavior are particularly discernable in the girls' series considered here.

Elsie embodied stereotyped feminine virtues—chastity, filial obedience, a world encompassed by her (extended) family, and an intense preoccupation with evangelical Christianity. Although Elsie seems submissive in the extreme, she manages to exert great power over her family and friends through her religious preaching and example. So significant is this preaching that, by the time Martha Finley ended the twenty-eight book series in 1909, the novels had become virtually without plot or characterization. Rather, the author used Elsie's voice to inflict upon her readers incessant lectures on the Bible and an extremely jingoistic version of American history.

Elsie was clearly out of step with the times. It was time for her to retire from her role as heroine for young girls and...