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  • Hero Strong” and Other Stories: Tales of Girlhood Ambition, Female Masculinity, and Women’s Worldly Achievement in Antebellum America by Mary F. W. Gibson
  • Corinne T. Field (bio)
“Hero Strong” and Other Stories: Tales of Girlhood Ambition, Female Masculinity, and Women’s Worldly Achievement in Antebellum America. By Mary F. W. Gibson. Edited by Daniel A. Cohen. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2014. Pp. 192. Cloth, $69.00.)

In this edited collection of Mary Gibson’s short stories, historian Daniel Cohen convincingly argues that we cannot appreciate the full range of women’s literary achievement in the 1850s until we recognize the popularity of cheap weeklies that printed original fiction. Known as story papers, these periodicals fueled an insatiable demand for content that empowered young, female authors to experiment with genre and plot. Some, such as Mary Gibson, defied the conventions of literary domesticity to pen striking tales of ambitious, masculine women. By collecting ten such stories written by Gibson between 1853 and 1859, Cohen enables scholars and students to analyze for themselves these long-forgotten tales of “girlhood ambition, female masculinity, and women’s worldly achievement.” He also makes a compelling argument that white, academy-educated New England girls who came of age in the 1850s constituted an “extraordinarily hopeful and ambitious cohort of American girls” (xii). If you read these stories, you will recognize the “new woman” of the postwar period as less novel and the young ladies of the 1850s as more daring than previously acknowledged.

Histories of midcentury girls have generally emphasized pressures young women felt to adhere to a narrow code of feminine behavior centered on piety and domesticity, even as they cultivated physical health and intellectual ability. Michelle Abate, in Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History (2008), identifies the 1850s as the decade when American writers began to celebrate young girls’ boyish antics so long as the girls gave up such behavior during puberty. Crista DeLuzio’s Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830–1930 (2007) and my own Struggle for Equal Adulthood (2014) identify reformers who argued that young men and women should pass through the same stages of maturation, but DeLuzio and I treat this as a radical proposal in the 1850s. Cohen’s recovery of Gibson’s story-paper fiction opens up a new world of popular [End Page 447] reading, demonstrating that girls had regular access to fictional stories that encouraged them to pursue individual ambitions throughout their lives. In Cohen’s account, the fictional heroines in these stories—and the authors who dreamed them up—were not tomboys but masculine women, and they were not marginal but enormously popular.

More research will be needed to uncover the full range of women’s story-paper fiction, but for now Cohen presents Mary Gibson as fairly typical of the “dozens, if not hundreds, of teenage girls and unmarried women in their early twenties” who wrote for cheap weeklies (10). Born in 1835, Gibson was orphaned and raised by a guardian in Woodstock, Vermont. She attended Thetford Academy, a coeducational boarding school, for one year, before moving to Boston to begin her writing career at age seventeen. Between 1852 and 1859, she wrote under several pseudonyms for papers such as the True Flag, the American Union, and the New York Ledger.

Cohen concentrates on Gibson’s heroines who pursue fame as well as heterosexual love. In the most compelling of these stories, a girl named Hero Strong declares to her boarding school friends: “I at least, am not afraid or ashamed to tell my dreams to you. … I must be wealthy and famous” (108). Hero succeeds in becoming a “world-renowned authoress” only to discover that she cannot be happy without also winning the love of Clinton Howell. The plot ends with a happy marriage, but one that Cohen convincingly reads as a subversion of conventional femininity. It is Hero’s achievement, not her beauty or purity, that wins her suitor’s heart.

Cohen borrows the term “female masculinity” from gender theorist Jack Halberstam to analyze how Gibson endowed her female characters and her own literary persona with avowedly masculine traits and attributes.1 Hero Strong speaks with “a deep...

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