Christine: Or Woman's Trials and Triumphs

Introduction

ix Introduction The only painful thought that filled her heart was the knowledge that she could do so little, and with words of power she endeavored to inspire her hearers with a desire to seek out and relieve the distressed , as well as to press forward to claim the wider field which she pointed out as before them.—Laura Curtis Bullard, Christine (199; emphasis added) When Laura Curtis Bullard wrote Christine: Or Woman’s Trials and Triumphs she created one of antebellum America’s most radical heroines: a woman’s rights leader. Through the creation of her unconventional title character, Curtis Bullard gave voice to her own support for female suffrage, careers, and economic independence, which was termed the “woman’s rights” movement in the mid-nineteenth century and was considered scandalous , even sinful, by many Americans.1 Curtis Bullard was twenty-five when Christine, her second novel, was published in 1856, and she was the editor of a newspaper for women, the Ladies ’ Visitor. She continued her career after she was married and became a mother, and in 1870 she succeeded Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony as editor of the suffrage newspaper the Revolution, publishing essays about the social problems caused by women’s inequality that she had earlier dramatized in Christine. Christine is written in the tradition of the bildungsroman and the reform novel of the nineteenth century. In an era when x Introduction women were considered to “unsex” themselves by public speaking , Christine sympathetically portrays a young woman who defies her family to join the lecture circuit for female suffrage and education. Curtis Bullard depicts her heroine’s public career as a natural extension of women’s charitable and reform work in the nineteenth century, thus asserting the “true womanhood” of woman’s rights leaders at a time when they were reviled by many middle-class Americans. While Curtis Bullard was editor of the Revolution, she was accused of adultery in the New York press, and the rumors resurfaced again as part of the notorious Beecher-Tilton trial. She spent her later years in less publicly prominent ways, writing essays, translating novels, and maintaining her friendships in the transatlantic literary world. Although she had once been well known, Curtis Bullard and her work fell from history, and she was relegated to the level of footnote, if mentioned at all, in American literary and political histories. Until this edition, Christine had remained out of print since it was first published in 1856, and little biographical information had been known about Curtis Bullard.2 Literary critic and cultural historian David S. Reynolds argues that “of all the oversights of literary and social historians of America , few are more heinous than the almost complete neglect of Laura Curtis Bullard” (Beneath 393). The goal of this edition is to introduce a new generation of readers to Curtis Bullard and her novel Christine. Laura Jane Curtis: Novelist and Newspaper Editor Laura Jane Curtis née Bullard was born in Freedom, Maine, on 21 November 1831.3 She was the eldest of the five children of Lucy Winslow Curtis and Jeremiah Curtis, who believed in political engagement and entrepreneurship (Mosher 17).4 The Curtises moved their young family to the northern Maine town of Calais, where Jeremiah Curtis helped to found the city’s first xi Introduction bank and the state’s first railroad. He became a leader in the antislavery Liberty Party, losing campaigns for governor in 1841 and for Congress in 1847 on the Liberty ticket (“Jeremiah Curtis ” 7; “Movement” 3; “National Intelligencer” 2). In 1850 the Curtis family lived in Bangor, where Jeremiah Curtis began the pharmaceutical business that eventually made him a millionaire .5 Curtis Bullard’s maternal grandmother, Charlotte Winslow, was a female physician known for her creation of a morphine-based tonic used to treat teething in children and aches and pains in adults. Although Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup had been sold since 1835, Jeremiah Curtis patented the formula in 1852. Through a barrage of newspaper advertising, trading cards, and recipe booklets, he made his mother-in-law a household name (Holcombe 116). By 1854 Jeremiah Curtis had moved the family pharmaceutical business to New York, which would become home to Curtis Bullard (Holcombe 116). In the same year, at the age of twentythree , Curtis Bullard anonymously published her first novel, Now-a-days!, which drew upon her own knowledge of life...