Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
February 9, 2005
Joan D. Hedrick, Charles A. Dana Professor of History, at Hartford’s Trinity College, received a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for her biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. When Hedrick began the Stowe project, she consciously chose to work on the life of a Hartford figure in order to take advantage of the city’s rich history and its underutilized archives.
A member of the Trinity faculty since 1980, Hedrick holds a bachelor’s degree from Vassar College and a doctorate from Brown University. She has published one other book, Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Work, in 1982. Source: Trinity College.
Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life – In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multi-layered world of nineteenth-century morals and mores, exploring the influence of then-popular ideas of “true womanhood” on Stowe’s upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched and sustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women’s lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, the great social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement, and the entry of women into public life. Source:
Recommended Reading
Associate Professor Peter Baldwin
University of Connecticut, History Department
Organizing Question
“How did Americans advocate or oppose the broader diffusion of equal rights during the Antebellum era?”
Secondary Sources
Foner, The Story of American Freedom, chp. 4 (1998)
When reading Foner’s chapter, compare how the idea of American “freedom” was understood in the context of race relations and gender relations. How did the antislavery and women’s rights movements differ in their use of the idea? What were their similarities and connections?
Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Life, chp. 18 (1994)
When reading Hedrick’s chapter, consider how the various aspects of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s personal situation shaped her understanding of slavery. Consider, for instance, how she was influenced by her experience of being a woman and a mother, by her class status, by her geographic location, and by her religion. How did these influences become visible in the novel?
Primary Sources
This collection of primary sources is intended to complement and illustrate several themes in the Foner and Hedrick chapters. The essays by Beecher and Grimke offer differing opinions on women’s relation to the antislavery movement. The excerpts from Douglass’s speech and from Stowe’s novel present differing views about the nature of African Americans, and about the relationship between race and gender. All the sources except the Fitzhugh excerpt illustrate the importance within the antislavery movement of Protestant Christianity and the great documents of America’s founding. The Fitzhugh piece is an intriguing attempt to rethink the idea of “freedom” in a society committed to slavery. Specific questions accompany the individual documents.
Beecher, excerpt from Essay on Slavery and Abolition (1837)
Douglass, excerpt from “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852)
Fitzhugh, excerpt from Cannibals All! (1857)
Garrison, “To the Public” (1831)
Grimke, excerpt from Appeal to Christian Women of the South (1836)
Stowe, Preface to the First Edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
Stowe, “The Martyr,” from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) |
