Between Womanhood and Citizenship: A Conceptual-Historicist Approach to Antebellum Women's Literature of Protest

Between Womanhood and Citizenship : A Conceptual-Historicist Approach to Antebellum Women's Literature of Protest

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Abstract Subject headings

This study investigates the tension between the antebellum ideas of “womanhood” and “citizenship” as represented in three classic texts of women’s literature of protest: the “Declaration of Sentiments” of the Seneca Falls Convention, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. After a brief discussion of what is meant by “literature of protest” and the reasons why these texts belong to this category, I proceed to read them and their historical context following a method inspired by Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts (Begriffsgeschichte); I approach “womanhood” and “citizenship” as concepts whose semantic fields can and should be analyzed in their diachronic and synchronic dimensions. Here, however, I will focus on the latter, in an attempt to account for conflicts as well as commonalities between them.

About the subject

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