Feminist Journalism in 19th C. Popular Press, Essay Example

Exemplary in her popular erudition on topics having to do with women’s culture in the United States in mid-to-late nineteenth century, the columnist known under the pen name of “Fanny Fern,” or Sarah Willis by birth name was as committed to the success of her own career as she was to the newspaper she wrote for.  A widow left to her own devices in the 1850s, after her husband died of typhoid, Willis made an entrance into journalism as learned careers for women became acceptable. The efficacy of popular press in general was surging during the mid-century, and periodicals offered the primary vehicle of mass communication reaching all sectors of a society constituted largely of recent immigrants with common school education.  The sale of her work, Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Port-Folio sold almost 100,000 copies on both sides of the pond, and fans in England and America enabled Willis to turn her 10 cents per copy in royalties into real estate purchase of her home in Brooklyn, New York. By 1855, Willis was earning a record $100 a week as columnist for the New York Ledger – more than any other colleague.

Feminist subject matter was at the center of Willis’ narrative praxis, and women audiences responded in kind with avid interest in literary weeklies. Much like the social impetus forged by impressionist artist Mary Cassatt of the nineteenth century, Willis’ translation of women’s culture into the realm of the abstract, the reasoned and even the foreign. Indeed, perspective in Cassatt’s paintings reflecting the flat space of Japanese woodcuts offers much in terms of metaphorical interpretation of Willis’ interest in law discussed in her 1858, A Law More Nice Than Just, the implications of statutory code in the life of a woman arrested for donning men’s clothing in public furthers this insistence that expropriation of the ‘logic’ attributed to ‘others’ was in fact the province of women. Willis’ was inspired by early social contract thinker and feminist, Mary Wollenstonecroft whom asserted, “the rights which women in common when men ought to contend for, I have not attempted to extenuate their faults; but to prove them to be the natural consequence of their education and station in society.” Her rhetorical style served to explore controversial polemics pertaining to the rights of women to their children, themselves, as citizens, and as the ‘property’ of men. Emboldened with frankness and existential insight into the paradoxes of American civil liberties were early, and in uncanny jest, in the last instance, she knew that “Independence” as she once entitled her column, was a pen away.

References

Canada, Mark. Fanny Fern (Sarah Willis), 1811-1872. Antebellum and Civil War America, 1784-1865. University of North Carolina at Pembroke.Web.

de la Croix, H. and Tansey, R. G. Gardner’s: Art Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1980.

Walker, Nancy A.  Fanny Fern.  New York: Twayne, 1993.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1792. Web.