Trailblazing Women!

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Novelist The author of the most read and most controversial novel of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe produced in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) the first great American literary phenomenon: only the Bible sold more copies in nineteenth-century America, and the novel became the first American work of literature that achieved worldwide cultural saturation. It is the first great social purpose or political novel in America that served to coalesce (and polarize) attitudes toward race that could be considered a contributing factor in the outbreak of the American Civil War. Few writers, either male or female, have ever been as forceful or as influential as Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, the daughter of Lyman Beecher, one of the best-known clergymen of his day. She attended the Hartford Female Seminary, run by her older sister Catherine, where she received an education in the classics, languages, and mathematics, subjects usually reserved for male students. In 1832, she joined her father, who had become the president of Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary. There, she met Calvin Ellis Stowe, a widower and professor at the seminary. They married in 1836 and raised seven children together. It was across the border in Kentucky that Stowe would view the impact of slavery directly. She also listened to the stories of the fugitive slaves who sheltered at the Stowe home after escaping to the North on the Underground Railroad. In 1850, Stowe moved with her family to Brunswick, Maine, where her husband was teaching at Bowdoin College. When the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law mandating the return of escaped slaves in the North, Stowe became determined to write a story about the problem of slavery, stating, “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak … I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.” The first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in serial form in The National Era newspaper from June 1851 to April 1852 and in book form in March 1852. In less than a year, the novel had sold an unprecedented three hundred thousand copies. Stowe’s ability to dramatize the emotional and physical effects of slavery on individuals, so much more effective than any previous abolitionist tract, electrified readers, exciting great adulation in the North and virulent attack in the South as well as praise from around the world. Thomas Macaulay in England declared her novel “the most valuable addition America has made to English literature.” Tolstoy considered it the highest achievement ever of moral art. Dramatizations, without Stowe’s authorization, flooded the stage, and it has been estimated that between 1853 and 1930, it never ceased to be performed. Stowe answered critics who charged her with exaggeration and invention of the plight of her characters in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), which documented the abuses she had dramatized. Stowe would take up the cause of slavery again in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) before retreating from overtly political subjects in novels that drew on her memories of childhood in New England, including The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), and Old Town Folks (1869). She would continue to publish novels, stories, articles, and essays into the 1890s. Amy Tan (1952–) Essayist, Novelist, Short Story Author A novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, Amy Tan is a critically acclaimed and widely read contemporary chronicler of the Chinese American experience, particularly the lives and conflicts of women, which she explored in her best-selling novel The Joy Luck Club (1989). Born and raised in Oakland, California, Tan was expected to become a physician by her Chinese-born parents. Tan majored in English at San Jose State in California, and, after graduate work at the University of California–Berkeley, she began her career as a technical writer. She turned to fiction as a distraction from the demands of her work, inspired from reading Louise Erdrich’s novel of Native American family life, Love Medicine. Tan’s hobby resulted in The Joy Luck Club, which linked stories told by four Chinese, immigrant women and their four American-born daughters, who struggle to bridge the generational and cultural gap. The novel stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for nine months. One reviewer observed that the book “is that rare find, a first novel that you keep thinking about, keep telling your friends about long after you’ve finished reading it.” In 1993, Tan coauthored the screenplay for the film version, the first major movie to treat the Chinese American experience. Tan’s follow-up, The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), concerns a daughter who learns of her mother’s Chinese past. The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) focuses on the relationship between two sisters. Tan’s fourth novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001), returns to the theme of the cultural clash between a Chinese mother and her American-born daughter. Saving Fish from Drowning (2005) examines American tourists visiting China and Burma, while The Valley of Amazement (2013) returns to mother–daughter relations set among the courtesans of Shanghai in the early twentieth century. In 2017, Tan published Where the Past Begins, a memoir that recounts her childhood, her relationship with her mother, and her evolution as a writer. Tan’s achievement over a productive career has been to demonstrate the power exerted by cultural heritage and the search for some kind of constructive synthesis between the past and the present, between generations, and between languages as well as the roles that can limit us but can adapt to suit experience.