Feminism in Literature | Women in the 19th Century - Sylvia D. Hoffert (Essay Date 1995)

SYLVIA D. HOFFERT (ESSAY DATE 1995)

SOURCE: Hoffert, Sylvia D. Introduction to When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Right Movement in Antebellum America, pp. 1-14. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Hoffert argues that American women who demanded a voice in national and domestic affairs in the first half of the nineteenth century created a philosophy that escaped the narrow confines of the ideology of Republican Motherhood, enabling women of future generations to enter public life.

Let me begin with a fable. “There once lived in a Farm Yard a great many Roosters and Hens, and it chanced one morning that a young Hen with a very fine voice began to crow. Thereupon all the Roosters hurried together and solemnly declared that there was nothing so dreadful as a Crowing Hen! Now there was in the Yard a Rooster who had always been feeble and could only cackle, but when the...

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