Hale, Sarah Josepha | Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett (essay date 1990)
Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "Two Visions of the Republic" in Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 17-37.
[In the following excerpt, Bardes and Gossett note the importance of community and comment on the role of women in Hale's novel Northwood.]
Six years before Tocqueville makes similar observations on the status of American women, Squire Romelee, the voice of wisdom in Sarah Josepha Hale's Northwood, comments:
I presume you will not find, should you travel throughout the United States, scarcely a single female engaged in the labors of the field or any kind of out-door work as it is called. And the manner in which women are treated is allowed to be a good criterion by which to judge of the character and civilization of a people. Wherever they are oppressed, confined, or made to perform...
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