[In the following essay, Graulich urges renewed critical and popular attention to Holley's fiction, in particular her first novel, My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's.]

According to a 1905 article in the Critic, Marietta Holley “entertained as large an audience … as has been entertained by the humor of Mark Twain.” Today few readers are familiar with Holley's work, though her narrator, the outspoken and strong-minded Samantha Allen, was “one of the most popular characters in American humor, male or female,” and the books which contained her opinions of “Wimmen's Rites” and a number of other social issues had an “enormous sale.” From 1873, when she published My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, to 1914, when she wrote her last book, Samantha on the Woman Question, Holley used Samantha's common sense, quick wit, and sharp tongue to win respect for women, show the importance of women's suffrage, and urge equal treatment before the law. Sharing the goals of her friends, Francis E. Willard and Susan B. Anthony, Holley recognized the persuasive power of comedy. And for this reason, she had a widespread influence on late nineteenth-century attitudes toward women's rights. Only forty years ago, in 1941, The Oxford Companion to American Literature claimed that Holley's “pseudonym, ‘Josiah Allen's Wife,’ was a household word for many years” (emphasis added).

Holley's “tremendous following” heard from Samantha, a self-respecting and independent middle-aged woman. Although she sometimes plays the rural bumpkin, Samantha is wise even when she is ignorant, and through her voice, Holley effectively attacks conventional and narrow thinking. Samantha speaks her mind through both narration and dialogue. When told that “‘it is a shame for a woman to speak in public,’” she thinks, “How dare any man to try to tie up a woman's tongue …” (p. 389). With humor and spirit, she lectures her husband, her friend Betsey, and nearly everyone else she meets. The following long and funny passage from My Wayward Pardner; or, My Trials with Josiah, America, The Widow Bump, and Etcetery (1880), a characteristic interchange between Samantha and Josiah concerning women's rights, allows Samantha to introduce herself to unfamiliar readers in her own voice. Josiah has been “twittin'” her about male superiority, arguing that “‘Wimmen are dretful simple creeters; gossipin', weak, weak-minded, frivolous bein's; extravagant, given to foolish display. … If I was ever proud and tickled about anything in my life, Samantha Allen, I am tickled to think I am a man.’” Samantha responds,

He had been readin' a witherin' piece out of the almanac to me—an awful deep, skareful piece aginst wimmen's suffrage. And feelin' cross and fractious, he did look so awful overbearin' and humiliatin' onto me, on account of my bein' a woman, that I sprunted right up and freed my mind to him. I am very close-mouthed naturally, and say but very little, but I can't stand everything.

While he was talkin' I had been a fixin' a new tow mop that I had been a spinnin' into my patented mop-stick, and had jest got it done. And I riz right up and pinted with it at a picture of the new capitol at Albany that hung over the sink. It was a noble and commandin' gesture (though hard to the wrist). It impressed him dretfully, I could see it did. I had that sort of a lofty way with me as I gestured, and went on in awful tones to say:

“When you look at that buildin', Josiah Allen, no wonder you talk about wimmen's extravagance and foolish love of display, and the econimy and firm common sense of the male voters of the state of New York, and their wise expenditure of public money. When you and a passel of other men get together and vote to build a house costin' nine or ten millions of dollars to make laws in so small that wimmen might well be excused for thinkin' they was made in a wood-shed or behind a barn-door.”

Says I, lowerin' down my mop-stick, for truly my arm was weary—gesturin' in eloquence with a mop-stick is awful fatiguin'—says I, “As long as that monument of man's wisdom and econimy stands there, no man need to be afraid that a woman will ever dast to speak about wantin' to have any voice in public affairs, any voice in the expenditure of her own property and income tax. No, she won't dast to do it, for man's thrifty, prudent common sense and superior econimy has been shown in that buildin' to a extent that is fairly skareful.”

It is a damper onto anybody when they have been a talkin' sarcastical and ironical, to have to come out and explain what you are a doin'. But I see that I had got to, for ever sense I had lowered my mop-stick and axent, Josiah had looked chirker and chirker, and now he sot there, lookin' down at his almanac, as satisfied and important as a gander walkin' along in front of nineteen new goslin's. He thought I was a praisin' men. And says I, comin' out plain, “Look up here, Josiah Allen, and let me wither you with my glancel I am a talkin' sarcastical, and would wish to be so understood!”

Samantha withers Josiah all right, and her sarcastical talkin' withered arguments against women's rights in some twenty books over forty-one years. Although Holley's persistent advocacy for women and their concerns could hardly have been overlooked, she here suggests that despite her sarcastical humor, she wishes to be understood, to be taken seriously. Her work is uneven, her satire often very topical, but while many of her concerns are outdated, her central one, women's rights, ironically is not. At her best, in My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, Holley fuses comic character with serious “opinions” to explore the influence of sexist attitudes and laws on women, men, and their society.

The “naturally close-mouthed” Samantha speaks often in this essay because I believe that she will win herself new readers. Once encountered, she is unforgettable, a sane, smart, spunky literary foremother with a sense of humor. She deserves to be a feminist household word, as her creator deserves tribute for a lifetime's work of what Walter Blair has called “propaganda … brilliantly handled.”

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Marietta Holley, the youngest of seven children, was born in 1836 in upstate New York, a region where feminism flourished during her adolescence. As a young woman, she helped support her family by “scribbling” sentimental poems and stories, which were praised by such literary powers as Lydis Sigourney and Oliver Wendell Holmes. But Holley apparently harbored mixed feelings about her own poetry. In the early 1870s, when she was in her mid-thirties and unmarried, she started parodying the sentimental tradition. In My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, Samantha endures and then debunks Betsey's numerous recitations:

“How this sweet poem appeals to tender hearts,” says Betsey as she concluded it.

“How it appeals to tender heads” says I … (p. 158)

Perhaps Holley worried that her own poetry was encouraging “tender-headedness” in women. Perhaps she felt that sentimentalism denied women a sense of humor. As Samantha says,

I have seen a good many that had it bad, but of all the sentimental creeters I ever did see Betsey Bobbet is the sentimentalest, you couldn't squeeze a laugh out of her with a cheeze press. (p. 27)

While Twain would later use Emmeline Grangerford to mock the sentimental poet's obsession with death, Holley's parodies expose the ways in which sentimentalism's glorification of romance and genteel feelings undermines women's strength and self-esteem. She creates the sensible and appealing Samantha as an antidote:

… I mistrust that Josiah if he had any encouragement would act spoony. I am not the woman to encourage any kind of foolishness. I remember when we was first engaged, he called me “a little angel.” I jest looked at him calmly and says I,

“I weigh two hundred and 4 pounds,” and he didn't call me so again. No! sentiment aint my style, and I abhor all kinds of shams and deceitfulness. (pp. 23-24)

To expose the shams and deceitfulness in her society, Holley turned to the Yankee comic tradition. Samantha is what Constance Rouke has called a “Yankee oracle”: a shrewd, ironic, and self-possessed philosopher, out in the world “a-doin'.” Her speech sometimes resembles that of earlier comic Yankee women like Benjamin Shillaber's Mrs. Parrington and Frances Whitcher's Widow Bedott, but both of these characters remain stereotyped fools, the humor often at the expense of women. Holley turns the tables on an American comic tradition that made women's rights the butt of constant demeaning jokes; as Walter Blair argues, “the feminist movement, which for decades had been a stand-by for broad comic attacks, in these writings became the policy vigorously supported.” Another Yankee humorist, James Russell Lowell, may have shown Holley a way to merge her politics with her art when he said that “true humor is never divorced from moral conviction.”

Samantha Allen is Holley's embodiment of her humor and her convictions. Samantha has “never beheld a heroine swoon away” (p. vi) or a “hero suspended over a abyss by his gallusses” (pp. v-vi), prerequisites, she worries, for becoming a writer, but she tells her readers that she cannot ignore the “deep voice” within her that says, “‘Josiah Allen's wife write a book about your life, as it passes in front of you and Josiah, daily, and your views on Wimmen's Rite's’” (pp. v-vi). Holley believes that her realistic, if comic, treatment of an ordinary woman's daily life and her interactions with her stubborn but affectionate husband will help show the absurdity of arguments that suggest women are weak, clinging, passive, and obsessed with frivolous details. But Samantha's views, her “opinions,” are more important than her life—or perhaps they grow naturally from it. She argues that women work as hard as men, without receiving the credit or emotional support they deserve, that stereotypes about women's nature prevent men from taking them seriously, that laws that “protect” women actually put them into the category of lunatics and idiots, that “‘every female clerk and teacher and operator’” is about “‘half starved on about one third what men get for doin' the same work …’” (p. 243). Much of Holley's humor comes through Samantha's interactions with her two “foils,” Josiah and the anti-feminist Betsey, but her comic triumph is Samantha's voice: her language, her speech rhythms, her honesty, her defiant but compassionate self-expression.

Samantha is no sentimental heroine, no swooner, no clinging vine. Holley is one of the first “regional” women writers to create a strong, unconventional heroine; in many ways, Samantha is a comic precursor of Jewett's well known Mrs. Todd. She is not young, and she certainly isn't pretty: describing one of her historical acquaintances, Susan B. Anthony, she comments, “The other lady was smart and sensible lookin', but she was some like me, she wont never be hung for her beauty” (p. 315). Fond of cooking and eating, she outweighs her husband by over one hundred pounds, and she is physically very strong. Naturally enough, she resents being called a “weak helpless angel” or a “sweet, delicate, cooin' dove.” She dislikes fashion, thinking that women who “rig themselves out” make themselves foolish. She isn't at all “spoony”: when Betsey tells her that a wife must greet her husband with “sunny smiles,” Samantha says, “Now I never was any hand to stand and smile at Josiah for two or three hours on a stretch, it would make me feel like a natural born idiot” (p. 131). She is never petty or jealous of other women, even when she finds that Betsey wrote a lovelorn poem to Josiah with the quaint refrain: “Oh Josiah, / It seemed as if I must expiah” (p. 30). She does criticize women, notably when they downgrade each other by gossiping and backbiting (“‘wimmen fling enough stuns at each other every day, to make a stun wall that would reach from pole to pole’” [p. 82]), but, as she says, “I always make it a rule to stand up for my own sect” (p. 32). Never shy, self-effacing, or speechless, Samantha believes in “freeing your mind,” and she loses no opportunity to support women, her sect.

Samantha presents herself as one who has worked hard throughout her life, raising her stepchildren, helping pay off the mortgage, and taking an active role in public life by supporting the abolitionist cause. Holley suggests throughout her novel that “women's work” should be valued, but especially in one of her funniest chapters, “A Day of Trouble,” a satirical look at the “easy life” of the housewife, her attitude is summed up by Samantha: “…well doth the poet say—‘That a woman never gets her work done up,’ for she don't” (p. 59). Just back from a trip, Samantha finds herself juggling a large number of chores, trying to make order and comfort out of chaos. Soon a local widower drops off his twins, certain that “‘they won't be any trouble.'” Even worse, Betsey shows up to give her a lecture on how “‘it was woman's highest speah, her only mission to soothe, to cling, to smile, to coo. … [I]t is woman's greatest privilege, her crowning blessing, to soothe lacerations, to be a sort of a poultice to the noble, manly breast when it is torn with the cares of life'” (p. 62). Harrassed, Samantha blows up:

“Am I a poultice Betsey Bobbet, do I look like one?—am I in the condition to be one?” I cried turnin' my face, red and drippin' with prespiration towards her, and then attacked one of Josiah's shirt sleeves agin. “What has my sect done” says I, as I wildly rubbed his shirt sleeves, “That they have got to be lacerator soothers, when they have got everything else under the sun to do?” Here I stirred down the preserves that was a runnin' over, and turned a pail full of syrup into the sugar kettle. “Everybody says that men are stronger than women, and why should they be treated as if they was glass china, liable to break all to pieces if they haint handled careful. And if they have got to be soothed,” says I in an agitated tone, caused by my emotions (and by pumpin' 6 pails of water to fill up the biler), “Why don't they get men to sooth' em? They have as much agin time as wimmen have. …”

“Women haint any stronger than men, naturally; thier backs and thier nerves haint made of any stouter timber; their hearts are jest as liable to ache as men's are; so with thier heads; and after doin' a hard day's work when she is jest ready to drop down, a little smilin' and cooin' would do a woman jest as much good as a man. Not what,” I repeated in the firm tone of principle “Not but what I am willin' to coo, if I only had time.” (pp. 62-64)

The competent Samantha manages everything, but Holley's realistic use of household details effectively points out the hard labor and organization required to run a house efficiently and economically, while Samantha's outburst underscores her own need for “soothing.” (In a hilarious scene a few chapters later, Holley explores the possibilities of role reversal when Josiah tries to “soothe” the ailing Samantha by “acting cheerful” in her sickroom.) Samantha proves time and again that women are strong and capable.

But Holley also shows that their “doggy obstinancy” keeps men like Josiah clinging to their own stereotyped definitions of women's character, stereotypes that misrepresent and demean women and their work. When they find themselves in untenable positions, Holley implies, men resort to cliches totally unsupported by fact. After a long and triumphant argument with Josiah, Samantha feels “sickened” when he reduces her to a protected “angel” whose points need not be taken seriously. When the “angel that cut every stick of wood she burnt yesterday, that same angel doin' a big washin' at the same time,” asks Josiah to bring her in some wood, he counters that he's busy while she, after all, probably doesn't have much to do:

“Oh no!” says I in a lofty tone of irony, “Nothin' at all, only a big ironin', ten pies and six loves of bread to bake, a cheese curd to run up, 3 hens to scald, churnin' and moppin' and dinner to get. Jest a easy mornin's work for a angel.” (p. 98)

Throughout My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, male characters like Josiah and Horace Greeley, a presidential candidate whom Samantha tries to convince to support women's rights, argue that women would no longer be “angels” if they were allowed to vote, that they would lose their “female delicacy” and modesty. Holley reiterates the distance between these romanticized and oppressive images and the reality of women's lives:

“You may go into any neighborhood you please, and if there is a family in it, where the wife has to set up leeches, make soap, cut her own kindlin' wood, build fires in winter, set up stove-pipes, dround kittens, hang out clothes lines, cord beds, cut up pork, skin calves, and hatchel flax with a baby lashed to her side—I haint afraid to bet you a ten cent bill, that that womans husband thinks that wimmin are too feeble and delicate to go the pole [to vote].” (p. 93)

Of course, Josiah looks particularly preposterous when he argues that women are too “fraguile and delikate” to vote since Samantha is twice his size, but he persistently attempts to reduce her stature by refusing to take her seriously. If Samantha is anything, she is self-confident and dauntless, and yet Josiah's undermining attitudes often hurt her: “When you have been soarin' in eloquence, it is always hard to be brought down sudden—it hurts you to light. …” (p. 98).

Josiah mouths the platitudes of male superiority more often than he acts upon them. He remains a fairly sympathetic character, and Samantha shares some tender moments with him. Through her, Holley stresses the realistic give and take of marriage; Samantha admits that “Josiah and I both have our failings.” Perhaps Holley presents Josiah sympathetically to attract male readers. The subtitle to My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's is “Designed as a Beacon Light, to Guide Women to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness; But Which May be Read by MEMBERS OF THE STERNER SECT, Without Injury to Themselves or The Book.” While critics have assumed that Samantha appealed largely to the “great host of feminine readers,” Holley here suggests that she hoped to reach a male audience by ironically implying to the “sterner sect” that they will do themselves no harm by attending to women's rights, that their opposition will certainly not “injure” Samantha's arguments.

But more important is Holley's allusion to Thomas Jefferson (after whom Samantha's stepson is named) and the “self-evident” rights of independence. Despite all of Josiah's talk about how “‘the law loves wimmin and protects ’em,'” Samantha shows how the law protects only men and their rights, how it can make a woman dependent on “a mean, cowardly man” who may “abuse and tyranize”:

Figurin' accordin' to the closest rule of arithmetic, there are at least one-third mean, dissopated, drunken men in the world, and they most all have wives, and let them tread on these wives ever so hard, if they only tread accordin' to law, she can't escape. (p. 95)

Samantha calls this “wife slavery,” and her arguments echo those of numbers of nineteenth-century feminist writers.

America's constitution and laws, Holley suggests, deny women the basic rights Jefferson claimed Americans fought the Revolution to attain. Like “lunatics and idiots,” women are not allowed to vote for the laws and lawmakers that govern them, but unlike them, they are held accountable for their acts; they “have the right, and nobody can ever deprive you of it … to be hung … jest as dead as a dead man” (p. 89). But, as Samantha ironically says, “It haint no woman's business whether the laws are just or unjust, all you have got to do is jest to obey ’em” (p. 90). It is no accident that she consistently personifies the laws with a masculine pronoun.

Perhaps Holley's most revolutionary criticism of the legal system is her assertion that women should receive equal pay for equal work: “‘If the law loves wimmen so well, why don't he give her as much wages as men get for doin' the same work? Why don't he give her half as much …’” (p. 87). This poor pay, she suggests to Betsey, forces women to marry men they don't love and helps keep unmarried women objects of contempt:

“… it stands to reason that a woman wont marry a man she dont love, for a home, if she is capable of makin' one for herself. Where's the disgrace of bein' a old maid, only wimmen are kinder dependent on men, kinder waitin' to have him ask her to marry him, so as to be supported by him? Give a woman as many fields to work in as men have, and as good wages, and let it be thought jest as respectable for ’em to earn thier livin' as for a man to, and that is enough.” (pp. 236-237)

While Samantha's political arguments are effective, Holley's most interesting analysis of women's issues comes through her creation of Samantha's opposite, the “old maid” who feels her “disgrace,” Betsey Bobbet. Betsey, who genteelly gushes about “woman's speah” and about her “tendah soul,” is a stereotyped man-hunting spinster, homely, affected, desperate. Through Betsey, Holley reveals how women are socialized into becoming caricatures of themselves; she is a pathetic victim of cultural definitions of “woman” and her “sphere.” Outraged at Betsey's lack of self respect and her denigrating of women, Samantha reveals how her anti-feminist beliefs work against her. As Holley's publishers said, “Betsey Bobbet's opinions act upon Josiah's wife's, as settings do upon diamonds: adding to their brightness and resplendency.”

Betsey is foolish and funny in a number of ways, but almost all of her weaknesses, Holley suggests, are connected to her sense of her “sphere.” Samantha hates her airs, her stilted diction, and her sappy and self-exposing poetry, but Betsey has learned her gentility from the sentimental tradition, from women authors; she is “tender-headed.” She is vain, and Holley stresses her artificiality by having her wear false curls and false teeth. But poor Betsey, as Samantha recognizes, needs to be pretty. While Samantha argues that women must learn to “respect ourselves,” Betsey believes that she is valuable only if she is married. Raised with only one goal and purpose in life, she has nothing else to do but chase men. She feels so powerless that in a rare moment of honesty she tells Samantha enviously, “‘You always bring about whateveh you set youh hands to do’” (p. 203).

Matrimony, according to one of Betsey's lyrics, is a true woman's only “speah,” so she tries to be a “clinging vine” to every man in town. Samantha has her own views on the subject: “I say if men insist on makin' runnin' vines of wimmen, they ought to provide trees for ’em to run up on” (p. 134). Betsey also has all sorts of romantic notions about the soothing, cooing, and sunny relations between husbands and wives which Samantha enjoys dispelling. Samantha is all for marriage herself, but she believes women can lead happy and productive unmarried lives. (Holley herself, of course, never married.) Betsey finally irritates Samantha into asserting:

“Women's speah is where she can do the most good; if God had meant that wimmen should be nothin' but men's shadders, He would have made gosts and fantoms of ’em at once. But havin' made ’em flesh and blood, with braens and souls, I believe He meant ’em to be used to the best advantage.” (p. 238)

Betsey finally marries an unwilling widower, Simon Slimpsey, whose thirteen children overwork her. Holley mocks Betsey throughout, but she allows Samantha a good deal of compassion for her. When Samantha asks her if her marriage has made her happy, Betsey replies, “‘I feel real dignified’” (p. 414), and she then earns the reader's sympathy. She is only the product of the attitudes about women expressed throughout the book by many characters. She is not strong enough to think for herself. Or perhaps she has purposefully been kept ignorant, as Samantha argues in another passage on the socialization of women:

The idee of its hurtin' a woman to know a little somethin', is in my mind awful simple. That was what the slaveholders said about the black Africans—it would hurt ’em to know too much. … But I say that any belief, or custom that relies on oppression and ignorance and weakness to help it on in any degree, ought to be exploded up. Beautiful weakness and simplicity, haint my style at all in the line of wimmen. I have seen beautiful simplicities before now, and they are always affected, selfish critters, sly, underhanded, their minds all took up with little petty gossip and plottin's. … Their mouths have been drawed so into simpers, that they couldn't laugh a open generous laugh to save their lives. Always havin' some spear ready under their soft mantilly, to sweetly spear some other woman in the back. Horace, they haint my style. Beautiful weakness and simplicity may do for one evenin' in a ball room. But it dont wear well for all the cares and emergencies that come in a life of from 40 to 50 years. (pp. 382-383)

By squelching their minds, society trains the majority of women to be underhanded, phony, and vain to gain power and respect. But not Samantha.

Samantha worries that these sex role expectations will affect her children. She thinks that “Tirzah Ann is dreadful sentimental, that is what spiles her mostly” (p. 21). Yet she has high hopes that her otherwise sensible stepdaughter will outgrow her “spooniness,” for she has stood up to the girl's father by asserting that “‘if Tirzah Ann is to be brought up to think that marriage is the chief aim of her life, Thomas J. shall be brought up to think that marriage is his chief aim … it looks just as flat in a woman, as it does in a man’” (p. 118). Irritated that men's sins are readily forgiven, even encouraged, while “when a woman has sinned once, that is all the place for her” (p. 114), she has brought up her stepson “to think that purity and virtue are both masculine and femanine gender” (p. 117).

Through Samantha's interactions with Josiah and Betsey, Holley challenges two strong opponents to women's rights: unthinking and conventional men and women. Walter Blair calls Samantha's opponents “nitwit characters,” a phrase which initially amused me. It is certainly true that Samantha makes them look like nitwits. And yet Holley would not dismiss these characters so easily. She recognizes that men like Josiah and the historical figures her heroine encounters have the institutional power to prevent women from achieving equal rights. She even appeals to their egos:

I can tell a man that is for wimmin's rights as fur as I can see ’em. There is a free, easy swing to thier walk—a noble look to thier faces—thier big hearts and soles love liberty and justice, and bein' free themselves they want everybody else to be free. (pp. 85-86)

And what about nitwit Betsey? She is a warning to all women.

Near the end of My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, Samantha waxes metaphorical about the waste of women's potential. “‘Why you would say a human bein' was a fool,’” she comments, “‘that would go to work and make a melodious piano, a calculatin’ to have it stand dumb forever, holdin' back all the music in it not lettin' any of it come out to chirk folks up, and make ’em better’” (p. 387). Samantha's quirky and spunky voice chirks the female reader up and makes her better. This voice conveys her most likeable and exemplary traits. As she herself says, “‘… when the Lord has put eloquence, and inspiration, and enthusiasm into a human sole, you can't help it from breakin' out’” (p. 387).

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When she wrote her last book, Samantha on the Woman Question, Holley was still arguing for women's rights. As she had been unable to agree with Victoria Woodhull and her defense of divorce some forty years earlier, she could not in 1914 support the violence of the English suffragettes, although she could sympathize with the justice of their cause. She remained a moderate but thoroughly devoted worker for women's causes. Because she never married, it is tempting to see her switch from sentimentalism to realism as a response to the attitudes about “old maids” which she explores in My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, attitudes she must have faced in her own life. She who claimed that unmarried women would not feel “disgraced” if they were allowed to work respectably for good wages could command in 1893 a whopping $14,000 advance. She died in 1926, at ninety, a wealthy woman who had spent her life “freeing her mind.”

That Holley made a fortune with her Samantha books suggests that her views were popular and that her readers enjoyed “women's” humor. She was only one of a number of popular women humorists like Eliza Calvert Hall, Gail Hamilton, Grace Greenwood, Kate Wiggins, and others. And yet then, as now, critics claimed that women had no sense of humor. In 1898 in her essay “Are Women Witty?” Kate Sanborn ironically challenged these accusations. About Marietta Holley, she says,

Her Samantha Allen and Betsey Bobbet convulsed the continent. She is constantly solicited for humorous articles and more funny books, until she is well-nigh killed. Men, I mean publishers, find that women's wit puts much money in their pockets. As they rattle the gold and caressingly count the bills from twentieth editions, do they still think of women as sad, crushed, sentimental, hero-adoring geese who can't see the humorous side?