[In the following essay, Cutter probes Freeman's attitudes toward post-Civil War stereotypes of femininity, focussing on “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin.”]

The nineteenth century was undoubtedly a time period when images of femininity became particularly fixed. During the first half of the century, changing economic conditions created a cult-like worship of “True Womanhood” and entrapped women in the domestic sphere, where they were to dispense love and morality.¹ And yet, even in the post-civil war era when the predominant stereotype of the “True Woman” gave way to the “New Woman” and women began to enter the work-force in greater numbers, they were not set free from constraining images of femininity.

Much critical attention has been paid to Mary Wilkins Freeman as a writer of the post-civil war period of decline in New England, and yet few literary critics have attempted to examine Freeman's attitudes towards these stereotypes of femininity which were so prevalent at the turn of the century.² However, a later short story by Freeman titled “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin” (1909) does demonstrate her awareness of the constraining and ultimately destructive nature of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminine stereotypes. Indeed, a radical critique of the two most prevalent images—the “Domestic Saint” and the “New Woman”—exists in “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin,” reflecting Freeman's understanding of the debilitating nature of all patriarchal images of femininity. Her critique is radical in that, deconstructing these two stereotypical images of femininity, Freeman leaves her characters no alternatives, no stereotypes, no roles to play. But perhaps that is part of the point. For Freeman, the image of the New Woman is not different from the True Woman; it is just another stereotype. And the sooner women move beyond these limited and limiting stereotypes, the sooner they will begin the difficult process of finding a self-definition which does not hinge on patriarchal cults of femininity.

As many historians have noted, the predominant image for women of the early and middle nineteenth century was the Domestic Saint, an image which focused on women's attributes of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.³ This stereotype held a great deal of power well into the late nineteenth century with the result, according to Robert Riegel, that even in post-civil war America, the traditional roles of the sexes remained constant.⁴ As late as 1871, M. Carey Thomas, daughter of an affluent Quaker family in Baltimore and future president of Bryn Mawr College, writes in a diary entry of being preached at about the cult of femininity: “Dr. Morris walked home with us and talked all the while about the ‘sacred shrine of womanhood’ and that no matter what splendid talents a woman might have she couldn't use them better than by being a wife and mother and then went off in some high faluting stuff about the strength of women's devotion completely forgetting that all women ain't wives and mothers …”⁵ Thomas' diary indicates that although the domestic mentality was under siege in post-civil war America, it still held a great deal of ideological force. Circumscribed by the bounds of the nursery and the home, women were expected to be the guardians of morality, the uncorrupted force in a corrupted and corrupting world. And yet, women were expected to maintain these virtues in the face of very difficult daily working conditions.⁶

Nancy Cott has argued that the majority of the literature constituting the “cult of domesticity” in the United States originated in New England; therefore these stereotypes may be particularly relevant to Freeman's characters, most of whom move in the constricted and constricting worlds of rural New England. Cott has also identified another series of attributes of this stereotypes which are particularly applicable to Freeman's women: the utter selflessness and denial of individual autonomy which frequently characterized the domestic saint. The canon of domesticity, as Cott argues,

prescribed women's appropriate attitude to be selflessness. The conventional cliché “that women were to live for others” was substantially correct, wrote the author of Woman's Mission, for only by giving up all self-interest did women achieve the purity of motive that enabled them to establish moral reference points in the home …⁷

Motherhood, in particular, the canon of domesticity argued, involved not self-expression, but self-denial; as Lydia Maria Child put it: “The care of children requires a great many sacrifices, and a great deal of self-denial, but the woman who is not willing to sacrifice a good deal in such a cause, does not deserve to be a mother.”⁸ In general, women's work had a “constant orientation toward the needs of others, especially men. …”⁹

The protagonist of “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin” is self-effacing, subservient, and pious, fulfilling the requirements of the cult of domesticity to perfection. The back-breaking quality of much of women's work in this time period is aptly illustrated by this description of breakfast in the Lamkin household:

Annie Sears was eating, with dainty little bites, toast and eggs prepared in a particular way. She was delicate, and careful about her diet. The one maid in the household was not trusted to prepare Annie's eggs. Amelia did that. She was obliged to rise early in any case. Harry Sears, Annie's husband, left for the city at seven o'clock, and he was also particular about his eggs, although he was not delicate. Addie loathed eggs in any form except an omelet, and Hannah, the maid, could not achieve one. Therefore, Amelia cooked Addie's nice, fluffy omelet. Tommy was not particular about quality, but about quantity, and Amelia had that very much upon her mind. Johnny's rice was cooked in a special way which Hannah had not mastered, and Amelia prepared that. Josiah liked porterhouse beefsteak broiled to an exact degree of rareness, and Hannah could not be trusted with that. Hannah's coffee was always muddy, and the Lamkins detested muddy coffee; therefore Amelia made the coffee.¹⁰

Despite the great effort involved, Amelia selflessly caters to each family member's needs. Furthermore, like the true domestic saint she is, Amelia completely forgets to ever consider her own needs—even on the simple level of physical nourishment. Through overwork Amelia has worn herself down, and while nourishing her family with carefully prepared meals, she has been “living on odds and ends” (143)—on the leftovers and scraps from her family's plates. Literally, Amelia is starving to death; as Amelia's sister Jane Strong notes, Amelia is “faded almost out as to color” (129), thin and stooped. In her total self-abnegation, in her complete subservience to the needs of her family, in her martyr-like purity and self-denial (which is even extended to the level of food), Amelia perfectly exemplifies the attributes of True Womanhood.

When Amelia collapses from starvation and exhaustion, and hovers in a death-like trance, another aspect of the worship of femininity is depicted. Annegret Ogden points to an additional feature of the cult of domesticity—a sort of saintly worship of a dead or dying mother: “In the mid-1860s, when early death from disease was much more likely to occur than it is now, the loss of a mother inspired what amounted to a dead-mother cult. So unbearable was the loss, and so traumatic the family's adjustment to the inevitable replacement of the deceased, that the dead woman, in memory, was converted into a saint.”¹¹ “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin” criticizes this cult which turns women into saint-like objects, which appoints them a holy status and a holy death, by showing that the end result of this cult-like worship of mothers is a dysfunctional family. When Amelia collapses, her family also collapses. Amelia's husband Josiah “had a feeling as if the solid ground was cut from under his feet. He had not known for so many years what it was to live without the sense of Amelia's sustaining care that he felt at once unreasoning anger with her, a monstrous self-pity, and an agony of anxious love” (148–9). The baby, Johnny, is allowed to eat an entire bowl of sugar cubes, and then to fall asleep in his high chair. Tommy, the young son, weeps and resolves “that he would never get holes in his mittens again” for his mother to mend (153). Annie, the older daughter, stands around crying for most of the remainder of the story, and Addie, the younger daughter, resolves to take her mother's place in the family, to “relinquish all thoughts of marriage, to live at home single, and devote her life to her mother” (152). Even Amelia's sister Jane—who plays the role of the intelligent, self-reliant observer—soon finds herself, without her sister's support, in the Lamkin family's cellar, with a broken ankle, soaked to the bone.

In their divergent and alarming reactions to Amelia's illness, the Lamkin family members demonstrate their total reliance on her; without Amelia, the family has no support, no nurturance, either psychologically or physically. Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1896 depiction of the domestic saint could well describe Amelia Lamkin:

She comprehends all, she balances and arranges all. … Everybody in her sphere breathes easy, feels free; and the driest twig begins in her sunshine to put out buds and blossoms. So quite are her operations and movements that none sees that it is she who holds all things in harmony; only alas, when she is gone, how many things suddenly appear disordered, inharmonious, neglected! All these threads have been smilingly held in her weak hand. Alas, if that is no longer there!¹²

When Amelia finally does collapse from exhaustion and overwork the “threads” of the family unravel, and everything appears “disordered, inharmonious, neglected”—mainly, because it is. Without its domestic saint, the Lamkin household cannot function.

And Amelia herself cannot survive—or even exist—outside her role as domestic saint. After she awakens from her faint, Amelia is “a broken creature. They hardly recognized her as Amelia. Amelia without her ready hand for them all, her ready step for their comfort, seemed hardly credible” (146). Even in death, Amelia cannot leave this role; she dreams of dying a beatific saint's death. In her illness Amelia is “beatifically happy” (164); she has visions of transcendence, of “branches … on the trees of God … full of wonderful blooms” and of “the far-away slope of mountains, and through them in turn the curves of beauty of the Delectable Hills” (167). Freeman's critique of the “Dead Mother Cult” and, indeed, of the entire cult of domesticity can thus be seen in the binding constrictions of Amelia's alternatives. Having once taken on the role of domestic martyr, Amelia can only escape through death.

Indeed, such cases of role conflict resulting in disease or death have been extensively documented by nineteenth-century historians. An increasing amount of physical and mental illness was noted by physicians in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg ties this to the rigid role prescribed for women during this time period. Hysteria, depression, and other mental diseases were common, as Smith-Rosenberg notes.¹³ While Amelia does not have a classic case of an hysterical personality, she does exhibit some of the symptoms of hysteria (such as chronic fatigue), as well as some of the symptoms of depression and anorexia nervosa. And yet, we must understand these symptoms of mental illness as a response to a constricting role—a role for which Amelia sees no alternative. Depression was common among women of this time period, and was frequently a product of a pernicious family situation. Much mental illness was “seen by the patient as related to some long-term, unsatisfying life situation—a tired school teacher, a mother unable to cope with the demands of a large family. Most of these women took to their beds because of pain, paralysis or general weakness. Some remained there for years.”¹⁴ Like Amelia Lamkin, many of these women chose to escape their roles through illnesses which kept them bed-ridden and isolated, either mentally or physically, from their families.

The role of domestic saint, then, was emotionally damaging, and frequently led to role conflict and mental illness. Amelia must “ameliorate” the lives of others—that is her one and only task, her one and only source of identity. Freeman critiques this ideology by showing that it inscribes the individual within a static and emotionally debilitating image which does not allow for personal growth. But Freeman also seeks to deconstruct the notion of female selflessness from within its own ideology. The title of the story, “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin,” points to an underlying irony inherent in the cult of domesticity: selflessness from women only fosters dependence, not independence or growth, in others. As Jane Strong points out to Amelia: “You've been doing your duty all your life so hard that you haven't given other people a chance to do theirs. You've been a very selfish woman as far as duty is concerned, Amelia Lamkin, and you have made other people selfish” (134). No one—Amelia, her family, or even Hannah, the maid—has benefited from Amelia's selfless behavior. Even from within its own ideology, the cult of femininity contradicts itself: a selfless domestic saint cannot possible fulfill her “mission” of fostering her family's growth; she can only create dependence.

Further, beyond pointing out the contradictory nature of this ideology, Freeman also seeks to make heroic ideology deliberately unheroic, deliberately self-serving. An example of this is provided by the reasoning of Amelia's daughter, Addie, when she decides to take on the role of family martyr, believing that her mother will die:

Addie did not weep. Gradually the expression of those who renunciate stole over her face. … The possibilities of entire self-renunciation lit it with spiritual glory. … She had never been so miserable and so blissful in her whole life as she was, sitting beside her mother's bed; for she, for the first time, saw beyond her own self, and realized the unspeakable glory there.

(152–3)

What is this “unspeakable glory” which creates intense pain, as well as intense bliss? It is the prospect of total self-immolation, of complete martyrdom. As Freeman shows through the young girl Addie's reasoning, it involves not only utter despair, but also utter bliss; spiritual debasement, as well as spiritual glory. In short, a life of self-deprivation is a life with its own rewards, as peculiar as they may seem.

Within the fictional world Freeman creates, selflessness is ultimately selfishness. Freeman experientially (through the story) and linguistically (through the title) deconstructs the cult of domesticity, the notions of selflessness and subservience. And yet Freeman's scathing indictment of the “True Woman” also focuses on what the stereotype evolved into in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: the “New Woman.” In the decades from 1890–1915 (decades during which Freeman was writing prolifically) discussions of the so-called “New Woman” abounded in the popular press.¹⁵ Indeed some commentators even went so far as to become completely bored of this topic. Charles Dudley Warner remarked in Harpers' November 1894 issue (a magazine which published Freeman's fiction, and which she undoubtedly read): “I wish they would let her [the New Woman] alone. I am sick of all this petty talk about her.”¹⁶ By 1894, then, the New Woman was on her way to becoming almost as well-known an image as the True Woman. And yet, while the New Woman image prevailed, the cult of domesticity still held force, as Welter explains: “the True Woman evolved into the New Woman. … And yet the stereotype, the ‘mystique’ if you will, of what woman was and ought to be persisted, bringing guilt and confusion in the midst of opportunity.”¹⁷

Thus by 1910 the image of the “True Woman” and the image of the “New Woman” coexisted, and Freeman's 1909 short story contains a critique of both these images. For in addition to the domestic saint, the story portrays a “New Woman” in Jane Strong, Amelia's unmarried older sister. Jane is independent, both financially and personally; she has an “easy, unhampered life in her nice little apartment” (158). She has also deliberately chosen to preserve this independent status and to remain single, as she tells her sister: “you know as well as I do that there were chances I might have followed up if I wanted to” (128). Jane understands and appreciates the advantages of her independence: “I'm enough sight better off the way I am. I'm freer than any married woman in the world” (129). Jane thus has one of the primary characteristics associated with the New Woman: an awareness of the individual's right to self-defined choices. As Carol George explains, the New Woman's liberation “was predicated on a new perception of herself and her role; she was an individual with valid needs to be met.”¹⁸ Jane's deliberate choice of a free and autonomous lifestyle is her expression of liberation, her expression of her right to self-defined choices.

Another important characteristic of the New Woman was her capacity for economic and intellectual freedom from men. In addition to her autonomous financial existence, Jane is also intellectually independent; she is a free-thinker who speaks her mind, and is not afraid to tell men what to do. For example, when Amelia faints, Jane speaks brusquely to Amelia's husband Josiah:

“Jane … looked impatiently at Josiah standing inert …‘For goodness' sake, Josiah Lamkin,’ said his sister-in-law, ‘don't stand there gaping like a nincompoop, but go for Doctor Emerson, if you've got sense enough!’… She spoke with forcible, almost vulgar, inelegance, but she spoke with the effect of an Ethan Allen or a Stark.”

(140–1)

Much of what characterized the independence of the New Woman was linguistic; as Smith-Rosenberg argues, “the New Women's language was self-assertive, and at times aggressive.”¹⁹ Jane's inelegance, her forcible language, allies her with this image, as well as reflecting a high level of intellectual autonomy from men. Jane does not wait for a male to tell her what to do; she aggressively takes control of the situation.

Jane's understanding of the true meaning of domestic roles also exemplifies her status as an autonomous, free-thinking New Woman. She sees what no one else in the family sees—that Amelia is being destroyed by her adherence to the cult of domesticity—and she predicts the outcome of Amelia's martyrdom. “One of these days you will go down and never come up” (136), Jane ominously and prophetically tells her sister. More importantly, perhaps, Jane also sees the ultimate meaning of her sister's role of domestic saint. She sees the selfishness embodied by her sister's utter subservience, as she tells Amelia: “You've been doing your duty all your life so hard that you haven't given other people a chance to do theirs. You've been a very selfish woman as far as duty is concerned …” (134). Jane's free-thinking is demonstrated by her ability to perceive the hidden meaning of Amelia's role of domestic saint.

Seeing the truth of this stereotype, Jane demonstrates a high degree of intellectual autonomy, an ability to abstract women's roles from the ideology which encases them. Furthermore, Jane articulates a perceptive and scathing indictment of the economic realities of marriage for women. Amelia's daughter Addie is planning to marry a poor man, Arthur Henderson, and Jane remarks that his lack of wealth is a pity since “Addie has no more idea of waiting on herself than if she were a millionairess. … Addie might do better when it comes to money” (134–35). When Amelia responds that “Money isn't everything,” Jane retorts: “It [money] is a great deal … and I guess Addie Lamkin will find it is if she marries Arthur Henderson and has to live on next to nothing a year, with everything going up the way it is now, when you have to stretch on your tiptoes and reach your arms up as if you were hanging for dear life to a strap on a universe trolley-car to keep going at all” (135). Again Jane perceives the hidden reality of social stereotypes; she realizes that for women marriage is not a matter of love and roses, but a matter of harsh economic realities.

Jane Strong, then, is a “New Woman” who can see through the dominant ideology to the pernicious reality of social institutions and stereotypes. Financially, personally, linguistically, and intellectually, Jane demonstrates her independence from men. Even her name embodies her status as a New Woman: she is Jane Strong—a stronger, more self-defined breed of woman. Amelia is meek and faded; “intense solicitude for others and perfect meekness had crossed her little face with deep lines, and bowed her slender figure like that of a patient old horse. … Amelia's neck, which was long and slender, had the same curve of utter submission which one sees in the neck of a weary old beast of burden” (129). The “perfect meekness” and “utter submission” of the True Woman causes her to bow her neck, but the New Woman, Jane Strong, carries her head high and speaks her mind. Even while leaving a room, Jane embodies the pride and dignity of the New Woman: Jane exits with “her head up, her carriage as majestic as that of a queen” (138).

And yet Freeman's critique of cults of femininity is also aimed at the New Woman, and after systematically constructing Jane as a New Woman, she systematically deconstructs the stereotype itself. If Jane is strong, she is also emotionally rigid and, in her own way, just as narrowly-defined as Amelia. Over the years, Jane has lost part of her personality. Indeed, Jane has hardened into a stereotype, an image of an individual: “Her face was quite as handsome as in her youth; all the change lay in the fact of its impregnability to the shift and play of emotions. A laugh no longer transformed her features. These reigned triumphant over mirth and joy, even grief. She was handsome, but she was not young. She was immovably Jane Strong” (130). Immovably strong, immovably an image of strength and self-reliance, she has lost something: emotional responsivity, “the shift and play of emotions.” Jane has become a stereotype.

Furthermore, the stereotype itself is hollow: it cracks under pressure. For example, when Amelia slides into a death-like trance, it is only Jane who retains the presence of mind to send for a doctor and get smelling salts, while the rest of the family is immobilized. Yet when none of this works to revive Amelia, Jane herself becomes hysterical. When the doctor finally arrives, he can only address his questions to the oldest male present—the thirteen-year-old boy, Tommy. The doctor treats Jane's emotional outburst with “cool hostility” so that “Jane stopped wailing and regarded him with awed eyes, the eyes of a feminine thing cowed by the superior coolness in adversity of a male. She was afraid of that clear, pink-and-white, young masculine face, with its steady outlook …” (146). So much for Jane's presence of mind, her intellectual independence from men. In the face of adversity, the New Woman's reactions of fear and submission to men seem very similar to the True Woman's.

Jane is therefore just as much a victim of cults of femininity as Amelia. Like Amelia, she is inscribed within an image, imprisoned within chains that she barely realizes exist. Indeed, by the turn of the century the stereotype of the New Woman had taken on some of the ideology of the True Woman, and the rhetoric surrounding the image begins to sound strikingly familiar. This 1897 poem, for example, aptly illustrates the rapidity with which the New Woman became an inflated, grandiose image:

The New Woman
She stands beside her mate, companion wise,
Erect, self-poised, with clear, straightforward eyes.
For what she knows he is she holds him dear,
And not for what she fancies him—with fear.
Hail, the new woman! By her choices she
Determines wisely what mankind shall be.
She will not with eyes open be beguiled
To choose a tainted father for her child.(20)

The virtuous, pure qualities of the cult of True Womanhood seem merely to have been transported to a different context. But the ideology is the same: Woman is the saviour of the world, the moral force in a tainted society. It is not wonder, then, that no sooner is Jane created as a New Woman, no sooner does she become a stereotype. If the New Woman is already, as early as 1897, being lauded as the founder of a new race, what chance does Jane have of retaining some identity as an autonomous individual once she is allied with this stereotype?

“The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin,” then, constructs these two stereotypes of women, only to radically critique them, only to show how they are constricting and hollow. Yet the story also involves a movement away from these cults of femininity, these inscriptions within stereotypes, both for Amelia and for Jane. In both cases, the movement out of these images involves a moment of epiphany that facilitates a truer understanding of the self, and of the self's relationship with others.

Jane's “epiphany” occurs in a most unlikely place. While sitting in the basement of the Lamkin household, drenched in wine from a bottle that has broken, with a sprained ankle from falling down the steps, Jane thinks about her life, perhaps for the first time: “She sat still, thinking. It seemed to her that she had never really thought in all her life before” (157). Through careful self-reflection and self-scrutiny, she comes to a more profound realization of her own failings, her own flaws:

She had always been considered a most exemplary woman by other people, and she had acquiesced in their opinion. Now suddenly she differed with other people and with her own previous estimation of herself. She had blamed her sister Amelia Lamkin for her sweet, subtle selfishness, which possibly loved the happiness of other people rather than their own spiritual gains; she had blamed all the Lamkin family for allowing a martyr to live among them, with no effort to save her from the flame of her own self-sacrifice. Now suddenly she blamed herself. She pictured to herself her easy, unhampered life in her nice little apartment, and was convicted of enormous selfishness in her own righteous person.

(157–8)

Reevaluating her behavior, Jane is forced to conclude that her estimation of her own self has been wrong, and that she has been guilty of selfishness regarding the individual she most loves. In this movement towards truer self-analysis, towards careful self-scrutiny, towards a clearer understanding of her own motivation, Jane takes a step away from her stereotyped image of herself. A humbled, crippled Jane emerges from the basement—but she is a wiser Jane. She makes the decision to stay and live with her sister's family—to partially give up her role as a “New Woman”—in order to help her sister.

Amelia, too, undergoes a period of self-scrutiny that involves a reevaluation of the self's own view of itself. Amelia realizes the selfishness of her allegedly selfless behavior when she sees it replicated in her daughter. Hearing her daughter's resolution to take over the role of domestic saint, Amelia suddenly awakens to the meaning of her own behavior:

In a flash she saw how selfish it was for her, this patient, loving woman, who had thought of others all her life, to be happy in giving up her life. She realized, too, what she had never felt when in the midst of them, the torture and the fires of martyrdom in which her life had been spent. Now that the unselfishness of other had quenched those fires, she knew what had been, and saw how fair the world might yet be for her. She reached back her loving, longing, willing hands to her loved ones of earth and her earthly home.

(171)

Coming to an understanding of her past, Amelia sees that her life has been spent in a constricting and destructive image, in the fires of martyrdom, in the tortures of a domestic saint. Renouncing these stereotypical images, she sees “how fair the world might yet be for her.” Like Jane, Amelia finds a vision of human connection which does not entail a cult of femininity, a constricting and constricted image. She finds a way of existing with others, rather than giving up her life for others.

And yet in reaching out her hands to her loved ones, what is Amelia reaching out to? Although one critic has asserted that Amelia “finally reassumes … her inevitable lot,” such a reading is not warranted by the text.²¹ Amelia awakens, but we do not know whether she will continue her role as household martyr, given that the unselfishness of others has allegedly quenched the fires of martyrdom within her, and given that in her absence the family has learned to care for itself. Amelia's fate is left deliberately ambiguous; the reader is not allowed to understand to what she has awakened. Jane's fate is also left unclear; Jane will probably live with the Lamkins, but this is never stated definitively. Furthermore, after Jane is retrieved from her self-analysis in the cellar, she is never heard from again. So both Amelia and Jane do achieve important realizations, but what this means in terms of their day-to-day lives is left deliberately unclear.

Freeman's critique of these two stereotypes—the New Woman and the True Woman—is therefore most radical in its refusal to generalize, in its refusal to replace these stereotypes with less constricting alternative images. Freeman shatters these images, leaving nothing behind, clearing away the mass of constraining images for late nineteenth and early twentieth-century women. For only in a radical shattering of all constraining images can the search for a self-definition which is beyond stereotyping truly begin. And in the moments when their social identities collapse and they come to a truer understanding of their own selfhood, Amelia and Jane have begun the difficult process of finding an identity which does not rely on societal stereotypes or cults of femininity.

Notes

1. Many historians have linked the codification of images during the first half of the nineteenth century with changing economic conditions. See Barbara Welter's well-known essay “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–174, which states: “In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman wherever she was found” (151–2). Welter's conclusions are supported by numerous other writers; see, for example, Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977) 70. A number of historians have also argued that women subverted their position in the domestic sphere by subtly expanding the realm of their power. See, for example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985) 53–76, or Glenda Gates Riley,”The Subtle Subversion: Changes in the Traditionalist Image of the American Woman,” The Historian 32 (1970): 210–227.

2. See, for example, Larzer Ziff, The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation (New York: Viking, 1966) 292–96, Austin Warren, The New England Conscience (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966) 157–169, or Perry Westbrook, Mary Wilkins Freeman (New York: Twayne, 1967). Perry Westbrook, for example, places “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin” according to a New England ethos, according to a “New England conscience that literally kills its possessor” (168), but fails to see how this ethos, this tendency towards self-sacrifice, was particularly virulent for women. Josephine Donovan's “Silence or Capitulation: Prepatriarchal ‘Mothers' Gardens’ in Jewett and Freeman,” Studies in Short Fiction 23 (1986): 43–48, on the other hand, argues convincingly that we can read Freeman's fictions “in the context of their historical moment in women's history” (48), but does not apply such a historical analysis to “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin.”

3. See, for example, Welter, 151–52.

4. Robert Riegel, American Women: A Story of Social Change (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1970) 34.

5. The Making of a Feminist: Early Journals and Letters of M. Carey Thomas, ed. Marjorie Housepian Dobkin (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1979) 49.

6. For descriptions of the amount of hard work required by most wives and mothers from 1780–1835, see Cott's chapter “Work.” For example, Sarah Snell Bryant's daily diary reports her duties as wife and mother in a large, respectable, but poor farm family from Western Massachusetts. Like Amelia, Bryant had sole responsibility for the household, as Cott explains: “she bore and nursed six children (usually returning to household cares within a few days after childbirth), and taught them all to read the Bible before sending them to school. Generally she occupied every day in making cloth and clothing—from the ‘hatcheling’ of flax and ‘breaking’ of wool to the sewing of shirts, gowns, and coats—knitting gloves and stockings, baking, brewing, preserving food, churning butter, gardening, nursing the sick, making candles or soap, washing, ironing, scouring, quilting with neighbors, and even entertaining visitors. During a summer when her husband was traveling, she also taught school” (41). Although Freeman is writing at a later time period, she clearly models Amelia on women such as Sarah Snell Bryant who selflessly endure the back-breaking labor of a woman's life on a rural farm. The domestic saint discussed by Cott is obviously not the same saint hostaged in the home described by Welter, but the ideology is similar: women must maintain a constant orientation to the needs of others and ignore the needs of the self.

7. The Bonds of Womanhood, 71.

8. The Mother's Book (Boston: Carter, Hendee and Babcock, 1833) 15–16.

9. The Bonds of Womanhood, 22–23

10. “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin,” The Winning Lady and Others (New York: Harper, 1909) 125–172, 126; parenthetically cited hereafter. There has been considerable debate about the function of women's work in writing by female authors. A recent article by Lorne Fienberg, for example, argues that in Freeman's fiction women's work serves as “a primary metaphor for the self-definition and personal fulfillment of her characters.” See New England Quarterly 62 (1989): 503. Yet clearly a later story like “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin” establishes an alternative perspective.

11. The Great American Housewife (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986) 65.

12. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Household Papers and Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896) 53.

13. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th-Century America,” Social Research 39 (1972): 655–7. Smith-Rosenberg's conclusions are based on a number of sources. See, for example, Edward H. Dixon, Woman and Her Diseases (New York: Charles H. Ring, 1846) 135–136; Alice Stockham, Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (Chicago: Sanitary Publishers, 1887) 83; Sarah A. Stevenson, Physiology of Women, 2nd edn. (Chicago: Cushing, Thomas & Co., 1881) 91; and Henry Pye Chavasse, Advice to a Wife and Counsel to a Mother (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1891) 97.

14. Smith-Rosenberg, “The Hysterical Woman: Sex Roles and Role Conflict in 19th-Century America,” 663.

15. As Robert E. Riegel explains, “discussions of the New Woman were omnipresent from the early 1890s to the outbreak of World War I. The magazines in particular seemed to find impossible an issue without one or more articles on the subject,” American Women: A Story of Social Change, 240. Robert Daniel also argues that the image of the New Woman was prevalent well before the 1920s. See American Women in the 20th Century: The Festival of Life (New York: HBJ, 1987) 20–21.

16. Charles Dudley Warner, “Editor's Study,” Harpers 89 (1894) 964.

17. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” 174.

18. Carol V. George, ed., Remember the Ladies (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1967) 124.

19. Disorderly Conduct, 46.

20. Miles Menander Dawson, “The New Woman,” The Arena 18 (1897): 275.

21. Julia Bader, “The Dissolving Vision: Realism in Jewett, Freeman, and Gilman,” American Realism, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1982) 186.