Based entirely on archival research, Poets in the Public Sphere traces the emergence of the "New Woman" by examining poetry published by American women in newspapers and magazines between 1800 and 1900. Using sources like the Kentucky Reporter, the Cherokee Phoenix, the Cincinnati Israelite, and the Atlantic Monthly, Bennett is able to track how U.S. women from every race, class, caste, region, and religion exploited the freedom offered by the nation's periodical press, especially the poetry columns, to engage in heated debate with each other and with men over matters of mutual concern.Far from restricting their poems to the domestic and personal, these women addressed a significant array of political issues--abolition, Indian removals, economic and racial injustice, the Civil War, and, not least, their own changing status as civil subjects. Overflowing with a wealth of heretofore untapped information, their poems demonstrate conclusively that "ordinary" nineteenth-century women were far more influenced by the women's rights movement than historians have allowed. In showing how these women turned the sentimental and ideologically saturated conventions of the period's verse to their own ends, Bennett argues passionately and persuasively for poetry's power as cultural and political discourse. As much women's history as literary history, this book invites readers to rethink not only the role that nineteenth-century women played in their own emancipation but the role that poetry plays in cultural life.

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction: Poetry in the Public Sphere 1 PART ONE 1. Literary Sentimentality and the Genteel Lyric 17 2. High Sentimentality and the Politics of Reform 40 3. The Politics and Poetics of Difference 62 4. Harper, Parnell, Lazarus, and Johnson 86 PART TWO 5. Domestic Gothic and Sentimental Parody 113 6. Irony's Edge: Sarah Piatt and the Postbellum Speaker 135 7. Sex, Sexualities, and Female Erotic Discourse 159 8. Making It New in the Fin de Siecle 181 Coda: After 1910 205 Notes 217 Index 253