Women as American Citizens

Abstract

Invited by the Arena in 1897 for a retrospective on fifty years of women’s progress, “our half-century of struggle,” and to prognosticate about the future, Susan B. Anthony documented a wide range of women’s advances in areas ranging from education to professionalization to legal status (901). In her estimation, it remained only to win complete national suffrage to realize the full “capacity and power of women for the uplifting of humanity,” for the “perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes, that shall result in the highest development of the race” (908). Though Anthony’s new women were the subject of such periodical essays as Mary Gay Humphreys’s “Women Bachelors in New York” and “The New York Working-Girl,” they figured infrequently in the plays in periodicals. With the exception of women in Arena and Forum, the female characters in most plays about women had more in common with what Barbara Welter called the early nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood,” Dana Gibson’s haughty aristocratic “girl,” or the well-bred “American girl” promoted by The Ladies’ Home Journal during 1900. This difference should be understood as the primary dramatized tension between advocates of the “New Woman” and traditionalists insisting on the necessity of maintaining the “Angel in the House.”