THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLITICAL IMAGES OF WOMEN IN AMERICAN CULTURE - FROM LATE-EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY REPUBLICAN MOTHERHOOD TO MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY FEMININE MY STIQUE

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The purpose of this research is to explore the images of women that appeared in the American literature from the late-nineteenth-century early republic to the mid-twentieth-century post World War I era in relation to the culture and thoughts in which they were created. In pursuit of that aim, a variety of literary genre such as popular literature, utopian literature as well as what are called "belles letters" were brought into focus, including novels by S. Weir Mitchell, a notable physician treating patients suffering from nervous diseases in Philadelphia in mid-nineteenth century and self-published stories by suffragists who expressed their own political ideas in the fictional form. Newspaper articles and advertisements were also analyzed to obtain the whole picture of an era. Four essays on the post-revolutionary seduction novels, later-nineteenth-century novels dealing with neurasthenia then called the "American Disease," late-nineteenth-century female utopian novels, and William Fa … More ulkner's As I Lay Dying where the early-twentieth-century southern society was vividly represented were published as the outcome of this research. Images of women depicted in each era were the artifacts of the influential thoughts and ideology that permeated the contemporary society. The dominant ideology of each era such as republicanism, social Darwinism, and popularized Freudian thought tend to create both positive and negative images of women, thus demonstrating the way its discursive and imaginative power was split between containment and suppression. Illuminating examples were the "Republican Motherhood" and the "coquettes" in the post-revolutionary era, the "Angel in the House" and the "Invalid or Mad women in the attic" in the Victorian America. "Eugenic Motherhood" depicted by late-nineteenth feminists who speculated on utopian societies were the alternative image other than the images of women fostered in the male-dominant society. This image, however, was absorbed into the "Scientific Motherhood" in the Progressive Era when educators and public hygienists in search of efficiency and order became the social backbone. In 1920s when mothers' influence over the mental and psychological health of children was emphasized, the ideological organizations such as National Congress of Mothers (reorganized later into PTA) emerged. Faulkner's "Abject Mother," one of the most gruesome mothers ever imagined by American authors was the antithesis of the ideal motherhood that was well internalized in popular mind under the Progressive mores. Less