2001/01/01 by Rachel N. Klein · 15 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Literature: history, themes, analysis #Cultural History and Identity Formation #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Scholarship #Ideology #Subject (documents) #Liberalism #Democracy #Girl #Literature #History of literature #Feminism #Aesthetics #Sociology #Philosophy #Art #Gender studies #Law #Politics #Political science
paper · doi:10.1353/leg.2001.0026
published in Legacy A Journal of American Women Writers 18(2), 135-152 (Society for the Study of American Women Writers)
openalex publication_date 2001/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
Through much of her voluminous writing, Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed her concern with the subject of work—its structure, its moral imperative, its regional variations, and its impact on family life. Her utopian vision of a free and democratic labor system informed her critique of slavery and shaped her analysis of the "woman's sphere." This essay foregrounds Stowe's central preoccupation with the labor questions of her own day and, in so doing, engages a tradition of feminist literary scholarship that invests Stowe's work with anti-commercial meanings. Rather than a subversive critic of the marketplace, Stowe was a substantial contributor to the intellectual history of American liberalism. 1