118
PARTISAN REVIEW
phase of the feminist movement. "Poverty, and ignorance, and crime;
disease, and wickedness, and wars! ... To kill each other, with all
sorts of expensive and perfected instruments, that is the most bril–
liant thing (men) have been able to invent. It seems to me that we
might stop it, we might invent something better. ... Why shouldn't
tenderness come in? Why should our women's hearts be so full of it,
and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and help–
less miseries grow greater all the while?" she asks. She does not - nor
does anyone else - explain how this female tenderness will "come in"
- she does not mention suffrage. But she is clearly drawing upon the
notion of female "influence" which such an arbiter of feminine opin–
ion as Sarah Hale , the editor of
Godey's Lady Book,
offered as a con–
servative alternative to the militant demand for specific "rights."
But the plea for female influence rests on another widely held
principle, the doctrine of the female "sphere" or what Barbara Welter
has called "the cult of true womanhood" by means of which middle–
class women in the nineteenth century made the home - to which
they were confined - a bastion of power. Exalted as guardians of
morality by men increasingly committed to an immoral struggle for
economic and political power, they became the major force behind
the liberal churches of the day. Without roles in business , without
office, but with leisure to read, they virtually took over the popular
literary scene not only as mass consumers of fiction but as writers of
it - to the consternation of male authors such as Hawthorne, who
complained of the "damned mob of scribbling women" who had in–
vaded his profession. The result was what Ann Douglas has called,
in an important study, "The feminization of American culture. "
It is to this process , maximized beyond anything he could re–
member, that James must have reacted upon his return to America
in 1881, and it helps to explain the energy of authorial conviction
which seems to emanate from Ransom's outburst that he wishes to
save his -sex , to save the age, "from the most damnable feminization!
... The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is pass–
ing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering,
canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exag–
gerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities . .. . The masculine
character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is - a very
queer and partly very base mixture-that is what I want to preserve ,
or rather, as I may say, to recover."
We must protest this division between masculine and feminine ;
