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Firstly, it talks about the social background of domestic feminism and the influence of this setting on Stowe. Secondly, it analyzes the power of maternal love, including men’s failure to redeem the world and women’s moral superiority over men. At last, it deals with the women’s courage, resolution and Christian love reflected by redemption the society. The female power and redemption of the fallen world embodied in the novel is for the purpose of appealing to the maternal values of white Americans in the nineteenth century and awaking their strong Christian sympathy and motherly love to fight against the chattel slavery.
II. The Influence of the Feminism on Stowe
2.1 Feminism under the Social Background
As we know, if we know a lot of the social background in the novel, it will be helpful for us to understand its significance. The novel that dramatizes women’s roles in the fight against chattel slavery in America owes debt to the two crucial events. One is the organization of a feminist movement in 1848 and the other is the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Law, forbidding the Northerners to help the runaway slaves, and requiring them to cooperate in the capture of fugitive slaves in 1850.
Beginning at the 1930s’ the first American feminist movement, reached its peak at the meeting at Seneca Falls, where feminists had spelled out their demands for full participation in American life. And there was public debate over the place of women in the life of the young republic. One party was represented by Angelina E. Grimke, who assumed the leadership of American women. This claim was challenged by the northern educator Cathaine Beecher, Stowe’s sister. In her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, Grimke had urged these southern women to perform exceptional acts—to break state laws and emancipate their slaves. She suggested that women, like men, can appropriately engage in sharp argument, and they most certainly should join the abolitionists’ petition campaigns, “The right of petition is the only political right that women have… Surely, we ought to be permitted at least to remonstrate against every political measure that may tend to injure or oppress our sex”(Stowe 9). However, in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, Addressed to A. E. Grimke, Beecher presented the basic tenets of an ideology that she developed to counter Grimke. An ideology historian Kathryn Sklar has dubbed “domestic feminism”. In her Treatise on Domestic Economy, Beecher had developed the notion of the moral superiority of females and the argument that by dominating domestic life, women could redeem American culture.
Facing the public debate concerning women’s role in the fight against chattel slavery, Stowe announced her position thus: “The first duty of every American woman at this time is to thoroughly understand the subject for herself, and to feel that she is bound to use her influence for the right… Above all, it seems to be necessary and desirable that we should make this subject a matter of earnest prayer”(Stowe 23). Stowe held the belief that women should be largely restricted to the “women’s sphere” and they influenced the world by Christian example and moral instruction. In a word, within the process of defending Christian domestic values, Stowe laid emphasis on inpidual sympathy and on the doctrine of Higher Laws in fight against slavery, and celebrates more ordinary women who practice not feminism and abolitionism but “domestic feminism”. The concept of domestic feminism is not only created under the social background, but also consistent with the ideology of femininity and domesticity in the nineteenth century.
2.2 Stowe’s Experience of Motherhood
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s commitment to the nineteenth century ideology of femininity and domesticity was closely related to her own experience of motherhood. Her experience of motherhood was difficult. She gave birth to twins within the first year of marriage, went to have five more children, one of them died as a baby despite everything she could do to save the child, and she found herself overwhelmed to the point of prostration by the endless bottles of soured milk and the countless interruptions that dragged her down as she struggled to became a writer in the mud-rutted outpost of Cincinnati in the years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written. To be sure, she was better off than her mother, who like other women of her generation bore a child every two and a half years until death of menopause, whichever came first, released her. Stowe, in contrast, had the birth control of abstinence available as a socially sanctioned choice. Still, her life as a mother was not one to make a person idealized the experience. Yet she did. What’s more, she was said to have loved being a mother and appeared to have been an unusually caring one. This enthusiasm for motherhood does not seem either hypocritical or mysteriousl. Instead, it reflected her deep intellectual commitment to the nineteenth—century ideology of femininity and domesticity, which was rooted, emotionally, in her yearning for the kind of mother love that she feared she had missed—a yearning, in turn, everywhere reinforced by the pervasive ideal of angelic motherhood dominant in Victorian American.