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COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Rhode Island
"The" Woman Question does not exist because there is no one time when it definitively was asked and answered. Rather, philosophers, theologians, scientists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and others wrestled--and continue to wrestle--with aspects of the Woman Question pertinent to their specific fields and times. For many women, the Woman Question was a question of selfhood, autonomy, agency, independence, and identity that challenged women's traditional domestic roles and fueled a culture of fear as the debate attempted to situate women in the world. For centuries, women articulated their own responses to the question and found other women who supported and rejected their positions as they became involved in the question through education, literary production, politics, and abolition. For instance, Catharine Beecher began the domestic science movement--the professionalization of homemaking--during the 1830s and urged putting it on a parallel with other science courses. Though that goal never materialized, she joined with Lydia Maria Child, redirecting her energies toward establishing women's seminaries. Child, who initially received praise for her novel Hobomok and her children's magazine, found herself on the wrong end of public sentiment when she turned her writing talents toward politics with The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835), as "[t]hose who had praised her literary production now castigated her radical and unwomanly departure into controversy" (Abzug 200). Undaunted, Child, along with Angelina Grimke Sarah Grimke...
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