Fanny Fern: Breaking the barrier for Women

In “The Scribbling Woman and Fanny Fern: Why Women Wrote Ann D. Wood made it conscious to the public that women writers were existent and that women wrote because writing was a form of expression for them and in some cases if they were to succeed help them economically. One of the many reasons why Ruth Hall was so famous in the 19th Century was because she was able to write about the struggles that many women had to overcome.

As I was doing research on my paper it became evident to me that during this time men felt threatened by women’s writings because women tended to focus issues that affected them as women and they took a more realistic approach in their writings. It was fascinating and at the same time shocking to find that men were harshly critical towards women. For example, Hawthorne stated that “Fanny Fern” writes as if the devil was in her and he went on to say that, that is the only condition under which a woman ever writes anything worth reading. I just couldn’t make sense of why men didn’t want to welcome women into the literary world.