During the last twenty years the opportunities and challenges to teach nineteenth-century American women writers have widened almost beyond the comprehension of those trained in previous decades. When I was in graduate school in the 1950s at Indiana and Yale, we read Emily Dickinson. Period. Today, that would be considered a scandal. The changes have been great, and good, but they have not been without problems. In this chapter I address a number of what I perceive as significant issues in teaching nineteenth-century American women writers. These I have named the problem of texts, the problem of history, the problem of context, the problem of subject, the problem of form, the problem of difference, and the problem of standards. As will be plain, the names are occasionally arbitrary and the categories somewhat overlap, but they may provide frameworks useful not only for those of us who were expected to know no more than Dickinson, but for those expecting to teach no less than Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Lydia Maria Child. As recently as five years ago, a comprehensive course on nineteenth-century American women writers could only be taught by copious use of the copying machine. For if you wanted your students to know anything by Harper or Child—or even anything about them—you had no choice. That is, beyond the brief anthology selections of seventeen writers (including Harper) one finds in Gilbert and Gubar’s Literature by Women, the nine (spread over two volumes) in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, or the twelve in the recent Harper American Literature, few texts were available. The only piece of Child’s writing then in print was an excerpt from Hobomok (1824) in Lucy Freibert and Barbara White’s useful volume called Hidden Hands. Apart from that book, only Judith Fetterley’s pioneering 1985 collection, Provisions: A Reader from 19th-century American Women, had resurrected such women, and others like Caroline Kirkland, Fanny Fern and Alice Cary, from oblivion.
