Miss Felicia Strouth

Research project: The Lady's Shakespeare: American Women's Interactions with Shakespeare's Plays, 1830s-1890s

Abstract

This project,  The Lady's Shakespeare: American Women's Interactions with Shakespeare's Plays, 1830s-1890s aims to join a historical discussion and explore the effects of wartime trauma on American women through a focus on Civil War diarists, literary societies and named Shakespeare groups. Through an intersection of trauma theory and feminist theory, I examine literary societies and named Shakespeare groups during the Antebellum and Postbellum periods of America's history. I start with the important groundwork of establishing women's interactions with Shakespeare through their private diaries, before examining the creation of women's only literary societies in women's education. I then study literary societies and Shakespeare groups beginning in the 1830s- through the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861. I then explore how many literary societies had to put their activities on hold and join up with Women's Volunteer Associations and various other volunteer organizations to aid wartime effort, despite a brief reprieve for the Tercentenary in April of 1864. My final chapter, exploring Women's Literary Societies and Shakespeare Reading Groups in the years following the American Civil War (1865-1890s) follows the dissolution of Women's Volunteer Associations and other wartime organizations and notes the differences in those women who wanted to restore the gender norm and the women who headed literary societies and Shakespeare groups who wanted to continue finding women's new place in society. This chapter follows the philanthropic and community based activities of these new groups, including the creation of public libraries and public green spaces, alongside the creation of scholarships for young girls in the local communities, alongside their influence on the newly developing West Coast, as literary societies and Shakespeare groups begin to gain popularity. I examine these creations using the intersection of trauma theory and feminist theory to find the role of the American Civil War and wartime trauma in the sudden gender shift from the 1830s to the time directly following the American Civil War.