Women’s political exclusion redirected their moral outrage into fiction.

Evidence

THERE WAS NO customary public outlet for a Maine woman’s rage against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This daughter of a famous clergyman, who was also the wife of a famous professor, knew men made the laws, and she knew men reacted publicly to laws. But Harriet Beecher Stowe was not a man, so her choices were limited. She was not the only woman who was frustrated. As Stowe’s biographer explained, “The political impotence Stowe felt in the face of unjust laws was building up like water behind a dam for many middle-class women.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 504

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: political powerlessness channels dissent into literature — the novel as the only open valve for women’s fury in antebellum America.
• XREF: connects to: Public hostility and dependence on opinion crushed many women writers’ careers