DOUGLAS, Ann

Born 1942, Morristown, New Jersey

Also writes under: Ann Wood

Daughter of Malcolm D. Watson and Margaret Wade Taylor; married Peter H. Wood, 1965 (to 1974)

Ann Douglas received her B.A. degree in English literature in 1964 from Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From 1964 to 1966, she studied Victorian literature at Linacre College, Oxford, England. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970, writing her dissertation on "Piers Plowman and the Monastic Vision Tradition." In 1974, she became a member of the faculty at Columbia University, where she currently teaches American literature and culture. She has been a member of the editorial boards of Women's Studies since 1972 and of American Quarterly since 1974.

The Feminization of American Culture (1977) is Douglas' first book and her major work, although she has published widely in periodicals. The first two sections ("The Sentimentalization of Status" and "The Sentimentalization of Creed and Culture") present her dominant thesis. Douglas maintains that the many similarities between women and clergy in America from 1820 to 1875 constituted an alliance that nurtured a popular literature and a sentimental society—in both of which we can see the beginnings of modern mass culture. In the book's third section ("Protest: Case Studies in American Romanticism"), Douglas explores the work of Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville and suggests alternative responses to "feminization" (a rather arbitrary and even sexist term), however, ultimately unsuccessful.

Douglas' appendices suggest the solidity of a sociological study, and in the lengthy scholarly notes she reveals both her extensive reading of 19th-century popular literature and her familiarity with secondary sources. But Douglas' thesis—the most innovative aspect of her study—seems tenuous in the end. Despite the similar plight of clergy and women at the time, a forceful alliance is not convincingly substantiated, although the economic, political, and intellectual parallels are compelling evidence of a shared "disestablishment." Similarly, the author's perceptive exploration of clerical and female "self-denial" is enlightening, while not quite persuading the reader of the larger connections for which Douglas argues. As Gerda Lerner notes, however, "the textual richness and methodological sophistication of this intellectual and literary history compensate for its overstatement, its lack of historical perspective, and its excessive display of erudition."

For the most part strikingly well written, The Feminization of American Culture draws attention to important aspects of 19th-century life all too frequently ignored by the student of literature. Douglas introduces the reader to many writings (particularly those by women) undeservedly overlooked and to others worth probing—if not for their literary excellence, for their significance as part of the main body of American letters. Douglas' treatment of the two "case studies" with which the book concludes is persuasively astute and profits greatly from the contexts she suggests in the rest of her work. Her examination of Margaret Fuller is particularly perceptive; she analyzes Fuller's difficulties as a writer and a woman whose central problem is the absence of an audience and whose options become increasingly limited.

At her best when dealing at some length with individual writers—Fuller, Melville, Stowe, Buckminster, Park, Henry Ward Beecher—Douglas is always provocative in The Feminization of American Culture, which has gone through several subsequent editions (1978 and 1988) since its 1977 publication. The book's ultimate value lies in the wide range of materials she examines and in Douglas' fresh view, whose coherence is at once a weakness and a strength.

After The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas went on to write articles for a myriad of publications as well as the introduction for a new edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1981. Douglas' next book, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s was published in 1995, and she wrote the introductions to Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader in 1998, and Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters in 1999. Douglas celebrated 25 years of teaching at Columbia University in 1999.

Other Works:

Articles in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Los Angeles Times, Modernism/Modernity, New Republic, New York Times, Raritan, Vogue and others.

Bibliography:

Reference Works:

Oxford Companion to Women's Writing (1995). Atlantic (May 1977).

Other references: CSM (2 Aug. 1977). LJ (Aug. 1977). Nation (30 May 1977). Newsweek (13 June 1977). NYRB (14 July 1977). NYTBR (26 June 1977). On Critical Analysis (interview on video, 1995).

—CAROLINE ZILBOORG

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