A White Heron (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Advancements for Women

The end of the nineteenth century brought many new opportunities for women in the United States and other industrializing countries, and Sarah Orne Jewett took full advantage of them. In 1848, just one year before Jewett was born, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and others had organized the famous Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York. By the time Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy in 1866, women were being granted certificates to practice medicine (for a time, a dream of Jewett’s), they were being admitted to universities, and led by Stanton, Mott, and Susan B. Anthony, they had formed the American Equal Rights Association dedicated to winning the vote for women and for African Americans. For the first time in American society, women were gradually and grudgingly allowed into full participation as citizens and as professionals.

Equally important for Jewett, women were beginning to enjoy a wider range of “acceptable” personal lifestyles. Married women could have careers, as in Louisa May Alcott’s Jo’s Boys, published in 1886, the same year as “A White Heron.” But it was no longer taken for granted, at least among urban upper-class society, that every woman would marry as soon as she could and live out her life as an unequal partner to a man, with no property rights and no protection should the marriage prove unhappy. For Jewett and others, there was the possibility of living an independent life, outside the traditional patriarchal structure. Women could have careers and earn enough money to support themselves. And, although there were no public and political organizations for lesbians in the nineteenth century, many women like Jewett felt free to discreetly devote their emotional energy to other women. The idea of the “Boston marriage,” or the intimate association of two women, was recognized and accepted, though not openly discussed.

All of this plays an important role in Jewett’s writings, which tend to focus on independent-minded women struggling with or rejecting men. Jewett wrote several stories and novels about women doctors — impossible at an earlier time. And even many of her rural people, like Mrs. Tilley and Sylvia, live full lives without male associates. When Sylvia rejects the hunter, whom she perceives as a suitor, she is claiming her independence from male-dominated society, just as Jewett and many of her contemporaries were able to do. She “could have served and followed him and loved him as a dog loves,” but in this new era she has other choices.

Industrialization

In large cities, manufacturing jobs were plentiful but dangerous, as corporate heads needed more and more cheap labor to keep the factories running. Laborers often went on strike to fight for better working conditions. In New York City, streetcar workers tied up the city for days in 1886 with a strike; finally they settled for a twelve-hour workday with a half-hour lunch break. New processes for working with metals were developed, the internal combustion engine was perfected, home products like Johnson’s Wax and Avon cosmetics became available, and big department stores like Bloomingdale’s opened their doors. It was still common in the countryside, however, for people to live simple lives of subsistence farming, without the benefits or hazards of industrial life.

The Growing Conservation Movement

By the late nineteenth century, what had once seemed a vast and limitless continent was now being recognized as fragile and in need of protection. Pollution in the cities like Sylvia’s “crowded manufacturing town” was uncontrolled and much worse than it was a century later. The great buffalo herds had been greatly reduced, and their decimation was widely observed in popular songs and tales. Forests were being cut down at an alarming rate, bolstered by the Timber Culture Act of 1878 which permitted the clearing of public lands. A fledgling conservation movement had begun, targeting the preservation of forests and wildlife.

The woods where Sylvia lives are second-growth forest, but it is in the old-growth great pine, “the last of its generation,” where she finds wisdom: “Whether it was left for a boundary mark, or for what reason, no one could say; the woodchoppers who had felled its mates were dead and gone long ago.” Jewett uses a symbol, a rare old tree, to underscore the value of preserving the land.

The heron, too, is rare and in danger. According to George Held, the bird Jewett would have had in mind was the snowy egret, whose feathers were much in demand for trimming ladies’ hats. It was nearly extinct by 1900, and federally protected in 1913.