SOURCE: “Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Studies in the American Renaissance, edited by Joel Myerson, University Press of Virginia, 1995, pp. 251-61.

In the following essay, Grasso argues that Fern's Ruth Hall was part of a larger mid-nineteenth-century debate over the public expression of anger by women, and whether this type of public expression could be considered appropriate “female” behavior and whether it posed a threat to existing gender roles.

[I]n view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States...