SOURCE: Auten, Janet Gebhart. “Parental Guidance: Disciplinary Intimacy and the Rise of Women's Regionalism.” In “The Only Efficient Instrument”: American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916, edited by Aleta Feinsod Cane and Susan Alves, pp. 66-77. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Auten examines ideological tensions between the female authors of regional and local color stories in the nineteenth century and the editors of magazines in which these stories were published.

Women writers made a place for themselves in antebellum periodicals by conforming: they both complied with the judgments of editors and publishers and appealed to the tastes and interests of readers. In the case of writers whom we now label “regionalists,”¹ however, this deference was tempered by a desire to school their audience of predominantly urban easterners to appreciate the rural, regional way of life. Therefore, antebellum regional sketches were shaped by the...