SOURCE: Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. “Why Try a Writing Career?: The Ambiguous Cultural Context for Women Writers of the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” In Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 2-26. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Coultrap-McQuin discusses the overt discrimination against women writers by the male literary establishment and publishing industry in nineteenth-century America.

On December 17, 1877, H. O. Houghton and Company, publishers of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, hosted a dinner party to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their literary magazine and the seventieth birthday of one of its major contributors, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Among the sixty guests were such famous writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Held in the East Room of the fashionable Hotel Brunswick in Boston, the event included a seven-course dinner, served with various wines...