SOURCE: "Foreword" to All the Happy Endings: A Study of the Domestic Novel in America, the Women Who Wrote It, the Women Who Read It, in the Nineteenth Century, Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1956, pp. xiii-xvii.

In the following essay, Papashvily argues that the domestic novel constitutes a more subtle but equally powerful form of resistance to nineteenth-century patriarchy than the 1848 Seneca Falls convention.

On July 19, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, a Woman's Rights Convention, the first ever held, met and after two days of impassioned discussion issued to the press a Declaration of Sentiments beginning:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

A detailed list of women's grievances followed. Man, the convention charged, had denied woman the franchise, a thorough education, and a chance...