ABSTRACT
FROM THE LATE 1860s TO THE MID-1870s, HARRIET BEECHER STOWE AND Elizabeth Stuart Phelps made public forays into the controversies surrounding the American woman’s movement.1 As early as 1865, Stowe avowed that the Woman Question was the next great social debate, the cause to which the nation should turn its attention with the Civil War over and Reconstruction underway. “This question of Woman and her Sphere is now, perhaps, the greatest of the age,” Stowe suggested in one of her Chimney-Corner papers2-especially now that America had “put Slavery under foot” (“Chimney” 673).3 In turn, Phelps couched her rallying call in even more inflated terms, writing a series of women’s reform articles for the Independent and the Woman’s Journal from July 1871 to February 1874.4 “It is no great figure of speech,” asserted Phelps, “to say that the ‘woman question’ is the most tremendous question God has ever asked the world since he asked, ‘What think ye of Christ?’ on Calvary” (“Higher Claim” 343).
