ABSTRACT
The most urgent complaint Augusta Jane Evans Wilson had about the women's movement was its threat to the sanctity of marriage. To her, women who were fighting for equal rights were actually fighting for equal rights to sin. In A Speckled Bird, she cynically relates the story of a feminist who left her husband and children, and then had the audacity to lecture on the ideal education of children. Evans had much to say about the state of womanhood in Macaria, agreeing with John Stuart Mill that women ought to have economic opportunities. Evans seems to be back-pedaling by arguing that Household Economics, Sanitation, and Decoration were the topics women needed to learn in 1907, but it is possible that, to Evans, intellectual pursuit was all well and good but not to the sacrifice of domestic duties.
