All-American girl Book

Our image of nineteenth-century American women is generally divided into two broad classifications: the silly, languid, pale maidens who flirt and fawn and faint, and the alienated, steely proto-feminists who rule their worlds with a rigid back. This division of women into victims and revolutionaries has served the purposes of modern feminists well, allowing them to claim feminism as the only viable role model for women of the nineteenth century.

In All American Girl, however, Frances Cogan identifies amid these extremes a third ideal of femininity: the "Real Woman." Cogan's Real Woman exists in advice books and manuals, as well as in magazine short stories whose characters did not dedicate their lives to passivity or demand the vote. Appearing in the popular reading of middle-class America from 1842 to 1880, these women embodied qualities that neither the "True Women"—conventional ladies of leisure—nor the early feminists fully advocated.

Intelligence, physical fitness and health, self-sufficiency, economic self-reliance, judicious marriage, and a balance between self and family were the goals of many of the period's advice and fiction writers. These writers depicted characters who were educated, responsible, and energetic: heroines such as young Edna Earl, in the 1886 bestseller St. Elmo, who has at her command several classical languages, higher mathematics, and comparative religion and theology; the title heroine of Mrs. A. J. Graves's 1844 story "Sarah Sherman," who questions equality in marriage; or the young girl in an 1860 Harper's short story who, "erect, and withscarcely an effort . . . glides along, skimming the surface like a yacht before the wind . . . now she increases the speed of her flight. Her skate-irons ring as she spurns the humming ice."

Cogan also finds opinions in popular medical books and articles countering the advice of doctors who believed that women should curtail all physical activity from puberty onward. Writers such as Dr. Dio Lewis believed that "sickness is selfish," and the outspoken William Blaikie lamented that many young women have "scrawny necks, pipe-stem arms, narrow backs, and a weak walk." Stating that the medical profession was "incomplete and ineffective" without women, physiologist Samuel Gregory argued for higher education of women and insisted that a "medical education would be a most valuable qualification for the maternal head of a family."

Though prevalent for almost half a century, Real Womanhood began to be absorbed by mainstream feminism after 1880, as changing views of femininity and women's roles further polarized the sexes. Rediscovering this lost ideal of a fit, competent, yet caring womanhood, Frances Cogan's All American Girl reveals a system of feminine values that demanded women be neither idle nor militant.