The early feminists’ struggle against patriarchy and its impetus to the nineteenth century american women’s rights movement in henry james’s the bostonians

Oleh :
Dessy Nuraini Anggariningsih - C0397025 - Fak. Sastra dan Seni Rupa

ABSTRACT This thesis is in the framework of American study approach, which attempts to analyze the problems through interdisciplinary study. The researcher takes the issue of the early feminists’ movement in rising the conscience of women’s rights in America as the subject matter to discuss Henry James’ The Bostonians (TB). This present study focuses on how the struggle of early feminists against sexual discrimination engenders women’s rights movement in the 19th century America. In accordance to the problem above, the objectives of this study are to find out the causes why women are excluded from the public domain and rights in patriarchal system of American society and how some feminists’ efforts to struggle for women’s public rights in equal basis with men. This study is library research. To achieve those objectives, this thesis employs some approaches as a representation of interdisciplinary study. The researcher attempts to reveal the American experience in this novel by applying literary, historical, and sociological approaches. The use of these approaches is meant to affiliate theories and knowledge from various disciplines in analyzing a work of literature. In other words, those approaches require collaboration among the disciplines to get a deep interpretation of the work. The literary approaches used in this study is feminist literary criticism to know how far the ideology sexes is provided by the author in controlling the text and to have interpretation to the text based on the woman reader’s point of view. The sociological and historical approaches are used to know the background of the social values and the crucial moments in the time. These approaches are applied in order to get most appropriate analysis and it will find supporting evidence dealing with the problem of the thesis. As the result of this research, the researcher finds out that due to the conservative and conventional values of patriarchal society, women had suffered from subordinate, oppressive, unequal, and injustice treatments that basically ignore their rights as individual beings. These treatments were legalized in a set of Victorian values of “the cult of true womanhood”. However, as a result of American modernization, industrialization, and democracy, American women became increasingly, though gradually, more independent. Believing in their own abilities and potential for power, they obliged themselves to help their oppressed sisters and to seek the need for independence, self-respect and serious purpose in life. Apparently, this social conflict between the feminist and the conservatives had engendered political excesses in the era of American reform, in the form of women rights movement. Though, many sacrifices are greatly needed as the consequences of their struggle, at least American women have realized that the equality of human rights of men and women is far more important than sexual differences.