American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869

Abstract

Through an exploration of women authors' engagements with copyright and married women's property laws, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822–1869, revises nineteenth-century American literary history, making women's authorship and copyright law central. Using case studies of five popular fiction writers - Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune - Homestead shows how the convergence of copyright and coverture both fostered and constrained white women's agency as authors. Women authors exploited their status as nonproprietary subjects to advantage by adapting themselves to a copyright law that privileged readers'access to literature over authors' property rights. Homestead's inclusion of the Confederacy in this work sheds light on the centrality of copyright to nineteenth-century American nationalisms and on the strikingly different construction of author reader relations under U.S. and Confederate copyright laws.

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“…Melissa Homestead's study of nineteenth-century American women authors detailed similarities in the language of copyright and coverture laws, similarities that make sense when one realizes that many of the same wealthy white men authored both. 42 Stephen Best drew a similar comparison between copyright's notion of "fugitive property" and the legal justification articulated by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. 43 Neil Netanel noted that "copyright unduly chills minority voices" by formalizing the ways that protection and power are obtained, and he joined other recent work in demonstrating how copyright can be used as an overt instrument of cultural colonialism.…”

Cultural Spillovers: Copyright, Conceptions of Authors, and Commercial Practices

“…But this still did not make magazines clearly positive spaces for copyright. Simply claiming copyright for magazines (whether entire issues or individual articles) remained rare (Homestead 2005;McGill in Gross and Kelley 2010;McGill 2003: 197-98;Mott 1930: 504;Slauter 2015). 4 And when magazines did claim copyright, they often allowed reprinting if credit was given, which garnered magazines and their authors valuable publicity.…”

“…During this period, copyright law applied to part of the market for literature in books: the book industry was a positive space for domestic work but a negative space for foreign work, since American law protected domestic books but excluded foreign books from protection. And although magazines were important forums for literary expression (e.g., Gardner 2012;Okker 2003), the magazine industry was a negative space because copyright law did not cover magazines (Homestead 2005;McGill 2003;McGill in Gross and Kelley 2010;Slauter 2015). We show that for domestic literature, books and magazines shared cultural conceptions about authors and intellectual-property rights, and they came to share commercial practices.…”

Feminist Aesthetics and Copyright Law

“…By refusing most women the legal status or benefits of proprietors, the law denied most female authors the proprietary relationship with their texts enjoyed by their male counterparts. 84 The practical distance thus produced between women's creative practices and the market may also have produced, in a sense, a psychological distance, a space of resistance, between the cultural creativity and its commoditization. 85 Regarded in this way, it would not be surprising to find that women's relationship to their texts acquired a different hue-one that is not accurately reflected in the proprietary structures of control maintained by the copyright system.…”