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Not to Live in Vain: Catherine Sedgwick

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Submitted By victoriazegler
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Pages 9
Victoria Zegler
HST 326: Women in America
November 14, 2011

Not To Live in Vain:
Faith and Ideals of Catherine Sedgwick

Love, involuntary and mysterious, holds a tight grip on the imagination. As young women, we ponder questions of marriage, careers and the ideals of love in our future. Ideals, such as these, were vital to the nineteenth century moralities. The principles of love and marriage provided models for women’s goals, as well as the opportunity to speak of their experience. Both of these ideals and the value of character represented the standards of perfection, which were essential to the sphere of life. Catharine Sedgwick, a fiction writer, subscribed to these high standards and refused to compromise. Her writings repeatedly emphasized the political and personal need for liberty and independence. The behavior of unmarried women in the nineteenth century provided an answer to their highly charged moral pursuit concerning duty, usefulness and love rather than the cultural elements concerning self-fulfillment.
In order to find out who we are, we must understand where we come from. The seventeenth century Puritans first declared the importance of affection in marriage believing that to love one’s spouse was a duty. Young men and women were to choose someone they could learn to love but being in love was not necessary. It was companionship and respect, which shaped the solid foundations of a successful marriage. However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, those stipulations were no longer seen as sufficient when it came to building a foundation. Matrimonies were now based on a strong and spiritual personal attraction. [1] Rather than marry someone they could learn to love, the men and women of this generation were now expected to marry someone they did love. [2] The evolution of human love can be associated with the exposure to

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