Deconstructing Upper-Middle-Class Rites and Rituals: Reading Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Stories Alongside Mary Louise Booth’s Harper’s Bazar

This chapter explores the ways in which the short stories Mary E. Wilkins Freeman published in Harper’s Bazar when Mary Louise Booth was its editor (1867-1899) contributed to the magazine’s covert but clear feminism. Shedding light on the ways US post-bellum consumer culture and periodical culture created rigid gender roles and delegitimized women who could not have access to those newly available commodities, Freeman’s stories underwrote the magazine’s feminist stance, providing her upper-middle-class readers with tools to question their own lives. Read in the thick cultural context of this high-end publication that made room for both fashion and its criticism, Freeman’s quaint New England stories worked as inverted mirrors paradoxically pointing to the affiliations of class, gender and race that were pre-requisite for social visibility in the 1880s.