Poet or Poetess?

Emma Lazarus, 1849 – 1887

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Many late nineteenth century American women writers, including Julia Ward Howe and Harriet Beecher Stowe, found success as authors. Still, they were often seen as a "damned mob of scribbling women." A well respected "poetess" like Lazarus was always placed one notch beneath the men who called themselves Poet. Even admirers complimented her with condescending phrases like, "She spoke like a man, but felt like a true woman."

Lazarus knew this situation all too well, as poems like "Echoes" and "Sympathy" illustrate. But in spite of her view of the limits on women writers, Lazarus was outspoken about so-called manly themes like literature, war and religion. Her article series "Epistle to the Hebrews," the poems of Songs of a Semite, and her impassioned defense of American Literature are just a few examples of her influential writings.

After Lazarus' death, however, her embarrassed family scrambled to stuff her memory back into a more demure and feminine form. Older sister Josephine published a memorial essay painting Emma as a painfully shy, "withdrawn" spinster, and "a true woman, too distinctly feminine to wish to be exceptional or to stand alone and apart, even by virtue of superiority. " And sister Annie worked to erase Emma's vocal Jewish identification. As literary executor—and Anglo-Catholic convert—she refused to grant permission in 1926 to reprint Emma's Jewish poems, finding them unseemly "sectarian propaganda."