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Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott) (1823-1904)
One of the first women to gain access into the congressional press galleries, Grace Greenwood, a well-known and much-respected woman journalist in the nineteenth century, made her opinions about the political life of the country known with candid, even caustic, critique.(1) In her newspaper columns she opposes capital punishment, responds to speeches by congressional leaders, and praises, and occasionally criticizes, other artists, writers, and thinkers. Favoring women jurists to gain stricter sentencing of men convicted of crimes against women and defending women reformers against attacks by her male colleagues, Greenwood consistently argues for reform of women's roles and rights through her long-running column for the New York Times.(2)
Greenwood skillfully uses humor in her role as a cultural critic to invite her readers to reconsider, and hopefully revise, their views on contemporary subjects, particularly as these issues relate to women. Like Fanny Fern's letters, Greenwood's letters are filled with humorous advice for women, but she often goes beyond the exposure of the double-standards and illogical limitations placed on women; Greenwood consistently shapes her narratives of contemporary events to espouse a perspective sympathetic to women.(3) Positing female agency onto mythological, sociological, historical, even biblical narratives, Greenwood draws analogies to her own time to revise stale, stereotypical definitions of womanhood. Rewriting myths to empower goddesses instead of gods, recasting social mores to appropriate strength as a feminine rather than masculine attribute, reshaping history to highlight heroines rather than heroes, and recreating biblical narratives to celebrate more female sinners as well as saints, Greenwood, not only in her newspaper column, but also in her earlier writing of poetry and fiction, persuasively calls for a broader vision of womanhood.
Many events in Greenwood's life likely led her to see the need for this broader vision. Grace Greenwood was born Sara Jane Clarke on 23 September 1823, in Pompey, New York. She was the youngest daughter of the eleven children of Deborah Baker and Thaddeus Clarke. Greenwood's physician father, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, participated in political causes; Greenwood first made the acquaintance of many leaders of the time, including William Lloyd Garrison, in her childhood home in Rochester. Greenwood often noted the irony of her puritan ancestry, calling herself a "small splinter"...