Young Writers Society

I recently thought of a book idea that centers around a young woman who would like to become an author, but that is either impossible (law-wise) and/or considered inappropriate in the era she lives in.
I'm having her live in America in around 1898, but I just wanted to know whether it was actually against the law for her to get her book published, or just considered wrong and wouldn't make the publisher many sales?

Thanks!

Unfortunately, that's the wrong era to pick. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, published at the opposite end of that century -- 1818. They weren't as common as male authors, but there were plenty of them, and there were no laws or social no-nos about it, really.

[I'm sure about the law stuff, but I'm not totally sure about the social part, since I couldn't find any evidence to back it up and I really don't want to go get my history textbook.]

Teague
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Thanks for the reply. I was going to put some more research into it, and maybe I'll just move the era back a century. Haha.

It was definitely not illegal -- I don't know a lot about American female novelists, but Jane Austen published her novels in the early 1800s, and the Brontes published their novels in the mid-1800s so it was no doubt acceptable practice by 1898. However, many female writers of the 19th century chose to write or were asked to use male pseudonyms.

(I just checked -- Louisa May Alcott, an American writer, published Little Women in 1868. She mostly published under her own name, and Little Women was a huge success.)

While there were certainly female writers, and their books certainly sold, there was a lot of societal pressure to put family, husband and home before writing. Virginia Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own" discusses this. "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) also discusses this issue in fictional form -- and it was published in 1892, so you should probably do some research on Gilman and see what kind of challenges she faced.

In short: female writers in 1898 faced a number of challenges, but they were mostly subtle cultural obstacles, instead of outright illegality and prejudice.

Thank you for your help. I'm just going to do a lot more research before I decide to write the book.