Harriot Beecher Stowe

 Harriot Beecher Stowe 

Who to choose or should that be whom to choose?

Sometimes in meetings or dinner parties or staff rooms when the conversation revolved around new curtains or fitted carpets or even someone's new car I, in my pomposity would try to introduce as I thought more interesting topics. One was ,"How many coutries are there in Africa?" Few people knew. Most guesses were way off the mark. I also  asked who wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?  The answer I frequently got was Mark Twain. As I am sure that in this room you all know that it was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

This leads me to my first mini biography. 

I went to an all girls’ Grammar school and have often wondered throughout my reading life why many of the interesting world changing women never featured in my education. ‘They’ say that we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. I never knew and still don’t who ‘they’ are but here is one woman writer and  activist on whose shoulders we are standing.

She was a woman of tremendous insight, wisdom and compassion. She had six children, ran a large household, campaigned tirelessly against slavery and after her husband’s death supported the household financially by her writing.

In 1850 an act was passed which mandated that the slaves who escaped to freedom in the North be returned to their masters. Stowe was outraged and she was moved to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly. It was first published as a serial in an abolitionist newspaper, the National Era. Her aim she said was to hold up in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible, slavery in all its reverses and changes.

Unlike the modest reception anticipated by Stowe the book was a publishing phenomenon. In 1852 the year of publication 5,000 copies sold in two days and 20,000 copies were sold in less than three weeks. Estimates say that three million copies were sold in the United States and it was translated into many languages. When ‘Uncle Tom’s cabin’ was first published it sold more quickly than any book ever printed except the bible. 

She was recognised at the time. Longfellow wrote, ‘How she is shaking the world with Uncle Tom’s Cabin…..Never was there such a literary coup-de-main as this.’ The English historian Thomas Macaulay called it,  ‘the most valuable addition  America has ever made to English literature.’ Tolstoy considered it the highest achievement of moral art and put it on the same level as  Les Miserable and  A Tale of Two Cities. Theatre stages were flooded with dramatisations and continued to be performed until 1930. It was the first American best seller. Puritan prejudice which considered fiction as worthless entertainment was changed. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was used to convince the legislators of the evils of slavery. Abraham Lincoln referred to her as, ‘The little lady who had made this big war.’  

So what changed? The book moved millions but it seems that the overt appeals to emotion and it’s political message caused it to be labelled propaganda and was therefore considered of little merit. I have also heard the arguments that it is now considered racist because of the stereotyping. But her aim was to open peoples eyes to the evils of slavery and this she achieved in a forceful way.

Jane Tompkins in the Heath Anthology of American Literature calls it ‘the most powerful book written by an American’. So, why has it not come down to us as an American literary classic? Could it possibly be that it is because she was a woman? What a pity, no what a tragedy, that it has been excluded from classical literature.

Harriet was more than the woman who wrote ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. 

‘The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe’  was written in her life time at her request by her son Charles. He was able to use her letters and journals so she considered it to be autobiographical. In it we learn of the active life she lead, of the campaigns she fought and the interesting people of her time with whom she corresponded, George Elliot for example.  

Quotes

If women want any rights they had better take them, and say nothing about it 

Women are the real architects of society.

 "Common sense is seeing things as they are, and doing things as they ought to be."

"Most mothers are instinctive philosophers."

Introverts and Extroverts

 Introverts and Extroverts

 Introverts are often better observers of other people than extraverts, even though extraverts rely on their relationships with others in order to feel that they exist. 

I have owned this book for many years, but it was a while before I really grasped the many useful messages it contains. If you get nothing else from this book other than an understanding that introverts can be sociable and extraverts can be shy, you are likely to find yourself with a vastly increased sense of what makes different people 'tick' - yourself included - and why one man's emotional meat is another man's emotional poison. This can be particularly helpful in a world busy focusing on extravert preferences - open-plan living and working spaces, constant action, suspense, thrills and horror in popular entertainment etc., etc.. Our brains are wired up differently from each other, and it is helpful to recognize that the external stimulation which enables extraverts to thrive can easily challenge and overwhelm the senses of the introvert - however well-balanced s/he is. The converse is also true - if you want to stress an extravert, keep him/her out of social contact, and away from busy activities, lots of sensory stimulation and new environments.

The psychologist Dorothy Rowe saw introverts and extroverts  as two different ways the human mind protects itself and stays alive psychologically. Her core belief:

“Every human being has one primary fear: the fear of annihilation, of ceasing to exist as a person. We all build a structure of meaning to keep that terror at bay. Extroverts and introverts simply build that structure in opposite directions.”The extrovert’s terror is silence and emptiness. The introvert’s terror is noise and intrusion.”

An extrovert feels real when others are responding. An introvert feels real when no one is demanding a response.” Neither is better. Both are attempts to solve the same problem: how to go on existing when everything inside us knows we will one day die. She repeatedly stressed:

Trying to force yourself to live the opposite way is one of the fastest routes to depression.

The work is not to become more extroverted or more introverted; the work is to stop being frightened of what you actually are.  I have found that introverts always know what is the most important to them but many extraverts do not, usually because they find it difficult to distinguish what they do from why they do it.…

She’s clear that: ‘Either we are “people persons’, who judge ourselves in terms of how others respond to us, or we are ‘what have I achieved today?’ people.”We all know (regardless of personality) about the value of thought leadership. The blogs and articles most of us share are those that speak with authority and expertise.

They’re the ones that really add value (another overused phrase, but again, for a reason). Self-promotional fluff, written in a hurry, simply isn’t heard above the online noise.

That’s not to say that extroverts only write self-promotional fluff. Of course, there are many outstanding, valuable articles written by extroverts.

It’s simply that an introvert is less likely to get caught up in self-promotion and more likely to take the time to think ‘what use is this to my audience? What value will they gain from it?’. That builds real, deep trust that is hard to shatter.