In both poetry and prose Walt Whitman envisions an America in which men and women are seen as equals. In an early draft (1847) of Leaves of Grass he wrote, “I am the poet of women as well as men / The woman is not less than the man.” Those lines did not make it into the first printing (1855), but other comparable lines did. The following passage is found in both the first printing and the 1892 “deathbed” edition: “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.”
The Reading Room
Walt Whitman Remembers the Ladies
In Makers of the American Mind philosopher Robert Whittemore notes, “In Whitman’s lexicon, the words ‘America’ and ‘Democracy’ are convertible terms.” This idealized America, which is still in process of becoming, is peopled by individuals “who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy” (Leaves of Grass).
Whitman returns to the theme of replacing old European practices with practices better suited to a forward-looking America in Democratic Vistas (1871). “We see that almost everything that has been written, sung, or stated, of old, with reference to humanity under the feudal and oriental institutes, religions, and for other lands, needs to be re-written, re-sung, re-stated, in terms consistent with the institution of these States, and to come in range and obedient uniformity with them.”
Democratic Vistas also contains Whitman’s most complete statement of the place of women in American society. “Democracy, in silence, biding its time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only—not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil of unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady), develop’d, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, we may admit, through their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical attribute—but great, at any rate, as man, in all departments; or, rather, capable of being so, soon as they realize it, and can bring themselves to give up toys and fictions, and launch forth, as men do, amid real, independent, stormy life.”
One of the key issues Whitman struggles with is the tension between community and solidarity on one hand and individuality and personal freedom on the other. At one point he characterizes democracy as “the leveler, the unyielding principle of the average,” with “another principle, equally unyielding” and as essential, “individuality, the pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself.” In an earlier discussion of this same tension, he calls individualism the “image of completeness in separatism, of individual personal dignity, of a single person, either male or female, characterized in the main, not from extrinsic acquirements or position, but in the pride of himself or herself alone.” At this point, Whitman draws at least a tentative conclusion: “it is mainly or altogether to serve independent separatism that we favor a strong generalization, consolidation.”
In accordance with his argument that we need to rewrite old tales and poems and re-sing old songs in a way that harmonizes with the American spirit, Whitman offers “portraits” of representative American women. He acknowledges that his exemplars “are frightfully out of line from these imported models of womanly personality—the stock feminine characters of the current novelists, or of the foreign court poem, (Ophelias, Enids, princesses, or ladies of one thing or another,) which fill the envying dreams of so many poor girls, and are accepted by our men, too, as supreme ideals of feminine excellence to be sought after.” Modestly and impishly, he claims, “I present mine just for a change.”
His first model was an “expert seamstress” who found factory life both unhealthy and uncomfortable and became the manager of a household. “She has told me that she finds nothing degrading in her position; it is not inconsistent with personal dignity, self-respect, and the respect of others.” His second owns a “mechanical business” and has daily dealings with “superior carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers.”
Whitman highlights the majesty of motherhood, so it should be no surprise that his third model woman is a wife whose primary tasks are related to raising her children and running the household. “Never abnegating her own proper independence, but always genially preserving it, and what belongs to it—cooking, washing, child-nursing, house-tending—she beams sunshine out of all these duties, and makes them illustrious.”
The final example of American womanhood Whitman presents is an elderly woman his mother knew. She was known as “the Peacemaker.” She had little education, “but possess’d a native dignity. She had come to be a tacitly agreed upon domestic regulator, judge, settler of difficulties, shepherdess, and reconciler in the land.”
In America the task “for both man and woman” is to “entirely recast the types of highest personality from what the oriental, feudal, ecclesiastical worlds bequeath us, and which yet possess the imaginative and esthetic fields of the United States.”
Whitman senses “something more revolutionary” in terms of the status of women is just over the horizon. He offers a prophecy: “The day is coming when the deep questions of woman’s entrance amid the arenas of practical life, politics, the suffrage, &c, will not only be argued all around us, but may be put to decision, and real experiment.”