A Lady Responds to 'Hawkeye': Sarah Louviere Challenges Gender Norms in 1873alt Louisiana
In this fictional response to an 1853 editorial, Sarah Louviere challenges the idea that girls are born neat and boys wild. Mud, hammers, and freedom ensue.
To the editor,
Having now read the letter printed from a Mr. Hawkeye in your recent column of The Weekly Comet dated June 5, 1853, I feel obliged to respond—not only as a woman, but as a girl who once mudded her dress, skinned her knees, and laughed doing it. The author’s notion that girls are somehow born tidy and tea-set-bound, while boys are predestined to charge into dirt and glory, is a fiction dressed up in trousers.
I know girls who climb trees better than any boy. I know boys who prefer baking pies to fighting wars. These things do not make them unnatural; they make them free.
If a girl is given only a doll and scolded when her dress is soiled, then yes, she may grow to believe neatness is her nature. But if she is given the field, the riverbank, and the hammer, she will take them. And she will build.
It is not our natures that differ. It is our freedoms. And we are tired of asking permission for them.
—Sarah Louviere
Further Reading: Sarah Louviere is responding to an editorial published in The Weekly Comet (Baton Rouge, LA), June 5, 1853, written by "Hawkeye," who claimed girls and boys are inherently different, with boys being dirt-loving and wild, and girls born neat and proper. Sarah’s rebuttal is part of the Society Section’s growing tradition of publishing alternate views from the era.
[Image source: Library of Congress, Louisiana State University Archives]
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