"Of course, I only speak to women—to my own dear sisters; I don't speak to men, for I don't expect them to like what I say. They pretend to admire us very much, but I should like them to admire us a little less and to trust us a little more. I don't know what we have ever done to them that they should keep us out of everything. We have trusted them too much, and I think the time has come now for us to judge them, and say that by keeping us out we don't think they have done so well.”
The social backdrop against which the story takes place is the rise of the women’s rights movement in America in the aftermath of the Civil War. Verena Tarrant is blessed with a gift for oratory, and she exploits this talent in the name of feminism. This quote is from the initial introduction of Verena as a spirited leader of the movement. The message is clear enough and the evidence backing her argument is clear as well. It was not just conservative men who found the call for equality of the sexes worthy of ridicule or radical extremism back then. The prickly part of this excerpt from her speech is not its condemnation of men having done a bad job running the world. Nor is it the targeted complaint that women have unwisely invested too much trust in men to do things with competence. What rankles those standing in opposition to the women’s rights movement is the part she slips in at the end. Collectively speaking, men can take being accused of doing a bad job with the same grain of salt with which they take not being trusted. The moment feminism starts to judge the very validity of the patriarchy is the moment the conflict starts getting serious.
“And as for our four fearful years of slaughter, of course, you won't deny that there the ladies were the great motive power. The Abolitionists brought it on, and were not the Abolitionists principally females?”
It has been estimated that the Civil War claimed as much as 2% of the entire male population of the United States. More than 600,000 males who would otherwise have been actively engaged in society were simply not there in the aftermath of the conflict. Ten years after the end of the war in the 1870’s which is the setting of the novel, there would have been a significant and noticeable impact of the loss of that many men reaching the prime of their productivity. This is the context in which Verena is staking her claims for the women’s movement having reached what would today be called critical mass. The abolitionist movement was essentially a dry run to prove the influence and power of women who are collectively devoted to unpopular social change. The absence of all those men from what would have been their rightful place in society created the perfect opportunity for women to seize the moment before it slipped away. The key phrase here is that during the movement to abolish slavery, women realized the potential power that comes with being motivated by a single cause. Having played a major role in securing the end of slavery, it is only logical that thoughts of securing the end of the patriarchy immediately ignited their motivation.
"He had not as yet been in many houses in New York, and he had never before seen so many accessories. The general character of the place struck him as Bostonian; this was, in fact, very much what he had supposed Boston to be. He had always heard Boston was a city of culture…"
Ransom is neither a Bostonian nor a New Yorker. He is not even, for that matter, a Yankee. As the owner of a plantation in Mississippi, Ransom went to battle for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The victory of good over evil in the conflict resulted in the family having to free their slaves. Having lost the plantation, Basil moves to New York and this quote indicates that he is very much an outsider in the heart of Yankee society. The key part of this quote is how Ransom has developed the concept of a social construct he labels as “Bostonian.” The title of the novel is an allusion to specifically Ransom’s idea that Bostonian is an adjective rather than a noun. To his way of thinking, a Bostonian does not apply merely to someone from Boston. It is a description of character, not location. Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant are thus specifically implicated in his mind as Bostonians not because they hail from the city, but because they inhabit Ransom’s outsider conceptualization of the “general character of the place.”
