Performance Matrix for Image, Moles and States of the Women in Late 19th Century Romanian and American Society

摘要

The latter half of the 19th century in the U.S. and Romanian Principalities was a time of unprecedented change and emancipation for American and Romanian women regarding their political engagement, legal status, access to higher education, entrance into the professions and public life and their visibility in the professional world of literature and arts where they started to forge a tradition of their own. Women were challenging the foundations of a patriarchal society where they had to face the most difficult problems for the nineteenth-century women: women's independence, especially the economic one, women's right to labour (the wage-earning options available to women were quite limited and domestic service was the single most important source of women's paid unemployment) or to vote, their domestic roles. It is important to notice that from the 1880s the "New Woman" in theory and fact changed the canon of American and Romanian literature, affecting writers' lives and invigorating the literature with new fictional design in character, form and theme.