SOURCE: Bakker, Jan. “Another Dilemma of an Intellectual in the Old South: Caroline Gilman, the Peculiar Institution, and Greater Rights for Women in the Rose Magazines.” The Southern Literary Journal 17, no. 1 (fall 1984): 12-25.

In the following essay, Bakker examines the “gentle feminism” and sentimentalized support for slavery in Caroline Howard Gilman's weeklies of the 1830s.

Although she was a Yankee by birth and education, Mrs. Caroline Howard Gilman became the best known southern female author in the antebellum United States. Largely responsible for her literary fame was the nation-wide dissemination of her popular young people's magazines printed in Charleston from 1832 to 1839. These were the first such weeklies ever published in the country: The Rose Bud (August 11, 1832-August 24, 1833), The Southern Rose Bud (August 31, 1833-August 22, 1835), and The Southern Rose (September 5, 1835-August 17, 1839). As the changes in their name suggests, the Rose magazines became increasingly adult in form and content, growing up...