Living across the Slaveholding State of Kentucky, the young Harriet Beecher Stowe met both abolitionists and fugitive slaves, both whom informed her of the cruelty of life in bondage. By the time she left Ohio with her husband and five children, she was convinced that slavery had to be abolished immediately. She stated, "I will write something .I will if I live" (Douglas 8). Her goal was set, so she settled down in Brunswick, Maine and there composed Uncle Tom's Cabin. In this novel she hoped to demonstrate slavery's wrongs to the nation (Douglas 8). She also hoped to do her small share for the cause, but it proved to be much more. With the help of her sister, Catharine Esther Beecher, and other feminist women who edited Stowe's so called, "idiomatic jargon", the book was on its way to be a world-renowned novel. She wrote the most powerful antislavery novel ever and it perhaps made her the most influential woman of her time. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin opened up America's eyes to the injustice of slavery and changed the course of women's history.
American women have played a large part in building our country. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the most prominent member of what was only the second generation of American woman novelists (Douglas 11). She was a maverick who shied away from all labels and associations (13). Even though she was never declared a feminist, in her substance she had a powerful feministic style. She proved this by using strong women characters in her story. This was rare in that time because most authors used men as their protagonist and the women played minor roles. In Uncle Tom's Cabin almost all of Stowe's characters are female. She purposefully made her female characters more round and dimensional than her male characters. Women act as their own in Stowe's novel, but only out of extreme desperation (Douglas 18). An example of this would be when Eliza runs away and dresses herself up as a man to save her son.
