Through her 1855 novel Ruth Hall, Fanny Fern intends to reveal how specious the ideology of separate spheres can be. To expose the flaws of this ideology, Fern uses satire and sentimental rhetoric to undermine traditional values such as “True Womanhood,” which according to Barbara Welter, are composed of four virtues, namely “purity,” “piety,” “submissiveness,” and “domesticity,", and the prevalent concept of men''s sphere in the public space and woman’s sphere in the private home, and to advance the feminist agenda of the necessity of work for women. Therefore, this thesis attempts to show how Ruth Hall points out the problematics of the binary concept of the separate spheres through the ups and downs of Ruth’s married life and insists on the importance of work for a woman to be able to maintain her identity as a human being and to raise her children in mid-nineteenth century America. The protagonist Ruth, whose life closely resembles that of Fanny Fern’s, marries Harry Hall who works in a bank, and lives a happy and comfortable life of the white middle-class, but is bereaved of him a few years later and left with only two little daughters without any inherited property.
With financial assistance neither from her father nor from her father-in-law, Ruth cannot stay in a private home but is forced to search for work to make a living. And she finds that the education she has had in school and at home as a girl is not appropriate for the work she wants to get in the public sphere to make a living. This shows that the white middle-class ideology of separate spheres can not protect a woman like Ruth, who is dropped from middle-class status and plunged into that of the lower classes in a day. Ruth finds herself in a situation where she must find work in society in order to survive with her daughters. This situation in itself deconstructs the ideology of separate spheres which commands that women stay in the private sphere of the home and only do the domestic work.
In spite of interruptions from her relatives, the widowed Ruth gets a job writing cheap articles for newspapers and succeeds in the end as a popular writer. Her success as a writer in a competitive capitalist society proves the falsity of the ideology of separate spheres which very strictly divides the public sphere and the private sphere. Instead, her success as a career woman shows the possibility of the co-existence of woman’s work and domesticity.
Besides, through her work, Ruth discovers herself as a human being and gains a sense of self-identity as a woman. The sympathy her readers show her expressed in the readers’ letters written to her, she transcends the dichotomy of the separate spheres and dreams of a new home in which a new order is possible replacing the home where the traditional ideology of separate spheres still governs.