In her essay, "From Cult to Profession, Domestic Women in Search of Equality," Cheryl Robertson highlights what women in 1840 (just before DeLamarter was born) were most likely to want for themselves and what others expected of them by quoting a 19th century author, Sarah Lewis:

"The chief object of their [women's] education is not so much to fit them to adorn society, as to vivify and enlighten a home. What a paradise even this world might become, if one half of the amount of effort expended in vain attempts to excite the admiration of strangers, were reversed to vary the amusements and adorn the sacred precincts of the home! . . . There are, morally speaking, no small duties. Nothing that influences human virtue and happiness can be really trifling, and what more influences them than the despised, because limited, duties assigned to women? . . . It is true, her reward (her task being done) is not of this world."

These were probably the ideals that Mary B. DeLamarter was raised to accept - yet they were also the beliefs that women of her era began to reject. Though it is impossible to pinpoint DeLamarter's own beliefs, her life and her writings seem to place her somewhat in between those two extremes. DeLamarter was a wife, a mother, and a Christian, but she was also a literary lady - which seems to have occupied much of her passions and time.

While it is somewhat easy to imagine the role of housewife, mother, and in extreme cases, servant of the house, it is more difficult to imagine the life of a fully committed poet of the late 1800's. Some of these women, women who most likely influenced DeLamarter and her poetry are:

Lydia Huntley Sigourney (1791 - 1865)
Maria Gowen Brooks (1794 - 1845)
Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806 - 1893)
Frances Anne Butler Kemble (1809 - 1893)
Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850)
Fanny Fern (Sarah Willis Parton) (1811 - 1872)
Frances Sargent Locke Osgood (1811 - 1850)
Sarah Louisa Forten ("Ada") (1814 - 1883)
Julia Ward Howe (1819 - 1910)
Alice Cary (1820 - 1871)
Phoebe Cary (1824 - 1871)
Lucy Larcom (1824 - 1893)
Adeline D.T. Whitney (1824 - 1906)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)
Rose Terry Cooke (1827 - 1892)
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830 - 1885)
Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)
Adah Isaacs Menken (1835 - 1868)
Celia Thaxter (1835 - 1894)
Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835 - 1921)
Louise Chandler Moulton (1835 - 1908)
Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt (1836 - 1919)
Christine Rutledge/ The Carolina Singers (fl. 1870)
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844 - 1911)
Emma Lazarus (1849 - 1887)
Henrietta Cordelia Ray (1849 - 1916)

List compiled from Nineteenth Century American Women Poets: An Anthology Ed. Paula Bennet

Paula Bennet's Introduction to this Anthology includes commentary on 19th century writers. Particularly useful to this study of women poets and Mary B. DeLamarter is Bennet's comment that 19th century woman poets especially, were often criticized by the "new standards" at the turn of the 20th century. This "New Criticism" termed the poets and their work as "out of date, literarily naïve, timid, [and] conventional, . . . as well as simplistically Christian and excessively relying on tears" (Bennet XXXIV). While these trends may have occurred, it is impossible to term a whole century of poems within the same four or five phrases.

It is true that many of Mary DeLamarter's poems, especially those published in the Inter-Ocean of Chicago newspaper, were very melodramatic . . . . but maybe that was their charm. They hallmark a time in society in which women were feeling more liberated and were finally able to express emotion, and while most could not truly do this in the home as housewives and mothers, they could begin this in their writing. . . not in just personal diaries, but in published writing.