Title: Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
Author: Linda Kerber
Year of Publication: 1980
Thesis:
Argues that the political theory informing the American Revolution looks a lot less radical taking into consideration white middle-class women, who are the subject of this study. These women, rather than draw from Enlightenment philosophers, found sources to inspire their voices in fiction writing. Developing the concept of Republican Motherhood, they found a way to express themselves as Benjamin Rush said, essentially to raise republican sons. This involved a necessary increase in their literacy. The American Revolution offered modest changes to these women's lives; in fact, divorce became more, not less difficult under coverture. However, one takeaway is how important it is to center on the agency of these women to show that they were developing their own political theory and expressing their patriotism within some fairly rigid social constraints.
Time: mid-1700s to 1820
Geography: U.S.
Organization:
Preface (10min)
- Political theory not as radical when women's writing is taken into consideration (xii)
- El. Cady Stanton makes a point about women being forgotten as she drafts the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls (xii)
- This book is about how to show how women entered the political domain without eschewing their domestic roles (xii) <-- this is interesting - as they embody the revolutionary spirit, educating their children, it shows how the home is the site of political education/education about how the world works.
Introduction - The Women's World of the Early Republic
- Poem sets the stage for public/private men/women sphere dichotomy
- Industrial tech as invading domestic life (7)
- In an era of political innovation, she challenges the assumption of maleness (7)
- - Boycott cited as the first time "women would also have to be pulled out of the privacy of their traditional domain and propelled to the public world of political decisions" (8) <-- begs the question of what is the difference between private/public and domestic/public.
-Cites women's contributions to the American Revolutionary War (8)
- Coverture unquestioned prior to War, during which questions arise. This issue challenges the degree to which we can see the Revolution as radical (9)
- The paradox of women as educators but not being too intellectual (10)
- MC white women leave male philosophers and look to fiction/memoirs for answers (11)
1. "Empire of Complacency" - The Inheritance of the Enlightenment.
- This chapter essentially establishes the extent to which Enlightenment philosophers considered women as part of society & especially with respect to their political engagement. It sets the stage for them having to draw elsewhere for inspiration.
- The paradox of the universal "man" and the not-so-universal man. Kerber leans toward "man" as literal.
- Hobbes - children are man's domain
- Locke - women to honor their fathers / primogeniture, yet should be able to control property, responsible for raising children, spouses as part of a contract (17-18)
- Montesquieu - women as legally free but governed by "manners" and custom (he valued conservative behavior (19)
2. "Women Invited to War" - Sacrifice and Survival
- Double standard for women - fought on both sides of the War, and so considered to be operating under male influence. (36)
- "Republican Motherhood" they needed to frame as something non-threatening to the social order
- Boardinghouses a domain where women could earn money.
- Women decidedly not simply the appendages of men.
3. "What Have I to do with Politicks? - The Meaning of Female Patriotism
- Difficult to assess women's political consciousness who joined the war efforts.
- See: Benjamin Rush's take on Mary Waters doctoring but also social prostrations to male doctors (74)
- See Grace Growden Galloway - not a patriot & revealed her thoughts in her diary (74-75)
- This beginning section is making the case that what couldn't be found publicly might be found in the diaries of women & letters/correspondence, perhaps fundraising, individual (then collective petitioning after the War (the slave narrative becomes so important in this light, then)
- Broadsides (110)
4. "She can Have No Will Different from His" - Revolutionary Loyalties of Married Women
- Quote by Theodore Sedgwick sets stage - not considering them of their own will, it's argued they don't have the responsiblity for their husband's decisions. (115) <-- This gets interesting if you think about myhts about the antebellum South, where white women were considered appendages and not their own agents.
- Idea of woman killing her husband as "petite treason" (119)
- Loyalty to the Republic over marriage stressed as women's property was the ante, though by the end not all patriot Republicans are on board with this (so it begs the question as to what other factors are considered - which hopefully can be teased out of the case studies in this chapter (124)
- Exile (self or otherwise imposed) considered forfeit (125) - this is super interesting considering Mann's Republic of Debtors and how staying in the physical home was a statement of honor and integrity (125)
- "Faced with a choice between encouraging a woman's support for the Revolution and her loyalty to a tory husband, even some Revolutionaries insisted that she choose loyalty to her hus- band. Faced with a choice between coverture and independence, the Revolutionary chose coverture. Even after the Revolution, the family circle remained a woman's state." (136)
5. "Disabilities...Intended for Her Protection" - The Anti-Republican Implications of Coverture
- "Taxation without representation" argument on women's labor (father of raped daughter suing for damages arguing loss of labor through pregnancy) (140)
- 1st 1/2 of Republic women actually have MORE difficulty controlling their property, not less (155)
- Thus, Kerber finds a demand for equal property rights is a precursor for demanding "republican rights." (155)
6. "Domestic Liberty" - Freedom to Divorce
- Was divorce a question of republican rights? (159) <--this really asks the extent to which women were progenitors in these questions
- CT & NY good places for research (source issue)
- Desertion, adultery for major causes
- Good way to measure literacy (using signatures)
- Women initiated most divorces.
- Still difficult to divorce before and after
7. "Why Should Girls be Learnd or Wise?"
- "Thomas Jefferson said the purpose of these institutions was to "instruct the mass of our citizens in these their rights, interests and duties, as men and citizens." (189)
- Rise of private academies (189)
- Women have huge barriers to entry (192)
- Literacy gap closing somewhere between 1780-1850 (193) (Check this against ourworldindata.org - though who is working on series that disambiguate by gender, race, etc.
"What American women needed—not least for rhetorical purposes—was an example of a woman of substantive intellectual ac- complishment who had not rejected the domestic world when she moved into the public one." (226) <-- later even in late 19th early 20th is this idea that women go get educated in order to find husbands (white m/c women).
"She had a responsibility to the political scene, though was not active in it. As one fictional woman put it, "If the community flourish and enjoy health and freedom, shall we not share in the happy effect? If it be oppressed and disturbed, shall we not endure our proportion of evil? Why then should the love of our country be a masculine passion only?"71 A woman's competence was not assumed to extend to the making of political deci- sions. Her political task was accomplished within the confines of her family. The model republican woman was a mother." (228)
8. "We Own that Ladies Sometimes Read" - Women's Reading in the Early Republic
- Women warned not to read stuff that would 'corrupt' them. (235)
- Elizabeth Drinker and her internalized self judgment for reading too much and not being responsible (239)
- Attacks on fiction by reading societies of women (even though many women read it anyway (241)
- Women writers bake in political stuff/life as women within these religious literary tracts. *****Enslaved people are doing this, too. So, I'm thinking it's about using a genre that is available in order to deliver (the genre in terms of slave narrative became it's own thing, but there are styles & scripts that are known to the audience, no?)
"Under the trappings of a traditional devotional tract is a biography of an intense young woman who explored more widely than most of her peers the options open to her community and her generation. A book like this one must be classified as women's history as well as religious history." (263)
9. "The Republican Mother" - Female Political Imagination in the Early Republic"
- Satire as a way for women to express dissatisfaction w/power arrangements
- Wollestonecraft - the "manly women" (or those who refuse the gender stereotypes) considered sexually promiscuous (and therefore morally repugnant), though Kerber argues Republican Mothers evade this critique (283)
- Republican Motherhood as a stage in social politicization (284)
Note on Sources
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
letters, diaries, court records, legislative petitions, pamphlets, books, essays, memoirs, fiction (xi,xii)
Historiography:
- Argues that women's writing/thinking has been ignored thus far (and that it should be treated as labor). (xi)
Keywords:
idiot
political virtue
Republican motherhood
"The Republican Mother integrated political values into her domestic life. Dedicated as she was to the nurture of public-spirited male citizens, she guaranteed the steady infusion of virtue into the Republic." (11)
"The Republican Mother was an educated woman who could be spared the criticism normally addressed to the Learned Lady because she placed her learning at her family's service. Benjamin Rush addressed the issue directly in his lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry for the Young Ladies' Academy: "Among the various illiberal reasons which have hitherto been given for neglecting the education of ladies, one has been —That a liberal education renders ladies inattentive to domestic duties— How praise worthy then would it be in such ladies to shew, by their conduct, that this remark is not only illiberal, but also ill founded." Rush urged an explicitly instrumental definition of the uses of education: families would be improved if women were educated. Education, he claimed, would provide "subject for rational and improving conversa- tion. ... it will cause your society to be sought for, and courted, by sensible men. . . . it will afford you pleasure in solitude." (228)
Metaphor of the "clinging vine" (66)
Baron / Feme (119)
Coverture
"Coverture, in short, was inconsistent with the most basic maxims of republican theory. The married woman, "covered" by her husband's political identity, became politically invisible." (return for page #)
Court of Equity (ch5)
bluestocking (ch7) (intellectual/literary woman)
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
I've been thinking I need to read the literature on the idea of using people's signatures as a signal that they are literate. I'm sure it's robust, but... I mean... some people may have had reason to hide their literacy (enslaved people, for example) and others might see reason to pretend literacy when they didn't have it. What techniques have folks used who could not read to make it appear so? Here is an interesting quote: "These disparities in literacy—from the basic ability to sign one's name and to read simple prose to the sophisticated ability to read difficult or theoretical prose, foreign languages, and the classics—have enormous implications for the history of the relations between the sexes." (192)
To what degrees was Republican Motherhood available or even desired to non-middle-class, and especially non-white people?
Quotes:
"Political theory appears less radical and more conservative when measured against the conscious refusal of constitution makers to recognize women's presence in the Republic and to change women's status. And the catalog of significant American literature is en- riched by the addition of essays, memoirs, and fiction written by women that have awaited careful evaluation." (xii)
On agency in constructing "the new female ideology":
"But the central architects of the new female ideology were women: not only Judith Sargent Murray and Susannah Rowrson, but also the anonymous "Female Advocate" of Hartford, Connecticut, novelists like Hannah Webster Foster and her daughters, and playwrights like Mercy Otis Warren, Equally important were the throngs of anonymous women who read these female writers, wrote letters to each other, kept personal diaries, tested the responsive- ness of the government to their needs by petitions to legislatures and lawsuits in courts, and began to organize themselves in benevolent and charitable societies." (11)
"It is a measure of the conservatism of the Revolution that women remained on the periphery of the political community; it is possible to read the subsequent political history of women in America as the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution had failed to do. From the time of the Revolution until our own day,thelan- guage of Republican Motherhood remains the most readily accepted— though certainly not the most radical—justification for women's political behavior. This book is an account of its origins." (12)
On the relationship between coverture and vagrancy:
"Coverture had unexpected practical implications. The law of vagrancy, for example, was shaped by the custom of coverture to the woman's disadvantage. The willingness of towns and counties to provide for legal residents incapable of supporting themselves was accompanied by an extraordinary caution about entertaining poor strangers, a skepticism of vagrants, and an insistence that each person establish clearly his or her right to legal settlement. The careful and explicit enforcement of the law of settlement had direct implications for married women, whose right to settlement in a town (and whose implicit claim, therefore, on town charity) was far more vulnerable than the right of men." (142) <—-This is super interesting. How does the history of vagrancy laws connect also to Native Americans & African Americans?
Benjamin Rush making the point on education of the sons.
"'The equal share that every citizen has in the liberty and the possible share he may have in the government of our country make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree, by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instruct- ing their sons in the principles of liberty and government" (229)
To one of the book's major lines of argument:
"They devised their own inter- pretation of what the Revolution had meant to them as women, and they began to invent an ideology of citizenship that merged the domestic domain of the preindustrial woman with the new public ideology of indi- vidual responsibility and civic virtue. They did this in the face of severe ridicule, responding both to the anti-intellectualcomplaint that educating women served no practical purpose and the conservative complaint that women had no political significance." (269)
"The willingness of the American woman to overcome this an- cient separation brought her into the all-male political community.27 In this sense, Republican Motherhood was a very important, even revolu- tionary, invention. It altered the female domain in which most women had always lived out their lives; it justified women's absorption and participation in the civic culture." (284)
The layers of irony:
"- The ironies... "Just as planters claimed that democracy in the antebellum South rested on the economic base of slavery, so egali- tarian society was said to rest on the moral base of deference among a class of people—women—who would devote their efforts to service: raising sons and disciplining husbands to be virtuous citizens of the Republic." (285)
Notes:
This comes out at the bicentennial (76)
The way we talk about domestic spheres seems troublesome, as I think learning this the first time we think of a "home" as the sphere, and read back stereotypical women's roles (thinking Leave it to Beaver).
See: Elizabeth Drinker (ch2,8)
See: Hannah Adams (ch3)
Chapter 4 would be a great chapter to return to as it really uses the legal history amazingly well to describe the nuances and implications of coverture during the Am. Rev.
- Books like these stress to me the importance for syntheses