First generations, p.23
First Generations, page 23
The parameters of this debate are important to consider: full political participation was never an option. Why this is so is less clear than it might seem. To argue that woman suffrage ran counter to tradition or custom, threatened viable gender-based divisions of labor, or challenged male dominance is only to say that it was a radical proposition. But, in fact, this radical reform was put into effect in one state with little opposition. In 1790 New Jersey adopted an election law that explicitly referred to voters as “he or she.” By 1800, suffrage was the right of every “maid or widow, black or white” in the state. And some women exercised that right. In 1797, women played a critical role in a closely contested election in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Ironically, this activism led to the rescinding of voting privileges, for the loser in this election took his revenge in 1807, when he mounted a successful campaign to disenfranchise both women and African Americans. The grounds given for limiting suffrage on the basis of sex and race are instructive. As dependent groups within the society, both women and blacks were considered too easily manipulated by more powerful members of the community. Although New Jersey legislators thus reverted to older notions that dependent groups could not be full citizens, the question remains: why was one state’s initial willingness to permit women’s suffrage not replicated in any other state?
And if no other government was willing to grant women formal political rights, how was women’s citizenship to be defined? Here, the connection to reformers’ emphasis on moral character and education clearly emerges. For in the new republic women were to be assigned civic duties rather than accorded formal political rights. They would be named guardians of the virtues essential to the republic and socializing agents of the next generation. Women were to embody and to impart to husbands and children what the rhetoric of the day called “republican virtues” —simplicity, honesty, and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the nation. They were to nurture in their children, and most particularly in their sons, a patriotic devotion to representative government and a keen sensitivity to signs of tyranny or decadence in the nation’s leadership.
Assigning to women the role of guardians of and instructors in virtue resolved several troubling ambiguities. First, it allowed the nation to acknowledge women’s contributions during the war without intentionally disrupting long-standing gender relations. Second, it enlisted the family in the service of a young and underdeveloped state. In addition, it diminished any potential opposition to women’s formal education by providing that education with a clear purpose. Many critics of formal educational institutions for women voiced concern that intellectual pursuits would have a defeminizing effect on women. As one Boston minister bluntly put it: “Women of masculine minds have generally masculine manners.” Opponents drew a vivid picture of the dire consequences of a curriculum that included geography, rhetoric, and English composition. The woman pictured was a mirror image of the emerging republican ideal, for she was “disgustingly slovenly in her person, indecent in her habits, imperious to her husband, and negligent of her children.” With well-defined ends for women’s education, however, the means were justified: if a good education prepared a woman to be a good mother and wife, an exemplar and conveyor of moral character, then it was an asset to the republic.
Who had elaborated this new civic role for women? What individuals or groups were the source of what came to be called “republican womanhood”? On this, historians disagree. Some see this new gender ideology as the handiwork of political leaders, and thus a role constructed for rather than by women. Others insist that republican womanhood was the creation of women themselves; a creation to be admired, considering the lack of political traditions women had to guide them. Neither Enlightenment philosophers nor the seventeenth-century English commonwealth men upon whom American male patriots so heavily and eagerly leaned outlined a political role for women. Indeed, these English thinkers most often used the feminine in apposition to the virtuous, arguing that political manliness led one to support a republic and to defend it, while effeminacy, with its love of luxury and its vulnerability to corruption and vice, led one to tolerate tyranny and accept political dependence. It was the task—and the achievement—of postwar women in America to confront this identification of virtue with the masculine and corruption with the feminine and deprive it of its powers. Women, or a group of women speaking for their sex, molded a revolutionary role for themselves by placing “the mother, not the masses … as the custodian of civic morality.” Perhaps the simplest, and best, explanation of the origins of republican womanhood is that it emerged out of a multitude of interactions between women and men and among members of the same gender, that it was the handiwork of political leaders and social critics, and that it bore the marks of self-interest, self-justification, and a postwar effort to understand the experiences of the Revolution.
It is also critical to remember that the broad social changes which predated the Revolution contributed powerfully to the issues raised and the solutions devised in republican womanhood. The rise of gentility by mid-century had already diminished the emphasis on housewifery in most prosperous households. Greater reliance on the purchase of household goods had given the wives and daughters of merchants, shippers, lawyers, planters, and gentlemen more leisure time. How this time should be spent was a subject of some controversy in the decades before the Revolution. Women’s leisure hours could be spent socializing and refining the home environment. Or they could be spent attending to children and to the development of their character and values. Long before Judith Sergeant Murray wrote her Gleaner essays, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was applying Mr. Locke’s theories of child-rearing to her oldest son. Or women could, with or without conscious articulation or consideration of the implications, use leisure to advance their own individual growth and satisfaction. An incipient credo of individualism was already evident among men of the new genteel classes. The clearest evidence of its entry into women’s lives was the craze for reading novels. Before the Revolution, the allocation of women’s leisure time and of their energies was a private matter. Genteel women were indeed often criticized and satirized as frivolous, extravagant, and selfish before the Revolution. But their sins were against their own good reputations or the reputations of their husbands. They were not sins against the body politic.
The Revolution altered this. It politicized leisure time and women’s activities within it. And in the postwar years, Americans debated this issue in a vocabulary highly charged with morality and patriotism. A political crisis had transformed the question of women’s leisure time into a matter of civic concern. Women’s capacity for and inclination toward extravagance could no longer be viewed as simply the failure of personal restraint. It now “raised questions about the continued independence and survival of the nation.” “Mothers,” proclaimed a minister in 1802, “do in a sense, hold the reins of government and sway the ensigns of national prosperity and glory.” If this demonstrates the compelling nature of the Revolution and the creation of a republic, it also makes clear that the material out of which republican womanhood was constructed already existed in American society.
Measuring the impact of this new ideology is as critical as discovering its origins, and as difficult. Certainly, it was not internalized by the wives and mothers of the largest minority population in the new nation—African Americans—or among the oldest residents of what was now the United States—Indian women. The issues raised by republican womanhood had no context in the lives of enslaved women. And among the Northern and urban free black communities formed by private manumission, by state-mandated plans for abolition, and by escaped Southern slaves seeking refuge in Northern cities, very different issues of identity confronted both women and men. Their preoccupation lay in testing the limitations and opportunities of freedom, in shaping institutions such as the family and the church to their own needs and desires, and in negotiating relationships with the larger white community. Republican womanhood was based upon the assumption that a wife and mother operated within a secured family circle, unthreatened by the separation of a wife from her husband or a mother from her children. It depended as well on the notion that the sons of a republican woman, once carefully educated, would take their place as full citizens in the new society. These were not the circumstances in the free black communities of Philadelphia or New York.
Native American women might find, in their fierce loyalty to clan or tribe, a spirit analogous to the patriotism that underlay republican womanhood. But in any form it took, the ideology of the victors would have been rejected by Indian women whose families, homes, and cultures were imperiled by American independence. After the last British forts vanished from the Ohio Valley, the remaining tribes had no ally to support their claims on Western lands. Even among the few tribes who had supported the Revolution, the price of survival was often the steady erosion of traditional gendered divisions of labor and family power. Among the Catawba, for example, women were slowly squeezed into English gender molds. For Catawba women, struggling to retain their own family names and pass them on to their sons and daughters and to remain active agents of commerce and land management within their community, the opportunity to be lauded as self-sacrificing mothers and wives—the hallmarks of republican womanhood—would be more ironic than rewarding.
Republican womanhood was, therefore, a set of gender roles and ideals that could evoke a positive response only within white communities. But even there, questions remain about the extent of its reception and the consequences of its adoption. If the tenets of republican womanhood were actually incorporated into the daily lives of the white families of America, did they reorder the hierarchy of women’s domestic roles? Was mothering valorized at the expense of what colonial society called “notable housewifery”? Did women acquire greater self-esteem from their role as educators and guardians of patriotism than they once had from their duties as household producers and frugal household managers? Were there hidden costs to this new civic role? It is possible, for example, to read the didactic literature of republican womanhood as a literature of restraint, by which women are exhorted to curtail passion and to renounce the sensuality of the material world for a reasoned and simple life of virtue. It has also been suggested by some historians that republican womanhood demanded that women sacrifice individualism on the altar of patriotism, just as a new ideology of healthy self-interest and individualism was gaining strength among white middle-class and elite males. If these men began to endorse self-interest as a more effective means of ensuring the republic than communal loyalties and self-sacrifice—and, by the nineteenth century, they did—then what civic value could republican womanhood continue to claim?
The extent to which republican womanhood was actually embraced or adopted by white Americans is the last of many uncertainties. Women without leisure time and without the resources to acquire formal education could not meet the demands of the ideology. The thousands of war widows whose petitions for relief, compensation, or pensions went unanswered by state and national governments were keenly aware of the fact that they had “don much to Carrey on this war.” However, their political consciousness did not translate into a contentment with raising patriotic sons and daughters. Even among the privileged classes, diaries and letters indicate that the definition of “virtue” heeded by many women did not arise from republican womanhood but from a religious ethic that long predated the war. Christian morality rather than civic morality lay at the core of the education these well-to-do mothers provided their children.
Perhaps the most telling fact is that republican womanhood—which kept alive women’s right to follow political developments and form political judgments—did not appear to outlive the Revolutionary generation. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a Boston matron looked back on her childhood in the earliest days of the new republic. In particular, she recalled the odd fact that the women in her family—her mother and aunts—had been interested in politics. She could remember their frequent political discussions, although the content had long ago faded from memory. Political discussion was a tradition, she quickly added, that she had not fostered in her own household. For this woman, and for others of her generation, the Revolution had been relegated to a historical event that no longer influenced their personal lives. Whatever exigencies had prompted their grandmothers to become “great politicians” no longer seemed relevant in their own lives. “In my opinion,” wrote one young woman in 1801, “[political subjects] are altogether out of a lady’s sphere.” It remained for the daughters of these women to rediscover and expand women’s place in the civic and political realms of American society later in the nineteenth century.
ALSOBY CAROL BERKIN
Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist
Women of America: A History (edited with Mary Beth Norton)
Women, War and Revolution (edited with Clara M. Lovett)
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
CHAPTER 1 : IMMIGRANTS TO PARADISE: WHITE WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHESAPEAKE
In the late 1970s a new scholarship on the colonial South emerged. By the end of the 1980s, that scholarship had succeeded in ending the “New Englandization” of colonial history. Through demographic studies and the examination of court records, wills, and material culture, this new group of scholars overcame the absence of more traditional sources such as diaries, letters, sermons, and political tracts in drawing their portraits of the region’s people, economy, and culture. Their work reflected the techniques and focus of the new social history, for in the resulting articles and books they reconstructed birth and death cycles, traced inheritance patterns, and looked closely at the division of labor in daily work life. This attention to issues such as community building, family structure and formation, and the establishment and transmission of culture made women central rather than marginal figures. Two collections of articles, published some nine years apart, are a good measure of the field’s development. The first is Thad Tate and David Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the 17th Century: Essays in Anglo-American Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); the second is Lois G. Carr, Philip Morgan, and Jean B. Russo, eds., Colonial Chesapeake Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). The former contains pathbreaking articles on women, including Lorena Walsh’s “‘Till Death Us Do Part’: Marriage and Family in Seventeenth Century Maryland,” and Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman’s “Now-Wives and Sons-in-Law: Parental Death in a Seventeenth Century Virginia County.” The more recent of the two volumes has James Horn’s “Adapting to a New World: A Comparative Study of Local Society in England and Maryland, 1650-1700,” and Lorena Walsh’s “Community Networks in the Early Chesapeake.” The authors in these two collections form the core of a highly productive group of scholars who work collaboratively and individually on the history of the Chesapeake.
Demographic studies are the basic building blocks in seventeenth-century Chesapeake women’s history. Among the most important articles are: Russell Menard, “Immigration to the Chesapeake Colonies in the Seventeenth Century: A Review Essay,” Maryland History Magazine LXVIII (1973); Lorena Walsh and Russell R. Menard, “Death in the Chesapeake: Two Life Tables for Men in Early Colonial Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine LXIX (1974); Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman, “Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIII (1976); and on black immigrants, Russell R. Menard, “The Maryland Slave Population, 1658 to 1730: A Demographic Profile of Blacks in Four Counties,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, XXXIII (1976), and Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
On the lives and experiences of seventeenth-century Southern white women, see the overview article by Mary Beth Norton, “The Evolution of White Women’s Experience in Early America,” which appeared in the American Historical Review 89 (1984). Norton has just completed a large-scale research project on seventeenth-century women entitled Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996). In addition, see the most often reprinted articles in the field of seventeenth-century women’s history: Lorena Walsh and Lois G. Carr, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in 17th Century Maryland,” which originally appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, XXXIV (1977); Carole Shammas, “The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America,” in Journal of Social History 14 (1980-81); Lorena Walsh, “The Experience and Status of Women in the Chesapeake, 1750-1775,” in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). See also Lois G. Carr, Russell R. Menard, and Lorena S. Walsh, Robert Cole’s World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), from which the information on Mary Cole was gleaned. For a critique of the literature on Southern colonial women, see Carol Berkin, “Clio’s Daughters: Southern Colonial Women and their Historians,” in Catherine Clinton and Michelle Gillespie, eds., The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Women’s legal status and inheritance rights have been the subject of several important studies in the last decade. The work is often daunting, since it requires competence in both women’s history and legal history and because the variation from colony to colony, region to region, and sometimes decade to decade are so great that few generalizations can be made from the case study of one colony or one court. Nevertheless, a reader interested in the subject can profit from reading Lois G. Carr, “Inheritance in the Chesapeake,” and Carole Shammas, “Early American Women and Control over Capital,” both in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989). They can also read Marylynn Salmon, “The Legal Status of Women in Early America: A Reappraisal,” Law and History Review, vol. 1 (1983).
