Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States

Teresa Anne Murphy

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208283
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Women's history emerged as a genre in the waning years of the eighteenth century, a period during which concepts of nationhood and a sense of belonging expanded throughout European nations and the young American republic. Early women's histories had criticized the economic practices, intellectual abilities, and political behavior of women while emphasizing the importance of female domesticity in national development. These histories had created a narrative of exclusion that legitimated the variety of citizenship considered suitable for women, which they argued should be constructed in a very different way from that of men: women's relationship to the nation should be considered in terms of their participation in civil society and the domestic realm. But the throes of the Revolution and the emergence of the first woman's rights movement challenged the dominance of that narrative and complicated the history writers' interpretation of women's history and the idea of domestic citizenship.In Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States, Teresa Anne Murphy traces the evolution of women's history from the late eighteenth century to the time of the Civil War, demonstrating that competing ideas of women's citizenship had a central role in the ways those histories were constructed. This intellectual history examines the concept of domestic citizenship that was promoted in the popular writing of Sarah Josepha Hale and Elizabeth Ellet and follows the threads that link them to later history writers, such as Lydia Maria Child and Carolyn Dall, who challenged those narratives and laid the groundwork for advancing a more progressive woman's rights agenda. As woman's rights activists recognized, citizenship encompassed activities that ranged far beyond specific legal rights for women to their broader terms of inclusion in society, the economy, and government. Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States demonstrates that citizenship is at the heart of women's history and, consequently, that women's history is the history of nations.

I

Women, History, and Nation

Chapter 1

Domestic Citizenship and National Progress

In the spring of 1774, Robert Aitken took out large ads in both the Pennsylvania Gazette and the Pennsylvania Packet to advertise his latest product, the Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women, in Different Ages. The book had been written by Antoine-Léonard Thomas and published in Paris in 1772, then translated (and expanded) by William Russell, who published it in Edinburgh in 1773. With no copyright laws to hold him back, Aitken printed and sold his own copies of Russell’s translation the following year at his Philadelphia bookstore. By that summer, the printer Samuel Loudon was advertising the book in his New York shop.¹

Aitken was a successful printer and bookseller in the eighteenth century, part of a thriving world of new commercial goods that were widely available in the colonial cities of the New World. And as his advertising made clear, this was a product that was directed at, as well as about, a key segment of his market: women. In line after line, Aitken laid out the topics covered by his new product: “the great and virtuous activities of women … the effects of Christianity on the manners of women … the books written in honour of women….” Every detail addressed the importance of women, suggesting a narrative that female readers might find interesting and even inspirational. As a way of enticing potential buyers, Aitken drew a connection between this new book and the very popular novel, Telemachus, written almost a century earlier by François Fénelon. Aitken reminded his audience that Fénelon had also written about the education of women, suggesting that those who loved Telemachus might find a similar delight in Thomas’s new offering, which was “indisputably the most elegant, and most philosophical treatise, on the female mind.”²

Aitken’s venture into women’s history was only the beginning. Two years later, his friend and rival, Robert Bell, was advertising Lord Kames’s Six Sketches on the History of Man for a price of ten shillings. Like Aitken, Bell carefully laid out a list of the contents, which indicated that Section VI was devoted to “The Progress of the Female Sex.” By the 1780s, bookstores from the mid-Atlantic states were promoting another popular entry in the field, William Alexander’s The History of Women: From Earliest Antiquity to the Present. Booksellers had found, and were eager to sell, a new product: women’s history.³

They promoted this new product in part because reading was becoming more widespread in eighteenth-century colonial culture, and women, in particular, were learning to read. Literacy rates were uneven; men were more likely to be literate than women, whites were more likely to be literate than blacks, and New Englanders more likely to be literate than southerners. But having said that, it is also clear that literacy at many levels was increasing during the eighteenth century and that in New England, at least, the majority of women could read by the time of the Revolution. In Philadelphia, not only were there women who could read books, but also there were four subscription libraries that circulated books among those who could not purchase them. The records of one of those libraries suggest that 40 percent of the patrons in the early 1770s were women.⁴

Booksellers such as Aitken and Bell were also recent immigrants to Philadelphia from Scotland and they continued to have strong intellectual ties to their homeland. Bell settled in Philadelphia in 1767; Aitken, in 1771. Both men are well known for their association with political supporters of the American Revolution, who ranged from Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson; indeed, it was Bell who first published Common Sense.⁵ But part of their success was rooted in their ability to channel ideas circulating in Scotland into the intellectual discourse of the colonies, and that included the Scottish discourse on women.

The Scottish Enlightenment, which fostered this discourse, was not concerned with women per se but rather with the world of commerce that had emerged in Britain. Theorists who contemplated this new order fretted about the ties that would hold it together and emphasized the role of sentiment as well as contract, an approach that necessarily involved women. As they interrogated the role of commerce and consumption in the advance of civilization, they argued that women were key participants. Socially conservative by inclination, these theorists were hardly complacent about what they observed around them as they watched older distinctions of rank crumble from the onslaught of this new commercial order. They found new forms of social stability in gender differences. Women, not men, they argued, were the great civilizers, and gender complementarity was critical to the creation of both civilization and society.⁶ Women’s histories that were created in Britain and sold in the colonies drew heavily on the Scottish Enlightenment; as such, they not only were products that were marketed in this new world of commerce, but also were a commentary on the entire process.

In addition to reflecting on a new commercial order, however, these books also engaged the new world of nations. Women’s histories were written as the British colonies in North America began to distinguish themselves from the metropole, and as those in countries such as Britain and France began to think about what it meant to be French or British. Britain had only been created at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the Act of Union. The British empire of the eighteenth century was built on trade and wars that England had fought with France and Spain in order to protect that empire of goods, thus fostering a growing sense of British national identity. No longer simply kingdoms or colonial outposts, these new countries confronted questions about what it meant to be a nation. If nations were rooted in a sense of common belonging, how did that belonging occur? Did women belong in the same way that men did? Were women capable of nationalism?⁷

These were also fundamentally questions of citizenship because, as questions of belonging, they asked on what terms women would participate in the nation. Commerce and national identity coalesced at this time around what some have called consumer citizenship. While many scholars have argued that consumer citizenship is something of an oxymoron, in which citizen passivity about important social and political issues is bought with material goods, others have pointed out that it is far more multivalent. Timothy Breen and Lawrence Glickman have made a strong case for the way in which residents of the British colonies were pulled out of their local community ties and into contact with more distant regions through their purchase of market goods. Most important, beginning in the middle of the 1760s, many in the colonies rallied politically around consumer boycotts of British goods. Through these protests, colonists began to adopt a growing sense of being American, as distinct from British, and the very nature of their activities meant that they also came together as citizens.⁸

Because women were central to the processes of both buying and selling, this was a transformation in which they were deeply involved. But not all citizen consumers were equal, and the participation of women in the market revolution caused concern on both sides of the Atlantic. Their independent relationships to the economy might be seen as a threat to the status hierarchies of the family. They could be viewed as purveyors of luxurious degeneracy in a new world of goods. And their very act of reading could catapult them into public discussions in which their opinions had dangerous social consequences.⁹ All of these fears surfaced and were contained in the women’s histories that began to circulate at the end of the eighteenth century. These histories examined the threats of women in the past and offered a prescription for containment: domesticity. Women, conceived as domestic citizens, emerged as the apex of a historical narrative of progress that was embraced in Europe, the colonies, and the new United States.

Problems and Possibilities of the Consumer Revolution

If a citizen had to be virtuous, economically independent, and able to represent himself in public, there can be no doubt that the activities of women in the eighteenth century raised some questions. Although we think of the commercial world as one dominated by men, from the merchants who owned ships and large trading companies to the artisans who turned out a growing number of products, in fact, women were both crucial and visible participants in this market revolution. In Philadelphia, for example, almost half of all retailers were women. They presided over taverns, grocery stores, and tobacco shops. A few worked as rope-makers, chandlers, and booksellers, and many more worked as milliners. The same was true in Boston, where women constituted 40 to 50 percent of the licensed retailers in the city or surrounding area. As Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor has pointed out with respect to Newport, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina, whether women worked independently of male family members or with them, they were integral to the urban economies in which they were enmeshed. Their activities, moreover, echoed those of urban women in England. Some English women worked with their husbands, others worked independently of them, and still others were unmarried. Middling women continued to take part in a large range of trades throughout the eighteenth century. Just because a woman worked in a trade did not mean, of course, that she was economically independent. She might still be part of a family system in which she deferred (economically and socially) to a father or brother or husband. She certainly would not have had the same access to resources as many men, a disability that would have confined her activities to small-scale operations rather than large ones. But she would have been a visible, distinctive presence in new trades as well as old.¹⁰

The meaning of women’s participation in commerce was further shaped by the fact that in many colonial cities, an increasing number of women were heading their own households or living independently of their families. About one-third of the adult women living in Philadelphia during the 1770s either headed their own households or lived as boarders, servants, or slaves in the homes of others. In Boston and the surrounding towns, the story was much the same. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the percentage of female-headed households there tripled, reaching as high as 20 percent.¹¹

Related to the issue of female-headed households was the structure of marriage and divorce as well as the rise in the number of illegitimate births. Informal marriages were common in the colonies (as they had been in the Old World). Whether it was to avoid paying for the costs of a legal marriage or because there were few officials to even conduct a marriage ceremony, many couples simply lived together as husbands and wives. While this practice was more common among the poor than among the wealthy, prominent citizens also engaged in the practice. Informal marriage had the benefit of allowing for an easy divorce, in which couples could simply declare an end to their relationship. In Philadelphia, as in England, casual (and not so casual) sexual encounters also led to a large number of illegitimate children. Parents were seldom punished for their conduct, but city fathers did make sure that proper child support was arranged. In New England, a growing number of young women who married were already pregnant at the time of the ceremony. Indeed, by the time of the Revolution, the percentage of pregnant brides there was approaching one-third.¹²

Scholars have debated exactly what this demographic profile might mean. While it could suggest that urban women experienced significant forms of independence in the late eighteenth century, the poverty of single women and the larger social structure in which they acted probably limited this possibility. They were limited in their access to capital, and they were still expected to work within a patriarchal system in which men were heads of households. Servants and slaves might not be living with their birth families, but in most cases they were living with a family and the head of that household was probably a man. Thus, the idea that women were operating independently during this period needs to be approached with some caution.¹³ On the other hand, their behavior, whether economic or social, might have been perceived as an increasing form of independence, regardless of the reality.

Further complicating this picture of economic participation is the role that women played as consumers and champions of new commercial goods. From shopkeepers such as Bell, they purchased books as well as silks and linens, sugar and tea, cutlery, ceramics, glassware, and domestic furniture that included beds, tables, and chairs. With these goods, women fostered a culture of sociability within their families and neighborhoods that powerfully affected social relationships, particularly between men and women. The world of commerce that replaced feudal loyalties with business contracts was also a world in which friendship assumed a growing importance, and the proper use of new consumer items affected one’s social status. More often than not, women led the way in using new items, an activity that might be seen as civilizing on the one hand, but destabilizing and even corrupting on the other.¹⁴

As women transformed relationships of sociability in their households through the use of these items, they also created new social relationships with the world beyond. New consumer goods allowed individuals to experiment with their identities. Those who bought items previously reserved for the rich could begin to imagine themselves as having a higher social station, or they could distinguish themselves within their own social milieu. Because it was often women who learned the rules of consumption and trained their families in polite behavior, so it was also women who were key to manipulating social position through consumption. The woman who knew how to pour tea and promote conversation around her tea table transformed a fancy tea service into an item of social distinction.¹⁵ Her sense of fashion could also create a sense of cosmopolitanism as she dressed her family in a way that mirrored styles in London. Moreover, the consumption of imported fabrics and tea services also connected these consumers to a larger world of transatlantic trade, binding buyers and sellers into a new kind of community. Thus, the new ties created by commerce that scholars such as Breen and Glickman have noted were connections that women facilitated in very visible ways.¹⁶

While women’s engagement with the world of consumer items opened up new social possibilities for themselves and their families, it also created instability. They might be celebrated as the civilizers of their societies, but these changes also created anxieties. With respect to consumption, these anxieties focused particularly on concerns about decadence and luxury, of unnecessary spending on useless items of fashion that drew people away from more useful pursuits of production. Women, and femininity in general, had long been associated with decadence. Considered too weak to control their passions, women were assumed to be more liable than men to fall prey to sensual pleasure. Thus, their interest in fashion and their knowledge of consumer items could easily be interpreted as dangerous proclivities that needed to be controlled. While their activities might be fashioning a new world, their influence and the world they were creating might be deemed undesirable.¹⁷

These concerns were particularly clear with respect to the tea table and the salons some elite women began to promote. Tea was a wildly popular new item of consumption in the eighteenth century, favored by women over men. Teatime, however, was often associated with the idle gossip of women. Women who organized salons instead attempted to turn tea drinking into more intellectually elevating occasions, where men and women might discuss literature, art, and even politics in polite settings. Annis Boudinot Stockton, an eighteenth-century poet, established a literary salon in her home in southern New Jersey shortly after her marriage in 1758. Elizabeth Magawley engaged in a similar venture in Philadelphia. These salons provided important connections between the intellectual worlds on either side of the Atlantic. But the very power that women exercised in salon culture meant that it could also be morally suspect.¹⁸

Their promotion of polite conversation also required learning, so that elite women were encouraged to familiarize themselves with the classical world that formed the basis of educated discourse in the eighteenth century. Women had to be careful not to go too far; actually learning Greek and Latin was seen as a pedantic conceit for them. But acquiring a knowledge of classical personages and history was another matter. In that way, women would understand what men had to say without actually knowing enough to start taking control of the conversations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Women, History, and Nation
• II Citizenship and Women’s History
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments