In the early years of the republic, women shared their spouses’ workloads—but from behind the scenes so that they received little public recognition. Thus they enjoyed a measure of latitude in some areas of their lives but found their autonomy firmly curtailed in other areas. That division had been obvious during the independence movement when women contributed in many ways but then attained no voice in the new government. Some wives fought alongside their men or took over for them when they were wounded. Others transported water and supplies. Housewives occasionally struck back at merchants who gouged customers on prices, as Abigail Adams explained when she related to John how one coffee merchant had fared. “[The women] seized him by the neck and tossed him into the cart,” Abigail wrote. “[They] opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it on the trucks and drove off [while] a large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction.”101 In Philadelphia, a group of women organized themselves to collect money for the colonial soldiers. The women originally planned to forward the collection to Martha Washington so that she could disperse it as they directed, but she had to return to Mount Vernon and they were forced to turn to George instead.102
Yet for all this hard work, women did not gain full political participation in the young American government. Abigail Adams had predicted as much. In 1776, when John was in Philadelphia helping to write the Declaration of Independence, she chided him: “I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the Ladies, for while you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives.”103
Historian Mary Beth Norton has pointed out that American women increased control over their lives in the decades following the Revolution despite their failure to achieve suffrage. Norton recommended looking at women’s private lives—their “familial organizations, personal aspirations, and self assessments.”104 The evidence showed, she wrote, new attitudes on courtship, spinsterhood, marriage, and bearing children.105 Because the home took on new importance as a place for training “virtuous” citizens, wives and mothers assumed greater power. That this new autonomy remained in the home did not mean that it did not exist.
One prescription for how women should limit their governing to their own households shows up in the writings of Judith Sargent Murray. Under the pen name “Constantia,” she achieved a reputation as a feminist in the 1790s because of her insistence that women deserved an education equal to that which men received. Yet she advised women to retain their “retiring sweetness” and “shun even the semblance of pedantry, rather question than assert,” look on their partners’ weaknesses “with pity’s softest eye [and] praise the men’s strengths.” Mothers’ role in government was confined to the home, where, she wrote, they would find pleasure in “viewing the smiles of their daughters and the sports of their sons.”106 “Constantia” would have approved of a popular magazine’s advice to readers in 1787: “A kind look, or even a smile, often conquered Alexander, subdued Caesar and decided the fate of empires and of kingdoms.”107
Not all American women accepted quietly the limitations placed on their participation in government. Some spoke out for a vote in both church and town.108 For example, one Connecticut matron, who took the pen name “Female Advocate,” suggested that the time had come to stop quoting St. Paul on how women should keep silence in the church and refrain from teaching men or preaching to them. “Female Advocate” pointed to other parts of the Bible that offered stronger models. The Old Testament’s Deborah, for example, served her people as judge and helped deliver Israel from King Jabin.109 If “Female Advocate’s” view that women deserved full political rights had prevailed, other states would no doubt have followed New Jersey’s lead and permitted women to vote along with “all free citizens.” But “Female Advocate” spoke for only a minority, and even New Jersey narrowed its franchise in 1808 to white males only.
Except for Abigail Adams, for whom controversy came as naturally as breathing, the first presidents’ wives fitted themselves into the contemporary model of womanliness. In public they were models of docility. Louisa Adams may have complained bitterly in private, and Dolley Madison confessed to great fatigue, but both maintained their sweet composure in front of others. Even Elizabeth Monroe, who contributed little to her husband’s political success, hewed to the accepted “feminine” reticence. Visitors who stopped at Mount Vernon, including the famous Marquis de Lafayette, frequently mentioned Martha Washington’s charming good nature,110 and a young Dutchman wrote his mother that at the Washingtons’ dinner table, George had ignored his guests but that Martha was so gracious she deserved an “exquisite” gift.111
Yet the records of all these women suggest a discrepancy between their public images and their private lives. Examination of each reveals how much spunk and courage lay behind the quiet voices and sweet smiles. Martha Washington provides an excellent example, although it is important to emphasize that the stories about her early years may be as apocryphal as those of George and the cherry tree. Accounts of her youth consistently describe her as a woman who had her own ideas. She slapped the face of an offensive suitor at a fashionable ball and rode her horse up the stairs of her uncle’s house.112 Later, after her first husband died, she found herself at twenty-six with two young children and one of the largest estates in Virginia. Writing to an English merchant, she outlined the conditions under which she would sell to him and her hopes that he would be fair. The many corrections in the manuscript draft indicate that she could not have found the task easy but the wording shows she could be firm: “It will be proper to continue this Account in the same manner as if [my husband] was living as most of the goods I shall send for will be for the good of the family.” She signed herself simply, “Martha Custis.”113
Martha showed fewer signs of that forcefulness in her later years. She managed her household well, and after George became famous and their home a mecca for visitors from all over the country, he commented to his mother that Martha ran Mount Vernon like a “well-resorted tavern.”114 Miniatures of her at midlife reveal stolid eyes, with no hint of either invention or merriment. They are the eyes of a woman unlikely to contradict her husband. Yet, in private, she continued to have a mind of her own. In a letter to her niece, written in 1794 while Martha was First Lady, she advised the younger woman to be “as independent as your circumstances will admit…; [because] dependence is, I think, a wrached [sic] state … ”115
Abigail Adams’s spunky vitality showed up throughout her life and is considered here only to emphasize that it was largely confined to the private sphere and best documented in letters to family members. During the years that John absented himself from home for first one patriotic duty and then another, she made the farm support the family, referring first to “your crops,” then shifting to “our” and finally to “my.”116 Left to make decisions on her own about harvesting crops and buying land, she tried to keep John informed but made it clear that she was in charge: “You made no perticular [sic] agreement with Isaac,” [the hired hand] so he insisted upon my paying him 13 [pounds], 6 [shillings] and 8 [pence]. I paid him 12, 18, and 8 and thought it sufficient.”117
Abigail occasionally complained of the weight of her responsibilities, but her family appreciated her contribution to the men’s careers. In 1776, nearly a century and a half before the publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Abigail lamented the lack of time and space for herself: “I always had a fancy for a closet with a window which I could more peculiarly call my own.”118 Abigail’s grandson may well have had her complaint in mind when he noted how her careful management had helped the Adamses escape the financial worries that plagued both Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. In the introduction to his grandmother’s letters, Charles Francis Adams wrote: “[She was] a farmer cultivating the land and discussing the weather and the crops; a merchant reporting prices current and the rates of exchange and directing the making up of invoices, a polit
ician speculating upon the probabilities of war, and a mother … and in all she appears equally well.”119
The active pen of Abigail and her descendants assured her a place in history, while Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, left few traces. She had died in 1782, well before her husband became president. It is significant, however, that the single extant document in her hand is a letter, written in 1780 when her husband was governor of Virginia. She had been asked by Martha Washington to assist her “sisters of Pennsylvania” in gathering money for the soldiers. “I undertake with chearfulness [sic] the duty of furnishing to my countrywomen an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth [to the independence movement],” Martha Jefferson wrote.120 In forwarding the “papers to be distributed” by women to women, she demonstrated once again how many matters of public concern were taken up in the domestic sphere.
Dolley Madison’s vivacious personality guaranteed her fame, but in her most celebrated act, she performed as a wife engineering the transfer of her house’s furnishings. That the item she arranged to save happened to be a portrait of George Washington rendered this a patriotic act. According to Dolley, British troops were approaching the capital in August 1814, and the president was out of town consulting with his military advisers. She had been warned that she should “be ready at a moment’s warning to enter my carriage and leave the city; that the enemy seemed stronger than had at first been reported, and it might happen that they would reach the city with the intention of destroying it.” Dolley insisted in a letter to her sister that she would not budge “until I see Mr. Madison safe so that he can accompany me.” When a friend came to “hasten” her departure, she consented to go “as soon as the large picture of General Washington is secured…. I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out.”121
Elizabeth Monroe left very few records as First Lady, but her courage much earlier demonstrates another kind of “womanly” participation in public affairs. James Monroe had been named minister to France in 1794, not an easy assignment with France in the middle of a revolution. One of his first tasks required delicate negotiation. In the shifting of alliances that made factions of the French Revolution powerful one day and dead the next, America’s old Revolutionary War friend, Marquis de Lafayette, had gotten caught. After denouncing the Jacobins in 1792, he fled the country but was soon captured and imprisoned near Vienna. His wife was first placed under house arrest back in France, but by the spring of 1794 when the Monroes arrived in Paris, she was being held in one of the city’s prisons.122 The French capital had become the site of bloody chaos and more than 1,500 people—including Mme. Lafayette’s mother and other relatives—were led to the guillotine during a six-week period that summer.123 The new American minister wanted to assist the wife of his country’s old friend but understood the delicacy of the situation. Any foreign meddling in what was understood to be an internal matter could create a backlash and make the case against Marie-Adrienne Lafayette even worse.
The Monroes resolved to appeal to Parisians who might then convince the Committee on Public Safety, who decided such matters, to free the prisoner.124 First, the Americans needed to draw attention to Mme. Lafayette and stir up sympathy for her plight. Because no private carriages were available for hire, the Monroes bought one and painted it so it would draw the curious. Then Elizabeth Monroe rode alone through the crowds that pressed in around her and demanded to know where she was going. They followed her to the prison gates, where a frightened and surprised Marie-Adrienne Lafayette came out to meet the American, and the two women chatted and embraced in full view of the crowds. Mme. Lafayette, who had feared she was heading for the guillotine when she was summoned that morning, could hardly conceal her delight at seeing Elizabeth Monroe instead. The crowds appeared every bit as moved as she, and their cheers had the intended result, or as James Monroe rather dryly summed up in his diary his wife’s successful mission: “The sensibility of all the beholders was deeply excited” so that the Committee on Safety consented to Mme. Lafayette’s release.125
Louisa Adams also revealed considerable courage but again in the role of wife and mother. While her husband was stationed in St. Petersburg in 1814, he was called to Ghent to work out the details of the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812. With that assignment finished, he wrote to Louisa, instructing her to sell everything and join him in Paris. Although it was the middle of winter and she would have to go through war-damaged areas, if not through actual fighting, she disposed of their belongings and prepared in a matter of weeks to begin the journey. For company she had only her eight-year-old son and three servants whom she hired the day she set out.
The account of Louisa’s trip from St. Petersburg to Paris reads like a concocted adventure, filled with danger, intrigue, and murder. When her carriage sank into the snow she called “out the inhabitants … with pick axe and shovel to dig us out,” she later wrote.126 Warned that there had been a “dreadful murder” the night before on the “very road over which I was to pass,” she refused to stop. Told that one of her servants had the reputation of a “desperate villain of the worst character” she had little alternative but to continue with him. Her informant begged her not to fire the man on the spot for fear he might uncover the source of her information and retaliate. Because she feared her servants might try to rob her, she carefully hid the gold she carried and then waved letters of credit in front of them so they would be misled into thinking that she picked up small amounts in cities along the way. When her servants deserted her, she hired others, and when impertinent border officials treated her rudely, she threatened to report them to their superiors. Her health was “dreadful,” she later wrote, but she persevered, stopping to rest at houses where she knew no one. Sometimes she sat up all night because she feared for her life if she slept.
Although Louisa protested demurely that she could not attend the theater on a stopover in Königsberg, “unprotected by a gentleman,” she dealt calmly with threats on her life. When crowds loyal to Napoleon surrounded her carriage and screamed “Kill them. They are Russians,” she pulled out her American passport. Then when they cried “Viveles Américains,” she obligingly responded, “Vive Napoléon,” before moving on. Not far from Paris she learned that forty thousand men had gathered at the city’s gates for battle and although “this news startled me very much,” she resolved “on cool reflection … to persevere.”127
When Louisa arrived in Paris on March 21, after weeks of difficult and dangerous travel, her husband was waiting at the Hotel du Nord “perfectly astonished at [her] adventures.” His diary makes light of the whole trip, and he wrote matter-of-factly to his mother: “Mrs. A performed the journey from St. Petersburg in 40 days and it has been of essential service to her and Charles’ health. She entered France precisely at the time when the revolution was taking place.”128 Although her maid needed two months of bed rest to recover, Louisa Adams, whom her family and historians portrayed as frail and sickly all her life, immediately resumed her regular schedule.
Abigail Adams could never match her daughter-in-law in European experience, but by the time her husband became president the older woman had lived in both France and England and had recorded her trials and triumphs in many letters home. She had joined John first in 1784 when for a few months the family rented a house in Auteuil outside of Paris. Because she could not speak French, although she read it, Abigail found dealing with servants difficult; dinner parties with non-English speakers made her uncomfortable. She worried about her clothes in a country where style obviously mattered. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature,” she observed, “to which,” she added primly, “Parisians are not averse.”129 But her curiosity and genuine interest in French ways proved more powerful than her complaints; and her own letters, as well as those of her daughter and husband, indicate these were some of the family’s happiest times.
The French stay was
cut short when John Adams was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1785. It was an extremely awkward post since his presence served as a reminder to Britons that they had recently lost thirteen of their American colonies. Abigail found her reception icy, and she informed her sister: “I own that I have never felt myself in a more contemptible situation, than when I stood four hours together for a gracious smile from majesty.”130 She could not wait to leave England. When the queen was later reported as having her own worries, Abigail showed little sympathy: “Humiliation for Charlotte is no sorrow for me,” she wrote her daughter, “[because she] richly deserves her full portion for the contempt and scorn which she took pains to discover.”131
After five years in Europe, Abigail could not hide her nostalgia for home. “I have lived long enough and seen enough of the world,” she wrote her friend Thomas Jefferson, “to bring my mind to my circumstances and retiring to our own little farm feeding my poultry and improving my garden has more charms for my fancy than residing at the Court of St. James where I seldom meet characters so inoffensive as my hens and chick[s] or minds so well improved as my garden. Heaven forgive me,” she added, “if I think too hardly of them. I wish they had deserved better at my hands.”132
In spite of their protests, the early First Ladies who lived for long periods in Europe profited from the experience—a preparation that few of their successors could boast. Not until a century later, during the Hoover administration of 1929 to 1933, would a First Lady’s travels rival those of Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Monroe, or Louisa Adams, who acquired the reputation of the most traveled woman of her time. The Constitution had set very few requirements for election to the country’s highest office and none at all in training or travel, but in the early years of the republic, when the psychological separation from Europe was not yet as complete as the physical one, international expertise rendered potential leaders more attractive. Four of the first six presidents (the two Adamses, Jefferson, and Monroe) spent several years in diplomatic service abroad and, except for the widowed Jefferson, had their families with them for at least part of the time, with their wives running large European households.
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