Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Many of the states passed new inheritance laws that recognized greater equality among sons and daughters and gave greater autonomy to widows by granting them outright ownership of one-third of the estate rather than just the lifetime use that had been usual in the past. Such widows now had the right to alienate the land or to pass it on to their children of a second marriage. Most of the states also strengthened the ability of women to own and control property. In a variety of ways the new state laws not only abolished the remaining feudal forms of land tenure and enhanced the commercial nature of real estate, they also confirmed a new enlightened republican conception of the family.77

  At the same time, various popular writings—such as the American novel The Fatal Effects of Parental Tyranny ( 1798)—added to the assault on patriarchy. Authors now imagined republican families in which children had much more equal relations with their parents than in the past. Indeed, most of the best-selling books throughout the Revolutionary era were didactic works that dealt with the proper relations between parents and children. They ranged from Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wake-field (Andrew Jackson’s favorite novel) to John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters.

  The Vicar of Wakefield (first published in America in 1769) had at least nine different editions in various American cities before 1800, while Gregory’s Legacy (first American edition in 1775) went through fifteen editions and sold twenty thousand copies during this period of the early Republic.78 In these works the republican family became bound together not by fear or force but by love and affection. Children were to be raised to be rational, independent, moral adults and were no longer to be compelled to follow parental dictates and marry for the sake of property and the perpetuation of the family estate. The individual desires of children now seemed to outweigh traditional concerns with family lineage.

  So desirous were American readers for books celebrating the development of independent children that they turned Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe into a longtime best seller. Between 1774 and 1825 Americans published 125 editions of Defoe’s novel, all heavily abridged to meet American interests and sensibilities. Crusoe defied his parents and ran away from home. When cast alone on an island he turned to the Bible and discovered God and Christianity. Indeed, his solitary independence on the island became the source of his conversion experience. The novel told its readers that salvation was possible for the individual isolated from parents and society—a reassuring message for many young American men cut loose from their former social ties. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography offered a similar message to young men who wanted to leave home and make it on their own. The first part of Franklin’s memoirs began appearing shortly after his death in 1790. By 1828 twenty-two American editions of the Autobiography had been published, many of them abridged and adapted for younger readers. During the decades following the Revolution, resisting one’s father and leaving home became an important motif in the many reminiscences written by that generation.79

  The biblical commandment to honor one’s father and mother no longer seemed as important as it once had been. Heavily abridged American editions of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (an American best seller in 1786) turned the novel into an unequivocal attack on parental severity. Where Richardson had blamed both Clarissa’s disobedience and her parents’ arbitrariness for her downfall, the abridged American versions made the young daughter a simple victim of unjustifiable parental tyranny. In a variety of ways Americans were being told that patriarchy had lost some of its significance.80

  Not everyone, of course, accepted these changes with equanimity. A New Hampshire congressman was shocked by the familiarity he witnessed among New York families. “Fathers, mothers, sons & daughters, young & old, all mix together, & talk & joke alike so that you cannot discover any distinction made or any respect shewn to one more than to another.” He was “not for keeping up a great distance between Parents & children, but there is a difference between sharing & stark mad.”81

  The Revolution had released egalitarian and anti-patriarchal impulses that could not be stopped. The republican family was becoming an autonomous private institution whose members had their own legal rights and identities.82

  ALTHOUGH MOST A MERICANS understood “rights” in the post-Revolutionary years to mean simply the rights of men, some began asserting as well the rights of women. Judith Sargent Murray, daughter of a prominent Massachusetts political figure, writing under the pseudonym “Constantia,” published an essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” in 1790, but it was not until the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Women by the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 that discussion of the issue became widespread. In fact, copies of her work, which Aaron Burr called a “book of genius,” could be found in more private American libraries of the early Republic than Paine’s Rights of Man.83 Although women did not need Wollstonecraft to tell them what to think, her book certainly released the pent-up thoughts of many women. As the Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Drinker put it, Wollstonecraft “speaks my mind.”84 Excerpts appeared at once, and by 1795 three American editions had been published.

  Suddenly, talk of women’s rights was everywhere. “The Rights of Women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear,” declared the Federalist congressman Elias Boudinot of New Jersey in 1793. “They are now heard as familiar terms in every part of the United States.”85 In the 1790s Susanna Rowson, novelist, playwright, and actress, put on a series of plays dealing with the universal rights of men and women. Judith Sargent Murray, believing that “the stage is undoubtedly a very powerful engine in forming the opinions and manners of a people,” also tried her hand at playwriting in order to promote the cause of women’s rights. Unfortunately, however, her effort, The Medium, produced in Boston in 1795, had only one performance.86 Far more successful was the novel The Coquette . . . Founded on Fact, by Hannah Webster Foster and published in 1797. It spoke directly to women on the issues of women’s education, employment, rights, and the double standard of sexual behavior; it remained immensely popular well into the nineteenth century.

  Although in this early period no organized movement arose on behalf of women’s rights, the way was prepared for the future. Murray, writing as “Constantia” in 1798, declared that she expected “to see our young women forming a new era in female history.” In the decades following the Revolution women gained a new consciousness of their selfhood and their rights.87

  It was a tricky problem for male reformers to claim rights for women while women remained legally dependent on men; any recognition of rights was bound to be picked up and used in unanticipated ways. When the Supreme Court of Errors in Connecticut in 1788 decided that a married woman had the right to devise her real property to whomever she wished, the decision was soon regarded as one “tending to loosen the bands of society.”88 Once the social bands were loosened, it was difficult to prevent slippage everywhere. Since rights were not really compatible with inferiority, it became harder and harder to maintain that inferiority. An 1801 poem began with a traditional recognition of women’s subordination to men. “That men should rule, and women should obey,/ I grant their nature and their frailty such.” Yet the poem ends on a very different note. “Let us not force them back, with brow severe,/ Within the pale of ignorance and fear,/ Confin’d entirely by domestic arts:/ Producing only children, pies and tarts.”89

  Many men, of course, were alarmed by what recognizing women’s equal rights might mean. “If once a man raises his wife to an equality with himself,” declared a Philadelphia writer in 1801, “it is all over, and he is doomed to become a subject for life to the most despotic of governments.”90 Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, earlier had been a leading advocate of offering women an education equal to that of men. But he was not prepared to accept the message Mary Wollstonecraft was preaching. If women shook loose from the family and became truly independent, he asked an imagined Wollstonecraft, “Who would make our puddings, Madam?” When she answered, “Make them
yourself,” he pressed her harder. “Who shall nurse us when we are sick?” and finally, “Who shall nurse our children?” With this last question concerning the role of mothers, Dwight has his imagined Wollstonecraft reduced to embarrassed silence.91 Apparently, talk about women’s equal rights was acceptable, as long as those rights did not actually affect women’s traditional maternal role in the family.

  Reconciling women’s rights with their traditional family roles proved to be difficult. Some said that women’s rights were actually duties—the responsibility of taking care of their husbands and children. Others said that the equality of the rights of men and women could be found only in a spiritual or social sense. Women in fact were now encouraged to mingle equally with men in nearly all social occasions—something that had not been common earlier. If both men and women had rights, then these rights had to be respected by both sexes. Although men were legally superior, they could not ride roughshod over the rights of women. In fact, in this enlightened age the treatment of women was supposed to be a measure of civilization. Did not “savages” regard their women as “beasts of burden”? If Americans wished to be considered refined and genteel, they certainly could not go back to those “barbarous days” when a woman was “considered and treated as the slave of an unfeeling master.”92 Still, despite the recognition of women’s equal but different rights, almost everyone, including most women reformers, agreed that women had an essential female nature that should not be violated.

  Indeed, many Americans came to believe that women, precisely because of their presumed female nature, had a special role to play in sustaining a republican society, especially one that was being torn apart by partisan fighting. Since virtue was increasingly identified with sociability and affability, with love and benevolence, rather than with the martial and masculine self-sacrifice of the ancients, it had become as much a female as a male quality. In fact, it was widely thought that women were even more capable than men of sociability and benevolence. “How often have I seen a company of men who were disposed to be riotous,” declared a 1787 publication, “checked all at once into decency, by the accidental entrance of an amiable woman.” Women seemed less burdened by artificial rules and more capable of demonstrating their natural feelings of affection than men. Indeed, “in the present state of society,” said Joseph Hopkinson in 1810, women were “inseparably connected with every thing that civilizes, refines, and sublimates man.”93

  Because they had a particular talent for developing affective relationships and for stimulating sympathy and moral feelings, women, it was said, were better able than men to soften party conflict and bind the republican society together. Through their soothing influence on the often hot-headed passions of men, women could heal the dissentions that threatened to tear the country apart. The way to do this was to isolate and confine partisan politics to the exclusively male-dominated public sphere and to leave the private sphere—the world of drawing and dining rooms, of dances and tea parties, of places where the two sexes mingled—under the calming and socializing domination of women. Although some genteel women continued to try to use their social skills and various social institutions—salons, balls, and soirees—to influence politics, most tended to withdraw from the public world of divisive politics and to assume the disinterested responsibility of adjudicating conflict and promoting peace in the private world. The separation of government and society, public and private, that lay at the heart of the thinking of radicals like Paine and Jefferson in 1776 was now expanded and legitimized.94

  If women had a special aptitude for refinement and sociability, then their first obligation was to civilize their children and prepare them for republican citizenship.95 Since women’s world was the home, the home became more significant than it had been earlier—a refuge from the nervous excitement and crass brutality that were increasingly coming to characterize the city and the commercial world in general. Women became responsible for the taste and respectability of the family and at the same time became the special purveyors of culture and the arts. Although women were excluded from participation in America’s political institutions, William Loughton Smith of South Carolina told a female audience in 1796, nature had assigned women “valuable and salutary rights” that were beyond men’s control. “To delight, to civilize, and to ameliorate mankind . . . these are the precious rights of woman.” 96

  Yet if wives and mothers had an important role in educating their husbands and sons in sociability and virtue, then they needed to be educated themselves. Too often, reformers said, women had been educated “not to their future benefit in life but to the amusement of the male sex.”97 They had been educated in frivolity and fashion; they had been taught to dress, to sew, to play the harpsichord, and to paint their faces, but not to use their minds in any meaningful manner. Republican women, it was hoped, would be different. They would scorn fashion, cosmetics, and vanity and would become socially useful and less susceptible to male flattery. Such republican women could become powerful forces in changing the culture. “Let the ladies of a country be educated properly,” said Benjamin Rush, “and they will not only make and administer its laws, but form its manners and character.”98 Rush prescribed for women reading, writing, bookkeeping, geography, some natural philosophy, and especially the reading of history; this last was to be an antidote to novel-reading, which many reformers assumed was destroying women’s minds. Because “the proper object of female education is to make women rational companions, good wives and good mothers,” they need not be educated for the professions or for participation in the male world. Certainly, they should never be taught philosophy or metaphysics, which might destroy their feminine nature.99

  Virtually every American reformer in this period, male and female, endorsed the education of women. In 1796 Massachusetts minister Simeon Doggett expressed astonishment that “one half of the human race have been so basely neglected.” It was undoubtedly the consequence of barbarism that depressed “the delicate female . . . far below the dignity of her rank.” In enlightened America, however, “this trait of barbarity” was rapidly disappearing and women were assuming “their proper rank.”100 American reformers went way beyond their English and European counterparts in urging that women be taught not just to sew, sing, dance, and play musical instruments but to think and reason and understand the world, if not like a man then at least more than they had in the past.101

  Consequently, during the two decades following the Revolution scores of academies were founded solely for the advanced instruction of females, a development unmatched in England. Although most of these academies were located in the Northern states, the young women, mostly from well-to-do families, came from all over the country. In addition to the usual ornamental subjects, they were taught grammar, arithmetic, history, and geography. For the first time in American history young women were able to acquire something resembling higher education in a formal and systematic way. Many of the women trained in these academies went on to achieve distinction in the nineteenth century.102

  Once the rights of woman were discussed in public, their subversive implications could not always be contained. A writer in a Boston magazine of 1802 calling herself “Miss M. Warner” opened with a conventional listing of women’s so-called rights: to cook for her husband, share in his troubles, and nurse him when he was sick. But then she paused and expressed what she assumed her readers must be feeling. These were not rights; “these are duties. . . . Agreed, they are/ But know ye not that Woman’s proper sphere/ Is the domestic walk? To interfere/ With politics, divinity, or law,/ A much deserv’d ridicule would draw/ on Woman.” Ridicule or not, many began pointing up the injustice involved in excluding “from any share in government one half of those who, considered as equals of the males, are obliged to be subject to laws they have no share in making!”103

  Some Americans now even glimpsed the possibility of women becoming full-fledged citizens with the right to vote and hold political office. In 1764 James Otis had broached th
e issue of the right of women to political participation. But it was the Revolution itself that really raised women’s consciousness. Women brought up in the post-Revolutionary decades had different expectations from their mothers. In her 1793 salutatory address at the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia, Priscilla Mason proclaimed the right and the responsibility of women to become orators. Not only were they equal to men in their ability to address political issues on public occasions, they were superior to men, as witnessed by the fact that many women had succeeded despite the best efforts of men to keep them down. “Our high and mighty Lords (thanks to their arbitrary constitutions),” declared Mason, “have denied us the means of knowledge, and then reproached us for the want of it.” This bold young orator went on to call not just for equal education for women but for their equal participation in the learned professions and political office.104

  Although some women in the 1790s began to assert themselves in public in this manner, public performances by women were generally frowned upon. Jefferson thought that if women were permitted to “mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men,” the consequence would be a “depravation of morals.” Even attending lectures with men present created some uneasiness.105