The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (review)

Caroline Winterer lucidly and skillfully expounds the various forms and patterns that American feminine classicism took between 1750 and 1900 and shows how the roles that the classical world played in women's public and private lives changed over that century and a half. She demonstrates how feminine classicism in America evolved during that seminal period in two large parallel arcs: from a disposition to Roman republicanism to an interest in Greek democracy (thereby closely following the general trend of masculine American neoclassicism), and from a mode (however limited) of political participation during the revolutionary period to a language of reclusive, internal self-perfection and cultivation by the late nineteenth century.

One wonders why we have waited so long for a book on feminine classicism, since we have witnessed over the past few decades notable contributions to our understanding of the classics' role in early America, from Reinhold Meyer's Classica Americana (1984), to Carl Richard's The Founders and the Classics (1994), and Winterer's earlier book, The Culture of Classicism (2002). We learned from those seminal studies about the various timings and forms in which classical antiquity affected early Americans, and the processes whereby it lost its grip as a leading paradigm in the intellectual life of the United States. The picture that Winterer now provides us in The Mirror of Antiquity deeply enriches current understanding as we can no longer see the discourse of and through the worlds of Greece and Rome in America as merely political, public, or masculine, or as an exclusively elite, white, and male endeavor. Winterer demonstrates in a remarkable and nuanced monograph how colonial, revolutionary, early republic, antebellum, and Gilded-Age American women, each in their own distinct and ingenious ways, operated through and made use of this long-gone world in ever-changing circumstances.

Classical antiquity has dominated Western minds ever since the collapse of the Roman Empire, especially since the revival of classical wisdom and learning in the era we have come to call the Renaissance. Subsequently, the ancients were present in the New World since the Discovery by setting scientific and intellectual benchmarks and providing moral and political support to diverse Europeans, from conquistadores to missionaries, from natural historians to imperial administrators. But until now we have understood this fascinating intellectual cosmos largely as a men's world. Early American historians have documented how jurists, politicians, artists, and polemicists operated seamlessly in an antiquarian culture that preferred the public to the private, the civic to the domestic. No more. Winterer demonstrates how through a variety of discourses, from the political to material consumption and aesthetic preferences and literary inclinations, women gained entry into this masculine sphere and made their presence noticed. She observes, "women, no less than men, were responsible for America's spectacular resurrection of classical antiquity during the period of nation formation" (2).

Winterer begins her analysis at mid-eighteenth century, which she and other historians have identified as a time of increasing popularity, accessibility, and penetration of the classics. The context of this dramatic popularization was the rising prosperity, commercialism, and aspirations for gentility across a broad swath of Americans; these processes were closely linked to the powerful current that historian Jack Greene described as cultural convergence, reinforced by Timothy Breen's recent identification of a new consumer culture during the late eighteenth century.¹ New cultural aspirations supported by the proliferation of print and the expansion of the public sphere exposed numerous middling Americans across the colonies to mores and spheres of knowledge traditionally out of their cultural reach. Among those areas was the world of antiquity, and the new beneficiaries were elite colonial women who "began in growing numbers to immerse themselves in the wondrous literary and material vestiges of classical antiquity" (12). Generally excluded from institutionalized learning and barred from professional or public roles, "they found other means by which to avail themselves of classical learning...