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

The classical past’s impact on the early Republic is well-known, and historian Caroline Winterer has previously written on it in The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Her new book turns to a specifically female world of classicism. In searching for the “totality of women’s lives, both the world of ideas and the world of things,” classicism emerges as key to constructing intra-class connections among an elite, particularly through consumption of domestic goods (ix). This was as true for colonists claiming membership in transatlantic polite society as for frontier families asserting cosmopolitan gentility in hopes of achieving local clout.

Winterer argues convincingly that despite educational and social barriers to classical knowledge, classicism was meaningful to women. She follows four generations of women, who establish classical symbols of female virtue and patriotism in a republic fearful of luxury, effeminacy and private influence. The earliest generation kept classicism private, fusing classical learning with female “accomplishments” or otherwise displayed within intimate social circles. Women active in the American Revolution and early Republic adopted the roles of the Roman matron and republican mother in order to find a place for women in a polity that coded citizenship and heroism in classical terms. These women reigned over parlors whose classical paraphernalia facilitated their participation in political conversations, precisely because they marked class rather than gender boundaries. Postrevolutionary generations turned to print culture, reflecting increased exposure to classical learning through new schools and museums. Middle-class women began to mobilize a more public classicism in service of social reform, most notably in the proslavery and antislavery movements.

Women’s “vernacular classicism,” acquired through French and English histories, encouraged blurred boundaries between the Mediterranean and the Orient: popular sources described both cultures as timeless and exotic (26). Here as elsewhere, Winterer turns to material culture for evidence. She demonstrates women’s activity as connoisseurs and buyers and male deference to their taste, their classicism encouraging the legitimization of consumption within republican ideology. Winterer provides insightful discussions of an array of images and objects, including the foreign policy implications of Grecian sofas. Mirror of Antiquity is particularly valuable for its nuanced approach to what is often treated as a seemingly unchanging tradition. Studies of individual women in each generation, including black women, demonstrate classicism’s malleability of form and meaning over time; regrettably there is no bibliography.

Winterer concentrates on antebellum culture, despite the ubiquitous classical females in repose who adorned Gilded Age public and private sites. Her last chapter describes classicism’s decline as the sciences gained increasing cultural authority. Antigone (entombed alive by a tyrannical patriarch) became the epitome of true womanhood, and classicism was directed away from public action just when women finally achieved nearly equal educational access to it. A brief epilogue strikingly highlights this shift: classically educated Emma Lazarus, in her sonnet on the Statue of Liberty, explicitly rejects antiquity’s authority over future, less elitist, definitions of the republic.