Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (review)

Karin Wulf's historical study reminds us that "sex and the city"-or, at least, the existence of a substantial population of single women in an urban context-is, however we may praise or lament it as a feature of contemporary life, far from a twentieth-century phenomenon. Wulf situates her study as an intervention into "the historical problem of detangling the history of women from the history of marriage," pointing out that "once marriage and motherhood take center stage as normative, the experiences of women outside marriage look marginal, unusual, and deviant and are so defined" (6-7). The emphasis on characterizing these women by what they were not-women outside marriage, not-wives-is unavoidable when speaking in generalities, since the category of unmarried women was complex and far from stable. It incorporated both heads of households and women who lived with other families, and included women who had not yet married, women who were committed to a single life, and women who were widowed or separated either for a period or permanently. All these women, however, presented a definitional problem for their societies, due to the intrinsic ambiguity of their gendered identities; Wulf perceptively characterizes them as existing "in a liminal state between what was understood to be masculine (independent, economic, and political) and what was clearly feminine (dependent and domestic)" (5). Troublingly, however, the marginalization of single women that arises from their "deviant" status has been perpetuated by modern scholarship: relatively little of the influential historical work on early America has explored the experience of the unmarried, and the few studies that exist of single women have focused on later periods. Wulf's work offers, then, the first sustained attempt to bring single women into the center of early American scholarship, and does so in a comprehensive, careful, and engaging way.

Philadelphia, Wulf argues, provides an ideal context for this examination, because it had a high population of single women (all cities, as opposed rural environments, shared this concentration to some degree; remarkably, Wulf's research suggests that over 20 percent of households in parts of Philadelphia were headed by women); because the gender ideology of the Quakers and Moravians, who were an influential presence, made it possible to develop alternative models of female identity outside marriage; and, finally but importantly, because of changes taking place by the middle of the century, in which the growth of Anglo-American public culture increasingly emphasized masculine independence and made female independence a more problematic social formation. Thus Philadelphia reflects at once certain unique qualities that made it possible to take an affirmative view of single women, and also shared in traits common to other American cities.

Though carefully delimited in setting, this relatively slim volume incorporates a wide array of evidentiary materials and considerations. Wulf is interested in single women both as subjects and objects-how they perceived themselves and how they were perceived by others. Her work attempts to be sensitive to the cultural and racial diversity of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and to the different experiences of wealthy and poor women. She draws on public records of many kinds, particularly tax assessments; on private records including commonplace books, letters, and diaries; and on printed sources, including almanacs and literary magazines. Each of the book's six main chapters highlights a different issue in the experience and construction of unmarried female identity: representations and counter-representations of spinsterhood in public and private literary contexts; the influence of religious ideology and radical religious community; the various family and household situations of unmarried women; work and community in the urban economy; poor women and poor-relief policy; and women's property and political authority, in particular the changing status of single women's authority in an increasingly masculinized political culture. Each chapter is framed by the example of a specific woman, whose particular experience and dilemmas are used to introduce and exemplify the broader issues the chapter discusses. This generally operates as an...