Understanding Gender in American Intellectual History

Canadian Review of American Studies 1992Special Issue, Part I Understanding Gender in American Intellectual History Jill K. Conway 7 Since the earliest efforts to chronicle the founding of the new American nation there have been serious women historians. Hannah Adams's 1799 history of New England from the settlement at Plymouth to the adoption of the Constitution was one of the first systematic accounts of the Revolutionary era. Adams's work was quickly followed by Mercy Otis Warren's (1805) history of the Revolution. In 1835,the prolific New England writer, Lydia Maria Child, published her History of the Condition of Women, the earliest feminist history of women's condition written in the United States. Adams, Warren, and Child were inheritors of an eighteenth-century French and British tradition favouring women's intellectuallife, and sawthemselves as trans-Atlantic versions of Mrs Elizabeth Montagu or the moralist Hannah More. The succeeding generation of women writers in the early national period were mainly keepers of diaries, writers of memoirs and travel accounts , or journalists like Anne Royall (1826) and Elizabeth Ellet (1850), who produced sketches of American life and manners, and popular histories of domestic life in the colonial period. This genre was devoted to the creation of a sense of American nationality, and to describing the role of women within their appropriate sphere in the new nation. These popular histories tell us about women's rising status within the nineteenth-century domestic sphere, and about the increasing ideological significanceassigned to women's performance of their domestic roles. They are earlysignsof the 8 Canadian Review of American Studies political significance of male and female social territory in a society endeavouring to dispense with hereditary social boundaries. In the writing of Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lydia Maria Child, and Maria W. Chapman, the outstanding women ideologues of the abolition movement, these two traditions merge into a singlepowerful polemic linking the origins of slaveryand women's subordination, and asserting that women cannot play their proper cultural role in the nation until they are free to act upon their moral rejection of slavery.The convergence of the two traditions during the cultural crisis of the abolition movement can be seen as a prefiguring of the later profound cultural upheavals during which issues relating to women's rights were central to the interpretation of the American past. Only the feminist outpouring of the 1960s and 1970s rivals the crisis of the antislavery era in intensity, but we can identify two other periods in which a redefinition of women's place in American society has been an important component for understanding and interpreting the past. The years at the turn of the century, circa 1890-1910, may be described as the period when American intellectuals struggled to comprehend the meaning of the emerging urban-industrial society, and included in that definition an evolutionary perspective on women's social role. During the 1930s, the first fruits of professional historical scholarship bywomen produced a crop of biographies which we may see as efforts to bring a new historical understanding to bear on the lives of the great suffrage leaders and pioneers of the women's professions . This essay traces the links between these earlier traditions of enquiry about the history of American women and the most recent wave of scholarly effort in that history. Indeed, many of the themes of the 1960s and 1970s were sounded emphatically in the 1830s, the 1890s and the 1930s, albeit without the full orchestration of modern historical scholarship. In the 1830s and 1840s,the Grimke sisters, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, arrived at an understanding of women 's subordination which linked women's situation to that of the slave. They saw the institution of marriage, with its legal annihilation of women's rights to property, to the product of their labour, or to their offspring, as analogous to slavery.This viewwas spelled out most succinctly in Sarah Grimke's Letters On the Equality of the Sexes (1838), and it was enshrined in the Jill K Conway I 9 histories of the period produced by loyal followers of the pioneers of the suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's views...