The Home Frontier: Households, Gender, and National Expansion in the Early Republic

This review essay considers two new books that reinterpret the political history of early national expansion, placing households and gendered power relations at its center. Focusing on Kentucky and Florida, respectively, Honor Sachs and Laurel Clark Shire explore the language of domestic order and the role of the ideal white settler household in expansionist rhetoric, racial ideologies, settler-colonial law, frontier statebuilding, and Native American dispossession. By centering households as a unit of analysis, Sachs and Shire offer historians a model for building an intersectional history of frontier politics—one that integrates women into the political narrative of U.S. expansion, and uncovers the significance of gender to the policies that helped make the early republic an empire.