The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America

Notes

Notes Abbreviations AAS American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. APS American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pa. CRBMC Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Columbia University Library, New York, N.Y. DL David Library of the American Revolution, Washington Crossing, Pa. HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. LC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. LCP Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa. MMA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y. NYBGS New York Biographical and Genealogical Society NYHS New-York Historical Society PMA Philadelphia Museum of Art PMHB Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography SCHS South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston WML Winterthur Museum and Library, Winterthur, Del. WMQ William and Mary Quarterly Introduction 1 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings, ed. E. J. Hundert (Indianapolis, Ind., 1997), 28, 33. 2 Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in “The Tatler” and “The Spectator” (Baltimore, 1997), 14–20. Mackie focuses on fashion as antithetical to an emerging bourgeois public sphere of rational debate. 3 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 138. 4 Samuel Adams to James Warren, October 20, 1778, in Paul H. Smith, Gerard W. Gawalt, Rosemary Fry Plakas, Eugene R. Sheridan, and Ronald M. Gephard, eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789, CD ROM (Summerfield, Fla., 1998). 5 James Eli Adams writes that the dandy, the fop’s equally fashionable and effeminate nineteenth-century counterpart, came into focus during periods of masculine identity under stress or revision. See Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 55. 6 Objects are an element of my study, but its focus is not a consideration of material culture. Rather than beginning with and proceeding from an analysis of artifacts, I approach fashion first as a discursive practice, which illuminates material culture as a site of power struggles and contested meanings. Studies of early America that 228 notes to pages 3–4 employ a material culture approach include Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001); and Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore, 2008). On dress, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg, Va., 2002). On England, see John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in England (New Haven, Conn., 2008); and Ann Buck, Dress in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1979). A collection that considers material culture in transatlantic perspective is John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds., Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006); and on England and France, see Aileen Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750–1820 (New Haven, Conn., 1995). 7 William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 49–50. Borrowing from cultural anthropology’s concern with the meaning of things, literature’s close attention to language, and sociological theory, I interpret a range of sources, including printed texts, letters and diaries, images, artifacts, and merchant accounts and correspondence in order to connect ideas and experiences, and to illuminate the relationship among different forms of power in early America—social, economic, political, and cultural. 8 Dress can be considered a form of performance in everyday life. See Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York, 1977). Dress’s messages do not rely on the spoken or the gestural but can be confirmed or invalidated by such acts. On “orature” such as song, dance, gesture, storytelling, and rituals as performance , see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996), 11. 9 On attempts to perform gentility, and dancing masters in particular as suspect purveyors of status, see Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia, 2009), 81–105. 10 For a comparative discussion of the northern port cities, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and on the five major British North American cities, Boston, New York, Newport, Charleston, and Philadelphia, in the revolutionary era, see Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York, 2007). 11 Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670–1780 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), 1...