The Distant Past of North American Women's History

As Gerda Lerner points out in her discussion of "U.S. Women's History: Past, Present, and Future," the distant past of this subject has been comparatively understudied. Much, if not most, of the energies in U.S. women's history has been focused on the era from the Progressive period to the present. I join her in calling for the importance of "the more distant past." As Lerner argues, examining gender before the emergence of a "national patriarchal state" allows us to see gender as it was "still being created and defined in a fluid way" (23). In addition, we can "study [gender and women] in cross-cultural comparison," a concern that should only become more important as minorities become the majority by the mid-twenty-first century (23). Not only do we still have much to learn about women's history before 1800, but also, as Lerner asserts, "The longer our range and the farther our reach the more we can understand the principles underlying the formation of social categories" (23).

I want to trace out some of the approaches that early American women's and gender historians have undertaken in the past few years, highlighting in particular works by younger scholars to suggest where the field is going.¹ The larger field of early American history has developed in two distinct and sometimes contradictory directions, and studies of early American women and gender have followed suit. The Atlantic world revolution, which aims to situate the North American colonies within an Atlantic-wide sphere of political, economic, and cultural connections and exchanges, is well underway.² More recently, however, some scholarship has moved westward towards a new continental conception of early America, examining the exchange of peoples, goods, and diseases across the land rather than the sea and among, rather than within, empires or nations.³ Both Atlantic world and new continental histories seek to challenge the traditional narrative of the rise of the nation state, to get away from the notion that colonial history is merely the prelude to U.S. national history.⁴

That said, it is in fact with the emergence of the nation state that we know the most about changing gender ideologies and roles. The concentration of studies in this period can be explained in part by the flourishing of print culture and increasing literacy among women and men, which resulted in increasing numbers of sources—and far more personalized ones—for historians to examine, but more importantly because the questions raised by the formation of the nation state, for contemporaries and historians alike, were at least implicitly, and often explicitly, gendered. There continues to be scholarship on the impact of revolutionary politics on gender ideologies that has refined but not yet displaced Linda Kerber's "republican mother."⁵ Early American gender history, especially of the late eighteenth century, has not been exempt from the shift identified by Lerner away from social histories towards those of representation, identity, and culture, particularly on the emerging culture of sensibility and on the intellectual lives of such women as Mercy Warren, Abigail Adams, and Phyllis Wheatley.⁶ Politics have not been ignored, although the focus has been on the gendering of politics and political languages rather than women's efforts to be included in the body politic. Many of these studies focus on middling and elite Euro-American, often northeastern, women, but such a focus does not necessarily ignore class and the best of these studies analyze precisely how these women participated in emerging class distinctions between themselves and their men, on the one hand, and those they deemed "vulgar" on the other hand. For instance, Konstantin Dierks' examination of letter writing during the second half of the eighteenth century shows how literacy and the ability to participate in a culture of sentimental letter writing was transformed from "a social practice that reinforced traditional gender boundaries" to one that "was redefined to bolster emerging class boundaries" and thus, like Mary Ryan's classic study of antebellum upstate New York, demonstrates the centrality of gender to class formation.⁷

Revolutionary and...