The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (review)

Before the expansion of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century, the formal study of Greek and Latin was largely men’s province. However, American women had drawn upon classicism by other means for more than a century before then. Following on her award-winning The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Caroline Winterer analyzes the ways in which four generations of educated American women reshaped and employed classical tropes for their own political, social, and cultural purposes. Through its malleability and range of allusions, classicism helped women of the new nation navigate the apparent dichotomy between austere republicanism and consumer culture; later, it offered antislavery and proslavery writers alike a world of stories to support their antebellum causes.

Before 1770 the Greco-Roman past signified not American revolution but transatlantic and especially British taste. Elite women such as South Carolina’s Eliza Lucas Pinckney gained increased access to classical culture, but within the constraints that stigmatized both “feminine frivolity and petticoat pedantry” (15). They drew their ideas of the classical world especially from Charles Rollin’s Ancient History, Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus, the American careers of which Winterer traces in women’s diaries, letters, and commonplace books. Written in or translated into eighteenth-century English, all four works could be seen as compatible with the progress of Christianity over the centuries. All four also helped fuel a rising world of goods, book-related artifacts, and home furnishings. Upper-class women in colonial North America incorporated and adapted classicism, too, when they sat for portraits in “turquerie,” lounging fashionably on damask sofas and bedecked with turbans and jewels. This mixture of classicism and Orientalism, a recurring theme in Winterer’s narrative, betrayed “an acute temporal flabbiness” (22) as eighteenth-century Americans blurred the distinctions between ancient Greece and its more recent, Turkish-controlled successor.

The American Revolution politicized women’s classicism. On the one hand, classical tropes helped elite women champion the cause of home rule. On the other, the same images helped smooth the questions about who should rule at home. The image of the Roman matron, popularized in the British historian Catharine Macaulay’s History of England, suffused the correspondence between Abigail and John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren’s use of the Roman play genre, and women’s visual self-presentation in austere “Roman” costumes rather than ornate “Turkish” ones. But the Roman matron also served an essentially conservative social function: just as women in ancient Rome could neither vote nor hold office, their selfdefined successors in revolutionary America (notably Abigail Adams as Portia) could participate in political upheaval without appearing to challenge domestic or social relations. As the Revolution ended, other classical female figures embodied deeper questions about women’s roles in the new nation. Americans preferred the image of Spartan women nobly sending their sons into battle over the more troubling potential image of Spartan women taking up arms themselves. Roman charity, reconfigured in the new United States as the “Grecian daughter,” allowed women to negotiate between their loyalties to husbands and to fathers; both she and Venus became platforms for discussion of women’s access to reason. In Martha Laurens Ramsay’s conservative outlook no less than in Judith Sargent Murray’s radical one, “women found ways to explore new questions generated by republican revolution through familiar female classical figures” (71).

The power of classicism persisted in fashion and political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century. Neoclassicism, fueled by the industrial revolution and rising purchasing power on both sides of the Atlantic, allowed women to square republicanism with fashions like “Grecian” robes and “Grecian” sofas. Indeed, the purposes drove the classical associations: “[W]hat made the robes Grecian was that they let women achieve an...