“A Variety of Domestic Misfortunes”: Writing the Dysfunctional Self in Early America

On the title page of her Memoirs (1810) Elizabeth Munro Fisher promised the prospective reader that in the following pages she would reveal “a particular account of a variety of domestic misfortunes” that had befallen her, in particular the unsavory details of her property dispute with Peter Jay Munro (her half-brother and John Jay’s nephew), which eventually led to her imprisonment on charges of forgery (Halevi 73). Early twenty-first-century readers and viewers have become inured to such revelations of family dysfunction, childhood trauma, and sexual misconduct on television, as well as to tell-all autobiographies which disclose the details of one’s personal history and intimate relationships (Illuz; Russell). But for three early nineteenth-century women and the readers of their narratives of self, such public disclosures represented a radical departure from earlier (semi-)private female articulations of self found in diaries and journals (Arch 137–40) by offering up formal, retrospective narratives, which included complex, assertive, and at times even belligerent, imaginings of female personal identity.

In this essay I contend that by reading together the narratives of Abigail Abbot Bailey (1746–1815), Elizabeth Munro Fisher (1759–1845), and Ann Eliza Dow (Alby) (1790–?), one can trace the emergence of a new and increasingly more critical view of the female self in post-revolutionary America, a female self now able (like its male counterparts) to take charge of or “repair” its life story and move further along a continuum from being the observer, to the actor, to the creator of one’s own life. Furthermore, I argue that these three texts, which are among the earliest published American women’s autobiographies (Fisher in 1810, Bailey in 1815, Dow in 1845), demonstrate the lingering impact the American Revolution and its ideas had on the lives and self-perceptions of women; even on those of three marginal, rural ones and their narratives of self in which they struggled (with varying degrees of success) to tell the story of how they, too, became independent.¹

Historians have long established that families in the past, much like many contemporary families, exhibited their share of conflict, abuse, and violence (Cott, Public Vows; Degler; Gordon; Riley). Stephanie Coontz has demonstrated that the concept of the “traditional family” emerged only relatively recently as a social value, and that families in the past rarely demonstrated the economic and emotional self-reliance many assume they possessed. However, with important exceptions (Brown and Brown; Fabian; Taves; Taylor), less scholarly attention has been devoted to the nonfictional narrative expressions of this facet of family life in the past, especially its expression in early American popular culture, although in the United States such texts constituted an important component of women’s life writings since the early nineteenth century.² Studies of women’s lives and roles in the family during this period have often relied on the experiences and writings of the more well-to-do and conventional (and to a certain degree urban) women. Bailey, Fisher and Dow were members of communities on the northern revolutionary frontier, which began to be settled in the years following the Seven Years’ War by individuals and families in search of land and opportunity. These communities lacked the kind of family and institutional stability found in the more southern New England communities of the period; with a new and highly mobile population, the political, social and religious order remained in flux well into the early nineteenth century (Roth).

A study of these three autobiographies recounting the lives of marginal women in rural areas during the American republic’s early years, then, opens up to view a new angle from which to examine the lives of women in this period. Bailey, a resident of New Hampshire, exposed her 26-year trials and tribulations with an abusive and adulterous husband, who eventually raped one of their daughters. Fisher told of her troubled life on New York’s frontier through the colonial and post-revolutionary period, all the while recalling (and in a sense reliving) the physical and emotional abuse she underwent as a child...