An Uneasy Marriage of Sentiment and Scholarship: Elizabeth F. Ellet and the Domestic Origins of American Women's History

An Uneasy Marriage of Sentiment and Scholarship·. Elizabeth F. Eilet and the Domestic Origins of American Women's History Scott E. Casper // "ΤΊιβ province of biography belongs to woman as that of history does JL to man," began a review in Peterson's Magazine in 1851. History, the record of public deeds and actions, was particularly suited to male authors and actors; biography, when focused on the interior life of an individual subject, was more suitable for women writers and subjects, whose realm of knowledge and activity was the private world of home and heart. So went the nineteenth-century logic, and few modern scholars have questioned or challenged the existence of a gendered division of genres in the antebellum United States.1 According to most scholars, Victorian America's interest in the past was masculine in every way: great men and epic battles dominated the attention of local historical societies and popular histories of the Revolution.2 Conversely, nearly all scholarship on nineteenth-century women's writing has concentrated on fiction, suggesting that if women challenged masculine notions of power or stepped onto a "public stage" they continued to do so within a genre considered acceptable for their sex.3 As Nina Baym's recent work indicates, many women did in fact write history before the Civil War, often in books designed for schools and home lessons. But most of these women either accepted contemporary concepts of American history as the study of battles and men or placed women in the alternative progression of Christian history.4 Elizabeth Fries Eilet (1812-1877), the first woman acclaimed as a scholarly historian of American women, challenged the male understanding of history from within, employing the methods and ideology of historical scholarship from the vantage point of the domestic. In 1850 Sartain's Union Magazine of Art and Literature recognized her pioneering efforts: "Mrs. Eilet has made for herself the niche which she occupies in the enduring temple of American literature. She has hunted up a subject which nobody before her seems to have thought of, and has made it interesting by her industry and talents."5 In researching and writing The Women of the American Revolution (1848), Eilet defined the methods and purposes of women's history in the United States: to construct a place for women in the scholarly narrative of the past and to reconceive that past itself through the © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) 1992 Scott E. Casper 11 lens of female "influence." Eilet self-consciously placed her work at the border between the emerging profession of history and the sentimental tradition that celebrated "woman's place" in Victorian America. If the marriage of sentiment and scholarship was at points uneasy, Ellef s story illuminates even more fully the difficulties of writing women's history in the age of domesticity.6 Ellet's significance extended beyond her place at the intersection of genres: she reclaimed the Revolutionary past for American women in three ways. First, she asserted that women—unlettered Georgia farm wives and poor New England girls as well as Martha Washington and Abigail Adams—had contributed to the achievement of American independence. Second, she argued that contemporary women could look to Revolutionary heroines, not just to the pious Christian wives and missionaries depicted in countless ahistorical memoirs, for their models of thought and action just as contemporary men could strive to emulate Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Finally and most innovatively, she demonstrated through her own writing that women could step into public as preservers of the past, intermediaries between a vanishing generation and its descendants . Eilet sought to redefine not only how the past was told but also who told it. In 1900, fifty years after Sartain's Magazine celebrated Ellef s "niche," the New York Times reviewed her work again: The new edition of Elizabeth F. Ellef s "The Women of the American Revolution" should have added interest just at this time, when a revival of Revolutionary days is the fashion in fiction. Herself a daughter of the Revolution, who, as the story goes, flirted with Alexander Hamilton himself, many of the sketches are pen pictures drawn from her...