Women's Rights and "Speech Communities" in American Legal History

Sandra F. VanBurkleo. "Belonging to the World": Women's Rights and American Constitutional Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xix + 409 pp. appendix, bibliographic essay, and index. $69.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Sandra VanBurkleo's Belonging to the World is part of a co-sponsored series by the Oxford University Press and the Organization of American Historians of Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights. Designed as a synthetic work that covers women's relationship to the law and American constitutional culture, the book begins with a discussion of women's legal rights in the colonial era and moves through to the late 1990s. It provides readers with a comprehensive view of women's public and political attempts to gain their rights.

She is interested in when women gain a public voice—what she terms a "speech community"—so VanBurkleo investigates the issue of silence and silencing of women's voices throughout American history. She begins by discussing the famous colonial examples of the trials and troubles of Ann Hutchinson and Ann Hibbens, both of whom were condemned for their violations of the norms of proper female speech. Hutchinson's critiques of the ministers' sermons (which took place in her home with large and sometimes mixed sex audiences) placed her outside the boundaries. Hutchinson was explicitly chastised for being a "preacher [rather] than a Hearer." As a woman, her role was to be a silent listener. The Puritans expected the male ministers to stand between laypeople and the Bible—they were to interpret it and explain it to them. Ann Hutchinson violated these strictures on female passivity and silence and paid for her offense through banishment, excommunication, and ultimately, her death on the frontier. So too, Ann Hibbens violated strictures on female speech, but this time in an economic realm. She went beyond the accepted role of "deputy Husband" by being a hard bargainer and challenger of what she suggested was price-fixing by local carpenters. Her church trial emphasized her improper speech and charged her with persisting in her contemptuous speech and behavior. She was excommunicated immediately; when her popular and prominent husband died in 1654, she became vulnerable to witchcraft charges and was executed as a witch. In this case, her unruly tongue literally did her in. These stories are an important part of women's and colonial history. What VanBurkleo does with these familiar stories is link them to her theme of persistent attempts throughout American history to silence women and women's challenges to suppression of their voices.

VanBurkleo compares and contrasts these earlier women to those who violated conventions against public speaking during the American Revolution and the New Republic. In this section, VanBurkleo focuses on economic changes that secured women to the domestic sphere even as many men left that space for jobs in the developing commercial economy. Although women's status ostensibly increased because their role as mothers received greater attention and glorification, they were also limited in their ability to claim a role for themselves in the public space of politics and the law. During and after the Revolution, women achieved greater access to education, in part through their claims as "Republican Mothers," but these claims did not extend their scope or legitimate any new public authority. VanBurkleo asserts that this early stage of the separation of spheres lessened the notion that the public or the government had a vested interest in the governance of the home, leaving women and children more vulnerable to abusive husbands and fathers. She also suggests that women "now were supposed to exert only an indirect influence on the state, forgoing direct participation and representation"(p. 44). In this light, the Revolution did not bring political emancipation to women. Furthermore, because English common law continued to be the basis of most of the judicial decisions in the new United States, women's subordination to men...