Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic by Lucia McMahon, and: Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity by Catherine Allgor (review)

McMahon and Allgor are both working within two of the oldest interpretive frames that construct the field of United States Women’s History—the nineteenth-century concept of “separate spheres” and the idea of “republican motherhood.” Reading the American Revolution as the capstone of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, historians have posited that political changes combined with Enlightenment ideals to convince political leaders that support for women’s education would produce the next generation’s enlightened citizens. Kerber found that the promise of republican motherhood for the political advancement of middling and elite white women was, in the end, unfulfilled.¹ Yet within this relegation of women to the domestic world, historians such as Cott, Smith-Rosenberg, and Ryan have argued that women’s agency and significant influence can be found within this separate sphere.²

Mere Equals and Dolley Madison insert themselves into both discussions, connecting the eighteenth with the nineteenth centuries as they facilitate a conversation about women at this transformative moment in political history. The years of the early republic have become the focus among historians of revolutionary America, with emphases upon the rise of popular democracy, the meaning of citizenship, and the development of a national identity. Since citizenship was necessarily white and male, historians have both celebrated the extension of it across class divisions and examined emancipation and the meaning of freedom for African Americans. In this scholarship, women have often been little more than an audience, but were women as silent and uninvolved as their invisibility implies?

McMahon examines the experiences and responses of bourgeois white women, mostly in the northern states, within the heady world of the new nation. She begins her explorations with the female academies that were established not so much to provide ornamental “finishing” as academic education. She argues that the goal of these academies, of the parents who sent their daughters to them, and of the girls who attended them was a rational education that turned out women who were neither coquettes nor pedantic intellectuals. This interplay between public representation, personal experience, and societal response framed women’s acquisition of education as an individual as well as a social enterprise (19). McMahon argues that the concept of “mere equality” served to provide both encouragement to women as well as reassurance to men that educated women would be intelligent, engaging companions to husbands.

McMahon analyzes women’s experiences in terms of life-cycle stages marked by relationships—friendships with peers, networks with sisters and mothers, courtship, companionate marriage, and motherhood. Through the use of an extraordinary body of personal correspondence and journals, McMahon follows the enhanced joys and unsettling challenges that learning brought to women’s lives. Each chapter is built around a particularly rich body of personal materials that reveals the thoughts and actions of a pair of correspondents. Although historians have long understood the deep emotional and intellectual relationships between women, readers might be surprised by the engaging exchanges between seeming equals during courtship, as well as the promise and disappointments of early efforts at companionate marriage.

Augmented with an illuminating use of print culture—from stories to novels, newspapers, and polemical literature—Mere Equality delineates stunning portraits of bourgeois women in terms of their hopes, enriched relationships, and ultimate inability to maintain their intellectual focus in the face of the emotional demands of motherhood. McMahon has provided an exceptionally developed picture of women’s agency during this time of social, cultural, and political development. Hers is historical research and textual analysis at its best, persuasively argued and elegantly written.

My only quibble is her use of the term patriarchy as a descriptor of basic social hierarchy. Patriarchy is a historically situated power structure, changing according to economic and social conditions as...