Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic

5. “The Sweet Tranquility of Domestic Endearment”: Companionate Marriage

116  Chapter 5 “The Sweet Tranquility of Domestic Endearment” Companionate Marriage In May 1812, John Griscom, educator, wrote to Jane Bowne Haines, his former student, offering congratulations on her recent marriage to Reuben Haines. Marriage, he noted, “brings to its final accomplishment the period of education” and “opens to the young and glowing mind, a scene, rising in alternate prospect, under the sober colouring of care and solicitude, and shining with all the brilliancy of hope and expectation.” The transition from student and daughter to wife and mother would serve as perhaps the best test of a woman’s education. John Griscom held fond hopes for his former pupil, certain that the “exemplary attention” that Jane applied to the various “duties of a scholar” would serve her well in marriage. Jane’s attention to education qualified her “to meet the various calls of domestic duty with that intelligent firmness and that enlightened zeal which enable an ‘affectionate wife’ to produce around her a sunshine of enjoyment.”1 A well-educated woman was an ideal marital partner. Inspired by new ideals that stressed both romantic and intellectual compatibility , many couples held high expectations of married life. As scholars have noted,the emerging companionate ideal refigured emotional expectations for romantic love and marriage in early national America.2 Softening older, patriarchal notions of male authority and wifely submission, the companionate ideal emphasized affectionate, egalitarian unions. Marriage was characterized as “the friendship subsisting between two persons, who “THE SWEET TRANQUILITY OF DOMESTIC ENDEARMENT” 117 are dearer to each other than all that the world can fancy.” Companionate marriage promised a world of equality and affinity shared between loving partners. “Of all the pleasures that tend to sweeten and to endear human life,” one author mused, “none can be more worthy the regards of rational beings, than those which flow from the reciprocal returns of conjugal love.”3 Scholars have explored the emotional standards that shaped the companionate ideal, but intellectual compatibility was also essential to many men and women’s understandings of love and marriage. As Daniel Parker wrote to his fiancée in 1817, “Your refined sensibility, your sweetness of disposition,...and your brilliantly cultivated mind, constitute the fatal charms which have constantly burst upon me.” Early national men and women idealized marriage as a “union of reason and love”—an egalitarian relationship that appealed to both the heart and the mind. “To support the equality of domestic friendship,” one author insisted, “a feeling heart, and an intelligent mind are requisite endowments.” The companionate ideal promised the joys of romantic love, coupled with the comforts of rational friendship. “When two minds are thus engaged by the ties of reciprocal affection,” they experienced “participated pleasure, which heightens prosperity and joy itself.”4 Seeking both emotional and intellectual affinity, educated women imagined companionate marriage as an expression of mere equality. Legally, the doctrine of coverture offered women no such notion of equality because a wife’s legal identity became subsumed under that of her husband’s. Most married women accepted these legal constraints; legislative acts to protect married women’s right to property would not be passed until the 1840s. Instead, the companionate ideal represented an emotional and intellectual reconfiguration of marriage, based on egalitarian principles. Although those principles did not translate into true legal, political, or economic equality, they transformed individual women’s expectations for and experiences within marriage.5 Focusing primarily on the marriage of Reuben Haines and Jane Bowne Haines, I explore in this chapter how the ideals, expectations, and experiences of marriage reflected educated women’s search for intellectual and emotional equality. Juxtaposing personal writings and prescriptive representations , I examine how early national men and women interpreted and experienced the companionate ideal. Were educated women able to negotiate a degree of agency and autonomy within their marriages? Did companionate marriage provide opportunities for women to live as the mere equals of their husbands? 118 CHAPTER 5 “Their Option to be Happy or Miserable” Writing to his fiancée Jane Bowne in 1811,Reuben Haines warmly described his friends’marriage: “they appear to me to present one of the fairest examples of the interchange of that affection ‘which is felt and understood in its true meaning and import by those done, who seek for happiness in the sweet tranquility of domestic endearment.’”6 Inspired by the presence of such reallife examples of...