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Introduction I N N O V E M B E R 1793 a report direct from Paris described for Philadelphia readers a "Grand Festival dedicated to Reason and Truth held at Notre Dame in Paris. This public ceremony included a group of young women dressed in white, who surrounded an Altar of Reason upon which a figure of Liberty stood.1The following August, Philadelphians echoed their French peers by celebrating the French Revolution in a similar manner. At ten o'clock in the morning participants assembled at the intersection of Market and Broad Streets. From there they paraded, accompanied by music, to the French minister Fauchet's residence two blocks away on the corner ofTwelfth and Market Streets. Here "Maidens dressed in white and tri-color costumes " surrounded an altar of liberty reminiscent of the one constructed by Jacques-Louis David for the Notre Dame ceremony2 In Philadelphia, these symbols of French political street theater assumed an American form in which young women expressed their opinions and asserted their rights as participants in public political culture.3 This book will explain how and why these Philadelphia women were a focal point of a very public, and a very political, activity. The idea for this project began with my belief that the social, political , and intellectual ideas regarding women in the post-Revolutionary era contributed to a more significant change in women's public lives than most historians have recognized. There was more at work in the political consciousness of men and women in the early republic than just a conservative ideology that paid lip service to women's civic roles 2 Introduction but in effect reinforced the identity of women with the private sphere. My starting point was a reconsideration of two historical paradigms: the concept of republican womanhood-a term developed more than twenty years ago by historians who examined post-Revolutionary rhetoric, prescriptive literature, and promotion of female education, and saw a conscious design to give women a part in the creation of a good society by allotting them the role of moral compass and educator of the private family-and the concept of separate spheres, which assigned women to domestic employments, homosocial relationships, and limited activity outside the home. Both of these constructs have been considerably modified by historians since they were first used twenty years ago, but neither of them has been abandoned.4 I find these paradigms unsatisfying for three reasons. First, historians have not adequately dealt with the consequences of the rhetoric generated by republican ideology as it concerned women-in other words, how it was applied to women's lives and activities. Some historians had imposed this ideological construct, but how accurate was it in assessing women's roles, both private and public? Second, most historical investigations still adhere to the notion of separate spheresthat legally, politically, and economically, women's status in the late eighteenth century was no different than it had been one hundred years earlier, and that this status limited women's public identities. I agree with their assessment that property rights, custody laws, and suffrage status remained unchanged, but I disagree with the conclusion that this framework confined women to domestic duties and private identities. Nor do I agree that republican womanhood, identified by historians as a concept designed to encourage women's education and knowledge of political affairs in order that they be better companions to husbands and more competent rearers of the next generation of male citizens, constrained women's civic activities. Women's public lives did begin to change in significant ways during the 1780s and 1790s,and these transformations laid the foundation for the long- term evolution of women's political, economic, and domestic status. Finally, I do not believe that historians have yet developed a sufficient explanatory device to connect the nascent protofeminism of individuals such as Judith Sargent Murray and Mary Wollstonecraft in the Introduction 3 1780s and 1790s with the public political activities of women in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Fundamentally, the task I set for myself is to look at the extent to which eighteenth-century women did not conform to the identities that twentieth-century historians have created for them and to begin to build a bridge between eighteenth-century women's history and nineteenth-century women's history. The purpose of this book, then, is to examine women's changing public roles as they resulted from the social, cultural, and political forces at work in American...

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