Gender in the American Revolution

In this book, Linda Kerber fully explicated the concept of what she called "Republican Motherhood," which has become one of the most influential analytical lenses through which historians study gender in early America. Kerber conceived Republican Motherhood as a mechanism through which women in revolutionary America bridged the gap between their traditional private domestic sphere and the traditionally male public polity. Partly through revolution and partly through their own efforts, women found a new role for themselves as guardians of republican virtue.

The extent to which this role transformed the place of women in the polity was, however, uncertain, Kerber argues. Even after the wrench of revolution, she writes, "the image of the Republican Mother could be used to mask women's true place in the polis: they were still on its edges" (12).

Linda K. Kerber

Norton

1986

book

eng

"The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment -- An American Perspective"

Gender in Early America

Linda K. Kerber

1976

journal article

eng

"Hospitality, Sociability, and Gender in the Southern Colonies"

social role, colonial women

Cynthia A. Kierner

1996

journal article

eng

Gender in Early America

Cynthia A. Kierner

Cornell University Press

1998

book

eng

"Mansions, Men, Women, and the Creation of Multiple Publics in Eighteenth-Century British North America"

Mount Vernon

The evolution of the many-roomed mansion in colonial British America permitted the creation of multiple public spaces within the house itself. Using the theoretical insights of Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Karen Hansen on the nature of the kinds of publics possible in the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates how real as opposed to theoretical publics arose. As outside space and mansions formed a continuum from "public public space" to "private public space," mansions permitted elite men to control "private public space." For elite men mansions provided a social geography wherein the range of alternative publics broadened. However, that process marginalized women by trivializing the ways that heterosocial social space was used and relegating female homosocial space to the mansion's political, economic, intellectual, and psychological periphery. The eighteenth-century mansion provided gendered spaces which facilitated the integration of elite men into local, provincial, and international publics but which simultaneously contributed to a wider segregation of men and women and the exclusion of women from the political, economic, and intellectual world beyond the house. In the nineteenth century these patterns would become legitimized for the middle classes through the ideology of domesticity and the notion of "separate spheres."

Jessica Kross

1999

journal article

eng

Daily life at Mount Vernon

Jean Butenhoff Lee

University of Virginia Press

2006

book

eng

"Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia"

Gender in the American Revolution

Janet Moore Lindman

2000-04

journal article

eng

Martha Washington

Benson John Lossing

Harper & Brothers

1886

book

eng

Custis family

V. 1. The years of migration - v. 2. The Virginia generations.

James B. Lynch

Picton Press

1992

book

eng

Daily life at Mount Vernon

Ann Parks Marshall

Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe

Ransdell Incorporated

1931

book

eng