Gender in Early America

Carol Berkin

Hill and Wang

1996

book

eng

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

Gender in Early America

Linda L. Sturtz

Routledge

2002

book

eng

Gender in the American Revolution

Joan R. Gundersen

Twayne Publishers

1996

book

eng

"The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America"

Gender in the Early Republic

Rosemarie Zagarri

1998

journal article

eng

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

Gender in Early America

Linda K. Kerber

1976

journal article

eng

"The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland"

Gender in Early America

Lois Green Carr

Lorena S. Walsh

1977

journal article

eng

"The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America"

Gender in Early America

Mary Beth Norton

1984

journal article

eng

Republican Motherhood

Carol Berkin

Knopf

2005

book

eng

"Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother"

Republican Motherhood

Rosemarie Zagarri's 1992 article re-imagines the intellectual roots of the concept of Republican Motherhood. Taking Linda Kerber's original conception as a starting point, Zagarri examines the roots of Republican Motherhood in early America in the Scottish Enlightenment. She specifically pinpoints key ideas in Scottish Enlightenment theory -- including "a sociological understanding of the family, a four-stage theory of history, and a characterological concept of 'manners'" (193) -- as intellectual underpinnings of Republican Motherhood. In so doing, Zagarri expands and deepens Kerber's original thesis, in which Republican Motherhood was created out of whole cloth as a gender-specific outcome of the revolutionary era.

Rosemarie Zagarri

1992

journal article

eng