Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (85 page)

The Revolution challenged older English patterns of inheritance and the aristocratic legal devices that had sought to maintain the stem line of the estate (entail) and to sacrifice the interests of younger children to the eldest son (primogeniture). The Revolutionary state constitutions and laws struck out at the traditional power of family and hereditary privilege. No one hated the dead hand of the past more than Jefferson, and with Jefferson’s Virginia taking the lead, all the states in the decades following the Revolution abolished both entail and primogeniture where they existed, either by statute or by writing the abolition into their constitutions. These legal devices, as the North Carolina statute of 1784 stated, had tended “only to raise the wealth and importance of particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence in a republic, and prove in manifold instances the source of great contention and injustice.” Their abolition would therefore “tend to promote that equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine republic.”

Many of the states passed new inheritance laws that recognized greater equality among sons and daughters and gave greater autonomy to widows by granting them outright ownership of one-third of the estate rather than just the lifetime use that had been usual in the past. Such widows now had the right to alienate the land or to pass it on to their children of a second marriage. Most of the states also strengthened the ability of women to own and control property. In a variety of ways the new state laws not only abolished the remaining feudal forms of land tenure and enhanced the commercial nature of real estate, they also confirmed a new enlightened republican conception of the family.
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At the same time, various popular writings—such as the American novel
The Fatal Effects of Parental Tyranny (
1798)—added to the assault on patriarchy. Authors now imagined republican families in which children had much more equal relations with their parents than in the past. Indeed, most of the best-selling books throughout the Revolutionary era were didactic works that dealt with the proper relations between parents and children. They ranged from Oliver Goldsmith’s
The Vicar of Wake-field
(Andrew Jackson’s favorite novel) to John Gregory’s
A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters
.

The Vicar of Wakefield
(first published in America in 1769) had at least nine different editions in various American cities before 1800, while Gregory’s
Legacy
(first American edition in 1775) went through fifteen
editions and sold twenty thousand copies during this period of the early Republic.
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In these works the republican family became bound together not by fear or force but by love and affection. Children were to be raised to be rational, independent, moral adults and were no longer to be compelled to follow parental dictates and marry for the sake of property and the perpetuation of the family estate. The individual desires of children now seemed to outweigh traditional concerns with family lineage.

So desirous were American readers for books celebrating the development of independent children that they turned Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
into a longtime best seller. Between 1774 and 1825 Americans published 125 editions of Defoe’s novel, all heavily abridged to meet American interests and sensibilities. Crusoe defied his parents and ran away from home. When cast alone on an island he turned to the Bible and discovered God and Christianity. Indeed, his solitary independence on the island became the source of his conversion experience. The novel told its readers that salvation was possible for the individual isolated from parents and society—a reassuring message for many young American men cut loose from their former social ties. Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
offered a similar message to young men who wanted to leave home and make it on their own. The first part of Franklin’s memoirs began appearing shortly after his death in 1790. By 1828 twenty-two American editions of the
Autobiography
had been published, many of them abridged and adapted for younger readers. During the decades following the Revolution, resisting one’s father and leaving home became an important motif in the many reminiscences written by that generation.
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The biblical commandment to honor one’s father and mother no longer seemed as important as it once had been. Heavily abridged American editions of Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
(an American best seller in 1786) turned the novel into an unequivocal attack on parental severity. Where Richardson had blamed both Clarissa’s disobedience and her parents’ arbitrariness for her downfall, the abridged American versions made the young daughter a simple victim of unjustifiable parental tyranny. In a variety of ways Americans were being told that patriarchy had lost some of its significance.
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Not everyone, of course, accepted these changes with equanimity. A New Hampshire congressman was shocked by the familiarity he witnessed among New York families. “Fathers, mothers, sons & daughters, young & old, all mix together, & talk & joke alike so that you cannot discover any distinction made or any respect shewn to one more than to another.” He was “not for keeping up a great distance between Parents & children, but there is a difference between sharing & stark mad.”
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The Revolution had released egalitarian and anti-patriarchal impulses that could not be stopped. The republican family was becoming an autonomous private institution whose members had their own legal rights and identities.
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A
LTHOUGH MOST A MERICANS
understood “rights” in the post-Revolutionary years to mean simply the rights of men, some began asserting as well the rights of women. Judith Sargent Murray, daughter of a prominent Massachusetts political figure, writing under the pseudonym “Constantia,” published an essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” in 1790, but it was not until the publication of
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
by the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 that discussion of the issue became widespread. In fact, copies of her work, which Aaron Burr called a “book of genius,” could be found in more private American libraries of the early Republic than Paine’s
Rights of Man
.
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Although women did not need Wollstonecraft to tell them what to think, her book certainly released the pent-up thoughts of many women. As the Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Drinker put it, Wollstonecraft “
speaks my mind
.”
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Excerpts appeared at once, and by 1795 three American editions had been published.

Suddenly, talk of women’s rights was everywhere. “The Rights of Women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear,” declared the Federalist congressman Elias Boudinot of New Jersey in 1793. “They are now heard as familiar terms in every part of the United States.”
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In the 1790s Susanna Rowson, novelist, playwright, and actress, put on a series of plays dealing with the universal rights of men and women. Judith Sargent Murray, believing that “the stage is undoubtedly a very powerful
engine in forming the opinions and manners of a people,” also tried her hand at playwriting in order to promote the cause of women’s rights. Unfortunately, however, her effort,
The Medium
, produced in Boston in 1795, had only one performance.
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Far more successful was the novel
The Coquette . . . Founded on Fact
, by Hannah Webster Foster and published in 1797. It spoke directly to women on the issues of women’s education, employment, rights, and the double standard of sexual behavior; it remained immensely popular well into the nineteenth century.

Although in this early period no organized movement arose on behalf of women’s rights, the way was prepared for the future. Murray, writing as “Constantia” in 1798, declared that she expected “to see our young women forming a new era in female history.” In the decades following the Revolution women gained a new consciousness of their selfhood and their rights.
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It was a tricky problem for male reformers to claim rights for women while women remained legally dependent on men; any recognition of rights was bound to be picked up and used in unanticipated ways. When the Supreme Court of Errors in Connecticut in 1788 decided that a married woman had the right to devise her real property to whomever she wished, the decision was soon regarded as one “tending to loosen the bands of society.”
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Once the social bands were loosened, it was difficult to prevent slippage everywhere. Since rights were not really compatible with inferiority, it became harder and harder to maintain that inferiority. An 1801 poem began with a traditional recognition of women’s subordination to men. “That men should rule, and women should obey,/ I grant their nature and their frailty such.” Yet the poem ends on a very different note. “Let us not force them back, with brow severe,/ Within the pale of ignorance and fear,/ Confin’d entirely by domestic arts:/ Producing only children, pies and tarts.”
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Many men, of course, were alarmed by what recognizing women’s equal rights might mean. “If once a man raises his wife to an equality with himself,” declared a Philadelphia writer in 1801, “it is all over, and he is doomed to become a subject for life to the most despotic of governments.”
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Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, earlier had been a leading
advocate of offering women an education equal to that of men. But he was not prepared to accept the message Mary Wollstonecraft was preaching. If women shook loose from the family and became truly independent, he asked an imagined Wollstonecraft, “Who would make our puddings, Madam?” When she answered, “Make them yourself,” he pressed her harder. “Who shall nurse us when we are sick?” and finally, “Who shall nurse our children?” With this last question concerning the role of mothers, Dwight has his imagined Wollstonecraft reduced to embarrassed silence.
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Apparently, talk about women’s equal rights was acceptable, as long as those rights did not actually affect women’s traditional maternal role in the family.

Reconciling women’s rights with their traditional family roles proved to be difficult. Some said that women’s rights were actually duties—the responsibility of taking care of their husbands and children. Others said that the equality of the rights of men and women could be found only in a spiritual or social sense. Women in fact were now encouraged to mingle equally with men in nearly all social occasions—something that had not been common earlier. If both men and women had rights, then these rights had to be respected by both sexes. Although men were legally superior, they could not ride roughshod over the rights of women. In fact, in this enlightened age the treatment of women was supposed to be a measure of civilization. Did not “savages” regard their women as “beasts of burden”? If Americans wished to be considered refined and genteel, they certainly could not go back to those “barbarous days” when a woman was “considered and treated as the slave of an unfeeling master.”
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Still, despite the recognition of women’s equal but different rights, almost everyone, including most women reformers, agreed that women had an essential female nature that should not be violated.

Indeed, many Americans came to believe that women, precisely because of their presumed female nature, had a special role to play in sustaining a republican society, especially one that was being torn apart by partisan fighting. Since virtue was increasingly identified with sociability and affability, with love and benevolence, rather than with the martial and masculine self-sacrifice of the ancients, it had become as much a female as a male quality. In fact, it was widely thought that women were even more capable than men of sociability and benevolence. “How often
have I seen a company of men who were disposed to be riotous,” declared a 1787 publication, “checked all at once into decency, by the accidental entrance of an amiable woman.” Women seemed less burdened by artificial rules and more capable of demonstrating their natural feelings of affection than men. Indeed, “in the present state of society,” said Joseph Hopkinson in 1810, women were “inseparably connected with every thing that civilizes, refines, and sublimates man.”
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Because they had a particular talent for developing affective relationships and for stimulating sympathy and moral feelings, women, it was said, were better able than men to soften party conflict and bind the republican society together. Through their soothing influence on the often hot-headed passions of men, women could heal the dissentions that threatened to tear the country apart. The way to do this was to isolate and confine partisan politics to the exclusively male-dominated public sphere and to leave the private sphere—the world of drawing and dining rooms, of dances and tea parties, of places where the two sexes mingled—under the calming and socializing domination of women. Although some genteel women continued to try to use their social skills and various social institutions—salons, balls, and soirees—to influence politics, most tended to withdraw from the public world of divisive politics and to assume the disinterested responsibility of adjudicating conflict and promoting peace in the private world. The separation of government and society, public and private, that lay at the heart of the thinking of radicals like Paine and Jefferson in 1776 was now expanded and legitimized.
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