The Fair Sex

White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic

Pauline E. Schloesser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780814797624
• eBook ISBN: 9780814786963
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2002
Once the egalitarian passions of the American Revolution had dimmed, the new nation settled into a conservative period that saw the legal and social subordination of women and non-white men. Among the Founders who brought the fledgling government into being were those who sought to establish order through the reconstruction of racial and gender hierarchies. In this effort they enlisted "the fair sex, "&#—white women. Politicians, ministers, writers, husbands, fathers and brothers entreated Anglo-American women to assume responsibility for the nation's virtue. Thus, although disfranchised, they served an important national function, that of civilizing non-citizen. They were encouraged to consider themselves the moral and intellectual superiors to non-whites, unruly men, and children. These white women were empowered by race and ethnicity, and class, but limited by gender. And in seeking to maintain their advantages, they helped perpetuate the system of racial domination by refusing to support the liberation of others from literal slavery.
Schloesser examines the lives and writings of three female political intellectuals—;Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, and Judith Sargent Murray—;each of whom was acutely aware of their tenuous position in the founding era of the republic. Carefully negotiating the gender and racial hierarchies of the nation, they at varying times asserted their rights and demurred to male governance. In their public and private actions they represented the paradigm of racial patriarchy at its most complex and its most conflicted.

1
Race, Gender, and Woman Citizenship in the American Founding

White supremacy and patriarchy have always been part of American politics and culture. If we want to get beyond them in the twenty-first century, we must go back and understand their roots in the founding of the United States.

Scholarly debates on the American founding have only recently begun to put gender and race at the center of analysis. The field of American political thought, established and dominated by white male historians and political theorists, has centered on republicanism since the 1960s. With some notable exceptions, few works in the field have analyzed the construction of race and/or gender hierarchy in the founding period.¹ Most works in American political thought are still carrying out the task set forth in the 1960s, of interpreting concepts of republicanism in discourses among Anglo-American men. To that end, scholars have analyzed the founding generation’s use of theoretical concepts such as virtue, liberty, political obligation, representation, and the public good without examining how they shaped race or gender relations in the American polity.²

During the mid-1970s, historians of women, made up mainly of white women, began to analyze the relationship between gender and republicanism in the Revolutionary era. Their works have ranged from criticisms of the founding for its patriarchal features, to a celebration of American republicanism for incorporating women into the polity as “republican mothers.”³ These works have suggested different answers to the question of whether and in what way we can consider “women” of the early Republic “citizens.” In general, their focus has been on white women, and almost none have considered how the issue of woman citizenship had everything to do with racial identity.

What I am calling the “patriarchal” thesis holds that no women, white, or nonwhite, were considered citizens before the advent of woman suffrage, and may not be full citizens even today. The patriarchal thesis for the early Republic was put forth by Joan Hoff-Wilson in her 1976 article “The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution.” She argued that there was really no change in white women’s legal status as a result of the Revolution; in fact, with respect to some rights, women actually lost power from their colonial status as monarchical subjects. Hoff had basically given evidence to suggest that the founders furthered the inequality of women in addition to excluding them from the rights of citizenship. Her 1991 book, Law, Gender and Injustice, showed that throughout American history, women had always been granted rights later than men, “too little, too late” to grant equality or equity with white males.

Hoff’s studies of women’s legal status confirmed Carole Pateman’s analysis of modern patriarchy in The Sexual Contract.⁴ In The Sexual Contract, Pateman demonstrated that patriarchy was intrinsic to Western republicanism through the gendering of spheres, and through the exclusion of women from the category of the rational human being capable of self-government. The “marriage contract” deemed wives subordinate to husbands, and simultaneously disqualified them for citizenship. Wives were viewed as femes coverts under the doctrine of coverture, and were thus subject to the rule of their husbands.

Subjective evidence from women’s letters and diaries, however, suggested a more complex story of lived experiences. Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton had separately examined such subjective evidence and articulated an alternative to the patriarchal view. Kerber’s Women of the Republic and Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters offered “difference” theses: that U.S. women were granted a gendered citizenship, as “republican” wives and mothers. Despite white women’s inferior legal status, they had enjoyed a new uplifted and politicized role as wives and mothers who would exemplify the virtues so necessary for republicanism to children and husbands.

White women were valorized for exemplifying selflessness and the commitment to prioritize public interest over private gain. The issue of direct representation was minimized, on the grounds that women were not as a whole contending for it, and besides, women’s voices were heard within the dynamics of family politics, which would then be translated to the public sphere through husbands, and later, sons. Hence, comparing white women with white men in terms of rights missed their different but equitable memberships in the polity. Proponents of the republican motherhood/republican womanhood thesis demonstrated that white women were indeed valorized for their efforts to model virtue and help maintain the Republic through their domestic roles.

Whether or not republican gender ideology mediated or undermined the development of modern patriarchy remains unclear. One major problem stems from a vagueness regarding the term “citizen.” The traditional definition of a citizen is one who rules and is ruled in turn. In the republican motherhood thesis, it is not clear what a “citizen” is if that person does not have the legal rights normally accorded a legal citizen. If the proponents of republican motherhood mean to suggest that women had a share in ruling, through their roles as wives and mothers, their evidence is shaky at best. If they mean to redefine citizenship to mean something like inclusion without equal rights, then the concept is so distorted the question becomes meaningless. At the very least, such a redefinition begs further questions.

For example, what power or currency is granted by designating white women “citizens” as opposed to noncitizen members of the United States? What are the implications of viewing women as included in rather than excluded from the group citizens? Who remains outside the theoretical category of the citizen if white women are no longer there? One possibility seems to be that compared to unnamed others in the United States, who also lacked equal rights with white men, white women fared better. Since the concept of the woman “citizen” is cultural rather than legal for republican motherhood theorists, the burden remains on them to demonstrate in what ways women had the opportunity to rule rather than simply to be ruled, or alternatively, to explain on what basis they should be included in contrast to others who would be excluded.

The argument for woman citizenship in the early Republic has rested on white women’s exemplary virtues, exercised through their roles as mothers and wives. As mothers, their political role was to rear patriotic and virtuous children. As wives, they were to reform and domesticate husbands. But this argument has not addressed the issue of family patriarchy: whether women experienced equal dignity in marriages or whether they were more or less subordinated.

Nancy Cott’s recent book on marriage and the nation does not alleviate this ambiguity. Cott uses the term “citizen” at times to refer to the legal definition, which excludes women, and at other times to refer to the cultural, gendered definition offered by republican motherhood theorists. She suggests that the monarchical view of marriage, in which husbands govern, was “transformed” during the revolutionary era, toward a more contractual, egalitarian arrangement. Marriage became idealized as a “symmetrical union,” characterized by mutual protection, economic advantage, and common interest. This view would seem to suggest that during the Revolution, the popular view of marriage was antipatriarchal. Later, in the post-revolutionary era, Cott notes that marriage became more hierarchical. Without examining the significance of this retrogression or the cyclical nature of wartime radicalism and postwar conservatism, Cott echoes the republican motherhood historians; she asserts the importance of women’s virtues and manners for the maintenance of republicanism, but fails to address the inconsistency between a concept of woman citizenship that suggests equality in ruling power, and the restoration of family patriarchy, which does not.⁵

My aim in this book is to peer beyond the veneer of republicanism, to regard the larger cycle of wartime radicalism and postwar conservatism, and to scrutinize women’s virtues for norms of racial, ethnic, sexual, and class hierarchies. Toward this end, a more fruitful and expedient question is whether and how white women became modern subjects, as white men generally did in the American Enlightenment and the movement for national independence.

Jurgen Habermas’s distinction between “communicative” and “instrumental” rationality is useful to clarify this point. Communicative rationality is possible when persons are viewed as equals in a discursive situation, such that the validity of truth claims can be determined by the force of the better argument. In contrast, instrumental rationality takes place in a “distorted” situation, which precludes the intersubjective determination of normative claims. This distortion may result from a failure of intersubjective recognition, where one party is viewed as having authority over another, such that he fails to justify what he considers “right” to others, and will not listen to others justify their normative claims to him. In other words, ends are predetermined or coerced by one or more of the parties, and others are not allowed to debate or question those ends.⁶

In their more celebratory strains, republican motherhood proponents have suggested that white women enjoyed either an increase of power or equality with respect to white men. Kerber has argued that republican motherhood ideology was an advancement for white women that successfully blended the domestic and public spheres, giving women a kind of political agency or voice that was new and different from the silencing and exclusion they had experienced as colonial helpmeets. Kerber has also noted that republican motherhood ideology was useful to justify education and political sensibility for women. Mary Beth Norton went further, stating that in the post-revolutionary period, women were recognized as different but “equal.” Society “had at last formally recognized women’s work as valuable.” The sphere of domesticity was no longer denigrated, nor subordinated to the masculine sphere.⁷

Upon close inspection, however, most of the evidence presented by the republican womanhood/motherhood proponents does not suggest that women enjoyed discursive equality or communicative action in their families. Indeed, Kerber’s conclusion seems to suggest that instrumental rationality was operative. Women were seen to have a political “function.” They were “restrained” and “deferential” “subjects” while their husbands were moving away from deference toward equal citizenship. For example, women’s political voices were sharply curtailed in the pervasive understanding that they were not supposed to tell their male relatives for whom to vote.⁸ In their subjection, wives were putatively represented by husbands in the public sphere, but as Kerber has argued, custom dictated that men’s “representation” of women need not be based on their wives’ consent or political opinions.

Jan Lewis’s research also suggests that white women were viewed in functional terms. She has emphasized women’s indirect roles in republican politics as “republican wives” who were viewed as the reformers of wayward suitors and husbands. In her view, this early formulation of a feminine political role was not feminist, nor did it reflect a view of women as “citizens.” Rather, republicanism demanded virtue of women because Americans recognized that women were intimately connected to men. Women were to serve an instrumental purpose for social ends largely determined by men.⁹

Since women in the Anglo-American community appeared not to have been situated as discursive equals in communicative rationality, the argument for woman citizenship based on the claim that the domestic and public spheres were equally valued cannot hold. If republican ideology rationalized women’s exclusion and inequality, then again, the designation “woman citizen” becomes meaningless, and the question of women’s “advancement” remains unclear.

To move beyond these problems with the republican motherhood thesis, I have focused on how power relations were shaped through communicative and instrumental rationality in the early Republic. In particular, I have been interested in whether gender ideology encouraged or discouraged the recognition of women as rational subjects with an equal status to make normative claims. Central to this question is the consideration of gender ideology in its race and class dimensions, and its power to limit and empower certain categories of women.

A few literate and privileged white women did seem to have rational and open-ended discussions with their husbands and other men. Some were extremely well-read, eloquent, and active modern subjects. Even these women had to be guarded, however, and could always be limited by others with the chastisement that they had stepped beyond the proper bounds of femininity. As we shall see, white women were rarely encouraged, and most often actively discouraged from considering themselves citizens of the polity, or equals in the republican family.

And yet, the proponents of republican motherhood are correct in their assessment that white women did appear to enjoy a new kind of subjectivity and elevated status in the early Republic. This elevation makes sense only when viewing white women with other noncitizens. As Mary Kelley has argued, the development of universal white female literacy and hundreds of female reading societies certainly fostered white women’s empowerment.¹⁰ Their empowered senses of self were also reflected in the founders’ decision to “count” each of them as whole persons for representation purposes, in contrast to the enslaved, who were counted as three-fifths. As Jan Lewis has noted, James Wilson’s suggested language in the U.S. Constitution is indicative of white women’s positioning.¹¹ Representation in the lower house was to be:

in proportion to the whole number of white & other free Citizens & inhabitants of every age sex & condition including those bound to servitude for a term of years and three fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians not paying taxes, in each state.

“Other” free citizens obviously referred to nonwhite men, while “inhabitants of every age sex and condition” referred to nonenslaved men, women, and children, including indentured servants, who lacked the full rights of those deemed “citizens.”

In this work, I am mainly concerned with the race and class foundations that made white women’s modern subjectivity possible, for this subjectivity was very much rooted in the positioning of children or nonwhites as the subordinate “others” of white middling women. The cultural privileges of women’s moral authority were delimited by age, class, and especially, race. Only white women of property-owning classes enjoyed moral authority in republican discourses.

Still, race has remained marginalized from the discussion of women’s status in the early Republic. The gender problematic continues to be theoretically isolated from the problem of race. In the 1980s and 1990s, the debate in U.S. women’s history focused on the “woman citizenship” question, with the understanding that white women were the focus. The question whether white women were citizens remained dominant despite Jacqueline Jones’s writings on slave women and her criticisms that the paradigm of republican motherhood failed to understand its own race and class boundaries. To go beyond a simplistic acknowledgment that the “republican mother” was white, I offer an analysis of the “intersectionality” of race and gender in the founding period, which describes how race was constructed through discourses on white femininity.¹²

In late eighteenth century republican discourses, women were not referred to as “republican mothers”; they were called “ladies,” and just as frequently, the “fair sex” or “the sex” for short. This fact is important. The phrase “fair sex” reveals exactly that which the historian’s trope “republican mother” makes obscure. The phrase “fair sex” can be traced to earlier conceptions of women’s political role in England and Europe. In Chapter 3, I show that the term “fair sex” was one of difference and exclusion, not equity and inclusion, as the trope “republican motherhood” appears to be. In the late eighteenth century, “fair” was a reference to light skin tone, and “sex” was a reference to females. “Fair sex” was a category that in the first instance distinguished those with light complexions from those with dark complexions, and females from males. “Fair sex” meant, essentially, “white woman” or “white women.”

The term “fair sex” helps makes sense of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s postmodern analysis of American identity in “Discovering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion.’” Smith-Rosenberg made an important contribution by turning the question of American citizenship to one of subjectivity and identity. She demonstrated that the center of American identity was white, male, and property owning, but white women too gained their subjectivity through race, class, and yes, republican ideology that valorized wives and mothers.¹³

Understanding how American identities were shaped through the negation of brown, black, indentured, enslaved, barbaric, or savage “others” was key to my own development of a theory of racial patriarchy. Fair sex ideology supported the development of racial patriarchy by giving white women a sense of subjectivity in a world that legally subjected them to white men. In other words, though fair sex discourses positioned women instrumentally to support the subjectivity and agency of white men, the ideology also granted white women subjectivity and agency by positioning nonwhite...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Race, Gender, and Woman Citizenship in the American Founding
• 2 Toward a Theory of Racial Patriarchy
• 3 The Ideology of the “Fair Sex”
• 4 The Philosopher Queen and the U.S. Constitution: Mercy Otis Warren as a Reluctant Signatory
• 5 From Revolution to Racial Patriarchy: The Political Pragmatism of Abigail Adams
• 6 Gleaning a Self between the Lines: Judith Sargent Murray and the American Enlightenment
• 7 Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author