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5 - Women's writing of the Revolutionary era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

By
Jennifer Baker
Edited by
Dale M. Bauer
Jennifer Baker
Affiliation:
New York University
Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

The American Revolution showcased women's capacities to engage in political debate and act in their support of, or opposition to, colonial rebellion. The new nation's Constitution did not, however, bring women suffrage or change their legal status. It is precisely women's new sense of their own potential, coupled with the lack of opportunities to realize that potential, which makes their writing of the era rich for study. This chapter will explore how Revolutionary-era women writers aspired to civic involvement, intellectual equality, physical liberation, and personal gratification, despite their inferior legal stature and exclusion from formal political processes. Specifically, it will show how they did so by positioning themselves in relation to two ideological strains of Revolutionary thought: classical republicanism, which enshrined male civic virtue and military service, and liberalism, which maintained that liberty, a condition variously defined, was a natural human right. These were not the only intellectual strands of Revolutionary thought (the importance of evangelical Protestantism, for example, has been well documented), and nor were these ideologies mutually exclusive so much as different in their emphases. My aim is to show how these modes of thought were crucial points of reference for contemplating women's place in the new republic, as well as how the tensions between them were of particular relevance to women's attempts at self-empowerment. National independence had ushered in a “new era in female history,” as Judith Sargent Murray wrote, but the exact nature of the Revolution's legacy for women remained unclear (The Gleaner, 703).

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The Cambridge History of American Women's Literature , pp. 91 - 118
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

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