David S. Shields

The Republican Court and the Historiography of a Women's Domain in the Public Sphere

One of the more useful recent developments in feminist historiography has been the turn away from the simple binarism of public/ private in discussions of the social activities of early modem women in western cultures. In particular Dena Goodmans work on the salons of ancien regime France has recovered the public work of women in the private institutions of sociability that operated in distinction to court and state.1Goodmans understanding of the public sphere is Habermasian in that it understands the public to have been a highly ramified ideal, entailing the antique concept of publicum as the depersonalized authority of state, the idea of public as a discursive space in which the vox populi can speak in distinction to the dictates of the state, and as an array of private institutions-clubs, coffeehouses, tea tables, salons-that constituted an autonomous region of political and cultural power. Women operated differently in light of the different forms of public in which they participated. One could make a quick and crude distinction: Women of the court in the absolutist public sphere exerted influence through secrecy, intrigue, and deception; one might say they were feminized and privatized. The salonnieres, in contrast, molded public opinion by sponsoring and participating in a liberty of conversation; they were publicizers of philosophy and maimers.What does Goodmans renovation of the understanding of womens public roles in France have to do with the historiography of the early republic? It permits us to question the all-powerful dominion of the domesticity thesis in the historiography of women.2The domesticity thesis holds that republican ideology entirely constrained womans work within the world of the private household. Goodmans work permits us to imagine for early America a fully formed womans domain in the public sphere, an arena of expression where domesticity does not restrict communication, or republican ideology limit womens roles to virtuous daughter, wife, and mother. She gives us as an alternative to the practice of the salon. The great salons were superintended by women who set mies for conversation, enforcing politeness by wit and quashing incivility with charm. The salonnieres promoted a colloquy between persons of state, savants, artists, and women of taste. The company was exclusive, but not so much in tenus of class or nationality as in terms of talent and conversational skill. The conversation of the salon became the crucible in which the ideas of politicians and philosophers were tried.Let us imagine for early America a space where femmes savantes might speak freely about politics with politicians, art with artists, gentility with gentlemen, and even the theory and practice of domesticity if they so chose. It should have the cosmopolitanism of the French salon-with its +heterosociability-yet there should be something more, an interest in forming a civil sorority found in certain British womens circles. We can visualize a domain of private society that, while permitting mixed conversation, also enabled women to project public concerns-to reform manners, cultivate taste, and critique culture. For the sake of argument, let us also conceive that this domain, or community, is organized so that it can project its views throughout the continent, say by means of a network of subsidiaiy provincial salons. Or let us be more concrete: Let us imagine Abigail Adams not in the meditative solitude of her household in Braintree, but at the center of a metropolitan company of men and especially women of learning, sensibility, and taste. And let us imagine this company actively publicizing an ideal of civility.Such an institution did exist during the final decade of the eighteenth century in America. It was called the Republican Court. Until the rise of the progressive historians early in this century, the Republican Court and its doings were matters of common knowledge among literate Americans. …

The American Antiquarian Society, 1812-2012: A Bicentennial History by Philip F. Gura (review)

Finally, however, these are minor quibbles compared to the contributions of this volume. The editors have altered and expanded the canon of revolutionaryera writing and shifted the terms in which we can discuss it. The effect is analogous to the appearance of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: we can no longer speak about “the age of revolutions” without questioning the failure of women to be fully included in this rhetoric or in the momentous changes that swept the globe. While the selections reaffirm, as the editors observe, “the abiding revolutionary power of writing and reading” as well as “the value of affiliating and organizing with other women” in a “lived form of revolution” (33), they also bring home the exclusions, violence, coercions, and oppression of a period in which the foundations of contemporary feminisms were laid. The promise is incomplete and the “revolution” is ongoing, this collection implies. These are important lesson as we enter into another age of agitation and change.

TEXTING A NATION

Since its publication in 2007, Trish Loughrans The Republic in Print has earned a reputation as a trenchant critique of the vision of the pre-1876 United States as a state whose national integrity depended upon the dissemination of print. Commentators fixed particularly on its argument that the early republic never manifested that degree of integration of internal improvements, roads, print technology, and local interests to materialize the Federalist vision of nationhood. In some circles it was hailed as a salutary counter to historians who embrace Benedict Andersons account of the national imaginary—a virtual nationhood irradiating citizens’ imaginations through reading newspapers and novels that impute national being. Loughran marshaled evidence that no newspaper, certainly no novel, and not even that most legendarily popular imprint, Thomas Paines Common Sense , enjoyed sufficiently broad distribution to invoke even a coherent fantasy of national identity. In print-culture studies she has emerged as the most vocal chronicler of the fragmented republic. She has earned the respect of those political historians who have pondered the incapacity of public-sphere historiography to account for the republics drift into the contending sections of the 1830s and the warring states of the 1860s.

Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (review)

Folded Selves deploys. A world-systems analysis distinguishes itself from other treatments of globalization, or even accounts of capitalism, by its understanding of capitalism as defined as much by infraclass bourgeois competition (often among national units) for domination in the world market as by class struggle in the core and periphery, and by its realization that capitalism, as a cyclical, but expanding, phenomenon, operates through economic long waves, which share general features, while also having their particularities. Although a world-systems perspective is relatively new for literary and cultural studies, Folded Selves indicates its rich potential for a more accurate and sophisticated sense of the American past.

Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (review)

Are historians suffering from abbreviated attention span? One wonders reading the initial reviews of John Seelye’s magisterial survey of the representation of Plymouth Rock, Memory’s Nation. The common plaint is that the book is too big, too elaborate, too detailed. A strange way to greet themost powerful demonstration of the constructed character of American origins published in recent memory. Seelye has documented chapter and verse each reinvention of the rock that has emblematized the tradition of the Pilgrim origins of American civic culture. Historians who permit their lack of interest in that tradition to convince them that such an exercise is unimportant fail to grasp the great contribution that Seelye has made to understanding the process of ‘‘the invention of tradition.’’ Perhaps Seelye’s disinclination to use the language of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger when commenting on the process does not make him appear sufficiently reflective. Yet Hobsbawm’s lexicon is not quite germane, for he is more concerned with the process of creating an imagined past for present political purposes, while Seelye is much more fascinated by the freakish mutation of a symbol in a variety of political and social contexts over time and in a variety of representational registers. Much of the impact of Seelye’s book depends upon the proliferation of absurd variations on the knee-high ‘‘forefather’s stone’’ invented by the Plymouth patriots in . In prints, paintings, and verbal evocations it swells to the girth of Gibralter, sprouts portals and a bristle of guns, sports arms and a head to form a stone cross, shrinks to the size of pebble, develops crags, serves as a pedestal for pretty Pilgrim maids, and disappears