This blog features three reviews related to Virginia Social and Gender History, 1770-1824 and after. Beginning with a selection from Fall 2018, each features our “Flashmob Virginia History“. It is a reading list in each area of study with cornerstone scholarship and publications from 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 new releases.
Social and Gender History in three books:
– Jefferson’s Daughters about the extrovert, the introvert, and the slave;
– Maternal Bodies as colonial female receptacle or republican moral exemplar; and
– Republic of Taste, things of beauty as dictated by political authority at home and in school.
Jefferson’s Daughters
Catherine Kerrison wrote Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America in 2018. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly by Charlene Boyer Lewis, and in the Journal of Southern History by Katherine Rohrer. It is available from Balantine Books, at Kindle, with Audiobook, and online. Buy “Jefferson’s Daughters” on Amazon here.
Kerrison clearly establishes the social order in Jefferson’s Virginia that both promoted white male opportunity and denied it to women of all races. But the book is about how each daughter personally defined their own gender and racial identity. All three enjoyed status conferred by Jefferson: Martha and Maria benefitted from a French education and modeled female intellectual independence of the salon. Harriet was elevated in slave society as a resident of the mansion who was a weaver, a wage earning ‘factory worker’ in Jefferson’s plantation economy.
Jefferson’s first two daughters received his name: they were Martha Jefferson Randolph and Maria Jefferson Eppes. They enjoyed the Monticello mansion upstairs, a good education, and were financially well married. Harriet was surnamed Hemings for her enslaved mother. Her room was in Monticello’s downstairs service corridor, and she worked at the textile mill until she left slavery to marry into white Washington DC society as a seven-eighths European. “Jefferson’s Daughters” develops each of the three subjects through the first twenty to thirty years of their lives.
Daughter Martha flourished in formal Parisian education and she socially matured with a self-assured ease both in the salon and in exchanges with all sorts of people. She developed an interest in politics, and independently expressed her hatred of slavery. Socially and intellectually, the eldest daughter was well prepared for her later role as Jefferson’s First Lady in the White House. In later years she bore twelve children in an unhappy marriage with her Virginia Governor husband. Subsequently she devoted her talents to the rise of Andrew Jackson.
Maria was six years younger, raised early on by Virginia relatives before joining Jefferson in Paris. She repeatedly disappointed her father for seeking an independent life, yet he blessed her companionate marriage. Unhappily she died in childbirth in her mid-twenties.
Harriet was the youngest by five years. Her slave status was enhanced by an independence grounded in her residence downstairs in the Mansion, and it was extended by her privileged employment as a plantation factory weaver. Jefferson and Sally Hemings arranged for Harriet to be delivered from slavery at age twenty-one, reportedly in a coach with $50 in get-away money. She then disappeared into Washington DC society passing for white and having her own children.
Buy “Jefferson’s Daughters” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Jon Kukla in his Mr. Jefferson’s Women (2009), Annette Gordon-Reed in her The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), Cynthia A. Kierner in her Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times (2012),
Lori Glover in her Founders as Fathers: The Private Lives and Politics of the American Revolutionaries (2014), Linda Depauw in her Founding Mothers (1994), and Charlene Boyer Lewis in her Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (2012),
Katherine E. Rohrer in her chapter, “The Lucy Cobb Institute: Mildred Lewis Rutherford and Her Mission to Preserve an Idealized Southern Community” in Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the American South by Steven E. Nash and Bruce E. Steward (2019).
Maternal Bodies
Nora Doyle wrote Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America in 2018. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly by Janet Moore Lindman. It is available from University of North Carolina Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Maternal Bodies” on Amazon here.
Ideas about women’s bodies changed from the 1750s to the 1850s. There were continuities across the decades of related medicine and technology, but this period saw the replacement of the female-controlled obstetric by midwives to a more “medicalized” pregnancy overseen by male doctors. In the transition, ideas about the pregnant woman’s body became “central to defining motherhood”, both as lived identity and political symbol.
Woman “corporeality” changed from fertile child-bearer to the agent transmitting republican ideology. Wet-nursing for middling and gentry women by other working poor, immigrant and slave women, fell out of favor. The political ideal for the maternal breast was still transmitting health and virtue to citizen offspring, but without the outside threat of contaminating the genteel home.
Initially, birthing was a social activity, women helping women in the event, and in all a shared experience among the women of friends and family sustaining the mother during her physical challenge. The lived experience of frequent multiple pregnancies led to physical duress and disability, back pain, muscle rupture, organ prolapse, and incontinence.
Meanwhile amidst enlightenment thought, republican ideology, and evangelical religion, an American ideal developed for the “transcendent mother” as defined by her piety and spiritual influence, parental authority and cultural power. Childbirth in the hands of men became “dissociated” from the mother’s body, a mechanical process addressing the womb as the primary object of a study in pathology.
“Mother” was transformed into an ideal of tender emotion and moral strength. In this book, Doyle extends the earlier history literature on reproduction, childbirth and motherhood beyond white women in the Northeast. She now explores Southern white, black and Indian women at the frontier of the early American republic as well.
Buy “Maternal Bodies” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Carol Berkin in her Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (2006), Janet Moore Lindman in her Bodies of Belief: Baptist Community in Early America (2011), Katy Simpson Smith in her We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835 (2013).
Republic of Taste
Catherine E. Kelly wrote Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of the Early Republic by Catherine Dann Roeber, and in the William and Mary Quarterly by Nicole Belolan. It is available from University of Pennsylvania Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Republic of Taste” on Amazon here.
Americans forged a national identity in their new republic in the half-century from the 1776 Declaration to the 1824 grand tour of the Marquis de Lafayette. Beyond rhetoric and politics, they laid down markers of material culture in texts, objects and in their built environments to both build up their publicly facing “culture capital”, and alto to enhance their “personal pleasure.
“Everyday aesthetics and visual politics” were combined in expression and experience to demonstrate a public worthiness in the newly-minted republican society. Although still limited in their access to vote, newly self-aware citizens of the republic patronized the proliferating regional academies of education and manners for their children. Their girls enrolled in dancing recitals and their boys performed tableaus enacting the revolutions of the solar system.
Kelly develops an historical sense of an expanded political authority of the time shared in a “republic of taste”. American citizens celebrated their newly ideological ability (whether innate or acquired) to identify and reflect on, create or acquire the “things of beauty” in the public cannon. While it encompassed an ever-widening circle beyond convention halls and pamphleteering, it also excluded elements of society by property holding, gender, and race.
The nationalistic impulse to demonstrate a “civilized” standard of culture on a par with the old world homeland had an “imperative of unanimity” that could even co-opt former loyalists. At the same time, the privileged and landed became the central tastemakers of “the textual, the visual, and the material”.
These all influenced public life, whether in collections of wax figures and printed cotton fabric, or Venus flytraps in their gardens and American paintings on their walls.
Buy “Republic of Taste” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Jennifer Van Horn in her The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (2017), and Peter de Bolla in his Land, Nation and Culture, 1740-1840: Thinking the Republic of Taste (2005), Caroline Winterer in her The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2009).
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Releases related to Virginia history in other eras from Spring 2018 journals can be found in previous Virginia History Blogs at Colonial Virginia Era – Summer 2018, Colonial Virginia History ii – Summer 2018, Revolution and New Nation – Summer 2018, Madison & Jefferson – Summer 2018, Antebellum Civil War – Summer 2018, Civil War Virginia – Summer 2018, and New South and Modern Virginia, part 1 – Spring 2018. Fall 2018 reviews begin with Late Colonial Virginia – Fall 2018, and continue with this blog on Revolution & New Nation Virginia – Fall 2018.
• The TVH webpage for Revolution and New Nation, 1750-1824 features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years: two that are widely used in Virginia college courses, and one to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019.
Note: visitors must scroll down the page; the Table of Contents is broken.
Sub-sections include Revolution & Constitution Policy, New Nation Policy, Social History in Virginia, Gender in Virginia, Religious Virginia, African American Virginia, and Wars in Virginia – American Revolution and War of 1812.