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PHILADELPHIA WOMEN and the PUBLIC SPHERE, 1760S-1840S

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PHILADELPHIA WOMEN and the PUBLIC SPHERE, 1760S-1840S “THE YOUNG WOMEN HERE ENJOY A LIBERTY”: PHILADELPHIA WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE, 1760s-1840s By KATHARINE DIANE LEE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of Nancy Hewitt and Paul G. E. Clemens And approved by _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ _______________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “The Young women here enjoy a liberty”: Philadelphia Women and the Public Sphere, 1760s-1840s by KATHARINE DIANE LEE Dissertation Director: Nancy Hewitt This dissertation examines women’s access to and participation in the community life of Philadelphia in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. It argues against the application of separate spheres to late-colonial and early national Philadelphia and proposes that women were heavily integrated into nearly all aspects of the city’s public life. Women from diverse backgrounds were actively involved in commerce, politics, protest, intellectual and legal debates, social institutions, wartime developments, educational advancements, and benevolent causes. They saw themselves and were viewed by their peers as valuable members of a vibrant and complex city life. If we put aside assumptions about women’s limited relationship to the public sphere, we find a society in which women took advantage of a multitude of opportunities for participation and self-expression. This project also examines the disparity between the image of the ideal housewife and the lived experience of the majority of female Philadelphians. Idealized descriptions of Revolutionary women present a far more sheltered range of options than those taken advantage of by most actual women. This dissertation also challenges the traditional periodization of women’s history from the late-colonial through the early national periods. Rather than seeing the ii Revolution as an aberration in women’s access to the public sphere, this project demonstrates that women drew on pre-war experiences as they participated in revolutionary protests and conflicts, and then carried those lessons into the first decades of nationhood. Revolutionary rhetoric and social changes may have accelerated the rate at which female opportunities proliferated in the early 19th century, but those trends were already beginning in Philadelphia in the 1760s and 1770s. Women relied on past experience as they worked to expand the boundaries of their world. While it was not a fully linear progression, women’s participation in the public sphere developed and increased from the 1760s through the 1840s: the way contemporaries understood women’s place within local and national communities changed and women grew to far greater prominence by the antebellum period, but those developments were deeply rooted in the mid-to-late 18th century female experience, which was one of involvement and participation, rather than separation and limitation. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the help and support of a variety of people and, as such, I would like to thank them. I would like to thank the staff of the Historical Society of Philadelphia and the Library Company of Philadelphia who helped me to identify and utilize multiple collections both obviously and tangentially related to my topic. I would also like to thank Lesley Martin at the Chicago Historical Society, Samantha Kirk and Eri Mizukane at the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, and numerous staff at the National Archives, Kew for their assistance in obtaining specific documents held in their collections. I also owe a debt to the staff at the Alexander and Kilmer Libraries at Rutgers University, the Dickinson College Library, the New York Historical Society, the Pennsylvania State Archives, and the Lancaster County Historical Society, all of whom patiently answered my emails and helped me to acquire books, articles, and manuscript sources without which I could not have completed my research. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the exceptionally supportive community within the Rutgers Department of History. My advisors, Nancy Hewitt and Paul Clemens, have been enormously encouraging and supportive as I imagined, researched, re-imagined, and wrote my dissertation. I’m so grateful to you for your enthusiasm, guidance, and friendship. Ann Fabian and Syracuse University’s Carol Faulkner also lent incredible insight as they read and commented on my dissertation, raising thought- provoking questions and pushing me to be a more rigorous scholar. I would like to thank Ann D. Gordon, Bonnie Smith, Alistair Bellany, Rudy Bell, and Camilla Townshend for iv expanding my historical boundaries and teaching me how to be a better scholar. I would like to thank Dawn Ruskai for her endless patience over the years, and express my gratitude for Dawn, Candace Walcott-Shepherd, and Barbara Cooper, who have become my friends as well as my colleagues. I am also grateful to the Rutgers Department of History for supporting my scholarship through the Mellon Summer Grant program and the Susman Writing Fellowship, which allowed me to focus all my time on researching and writing my dissertation. And I would like to thank Molly J. Giblin for all the pizza and wine, the help and commiseration, and the encouragement and friendship. Lastly, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my family, all of whom have walked through the years of graduate school with me and without whom I would never have made it to the end. To my mom, thank you so much for listening to me think out loud, reading my drafts, providing eagle-eyed editing, and endlessly supporting me through all the stages of graduate school. To Dad and Sandy, thank you for your interest in my work and your enthusiasm about my research discoveries and experiences throughout the years. To Chip, Kelly Jo, and Vaughn, an enormous thank you for your support, but also for the fun and laughter and great breaks from my work. To Kate and Dan, thank you for being my friends and my family – the past eight years have been so much more fun because of living close to you. I also want to thank the women of PEO Chapter EY, Tulsa Oklahoma for your endless support and for allowing me to try out my ideas on you every spring. All of you are part of this dissertation and I thank you all. And finally I would like to dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my much- loved grandmothers, Virginia Cook Woodard and Mary June Lee, who supported me through every stage of my education and whom I greatly miss. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 Chapter One – She “proposes to carry on the business”: Women and Commerce in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia 36 Chapter Two – “A Society of Patriotic Ladies”: Women and Politics in Revolutionary Philadelphia 99 Chapter Three – “Tho a female I was born a patriot”: Philadelphia Women and the Revolutionary War 161 Chapter Four – “Shou’d I leave this place they will … confiscate my estate all so”: Philadelphia Women, Property, and the Law in the 1770s and 1780s 232 Chapter Five – “Our young women [are] forming a new era in female history”: Philadelphia Women in the Young Nation 301 Conclusion 364 Bibliography 375 vi 1 Introduction In 1835, Anne Weston, a leading member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, wrote a letter to her sisters at the Concord female abolition society, encouraging them to support the free produce movement. She invoked the enthusiasm of female participants in the pre-Revolutionary boycotts as inspiration for abolitionist women concerned about their place in the anti-slavery movement: Who doubts for a moment that similar attacks were made upon our grandmothers when the dark days of the Revolution dawned. Did they sit down quietly and attend to their domestic concerns without feeling and acting for their country? Facts innumerable show the ardor and zeal with which they were inspired. Look back and see the societies that were formed to supply the destitute with clothing! See them on the hill-side and in the valley, industriously gathering an herb which they call Liberty Tea, to supply the place of their favorite beverage from which they resolutely abstained. It may be said, sewing and gathering herbs come within ‘the appropriate sphere of woman.’ Well, remember their readiness to aid their husbands, fathers and brothers…. Did they overstep the bounds of female delicacy and propriety? … Let not the fear of man’s ridicule, or his pretended anxiety for the supposed welfare of our sex, deter you from using all proper influence which you possess against sin.1 Another abolitionist, Mary Parker, echoed this connection between the women of the Revolution and the female activists of the mid-nineteenth century in an article published in the Liberty Standard: “Shall not their [women who supported the Revolution] ‘cheers’ be heard by those who seek the deliverance of whipped and manacled women, by the peaceful and sacred power of the ballot.”2 Clearly, female abolitionists looked to the past for inspiration and validation as they worked to end slavery and gain acceptance as activists and advocates for social change. 1 Anne Weston to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, 22 July 1835, reprinted without attribution within “Influence of Woman,” Liberator, 15 September 1837. 2 Liberty Standard, 18 January 1843. 2 Women of the 1830s and 1840s recognized strong connections between their times and those of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations. While frequently divided into two distinct eras that are usually studied separately, the pre-Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary periods constitute a long arc of gradual change in the lives of American women that should be interrogated together.
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