Copyright by Caroline Hopkins Wigginton 2010
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Copyright by Caroline Hopkins Wigginton 2010 The Dissertation Committee for Caroline Hopkins Wigginton certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Imagined Intimacies: Women’s Writing, Community, and Affiliation in Eighteenth-Century North America Committee: ____________________________________ William J. Scheick, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Lisa L. Moore, Co-Supervisor ____________________________________ Joanna M. Brooks ____________________________________ James H. Cox ____________________________________ Carolyn Eastman ____________________________________ Jennifer M. Wilks Imagined Intimacies: Women's Writing, Community, and Affiliation in Eighteenth-Century North America by Caroline Hopkins Wigginton, B.A.; B.S.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2010 Acknowledgements I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my committee chairs, Professors William Scheick and Lisa Moore. Their feedback was invaluable. Without their guidance and help, this dissertation would not have been possible. I also would like to thank my committee members, Professors Joanna Brooks, James Cox, Carolyn Eastman, and Jennifer Wilks, whose work repeatedly returned me to the dignity and humanity of my subjects. In addition, a thank you to Professors Coleman Hutchison and Matt Cohen, both of whom provided feedback, despite not being on my dissertation committee. I would not have written any dissertation at all without the early assistance of Professors Phillip Barrish and Domino Perez who encouraged me to follow my passions and guided me in improving my writing. My dissertation writing group -- Catherine Bacon, Layne Craig, Naminata Diabate, Molly Hardy, Michelle Lee, Aména Moinfar, and Laura Smith -- provided fellowship in addition to careful readings and suggestions. The University of Texas provided financial support via assistant instructorships and a dissertation fellowship. The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin graciously awarded me the Ellen Clarke Temple Graduate Award in the Study of Women in History, without which my archival research into Sarah Osborn’s writings would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank my family. My parents and stepmother have celebrated my accomplishments and instilled in me a love of learning. My children, Luke, Georgia, and Aubrey, are a joy. And, of course, my husband, Kerry, has been unswerving in his love and support throughout my years in graduate school. Thank you. iv Imagined Intimacies: Women's Writing, Community, and Affiliation in Eighteenth-Century North America Caroline Hopkins Wigginton, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisors: William J. Scheick and Lisa L. Moore Abstract: My dissertation argues for a fundamental reorientation of our approach to public intimacy and identifies a lushly pragmatic rhetorical schema via which black, white, and Native women enter colonial American public life. I contend that these early American women employ the language of personal intimacy -- familial, spiritual, domestic -- to craft wide-ranging public interventions. Through references to their private affiliations, they associate themselves with others who share their religious, economic, political, and social concerns and thereby forge semi-public communities. I demonstrate that because such language retains women's often un-egalitarian and un- affective experiences of quotidian intimacy and therefore appears "natural" for women, it masks the radicalism, formal and substantive, of their interventions. Thus, in making public issues intimate, these women discreetly authorize and advance their interests. They use the same techniques whether they are preaching religious principles, positing alternative political models, or promoting preferred agricultural commodities. I rely upon v an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, including studies of anthropology, religion, and economic, political, and regional history, to produce dense local studies. Yet, since I interrogate an array of authors and genres -- published and manuscript poetry, diplomatic and legal documents, commonplace books, spiritual diaries, autobiographies, and letters - - my project synthesizes those studies into a history that is multi-denominational, multi- racial, multi-class, and multi-regional. vi Table of Contents INTRODUCTION "We Associate Ourselves": Women's Writing, Intimacy, and Affiliation in Public Life . 1 CHAPTER ONE Addressing Commerce and Community: Coosaponakeesa's and Eliza Lucas Pinckney's Epistolary Interventions into Mercantilism . 25 In a Red Petticoat: Friendship, Commerce, and Anger in Coosaponakeesa's Writings . 34 Playing the Blues: Eliza Lucas Pinckney's Letterbook and Indigo Experimentation . 62 CHAPTER TWO Nursing Piety in Newport:White and Black Mothers in Sarah Osborn's Spiritual Diary . 90 CHAPTER THREE Phillis Wheatley and Forgetting to Mourn . 139 CHAPTER FOUR A "Union of the Soul": Friendship, Piety, and Politics in Milcah Martha Moore's Book . 191 EPILOGUE . 244 WORKS CITED . 252 vii INTRODUCTION "We Associate Ourselves": Women's Writing, Intimacy, and Affiliation in Public Life In a 1780 broadside entitled The Sentiments of an American Woman, elite Philadelphian Esther de Berdt Reed published a plan by which women, in a collective expression of gratitude and patriotism, could donate money directly to soldiers fighting in the American army against the British. After identifying amongst her fellow American women a "universal" desire to assist the revolutionary cause, she rousingly situates that desire within a classical and biblical history of named and unnamed women: Our ambition is kindled by the fame of those heroines of antiquity, who have rendered our sex illustrious, and have proved to the universe, that, if the weakness of our Constitution, if opinion and manners did not forbid us to march to glory by the same paths as the Men, we should at least equal, and sometimes surpass them in our love for public good[. .] I call to mind with enthusiasm and with admiration, all those acts of courage, of constancy and patriotism, which history has transmitted us: The people favoured by Heaven, preserved from destruction by the virtues, the zeal and the resolution of Deborah, of Judith, of Esther! The fortitude of the 1 mother of the Macchabees, in giving up her sons to die before her eyes: Rome saved from the fury of a victorious enemy by the efforts of Volumnia, and other Roman Ladies: So many famous sieges where the Women have been forgeting the weakness of their sex, building new walls, digging trenches with their feeble hands, furnishing arms to their defenders, they themselves darting the missile weapons on the enemy, resigning the ornaments of their apparel, and their fortune, to fill the public treasury, and to hasten the deliverance of their country; burying themselves under its ruins; throwing themselves into the flames rather than submit to the disgrace of humiliation before a proud enemy. (1) De Berdt Reed then spans the distance between such rather mythical (and, in some cases, fictional)1 women to her present moment by identifying more recent "heroines" within the ranks of European royalty: Born for liberty, disdaining to bear the irons of a tyrannic Government, we associate ourselves to the grandeur of those Sovereigns, cherished and revered, who have held with so much splendour the scepter of the greatest States, The Batildas, the Elizabeths, the Maries, the Catharines, who have extended the empire of liberty, and contented to reign by sweetness and justice, have broken the chains of slavery, forged by tyrants in the times of ignorance and barbarity. 1 Volumnia is a character from William Shakespeare's play Coriolanus. She saves Rome by urging her exiled son to cease a vengeful siege upon the city. Judith is the titular figure of the apocryphal Book of Judith. The book is considered to be fictional due to multiple inaccuracies about its purported setting. See Carey A. Moore's "Judith, The Book of" in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 2 She concludes this portion of her proposal by noting the sacrifices of "Spanish Women" on behalf of their "Sovereign" and by praising Joan of Arc who led the French in battle against the "the ancestors of those same British, whose odious yoke we have just shaken off." These two introductory paragraphs, a fourth of the entire document, indicate that de Berdt Reed believes one of her primary rhetorical tasks is to justify women's participation in the public realm of politics and war. That she initially does so through a millennia-long genealogy of heroic feminine intervention suggests she believes there is something predictable and moral about women's involvement and that it is only artificial "opinion and manners" and women's "weak[]" corporeality which prevents it during less extraordinary times.2 De Berdt Reed observes that a shared feeling, love for one's country, impels women to "forget[]" their supposedly inadequate bodies. Thus sentiment overwhelms physical impediments. Yet, when de Berdt Reed declares "we associate ourselves," she characterizes that predictable forgetfulness as purposeful. Though women are "[b]orn for liberty," women must consciously accept their