This entry consists of two separate articles: Overview and Ideas of Womanhood.
Historians use the concept of gender to analyze the socially constructed systems that order human experience based on perceived sexual difference. Gender structures relationships of power, not only between men and women, but also across other social divides. Scholarship on gender during the early Republic has long emphasized changing ideas about women. It now seeks a more complex understanding of the relationships between masculinity and femininity and also between prescribed gender ideals and actual patterns of behavior. Gender norms help to define and demarcate other aspects of identity and social order, especially along the lines of race and class. Many gender norms remained consistent during the colonial, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary eras, whereas others changed as Americans adapted the intellectual currents of the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world to the needs of the new nation.
In the early Republic the household was the basic social, economic, and political unit. Society celebrated masculine and feminine traits that fostered and reproduced well-ordered households. The paradigmatic American household during this period was that of the independent yeoman farmer, an ideal derived from England. Revolutionary literature—particularly the writings of John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur—helped transform this English ideal into an American icon. The changes in this ideal between 1750 to 1830 illustrate the subtle shifts in dominant gender norms during this period.
For eighteenth-century households, independence was obtained through interdependence. The prototypical yeoman was a benevolent patriarch, whose status and power derived from his ability to govern his dependent wife, children, and perhaps also servants and slaves. His feminine counterpart was the "good wife," who contributed to household prosperity through production, reproductive labor, and rational consumption, and who also modeled deference and submission for other dependents. The collective aim of a yeoman household was a comfortable "competence," meaning enough wealth—and especially enough land—to keep the immediate family employed at home. Prosperity enabled a yeoman to become a patron to his poorer neighbors, giving them work and sustenance they could not provide for themselves; in return, he earned respect, rank, and authority in his community.
In its broad outlines, this pattern of patronage-based social hierarchy also applied to artisans and gentlemen. (In America even those who aspired to gentility usually had to acknowledge that their wealth and leisure had originated in the labor and values of ancestors of the middle sort.) Even the wealthiest independent households were not selfsufficient. Rather, they occupied a position of strength within the interdependent hierarchies and patronage networks that made up the colonial social fabric. In all instances, the vaunted independence of the household head was predicated on the dependence of many others.
Contrary to the ideal of yeoman independence, in reality the majority of families were not fully selfsupporting. Most white households found it necessary to send family members out into the service of others. Native Americans and African Americans faced formal legal barriers to their attempts to marry and form independent households, even when they were technically free. The denial of legal protection to the marriages and family ties of slaves rendered slaves permanent dependents in the households of others. White Americans seized on differing gender and kinship conventions—and invented differences when necessary—to justify their exploitation of people of color. African American men, they argued, were physically strong but morally weak, subject to childish passions that made them unfit for independence. Native American men might be valiant warriors, but they were too lazy to make good household governors. Moreover, the labor they expected of their women indicated their savagery. Women of color could perform physical labor that would exhaust European women, but they supposedly lacked the natural modesty and piety that made the latter virtuous wives and mothers.
Basic assumptions about organization of household government, and its foundational place in the polity, did not change with the American Revolution. However, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did see subtle shifts in beliefs about the appropriate way to exercise masculine authority, in the meaning of masculine independence, and social tolerance for individual ambition.
Male household heads retained formidable legal powers over their dependents well into the nineteenth century, but during the era of the American Revolution they began to express reservations about how this authority should be used. Historians argue that a gentler, paternalistic ethos called into question the authoritarian prerogatives of household patriarchy. The sources of this shift included the Scottish Enlightenment's celebration of "men of feeling," political disavowal of monarchical despotism, and—perhaps—self-consciousness inspired by Americans' own critique of "savagery" in the households of subject people of color. Most significantly, the 1780s saw an explosion in popular literature that idealized marriages based on affection and shared "sensibility." Sentimental writers turned the loving submission of a wife to the gentle guidance of her chosen husband into a metaphor for the virtuous citizen's consent to just government. Conversely, this literature condemned "rakes" and the "coquettes" as masculine and feminine manifestations of the arbitrary passions that fostered tyranny in households and in society at large. The impact of paternalistic rhetoric is difficult to measure concretely, but over time it opened new opportunities for social dependents to question masculine power.
The Revolutionary era also saw a reformulation of the concept of independence. It became a natural characteristic of individual white men, rather than a status attained through control of property. The masculine right to control dependent wives and chil-dren—not the economic resources needed to maintain that control—became a marker of sufficient independence for political privilege. In 1785, for example, an advocate of universal white male suffrage argued that "every man . . . has what is supposed by the constitution to be property: his life, personal liberty, perhaps wife and children, in whom they have a right, the earnings of his own or their industry." By emphasizing the enduring authority of male household heads, the writer recast poor white men as independent property holders and defended their claim to the vote. Such reasoning enlarged the electorate, but it also cemented women's political exclusion. New Jersey's 1808 revision of its voting requirements illustrates this point: the state reduced the property qualification for suffrage and at the same time denied propertied women and free blacks voting rights they had exercised since the Revolution.
The final noteworthy shift was in attitudes toward individual ambition. The patriarchal yeoman household was supposed to be self-replicating, with children following in the footsteps of, and adhering to the gendered ideals of, their fathers and mothers. Economic circumstance made this ideal unattainable for most families. In the early Republic, children could seek alternative means of support by pursuing education in newly available schools and academies, by moving to growing cities and towns, and by relocating to lands opening in the West. In particular, new educational opportunities for boys and girls encouraged them to aspire to wealth and gentility rather than mere competency, and to question the values of their parents. Loss of control over children ultimately led to a rebellion against the male's traditional authority in household government during the Civil War era.