Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution by Mary Sarah Bilder Kimberly A. Hamlin (bio) Keywords George Washington, Eliza Harriot, U.S. Constitution, Education, Female genius Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution. By Mary Sarah Bilder. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. 360. Cloth, $29.50.) In May of 1787, a British woman named Eliza Harriot O'Connor delivered a lecture on "the Power of Eloquence" in Philadelphia. This occasion likely marked the first time a woman spoke publicly in the United States. The event was attended by future president George Washington and, quite possibly, several other prominent men who were in town to attend the Constitutional Convention. Washington pronounced the lecture "tolerable." For years, this curious episode puzzled and enchanted Mary Sarah Bilder, whose book Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution reflects her efforts to understand the larger significance of what transpired that evening. Bilder aims to "flip the outside in and the inside out" by looking at the people excluded from the Constitutional Convention but whose lives nevertheless helped shape what was discussed within (4). A self-described "constitutionalist," Bilder documents the world of possibilities that existed for women, and to a lesser extent for African Americans and people of color, during the tumultuous years in which the Constitution—a term that first meant a system of government—came instead to refer to a single document. According to Bilder, Eliza Harriot's lectures establish that many alternatives to white male rule existed within what ultimately became a document that enshrined it. The key to unlocking this alternative universe of female citizenship is the late-eighteenth-century debates about female intellect and [End Page 323] education because, all sides agreed, education provided the first step on the path to political representation and maybe even voting and officeholding. Eliza Harriot (Bilder refers to her by her first two names) lived and lectured during the heyday of discussions about "female genius," a period that culminated in the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). A major contribution of Female Genius is the rich intellectual, transatlantic history of this potentially revolutionary ideal. Each of the book's six chapters present a lively intellectual history of the Age of the Constitution—from the brief vogue for female debating societies to Irish revolutionary societies. The book also contains terrific explanatory material, including 38 images, a helpful timeline, and supplementary notes on the research process. Another strength of the book is the three-dimensional world that Bilder constructs for Eliza Harriot, especially given the paucity of sources. Relying on genealogical sources, census records, digitized historical newspapers (especially the 140-plus advertisements that Eliza Harriot herself placed), and the papers of prominent others (most notably George Washington whose collection holds all five of the existing letters penned by Eliza Harriot), Bilder sketches a compelling biography of a woman whose life was both extraordinary and representative. Born to English merchants in Portugal, Eliza Harriot resided in many parts of the British Empire before settling in the U.S., with her Irish husband John O'Connor, in 1786. Within the new democracy, she moved frequently because of her husband's inability to keep a job. In each new city Eliza Harriot offered public lectures, which she then used as a platform to establish female academies from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and many cities in between. The bigger questions undergirding the book include: What did the Constitution mean for women? How did it come to be that women, along with people of color, were written out of the Constitution? The introduction and bibliographic essay are in conversation with historical works that offer various answers to these questions, including classics by Mary Beth Norton, Linda Kerber, Mary Kelley, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Bilder challenges the consensus that Republican Motherhood best describes the role of women in the early republic. Instead, she suggests that Republican Motherhood, along with its chief exponent Benjamin Rush, represents just one of many competing visions of the role of women in that tumultuous era. Eliza Harriot...