IS THERE AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF EARLY AMERICAN WOMEN?

Abstract

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)Susan Stabile, Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004)Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006)Consider Abigail Adams. Known to us mostly through over one thousand letters that she exchanged with her husband, John Adams, she was a woman of redoubtable intelligence and energy. Wife of the second president of the United States, she was mother to its sixth. She traveled to France and England, rubbing elbows with dukes and diplomats; she read deeply in history and literature; she supported the literacy of black children; she was a conduit for the American reception of Catharine Macaulay's republican-friendly History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (1763–8). The letters between John and Abigail fly so fast and furious, are so full of learned banter and palpable yearning, that their marriage appears strikingly modern, a union of equals. Let us not be deceived. Abigail Adams, like other women of her generation even in the social stratosphere, had no formal schooling, and her erudition was dwarfed by the massive learning bestowed upon John. He had a Harvard BA and read law for three years. He took for granted a vast public arena in which to unleash his colossal, if tortured, political ambitions. Abigail never published a word.