Married to Each Other; Married to the Cause. Singlehood and Sibship in Antebellum Massachusetts

Abstract

The family, and specifically marriage and sibship, serve not only as subjects but also as agents of public events and policy. Scholars of American antebellum reform note that the majority of women joined these movements as part of a family unit, but argue that while kinship recruited women to social activism, it did not sustain them in it. This study of the Weston sisters of Weymouth and Boston, Massachusetts finds single women essential to the public activism of their married sisters and, indeed, one another by virtue of sharing both the domestic and political labor required to accomplish both. Furthermore, family relations shaped political ones as the lessons learned about power arrangements between men and women in a household supported by the paid labor of daughters and characterized by the intemperance of father and brothers, translated into female confidence, skepticism of male competence and perseverance, and resistance to male dominance in public.