Masculine Republics and “Female Politicians” in the Age of Revolution

Abstract

Ever since advent of women's history as a specialized discipline, feminists have been debating impact of age of revolutions on women's political participation. In early iterations of this debate, liberals and many Marxist feminists thought that language of natural rights made it possible for excluded groups, including women, to make claims upon state for full citizenship rights. Of course, it would take over a centuiy of collective struggle to hold powers that be to promise of civil and political equality. In contrast, radical feminist position taken by Catherine MacKinnon and Carole Patemen, among others, was that modem liberal regimes were in principle masculine: The new republican citizen and subject of rights was founded on exclusion and by definition, male and white.1Teute and Shields's essays on republican court were, on American side, crucial interventions into this debate, which had, by early 1990s, taken a Habermasian turn. The central utility of Habermas, for all of us, whether we identified ourselves as working within Habermasian camp or simply as in conversation with it, was that it broadened greatly our understanding of what constituted politically relevant modes of communication and places of debate. This was especially true of revisionists like Teute and Shields, who rejected narrowly orthodox readings of Habeimasian public sphere and favored, instead, a more capacious version of what counted as politically relevant. They cite Dena Goodman as an important influence, and this is significant because she sympathetically reread Habermas in light of scholarly work on sociability and manners originating with Norbert Elias and Philippe Aries and elaborated, on British side, by John Pocock, Lawrence Klein, and many others. The result was a new conceptual map of the political, the social, and the in late eighteenth century. This new map reframed debate on gender and politics not least because it upended older, blunt opposition between public and private life, in which private had been taken by historians to mean merely domestic and feminized. Instead, public sphere now embraced many of cultural institutions and spaces that fostered heterosociability, including interior places, like drawing rooms and tea tables, that were especially closely associated with women.2Teute and Shields's focus on republican court and its central institution, salon, was right on money precisely because in Habermasian ternis, salon was part of an intennediate zone where women (and men) projected public concerns. Their work helped launch a vibrant line of scholarship associated with Catherine Allgor, Susan Branson, Rosemary Zagarri, and, for a later period, Elizabeth Varon, among others, on political activities of elite and middle-class white women. The result has been a startling reappraisal.3Although they have since scaled back strongest of their claims, Teute and Shields unequivocally argue in these essays that women of republican court were powerful political agents who helped to forge a national governing class in era stretching from Confederation through presidencies of Jefferson and Madison. And list of what they did was long. They presided over salons that linked capital city to different regions of country and provided spaces of sociability where political partisans could mingle and converse; they fostered marriages that consolidated links between leading political families and regional commercial elites; they managed demands of local constituents; they brokered what federal patronage there was to dispense; and they massaged political news and opinion as it traveled along circuits of communication that linked conversational circles, personal correspondence, unpublished belle lettres, and press.* * * 4Teute and Shields also perceptively argue that there was nothing invisible to their contemporaries, or, for that matter, to later nineteenth century historians, about power of these women, however oblivious to it twentieth-century professional historians may have been. …