Susan Reynolds Williams. Alice Morse Earle and the Domestic History of Early America.

Abstract

To many scholars, Alice Morse Earle represents the “pots and pans” version of early twentieth-century social history, best left for antiquarians and antique collectors. In this compelling biographical study, Susan Reynolds Williams argues for Earle's significant place as a Progressive-era historian of American family and social history, “a voice that integrated the intimacy of domesticity with the scholarly objectivity required by the historical profession” (p. 15). While reports of a treasure trove of fifty boxes of Earle's research materials did not pan out, Williams focuses on Earle's published writings—some seventeen books and forty-two articles between 1890 and 1904—along with publishers' correspondence, family genealogy, and contemporary authors in material culture and American history. Williams presents Earle's various books in a roughly chronological fashion but more interestingly structures her study by emphasizing topics such as Earle and her New England family history, the study of material culture for understanding ordinary everyday life to genealogy, and early twentieth-century appeals to class supremacy. Threaded through all is critical attention to the making of a popular author and a professional historian. Earle's father migrated from northern New England to seek his fortune in industrializing villages of Massachusetts before marrying in the booming city of Worcester, where Alice was born in 1851. She attended Boston finishing school and married New York stockbroker Henry Earle; four children quickly followed and were raised in the family's Greek Revival town house in Brooklyn Heights. Williams discusses Earle's family photographs of her children in historical dress as an early example of Earle's budding interest in formulating connections to a usable past through use of historical prop and its expression of the colonial revival. Earle's activity in local social institutions such as the City History Club and national social clubs like the Daughters of the American Revolution becomes a way of understanding her growing commitment to social reform and the power of history as a civilizing agent. Through her social activities and writings, Earle looked to domesticity as a means of maintaining the social order, and Williams effectively contrasts that stance with the ideology of women's suffrage organizations, while comparing Earle's 1895 biography of Margaret Winthrop with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Women and Economics (1898).