The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic

Abstract

In this provocative book, Pauline Schloesser relies on a theory of racial patriarchy to explain the roots of white and male supremacy in the early United States. This racial patriarchy established a pecking order of whites and people of color as well as of men and women during the early national period. Schloesser focuses her study on the position of white women and argues that they held a unique place in this racial and gender hierarchy. She describes the fair sex ideology that praised white women for their whiteness at the same time that it subjugated them due to their sex. Her work examines how institutions in early America, including schools, slavery, and churches, helped to promote fair sex ideology as a means of reinforcing racial patriarchy. Schloesser investigates how prominent white female thinkers in early America contended with fair sex ideology and racial patriarchy by focusing on Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, and Judith Sargent Murray. While her approach is narrow, Schloesser skillfully uses that strategy to test her theory. She concludes that fair sex ideology reinforced gender and racial hierarchy because white women received a limited political voice, some power in their families, and partial access to property due to their sex and race. As a result, white women consented to racial patriarchy even though it placed them lower in the hierarchy than white men. According to Schloesser, women initially balked at gender inequalities but did not go the extra step to viewing racial discrimination as equally unjust. She argues that each of the three women agreed to racial hierarchy more easily than to gender hierarchy and that this acceptance ultimately led them to condone racial patriarchy.