The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina

Abstract

Prompted by theories about complexities of power in modern society, a number of historians, feminists most prominent among them, have joined recent debate over proper definition and boundaries of the political. The stakes are high. As one feminist philosopher put it, this question about limits of political is precisely a political question.1 In advocating an expanded approach to political history that transgresses limits of formal politics and confounds conventional distinctions between public and private spheres, Joan Scott and others have raised intriguing possibility of a gendered history of politics.2 The history of republican political ideology and culture in antebellum South may seem a long way from concerns of contemporary theorists, but it is not so far, perhaps, as it appears at first glance. After all, theories of government and citizenship, in modern republics as in ancient ones, have been grounded in assumptions about relation of public and private spheres, or civic sphere and household. In Aristotle's Politics, for example, according to Jurgen Habermas, Status in polls was . .. based upon status as unlimited master of an oikos. Moveable