‘Your household accounts have always been so interesting’: family relations and gender politics in Lincoln's two ‘houses’

Abstract

Since the release of Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln (2012), film critics and scholars have debated the film's depictions of race and who was responsible for abolition, as well as its historical accuracy and the actors' portrayals of the Lincolns and key characters in the White House and House of Representatives. There has been a more scattered response, however, to the film's representations of family relationships and gender politics. This essay explores how the film blends twenty-first century perceptions about nineteenth-century expectations of fathers and mothers, men and women, and political and familial agency. The film encourages this type of analysis by turning the two ‘Houses’ into sites for affirming, reinforcing, policing, and challenging gender appropriate practices.