Researchers often look to Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker (1735–1807) for her observations and experiences during the founding decades of America. Scholars have consulted her massive diary—2,096 pages in the full print edition—for insights into the Quaker faith; the American Revolution; colonial, imperial, local, and national politics; trade and consumerism; domestic furnishings; gender; servitude and enslavement; immigration; expansion; medicine; gardening; births; sicknesses and death; family; sociability; crime; education and reading; women’s daily lives; and much, much more. Selections from the diary appeared in print starting in the late nineteenth century. The whole diary was edited and published in three hefty volumes in 1991, thanks to the meticulous work of Elaine Forman Crane and her team of scholars. The more recent digital edition is searchable by word or date (for a fee).1Godbeer has discovered another use for this diary, along with other family papers, to form the basis of a joint biography of the unusually well-documented lives of a long-lived married couple. According to Godbeer, Drinker and her husband Henry Drinker (1734–1809) formed “part of a pioneering generation” seeking “mutual love” and romance in courtship and wedlock, thus diminishing older concerns over religious, status, and financial considerations (25). Even the extensive paper trail left by the Drinkers has its limitations. Most of Henry’s letters were to trading partners and managers of his speculative investments in western lands, not to more personal contacts. Lacking the scope and range of his wife’s writings, his surviving letters have been of interest primarily to specialists in business and economic history. Nonetheless, his few letters during their courtship adopted the passionate language of eighteenth-century novels, and their mutual correspondence during his imprisonment for being insufficiently pro-American during the Revolutionary War crackled with tension and fear. At that time, Elizabeth was temporarily head of the household and Henry to some degree dependent on her. Later, adult children and servants were constant sources of disruptions at home.The ubiquity of Drinker’s diary in current scholarship is surprising since in their time, Henry was the more prominent—a respected, if not always successful, merchant, speculator, and Quaker. When she married Henry in 1761, she fell under his authority just as domestic servants fell under hers. Although Godbeer describes her as living in a sheltered “domestic cocoon,” her nine births and five surviving children, ill-health, troublesome servants, and motley crew of visitors (including roving armies) gave her much to write about in her diary (206).Godbeer’s summary of the Drinkers’ history veers between a description of a loving marital relationship and an unequal and commonplace union of two people operating in separate spheres. Particularly in their last decades, Henry was absorbed by work for the local and regional Quaker meetings and his failing real-estate ventures, some of which have been treated elsewhere, while Elizabeth, for health and other reasons, even withdrew from Sunday worship meetings.2 The Quaker faith gave women important roles in the meetings and as traveling preachers. Elizabeth, however, stayed home; Henry stayed in his office.Many of the topics raised in the book will be familiar to specialists, and others—indentures, wage labor, Quaker practice, and gender among them—would have benefited from more detailed treatment. Most important in assessing this marriage is the apparent assumption that Elizabeth’s diary was private, and therefore candid and not self-censored, but from the beginning, Elizabeth shared the diary with family and close friends. Her obituary, probably written by her husband, praised the “pure and serene” language of her entries, among other details that indicate a close familiarity with her writings. This situation begs the questions, in a voluminous but semi-public diary, what did she omit? Did the diary’s emphasis on “perfect propriety” mask a more complex relationship with her spouse and others?3 Why did Henry’s descendants remember him as “upright, severe, and distant” and “austere and unbending.” 4 These characteristics would seem to be at odds with either love or companionship. Godbeer’s treatment of this marriage should encourage further research into this important family living in troublesome times.
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