"Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2002"
"This book should be viewed as a jumping-off point to examine
the theory of racial patriarchy at different times and places
throughout American history."
--"The Journal of American History"
"Provides an excellent theory for understanding the mutual
constitution of race and gender in the formation of 'women's
identity'"
--"Women & Politics"
"Schloesser raises issues most Americans would rather
ignore."
--"Social & Behavioral Sciences"
Once the egalitarian passions of the American Revolution had
dimmed, the new nation settled into a conservative period that saw
the legal and social subordination of women and non-white men.
Among the Founders who brought the fledgling government into being
were those who sought to establish order through the reconstruction
of racial and gender hierarchies. In this effort they enlisted "the
fair sex," white women. Politicians, ministers, writers, husbands,
fathers and brothers entreated Anglo-American women to assume
responsibility for the nation's virtue. Thus, although
disfranchised, they served an important national function, that of
civilizing non-citizen. They were encouraged to consider themselves
the moral and intellectual superiors to non-whites, unruly men, and
children. These white women were empowered by race and ethnicity,
and class, but limited by gender. And in seeking to maintain their
advantages, they helped perpetuate the system of racial domination
by refusing to support the liberation of others from literal
slavery.
Schloesser examines the lives and writings of three female
political intellectuals--Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams,
and Judith Sargent Murray--each ofwhom was acutely aware of their
tenuous position in the founding era of the republic. Carefully
negotiating the gender and racial hierarchies of the nation, they
at varying times asserted their rights and demurred to male
governance. In their public and private actions they represented
the paradigm of racial patriarchy at its most complex and its most
conflicted.
General
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