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Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic
248![Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic
248Hardcover
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Overview
In the new nation, a pioneering society, pushing westward and unmooring itself from established institutions, often enlisted women’s labor outside the home and in areas that we would deem public. Yet, as a matter of law, women lacked most rights of citizenship and this subordination was authorized by an ideology of sexual difference. What women and men said about education, how they valued it, and how they used it to place themselves and others within social hierarchies is a highly useful way to understand the ongoing negotiation between equality and difference. In public documents, "difference" overwhelmed "equality," because the formal exclusion of women from political activity and from economic parity required justification. McMahon tracks the ways in which this public disparity took hold in private communications. By the 1830s, separate and gendered spheres were firmly in place. This was the social and political heritage with which women’s rights activists would contend for the rest of the century.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801450525 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 09/15/2012 |
Pages: | 248 |
Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction: Between Cupid and Minerva1. "More like a Pleasure than a Study": Women's Educational Experiences2. "Various Subjects That Passed between Two Young Ladies of America": Reconstructing Female Friendship3. "The Social Family Circle": Family Matters4. "The Union of Reason and Love": Courtship Ideals and Practices5. "The Sweet Tranquility of Domestic Endearment": Companionate Marriage6. "So Material a Change": Revisiting Republican MotherhoodConclusion: Education, Equality, or DifferenceList of ArchivesNotesIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Mere Equals features an overarching narrative about the emergence of an idea of mere equality and its demise and reformulation into separate spheres. Lucia McMahon cleverly shows this process unfold over time (1790 to 1840) and over the seasons of her individual subjects' lives.
Mere Equals introduces us to newly independent Americans who engaged in a conversation that has as much significance for us today as it did for them. In the wake of the Revolution, they asked themselves if women who now had the opportunity for more advanced education were men's intellectual equals. And if they were, did they have the same right as men to claim economic and political power? Should older ideas about sexual difference and gender hierarchy be abandoned? Lucia McMahon takes us into the lived experience of a generation who grappled with the implications of women being considered equal to and simultaneously different from men. Bold and innovative, Mere Equals addresses a debate that remains crucial in the twenty-first century.
In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon explores the intellectual lives of middle- and upper-class white women in the early republic. While we know about the growth of educational opportunities for women in this period and about the somewhat fluid situation as regards women's ability to participate in politics, McMahon does signal service in showing the meaning of intellectual equality in the private lives of ordinary women. Her study advances the discussion of white women’s history in this pivotal era.