Description
Book SynopsisIn Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon's archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women's experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the mere equals of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Americans grappled with the competing issues of women's intellectual equality and sexual difference.
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,
Trade Review
By drawing upon some forty different collections of family papers, diaries, and other documents held at libraries, historical societies, and other repositories from Massachusetts to North Carolina, McMahon has artfully pieced together the intimate textual traces of the lives lived by less-well-known women. In doing so, she productively limns the nuanced roles that both Cupid and Minerva played for American women in this crucial period of history.
-- Jane Greer * The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society *
In this engaging, thought-provoking book Lucia McMahon explores early national woman's education, highlighting how Americans simultaneously held notions of intellectual equality alongside belief in persistent, rigid sexual difference. They did so through their paradoxical belief that women were 'mere equals' and women's intellectual and social equality were allowed but political citizenship and participation were not.
* Journal of American History *
"McMahon follows the enhanced joys and unsettling challenges that learning brought to women's lives. Each chapter is built around a particularly rich body of personal materials that reveals the thoughts and actions of a pair of correspondents.... McMahon has provided an exceptionally developed picture of women’s agency during this time of socialculturaland political development. Hers is historical research and textual analysis at its bestpersuasively argued and elegantly written." —Marilyn J. Westerkamp
* The Journal of Interdisciplinary History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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 Archives
Notes
Index
