ABSTRACT
In an 1838 article for the Democratic Review, Catherine Maria Sedgwick declared that the leisure-class resort of Saratoga Springs ought to be “considered a sort of Jerusalem and an annual gathering there a national jubilee, when we are emancipated from something worse than political slavery,— for those sectional prejudices are chains and manacles to kindly feelings” (qtd. in Chambers 2002: 169). While Sedgwick’s praise for society’s annual errand into the wilderness of the watering hole may seem extreme in its twinned invocation of Puritan history and abolitionist rhetoric, such claims that the leisure-class resort might serve as the testing ground for an “American” national identity, or, at least, for its transregional national elite, were common within antebellum culture. Although the New York Herald in 1853 might lambaste the annual “pilgrimage” as “full of the follies of fashion, the infatuation of wealth, above all the pretensions of snobbism, and absurd shabby genteelism” (qtd. in Sterngass 2001: 71), many saw possibilities for a new imagined national community that would be based on a shared consumer culture of leisure activities, tourism, beauty, and fashion. In her self-published book The Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859), Eliza Potter echoes this cultural invocation of the ties between leisure-class resorts and national community building amidst the sectional divides of the pre-Civil War years. As Potter announces in her opening remarks on Saratoga, where she worked, “Belles were there from all parts of the country. The North vied with the South, the West with the East in beauty, wit, in elegance and splendor” (53). While throughout her representations of “high life” (or leisure-class society), Potter vacillates between both republican disapprobation and nationalist utopian rhetoric in her analysis of these leisure-class resorts, she as well as other wage-earning
black women at the mid-nineteenth century, such as Elizabeth Keckley, saw in the economic relations of black and white women in leisure-class society new possibilities not only for earning power but also political and cultural agency. In their Tocquevillian survey of these “private societies” (Shields 1997: xiii), private societies that, I will argue, formed complicated women’s counterpublics,1 Potter and Keckley redefi ne the labor of black workingclass women as the “fashioning” of taste, which, as much as reason, infl uenced public opinion within an emerging consumer republic.
