ABSTRACT
With respect to gender, intellectual debates in late eighteenth-century Europe shifted from Latin to French and from the academy to various clubs, salons, and coffeehouses, which exposed a modicum of well-educated European women to philosophical and scientific viewpoints. Alongside racial and gender inequities, lower-class citizens in the United States, particularly recent immigrants arriving in port cities along the eastern seaboard, were targeted as parasitic freeloaders who drained public charities. Throughout the nineteenth century, a key question for individuals positioned outside the sphere of white, male privilege was how and where they might legitimately place their own intellectual talents and human equivalence. By the end of the nineteenth century, many transatlantic writers began to concentrate on the harsh realities of urban poverty that Lippard had effectually unpacked fifty years earlier. Ethno-racial intolerance and female subjugation are a substantial and ignoble part of the fabric that makes up America's cultural history.
