ABSTRACT
Historians have followed several lines of inquiry in addressing the antebellum women's rights movement, addressing legal reform, abolition, and republican ideology, but all have had to contend with gender. In consigning women to the "private sphere", identified with the home, men could maintain patriarchal authority over their household as something separate from the "public sphere" in which they questioned hierarchy. Feminist theorist Judith Bennett noted that most women in history have had to make "patriarchal bargains" when redefining contemporary proscription on gender, and Republican Motherhood fit Bennett's model of "patriarchal equilibrium", a process whereby women pay for gains in one area with losses in another. Invoking a seemingly universal female experience of motherhood also masked the new ideology's singular application to white women who had developed Republican Motherhood in response to their own class and race concerns. Tying female virtue to sexual behavior became a tool by which to exclude non-elite women from influence.
