ABSTRACT
Discussions of women’s political fate during the Revolutionary era frequently begin-and sometimes end-with Abigail Adams’s famous request to John Adams during the 1775 Continental Congress to “Remember the Ladies” and John Adams’s dismissive reply. Indeed, one recent analysis has claimed that “the founders mostly forgot about women’s rights and citizenship” (Kann, Gendering 1).1 For the historiography of American women and citizenship, Adams’s letter has become the linchpin in a narrative that argues that “the founders” simply couldn’t imagine women as citizens: the Adamses’ exchange of letters (in their full context, letters that are joking and affectionate) seems to prove that the failure to enfranchise women was due to liberal society’s incomplete evolution. These letters have, I would argue, received undue emphasis at the expense of a wide range of writings that demonstrate that women’s political rights certainly were imaginable, and that women in particular worked at imagining them. If, as Michael Warner and others following Habermas have argued, the republic of letters opened up the possibility of political participation to those who had never been anything but subjects of a monarch, we must not ignore women’s attempts to use their participation in public discourse to argue for political rights and to construct a vision of women as political beings. In the preceding chapters, I have argued that women’s authorship disrupted the emerging gender system in subtle ways: by creating networks of literary women that merged homosociality with literary sociability in order to vindicate women’s intellect; by extending the authority of the maternal author to the definition of manhood; and by dramatizing women’s martial activities as an excessive element troubling a gender system based on biology. None of these activities gets at the heart of “women’s rights” as the nineteenth and then twentieth centuries would come to understand them, an understanding in which the right to vote and then the exercise of that vote took a central, arguably even fetishized, role.2
