With this year marking the 40th anniversary of Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic, popularizing Republican Motherhood as an understanding of women in the Early Republic, I propose a supplementary theory to understand women in this time. Kerber’s Republican Motherhood articulated the accepted role of women: the “steady infusion of virtue into the Republic” by raising children to be responsible citizens. This mindset justified the education of women because they were responsible for the early inspiration of their children to care for the new nation. Kerber emphasized the division of public and private space, with the corresponding distinction of the public for men and the private for women. But her theory does not paint the full picture of activities women carried out.
Studying the outcomes of women educated at the Litchfield Female Academy (LFA) from 1792-1833 to write my senior thesis at Georgetown, I found dozens of women who pursued a fine balance of working outside the home without fully disrupting the separation of public and private space. They served as presidents, treasurers, and board members of voluntary organizations with varied missions: to care for orphans, instill morality among their communities, and to beautify their towns for the benefit of all.
These women acted according to nineteenth-century gendered expectations, but rather than limiting themselves to their homes, they chose to educate the children of the whole community, to teach young women for miles how to raise their families properly, and to care for the sick and the needy throughout their towns. By operating as mothers at the community level, women did not even need to have their own children in order to carry out the tasks that their own mothers had trained them for. These women had been highly educated as girls, and at Litchfield they were instilled with the protestant evangelism of the Reverend Lyman Beecher to yearn for pious, moral reform in their communities. With the skills and the motivation, these women broke free of their boundaries without upending the whole structure of society.
A prime case study of this phenomenon is Fanny Smith Skinner, who attended the LFA in 1796 and later moved to Utica, New York with her husband Thomas. Utica published an annual town directory, listing the names, professions, and residences of all members of the community throughout. These records provide an ideal tool for studying individuals’ involvement in their town and their connections to each other.