Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Author:Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307472779
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-09-22T16:00:00+00:00

Why did all-creating Nature

Make the plant for which we toil?

Sighs must fan it, Tears must water,

Sweat of ours must dress the soil.

Other writers claimed that in sweetening their tea with sugar, ladies were actually consuming the flesh of slaves.69

In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which appeared in England at the height of the boycott, Mary Wollstonecraft turned the image inside out by attacking the false propriety—the sweetness—that kept women from acting as independent beings. “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subjected to prejudice which brutalizes them…only to sweeten the cup of man?” she asked. “Is this not indirectly to deny woman reason?”70 She feared the very influence that Adams and other men invoked as a substitute for political power. “When I call women slaves, I mean in a political and civil sense,” she wrote, “for, indirectly, they obtain too much power.”71

In revolutionary Paris, an actress and political pamphleteer named Olympe de Gouges developed a similar argument. “This sex, too weak and too long oppressed, is ready to throw off the yoke of a shameful slavery,” she wrote. Like Wollstonecraft, she believed that women had the same capacity for reason and civic engagement as men. Her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen picked up where the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen left off. She disdained the notion, common then among French intellectuals, that women were “inactive” citizens. “I am a woman,” she wrote, “and I have served my country as a great man.”72

In 1792, the Library Company of Philadelphia hung a painting in its headquarters titled Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences. In it, a rosy-cheeked white woman in a fashionable white dress sits on her pedestal like a schoolmarm. She is a schoolmarm. There is a globe on her right, a pile of books at her left, and on the floor beside her are an easel, brushes, and a lyre. If it weren’t for the cap-crowned pole leaning lightly on her right shoulder, she might be a teacher in one of the newly opened academies in the early American republic, except that the students gathered around her on the ground represent slaves. A boy in a red coat leans forward, his head resting wearily on one hand, while behind him a mother holds a young child whose arms stretch hopefully forward.

When Samuel Jennings, an expatriate American artist living in London, first proposed contributing a painting to the library’s new building, he suggested a portrayal of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. The gentlemen of the Library Company, however, demurred. They wanted nothing less than “the figure of Liberty (with her Cap and proper Insignia)” surrounded with “Groups of Negroes sitting on the Earth, or in some attitude expressive of Ease & Joy.”73

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