History/GWS 249 Reading Guide
Women’s Reading and Writing during the Revolution and the Early Republic
- Linda Kerber, chapter 8, “Women’s Reading in the Early Republic,” Women of the Republic (1980), 233-264. (e-reserve)
see also Jane Austen, selections from Northanger Abbey, Ch. V, 36-38; Ch. XIV, 108-110 (cited in part in Kerber).
Texts:
- Abigail Adams (1744-1818), Correspondence between Abigail Adams and John Adams, March-May, 1776. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Boston, Mass. : Massachusetts Historical Society, 2002. Note: this first link takes you to the homepage of the collection. The links below take you to the assigned letters.
- Abigail to John, 31 March-5 April 1776.
- John to Abigail, 14 April 1776.
- Abigail to John, 14 April 1776<.
- Abigail to John, 7-9 May 1776.
- John to Abigail, 22 May 1776.
- John to Abigail, 27 May 1776.
- Judith Sargent Murray (Constantia), “On the Equality of the Sexes,” Massachusetts Magazine, or, Monthly Museum, Vol. II (March and April, 1790), 132-135, 223-226. Digital Library, U. Penn
Questions:
- What does Adams’s correspondence with her husband suggest about her perception of their relationship?
- What interested her? What concerned her? What did she view as her responsibility to her husband, her family, and herself?
- What did she read?
- According to Kerber, how were women's minds appropriately nurtured in the early republic?
- Why were novels seen as dangerous? Why did American society in the early republic blame novels for a woman's "downfall"? What other concerns inspired the prescriptive warnings?
- Why were women encouraged to read history? What were women expected to gain and learn from such reading? In what ways were those expectations limited? Why?
- Was the distinction between history and novels always clear?