"Women of the Republic"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the roles that women played in the establishment of the American Republic. It analyzes Kerber's work and explains that for women of the colonies, the world after the American Revolution was no more equal, in many respects, than the world that had existed before it. All men-property-owning men-may have been equal. But women remained under the new laws of the Republic, mere inferior beings, of questionable citizenship status.

From the Paper:

"Again, this is not to deny Kerber's claim that American colonial women "imbued that domain with unprecedented significance... Motherhood assumed almost the role of a 'fourth branch of government,'" but merely to remind the reader that this ideology was in response to the larger world's intransigence, not simply a choice of women to shape their lives according to this model. (Kerber, p. 172) Nor is this to deny the vitality and creativity brought by American women to this ideology-but one can only long that such ideology was as freely chosen as the pro-freedom rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence envisioned men freely choosing their government leaders and rights. If only women's lives, one might long, could have been more influential in shaping the post-Revolutionary terms of its political discourse as well as domestic ideology, however powerful and important actors they served in the domestic sphere."

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