Gender, Neutrality, and the Nursing Father in Pratt’s Emma Corbett
This article examines Samuel Jackson Pratt’s 1780 epistolary novel Emma Corbett; or the Miseries of Civil War, a text which represents familial relations in terms of the American Revolutionary War, as well as how this war divided families, such as the novel’s Corbett and the Hammond families, based on their national affiliation. This essay considers family in Emma Corbett by discussing representations of motherhood and masculinity. I argue that Pratt represents figurative and actual mothers in the novel as problematic in a number of ways, and he figures maternal subversiveness as in need of eradication. Instead, the neutral patriarch, who exemplifies the proper balance of sensibility and reason, is worthy of supplanting women in the text, and he is to be preferred even to sensible, poetic men and to dutiful, soldierly ones. Representations of masculinity in the novel demonstrate that to show emotion was a sensible, manly quality, but sensibility needed to be tempered lest a man become too emotional, too patriotic, or even effeminate. By critiquing masculinity as well as motherhood as they are embodied by characters like Emma Corbett, Charless Corbett, and Henry Hammond, Pratt offers Robert Raymond as the “solution” to these problems of motherhood and masculinity: he becomes a neutral, hybridized masculine and feminine patriarchal example who, as a kind of Lockean nursing father figure, repairs the Corbett and Hammond families’ damaged relationship, one instigated by their divisive national alliances.
Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educated women and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest's new study, which explores how small changes in the meaning of patriotism and the relations between public and private categories permitted educated British women to imagine themselves as political subjects. "Small Change" considers the celebration of learned women as tokens of national progress in the context of a commercial culture that complicates notions of gender difference. Guest offers a fascinating account of the women of the bluestocking circle, focusing in particular on Elizabeth Carter, hailed as the paradigmatic learned and domestic woman. She discusses the importance of the American war to the changing relation between patriotism and gender in the 1770s and 1780s, and she casts new light on Mary Wollstonecraft's writing of the 1790s, considering it in relation to the anti-feminine discourse of Hannah More, and the utopian feminism of Mary Hays.
Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists
I n recent years historians have come to recognize the central role of the family in the shaping of American society. Especially in the eighteenth century, when "household" and "family" were synonymous terms, and when household manufactures constituted a major contribution to the economy, the person who ran the household-the wife and mother-occupied a position of crucial significance. Yet those who have studied eighteenthcentury women have usually chosen to focus on a few outstanding, perhaps unrepresentative individuals, such as Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Abigail Smith Adams, and Mercy Otis Warren. They have also emphasized the activities of women outside the home and have concentrated on the prescriptive literature of the day. Little has been done to examine in depth the lives actually led by the majority of colonial women or to assess the impact of the Revolution upon them.1 Such a study can illuminate a number of important topics. Demographic scholars are beginning to discover the dimensions of eighteenth-century households, but a knowledge of size alone means little without a delineation of roles filled by husband and wife within those households.2 Historians of