MANSIONS, MEN, WOMEN, AND THE CREATION OF MULTIPLE PUBLICS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NORTH AMERICA.

Introduction

Beginning in the first quarter of the eighteenth century many colonial elites built homes modeled on England's lower gentry. These dwellings were different in both size and function from earlier houses. Not only were they larger, but they divided up hitherto undifferentiated space into separate rooms where specialized social interactions took place and where the public part of the house could be segregated from the private.

Scholarly discussion about the new spatial arrangements in the great house has focused upon an aspiring, nouveau-riche elite's quest for gentility. [1] Ornate rooms signaled wealth and taste, and therefore social superiority, as the wealthy invested their objects and their homes with meanings, expressed through an encoded polite behavior, which, it has been argued, sharpened class distinctions. Such a process is probably true, but this essay moves beyond gentility to argue that the spatial resources made available by the building of eighteenth-century mansions permitted the formation of multiple gendered publics. It assumes that colonial mansions were both mirrors of and metaphors for colonial society and asks what publics were created through differential access to and use of space, how these publics bound people together into both more local and more widespread communities of interest and ultimately power, and how these publics became more gendered over time. To explore this more subtle use of space this e ssay utilizes the theoretical insights of Jurgen Habermas, Karen Hansen, and Hannah Arendt on the construction of public spheres to show the process through which real as opposed to theoretical publics evolved. [2]

The evolution of the colonial mansion from a two room hall-parlor house to a many-roomed great house provided space that was hierarchically organized with men having access to the more formal, expensive, and psychologically satisfying parts of the house for all-male activities. These rooms, the political and intellectual centers of the house, allowed men to interact with male peers on a variety of levels, while the library permitted them to temporarily cultivate a life of leisure, perhaps even partake in what Hannah Arendt calls the vita contemplativa, "the only truly free way of life," excluding, as it did, the "necessities of earthly life." [3]

Mansions also provided space for mixed-gender and female publics to emerge. Heterosocial interaction utilized almost the same spaces as did all male socializing with the important exception of the library but, given eighteenth-century notions of women's intellectual capacities, men and women tended to confine their conversation and opinion making to the superficial. All-female space in the big house was never available unconditionally unless it was the bedroom of a single woman. Married women also used bedrooms as personal parlors but of course shared these rooms with spouses. Functionally, however, the eighteenth-century big house allowed the elite to separate men and women within the domestic sphere long before the American Revolution, a pattern which by the 1820s had filtered down to the middle classes and has been variously called "female culture," or "separate spheres," by those studying the nineteenth century. [4]

The eighteenth-century mansion allowed for the formation of multiple publics, but the term itself requires definition to be useful. In this essay, public will refer to a body of private individuals who form a public opinion; or who exercise reason and judge the humanistic, natural, social, and political world about them; or who share assumptions, values, or conclusions about that world; or those who connect emotionally or indulge communally in personally rewarding behavior; or who judge the taste, virtue, value, or education of other people. [5]

Publics had other characteristics besides their personnel. Colonial publics were contingent, evanescent, and arguably essential. They were contingent in the sense that they formed within particular historical contexts (the gentleman s dinner or the great house ball were concrete social events having specific times and places). They were temporary in that they came together and then dispersed in a cycle that repeated itself with different actors and, perhaps, different purposes. They were essential in that they created the sphere not only where interaction with others took place, but more importantly, where such discourse created knowledge of the world, indeed, the very reality of the world itself. That more than one public arose meant that more than one reality was possible within the physical, social, and psychological space provided by the great house. [6]

Mansions, however spacious, were only one of many venues available in which elite men formed various publics. Indeed, the great house complemented the taverns, coffee houses, clubs, or the military, governmental, ecclesiastical, and judicial proceedings which occasionally brought them together. Such outside meeting places formed one part of a continuum from open public public space, such as a tavern, through more restricted public private space, such as a club, to the controlled closed private public space of a home. Only the mansion allowed the elite to interact with whom they wished when they wished rather than who happened to be present say, at a tavern, or at the odd times when legally mandated bodies met. And of course in rural areas (like the plantation South) where few taverns were available, mansions were the only places available to meet most of the time. [7]

Alternative public public space for women was far more limited. Respectable women did not frequent taverns although young men and women of the lower orders might dance there in small groups. There were no female equivalents to clubs or coffee houses. Major cities in the last half of the eighteenth-century offered ballrooms and theaters where men and women found others of like taste, but these had limited seasons and a much less private clientele than a house provided. [8]

Earlier or lesser housing also failed to provide much private public space for women. Before the advent of the great house, cooking and most other chores were done in the public "hall" of a hall-parlor house, a house form discussed below. Nastier chores were done in yards. Once houses were large enough for separate kitchens the woman of the house rarely did the heavier, dirtier labor of everyday life even though she might still supervise the work of others. She was unlikely to form a public with slaves or servants even if women at times provided emotional support for one another. [9]

In sum, the mansion provided its own special niche, apart from and in addition to whatever other space the culture offered, wherein a number of publics could coalesce. The big house gave elite men a more private and intimate alternative to outside establishments and for the rural South provided the only easily accessible space to meet one another undisturbed by casual visitors--one of the developing differences between the urbanizing North and the plantation South. On a much diminished scale, the great house served the same function for women. But, while the mansion opened up the range of alternative publics for men, it functioned more ambiguously for women. In the ongoing debate about whether women gained or lost control over their relationship with the world beyond the household in the eighteenth century, this article lends support to the latter interpretation as the mansion's social geography allowed them to be edged from the house's political, economic, and intellectual center to its periphery. [10]

The Evolution of the Great House

In colonial America the mansion emerged in the first decades of the eighteenth century. It is instructive to see what preceded it and how this lack of space made the formation of a Habermasian privately-based public sphere difficult. Even at the very end of the eighteenth century most housing in America was both crowded and small. Household size remained relatively constant between 1700 and 1775, averaging between five and seven persons in all of the colonies. House size averaged under 1,000 total square feet with ground floor space averaging less than half of that. The better-off farmer had a home of two rooms on the first floor known as a "hall-parlor" house. He might have also had two rooms upstairs. Those lower down the social scale had smaller homes of one or two rooms with perhaps a half story above. Even the wealthy had lived simply until the first quarter of the eighteenth century in some places like Virginia, and as late as the 1750s in western Massachusetts' Connecticut Valley. [11]

Housing size influenced the range of activities which went on indoors and the privacy and specialization available to owners and visitors. The hall-parlor arrangement of the better off made it possible to segregate public from work space, and men from women, at least part of the time. The hall was the working part of the house where food preparation, eating, washing, mending, and most other chores took place. It was the warm part of the house in winter and might provide sleeping quarters for all except the dwelling's owners. The parlor had the house's best bed, its better chairs and maybe smaller tables, any china or silver, pictures--in short, anything of value that could be displayed.

But we are still talking about only two rooms. Men might be able to converse freely in the parlor, but the life of the household was nearby, and privacy at a minimum. It must have been fairly easy for women in the house to be generally informed, to pick up gossip, and to hear about politics. It might also have been easier to grasp the economics of the household for there were no private studies or offices to which men could retreat. All in all, there was more shared knowledge. And maybe coincidently, women held more authority. Under these circumstances men who wished to be with other men went to local taverns which by the end of the seventeenth century had developed private rooms where gentlemen could converse among themselves. The first coffeehouse opened in Boston in 1676. By 1690 one of Boston's two coffee-houses was run by Benjamin Harris, a bookseller and the colonies' first newspaper publisher. It was in this kind of all-male space that men could learn the latest news and conduct business. More importa ntly, they could also take each other's measure, and decide who could be trusted and respected. And perhaps, as Habermas suggests, it was the creation of all-male space which permitted a politically important public. The French salon, which reflected the influence of women, never made the leap from art to politics, from style to substance, the way that the all-male English coffee house did. [12]

The evolution of the big house, and thus the kind of space it could offer, took place in generally recognizable stages. Mount Vernon might serve as a case in point. Between 1674 and 1700 a structure of some sort stood on the site, probably a hall-parlor house, one and one-half stories high. Sometime before 1740 this house was enlarged to become a thirty-three foot by forty-seven foot great house with a central hall flanked by two rooms on each side--a bedroom, large parlor, small parlor, and dining room. In 1754 George Washington inherited the house and upon his marriage in 1759 he enlarged it again, adding a second story. These upstairs rooms were apparently bedrooms although in some mansions, like Virginia's Governor's Palace, "the most influential house in the Chesapeake in the early eighteenth century," the Miles Brewton house in Charleston, South Carolina, or the Samuel Powel town house in Philadelphia, one of the second story rooms became the grand room of the house known as a drawing room. From 1773-1 787 Mount Vernon was further expanded by the addition of two rooms on either side of the mansion. The North room, called in Washington's day the "New Room," or the "large dining room," became the grandest room in the house, rising a full two stories. The South room became Washington's library. On the second floor he added a bedroom connected to it by a narrow staircase. Figure 1 shows the finished floor plan. During the course of the century what had been a simple two-room hall and parlor house had been transformed by various owners into a twelve room Georgian mansion with a hall, large and small parlors, large and small dining rooms, a gentleman's library, and six bedrooms. [13]

While a two room hall and parlor house might have permitted tension between function and authority as discrete publics had no place to form, a twelve-room mansion separated the two, allowing the formation of a multiplicity and hierarchy of publics, in the process reinforcing the importance of social hierarchy. British gentry culture provided the models for both houses and publics which colonists now had the desire and, more importantly, the wherewithal to emulate. The eighteenth-century Georgian mansion's rooms in descending order of what Cary Carson calls "hierarchies of social importance" were ballroom, drawing room; dining room; parlor, hall; library; and finally bedrooms. Different publics would grow in these psychologically and physically separate spaces. If the two-room house had made it difficult to communicate private information without the whole household knowing it, the larger house facilitated such segregation. It made possible publics, within the mansion, whose major defining characteristic was arguably gender as it permitted a "reality" in which women were increasingly marginalized. [14]

The Possibilities of All-Male Space

The great house provided men with the opportunity to meet with other men in a more selective way than was possible even in the elite taverns and coffee houses which became economically viable in the eighteenth-century. What was important about male home space was that access to it was controlled. Not even all men were welcome. For the sake of analysis, we can define three different kinds of publics which reflected the bonds that men shared within the spaces of the household, keeping in mind, however, that in practice these could overlap. First was the most general public of "bonhomie," which brought old friends together and which created new friends in a relaxed atmosphere. Second was a more instrumental kind of public based on the need to be part of the general flow of economic and political information necessary to maintain ones place in the larger culture. Third was a broader, "humanistic," or scientific public which might have arisen through personal interaction but often took the form of correspondence with a far-flung network of educated and interested peers. All but the last of these encouraged male interaction in the more public and desirable parts of the house. Personal correspondence could take place in the library--the male inner sanctum. Men did not meet with other men in bedrooms.

Drawing rooms if the gathering were large enough, parlors and dining rooms otherwise, provided the private settings where men joined one another. What mattered most was that women were absent. In 1744 young William Black, visiting Philadelphia on business, found an old acquaintance who invited him to visit. Black subsequently reported, "I found him at Home according to Promise, & there I spent the forepart of the Night very Agreeably. He kept Batchellor House, and Consequently more Freedom, than when a Wife and Children is to be Conform'd to." [15]

In South Carolina, "Mr. Peter Manigault and His Friends," (Figure 2) are clearly at ease with one another as they engage in light-hearted banter and even some silliness as the wig on a stick suggests. Without women men constructed a different masculinity. They could be less "polite" and more relaxed. They were able to speak about different matters. The young, livened, male, black slave, nodding off at the side of the room, was, like the parrot, no barrier to male socializing. Gender, in this case, outweighed race in determining elite comfort levels. And it might have been that a slave was so far removed from white culture that those in the room perhaps mistakenly believed that their privacy would be protected from later idle gossip.

European visitors found patterns of sexual segregation familiar and comforting. The Marquis de Chastellux described General Philip Schuyler as a most genial host at his home in Albany, but when he and an all male party went off with the general to his farm house at Saratoga they had an even better time, "for General Schuyler, like many European husbands, is still more amiable when he is absent from his wife." Mixed dinners which reverted to single gender socializing changed character as the women left. After removing the table cloth the remaining men drank and smoked, and "the dinner began to grow merry," as Chastellux noted of a dinner in the Philadelphia home of James Wilson. [16]

Males bonded together, tested each other at cards and jests, acted foolishly, and, beneath the surface and more importantly, evaluated each other, even as mixed-gender activities took place in other parts of a large house. At a well-attended ball held in the home of Squire Richard Lee of Virginia in 1774, dancing took place in the ballroom while in the mansion's other rooms gentlemen played cards, "some drinking for Pleasure; some toasting the Sons of America; some singing 'Liberty Songs' as they call'd them, in which six, eight, ten or more would put their Heads near together and roar." When Philip Fithian, the Northern-bred tutor attending the ball, was rudely dismissed by George Lee since he neither danced nor played cards, he was really being told that he was not part of this public unless he engaged in its activities and could thereby be evaluated by its rules. [17]

Meeting with friends, or those whose letters of introduction guaranteed that they were socially acceptable, did not preclude exchanges of information which were potentially useful. While the eighteenth century saw the emergence of newspapers, and a concomitant larger "informed" public, it was not yet fully modern in the sense that most news could be obtained impersonally. Colonial newspapers and English magazines tended to omit local events and their more farflung reporting was weeks or months old. Even the elite learned much of what they knew from one another but especially travelers. During the eighteenth century, an elite intercolonial culture emerged which permitted recognition of its members and a broad array of shared interests. Alexander Hamilton, the Scots expatriate physician who rode from Annapolis, Maryland, to Maine in 1744, found doors open to him. While most of his male socializing took place in clubs and taverns, occasionally he was asked to dinner in the more intimate setting of private homes . Sometimes women were at table, but sometimes not. Absent women, the conversation could turn to matters of more interest to men like trade or the law (which ladies would have little knowledge of), or politics (which could engage both). In New York City he dined at Stephen Bayard's brother's where "there were 13 gentlemen att table but not so much as one lady." The talk turned "tiresome and flat" centering on privateering and the glories of America. His boredom suggests that Hamilton was not yet embedded in this particular incipiently nationalistic public. [18]

Josiah Quincy also traveled for his health, but the Boston lawyer took advantage of his travels to explore political sentiment about the Mother Country when he beaded South in 1773. A Massachusetts political partisan, Quincy self-consciously tried to create the reality of an intercolonial public as he tested the waters of opinion among local political elites. In the pre-dinner conversation at the elegant home of the Charleston merchant, Miles Brewton, he noted "politics started before dinner." The company was in the midst of a heavy discussion about the wisdom of Great Britain's taking Canada at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 and Boston's secret design to rule the continent when dinner was called. At a subsequent dinner at Brewton's he "had a fine dish of politics," and later was able to speak with Brewton alone "with regard to a general, permanent, continental literary correspondence." This idea would evolve into the Committees of Correspondence which united the revolutionaries of the various colon ies and shaped public opinion about England into a new, more sinister, worldview. [19]

Politics was not the only bond that men forged as they came to know and respect one another in the privacy of the great house. Humanistic or scholarly concerns also brought men together, sometimes in emotionally satisfying ways. When the Marquis de Chastellux visited Thomas Jefferson at Monticello in 1782 he first found Jefferson reserved, but within two hours of "walking, the library-- and above all, conversation which was always varied, always interesting," he found they agreed in both feeling and opinion. Indeed, he felt as though they had known each other all their lives. He mentioned in particular an evening of conversation "over a 'bowl of punch,' after Mrs. Jefferson had retired," when talk turned to the poet Ossian, and Chastellux and Jefferson found "a spark of electricity which passed rapidly from one to the other" as they recited passages to one another and for the benefit of Chastellux's companions. The volume itself was produced and "before we realized it, book and bowl had carried us far into t he night." Emotional empathy, taste, and sensibility had united into one private public a Virginia planter, and a French nobleman. [20]

Jefferson, Chastellux, and their companions probably read Ossian in a parlor, but the book was undoubtedly retrieved from Jefferson's library-study. Studies had long been available to ministers and larger merchants, professions which required undisturbed space--for books, ledgers, and writing paraphernalia-- and undisturbed time. During the eighteenth century merchants and lawyers might have offices away from their dwelling. But the mansion opened up a male space untied to or contaminated by profession. Here, away from clients, women, children, servants, and visitors, elite men came as close as any in the eighteenth century could come to the vita contemplativa, life devoted to thought and the intellect. Such cultivation was enhanced by the print revolution which, according to Habermas, replaced patrons with publishers thereby turning written works into commodities available to the literate. [21]

The gentleman's library, or if he had no separate place, a parlor with his bookcase and writing desk, often combined in one beautiful, massive, expensive, and impressive piece of furniture, (Figure 3) might well have been on the one hand the most private part of the house for him, and on the other, the place where he entered the widest of all publics, the international scientific and literary community--the "republic of letters."

Libraries were quintessentially private male space, "the innermost, personal sanctum of the great man." This kind of space gained in popularity as the eighteenth century progressed and was often included in remodeling older structures as happened at Mount Vernon. Pennsylvanian Isaac Norris, II, inherited the country seat, Fair Hill, from his equally bibliophilic father. One of them built its separate library. In the early 1770s John Dickinson, the celebrated pamphleteer and patriot who inherited the use of the property through his wife, Mary Norris, made extensive renovations turning this dependency into a library-office. [22]

The same pattern emerged in the South. When two flankers were added to South Carolina's Middleton Plantation in 1741 one became a library. Libraries became an integral part of later eighteenth-century structures like Charleston's Manigault house, built around 1790, and were an indispensable part of any large nineteenth century residence such as Charleston's Nathaniel Russell house, with its oval library built c. 1809, or Henry Izard's 1809 mansion, The Elms, built at Goose Creek. Mid-nineteenth century books of house plans included libraries for mansions, country seats, and even smaller, yet luxurious, rural houses. The architect Gervase Wheeler described one such room in a small villa as "a private study for the gentleman of the house," which could double as a guest room "when extra accommodation would be needed." [23]

Libraries were private spaces often entered by invitation only. William Byrd, II, built one of the first dedicated library structures in America as an outbuilding to Westover in 1709. He added locks in 1710, keeping out, among others, his wife. James Logan's library at Stenton, outside of Philadelphia, took up the front two rooms of the first floor where somebody else might have put parlors. His pride and joy, and one of the best collections in America, he enjoyed showing it off to visitors, inviting them to become part of the bibliophilic public to which he belonged. Not everybody was so inclined. William Black, more interested in spending time in the parlor with young Hannah Logan, found to his chagrin in 1744 that "we were going to take leave, but it appear'd we must first view his Library, which was Customary with him, to any Persons of Account." Persons beneath this level were not part of Logan's public. Robert Carter, arguably the wealthiest gentleman in Virginia in the 1770s, kept his library on the f irst floor of Nomini Hall. Among the inducements he offered in his search for a tutor to his children was "the Use of his own Library." Still, this was Carter's private space and when the new Princeton-educated tutor chose to use it, "Mr. Carter at my request, gave me the Keys to his Book-Cases and allowed me to spend the Day alone in his Library." The library was not part of the public space of Nomini Hall the way a parlor was, and its treasures were available only to those who held the keys. [24]

George Washington used his study to escape from the public nature of the rest of his house, which he referred to as a "well-resorted tavern." His step-grandson described the library as "a place where none entered" except with explicit permission. Visitor Samuel Powel of Philadelphia, one of those invited in, explained that such a refuge was "absolutely requisite" in a house of "perpetual and elegant hospitality," i. e. one open, like a tavern, to a number of different publics. [25]

Byrd, Logan, Carter, Jefferson, Washington, and other wealthy and often intellectually curious elite men occasionally entertained visitors in their libraries but more often they used this private space and their free time, away from all outside demands and distractions (the kind of time women rarely had) to read and think, and sometimes write. William Byrd read old and new works in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian, as well as English, and wrote letters and verse. James Logan had a long correspondence about mathematics with Benjamin Franklin and New York's polymath, Dr. Cadwallader Colden. Wealthy Quaker merchant John Smith, an avid reader and son-in-law to James Logan, was "so moved at the deceit and Quirks in [Gilbert Tennent's Sermon on the Lawfulness of War] that I determined to Essay an answer and accordingly began one." One of the most famous political tracts to come out of this period was Philadelphian John Dickinson's Letters from an American Farmer (1768), which made him well-known throughout the co lonies. (Josiah Quincy could hardly contain himself when Dickinson, "the celebrated Pennsylvania 'Farmer'", asked him to dine at Fair Hill.) And finally, even those in the "wilderness" constructed mansions with studies to house surprisingly large and sophisticated book collections as did Sir William Johnson when he built Johnson Hall in Iroquoia, now New York's Mohawk Valley. Away from family and the large number of Native Americans who continuously visited, Johnson was one of an elite American intelligentsia engaged in the scientific, religious, philosophical, and political questions which ordered their world and provided them with understandings of the ways in which it worked. [26]

To sum up: Mansions both reflected and met the needs and desires of their elite male owners. Gentlemen interacting with other elite men used all its rooms except the bedroom. Most of their socializing took place in dining rooms and parlors. They used drawing rooms when the gathering was large enough. When evaluating one another and conversing about those things that interested them they appropriated the most ornate and socially important portions of the house. Here, away from women and lower class men, they formed a variety of publics, depending upon who was present and what the issues were. Josiah Quincy talked politics; Thomas Jefferson found a French soul mate. Libraries were elite male's inner sanctums. Secluded in the privacy that only such space could provide, away from not only visitors but also the other denizens of the house, they cultivated the vita contemplativa, harvested the fruits of their labors, and exercised their place in an international public of science, religion, arts, and letters.

Heterosocial and Women's Space

The mansion allowed men to develop three kinds of homosocial publics: bonhomie or friendship, networks of political and economic information, and entree into an international intelligentsia. But the rooms available within the great house also permitted heterosocial space and occasional, situational, space for women without men. Men with women embraced a different range of behaviors than those enjoyed by men alone. These were narrower, more formal, more polite, and less "merry," to use the Marquis de Chastellux's term. The behavioral codes required of both genders for mixed company and the exclusion of women from political and mercantile spheres of action combined with eighteenth-century beliefs about women's inferior capacities for intellectual pursuits and friendship to insure that men and women together would form different publics from men alone.

While the rise of the big house opened up the range of publics available to elite men, it constricted those available to elite women. The older smaller hall and parlor house allowed women access to much of the conversation and information that passed among men. Even if she were not part of that conversation she acquired background knowledge and a sense of men's larger concerns. The mansions new spatial arrangements isolated women from the economic, political, and intellectual affairs which occupied men. Those publics left to them were the domestic, the superficial, and the trivial. Gentility, after all, rewarded the ornamental over the instrumental, celebrated the conquest of necessity, and promoted time-consuming frivolity. Surface replaced substance, thus creating and reinforcing the reality of "natural" gender hierarchies. For nineteenth century America, scholarly attention has focused on middle- and upper-middle class women, for they were active along a number of different fronts including social and rel igious reform and the development of the cult of domesticity and a "female culture." What truly wealthy women did, especially in the North, is unclear. Perhaps they became increasingly ornamental and, hence, marginal, as were the publics to which they belonged. [27]

Tempering this loss of entree into the larger outside world, the mansion provided some women space away from outsiders. Bedrooms, the least ornate and furthest removed physically and psychologically from the house's social center, were the only place in a great house where nonfamilial men were barred. Here elite women created homosocial publics of their own. Younger women used a mansion's bedrooms to entertain young female friends. Both younger and older women used this private space to read and perhaps keep up a private correspondence. Women did not have private libraries.

While the mansion's more ornate rooms--ball or drawing room, dining room, parlor, and hall--allowed men alone to exchange political and economic information or discuss intellectual matters, these same spaces, when used by men and women together, created publics focussed on the polite and the superficial. Lavish balls joined men and women, as did the more intimate teas which were thought of as women's entertainment even though men were often included. These gatherings sharpened social skills and provided the venues where encoded behavior sharpened class distinctions. The behaviors appropriate to such settings included restraint, politesse, and "amiability," a favorite eighteenth century term which, like today, connoted friendliness and likeableness, grace, and superficial sociability.

Balls allowed the elite to show off their skills at dancing, skills which Rhys Isaac has suggested were class markers, especially in a society with no obvious aristocracy. The Princeton-educated tutor Philip Fithian clearly failed this test--the real message of the aforementioned discourteous challenge by George Lee. The mixed-gender public which attended the large social fetes held in the mansion's grandest rooms decided not the great intellectual, religious, political, or economic issues of the day but the more individual private issues of marital suitability and place in the social order. If one were high enough he (and possibly she) could opt out of this arena entirely. While the wife and children of Robert Carter attended the grand ball at Squire Lee's, Carter chose to remain at home. [28]

Teas, held in a mansion's parlor, provided an opportunity for men and women to mix in a more intimate private setting than a ball and thus create a smaller public which could encompass sensibility. Here a family was judged by the taste displayed through their tea equipage and the grace with which the presiding woman served tea and dispensed "chat." Other activities which engaged those invited to tea might be conversation, singing, dancing, or card playing and other games. [29]

The mansion's formal rooms encouraged an etiquette for teas and other mixed gender gatherings which required pleasantries, but not anything serious. In so doing, they permitted a reality which increasingly devalued women's intellectual development and achievement in favor of the polite and the ornamental. One popular conduct manual warned that women must "not be in danger of putting yourselves forward in company, of contradicting bluntly, of asserting positively, or debating obstinately, of affecting a superiority to any present, of engrossing the discourse, of listening to yourselves with apparent satisfaction, of neglecting what is advanced by others, or of interrupting them without necessity." Perhaps as Jane Kamensky suggests, one of the larger trends of the eighteenth century was to devalue women's speech in all venues. [30]

Unlike men, elite women were not trained to engage in intellectually weighty matters; such pursuits could be considered a liability, making a woman unfit to occupy those publics available to her. Eliza Lucas, in the rare position of running her father's South Carolina plantations and living her life without any male supervision, was uncommonly bright and an avid reader. However, her reading of Virgil and Plutarch distressed an elderly female neighbor who warned her that getting up so early to read would spoil her looks and thus "it should spoil [her for] marriage," making her a misfit in a society wherein almost all eligible women married. [31]

The public of political thought and action was also denied women even as during the waning years of British rule it constituted a major public for men. When the good ladies of Edenton, North Carolina, met at Elizabeth King's mansion to sign a pledge against tea in 1774 one of their rewards was a particularly vicious cartoon which showed them as mannish, ugly, lascivious, slovenly housekeepers, and unfit mothers (figure 4). Arthur Iredell wrote playfully to his brother James, whose sister-in-law was one of the Edenton signers, that he hoped there was not a "female Congress" in Edenton since Englishmen had enough trouble with male Congresses. Women were not fit to forge such an overtly political public. [32]

Eighteenth-century culture did not respect bookish or thoughtful women nor did it necessarily acknowledge women's capacity for deep as opposed to superficial emotion. Some men wondered if women were even capable of true friendship. John Ewing told Esther Edwards Burr that "He did not think women knew what Friendship was. They were hardly capable of anything so rational." Since there was no reason to take such people seriously, they could be and were excluded from the public sphere of serious things. [33]

Men and women together used the ornate space within the great house to create a public in which wit, manners, and polite conversation allowed for agreeable time spent together. This public passed judgment on its own members and perhaps on the literature of the day. What it did not become, even though some like the Philadelphia poet Elizabeth Magawley might have wished it, was a serious forum for discussing literature, art, or philosophy as were the salons of France. With a few notable exceptions, the aristocratic French officers who fought in the Revolution, and who knew elite salon life first hand, found only its more superficial aspects in America. [34]

Women without men used far less of the great house than women with men or men alone. There is no record of all-female gatherings for dinners in dining rooms or for large discussions in a parlor except perhaps the Edenton women who met at the home of Elizabeth King. Only men used these spaces in these ways. Women did retreat to a parlor after a mixed gender dinner, although only until the men joined them, turning homosocial space into heterosocial space. Women also entertained other women in parlors when they visited. But parlors in the eighteenth century were not female space nor were they decorated as such. The feminization of the parlor, at least for the middle classes, evolved during the nineteenth century. [35]

If women had any space that might be theirs it was the bedroom. The least ornate and sophisticated rooms of the mansion, and those furthest psychologically and geographically from most kinds of public, bedrooms became the refuge of women, especially unmarried women. Here women entertained other women or became part of the public created by reading and writing. Only rarely were men permitted in this most intimate part of the house. Describing social life in Boston, Jean-Francois-Louis, Comte de Clermont-Crevecoeur, complained that after drinking tea the ladies retired to their own rooms where outsiders were forbidden unless known to the family. The French exile Moreau de St. Mery wrote of Philadelphia in 1793 that "Never does one walk into a woman's bedroom." [36]

Once large enough to have private, dedicated bedrooms, great houses provided the space where women could interact with other women to discuss those things of interest only to them, thus forming a feminine public. Those without family responsibilities-perhaps at either end of their life cycle--had the most time. Younger women had the most freedom. Philadelphian Peggy Rawle visited some friends and spent the time in the bedroom chatting. Elizabeth Drinker recalled the days of her youth when she and her good friend Elizabeth Moode "had a long discourse ... upstairs, in the Dark". Nancy Shippen Livingston, separated from her husband and daughter and living again as the ward, hence child, of her parents, sat upstairs in bed with her friend Louisa, "in deshabille. I was reading & she hearing." They were found that way by her grandfather who called them "lazy girls." They immediately got up, dressed, and "went down & drank a sociable dish of Tea with G Papa." The intimate literary but non-adult public of Livingston and Louisa ended when faced with what were considered more important familial social demands which in turn created a different public which used another part of the house. [37]

Older women, especially those in poor health, spent much of their time in their bedrooms. Elizabeth Drinker's three volume diary often reports of retreating to the upstairs. Nancy Shippen Livingston's mother, mired in what sounds to modern ears like clinical depression, chose to spend her time in a country house with nobody but the servants needed to care for her. Unless servants were permitted to express their opinions and form social bonds with their mistresses, the only public such women could participate in would be epistolary.

Finally, while a parlor or separate study furnished men with a place to think, read, and write, women used part of the bedroom for such purposes. George Washington finally built himself a separate library wing. Martha Washington's small desk sat in their bedroom (figure 5). There is no evidence for separate women's libraries and even the idea of a lady's library, decorated and stocked without male guidance, was enough to launch Joseph Addison in The Spectator, one of the most influential publications in Anglo-America, upon a cutting and mysogynistic commentary on female intelligence, taste, diversion, and use-fulness. That said, women probably had some access to husbands' and fathers' libraries where they formed part of a public whose tastes created a market for the novels, like Pamela and Clarissa, which first appeared in the 1740s, and for the enormously popular secular moralists whose writings appeared in The Tattler and The Spectator. Someplace within the mansion, perhaps at small desks in bedrooms, or t ables in parlors, women also created for themselves a small public of correspondents, mainly relatives, with whom they formed an emotionally-bonded public which interested itself in family news as well as opinions about not only literature but also local politics and religion. [38]

A few women used their private space to reach out further. In the Delaware Valley, a small group of female poets shared their work with one another, and with men, although they rarely published in their lifetimes. These literary endeavors formed yet another public, albeit one confined to a small elite within local polite society. A very few women composed and published sophisticated verse. Elizabeth Magawley imitated Horace in her "The Wits and Poets of Pennsylvania," published in 1731. Her effort was apparently part of a paper war going on with two other poets in the pages of the American Weekly Mercury. But this was arch stuff. Women did not become part of the larger publics of correspondence which focused their energies on religion, science, mathematics, or politics. Indeed, lack of time, not necessarily space, probably kept most women from the luxury of the vita contemplativa, but that issue is beyond the scope of this paper. [39]

To sum up: the mansion provided the room for heterosocial as well as female publics to arise. Men and women used the same spaces that men did, except for the library, but their conversation tended to be more superficial than all-male discourse. Contemporary ideas about women's intellects made the more serious unusual. All-female space was never unconditionally available except for single women's bedrooms where younger women confided in, gossiped with, and read to one another. Bedrooms might also contain a desk where women read and wrote, thus forming a public of distant family and friends and belles lettres.

Conclusions and Implications

The eighteenth-century evolution of the colonial mansion from a two room-hall and parlor house to a multi-roomed great house allowed the formation of multiple gendered publics. Hierarchically organized space gave men access to the more formal, ornate, and psychologically satisfying parts of the house for homosocial activities. Constituting the political and intellectual centers of the house, these rooms permitted male peer interaction on a number of levels. The absence of the lower orders and women, who were close by in a two room house, allowed for the spatial construction of masculinity. Here, "merry" or serious, men could be men.

The segregation of elite men strengthened their own kinship and solidarity with one another. Three interlacing kinds of pan-colonial publics emerged from the privacy and spaciousness that the mansion provided them: friendship and trust, a more general communications network for economic and political information, and a humanistic-scientific societas which included both those physically present and those linked through correspondence. Dedicated libraries, whose number increased during the latter part of the eighteenth century, gave men the space and the privacy to engage in the vita contemplativa. Alone and surrounded by books, they thought, read, and wrote the letters and tracts which linked them to both an intercolonial and an international "republic of letters." Indeed, the gendered social space provided by the big house allowed a colonial male elite to recognize and feel at ease with itself wherever in the colonies men might find themselves.

On the other hand, the segregation of elite men reinforced their differences from those "others" excluded from the mansion's male spaces and exacerbated their otherness. These others included social inferiors and women. Separation from inferiors would intensify in the nineteenth century with the rise of a modem class system and the physical partition of cities by wealth. The wealthy created their own clubs, schools, and neighborhoods where they were insulated from those less well off at the same time as those below them created working and middle class cultures.

While the mansion gave men all-male space, it also provided men and women the elaborated rooms within which to entertain, judge, and be judged by one another. Balls, teas, and perhaps dinners allowed elite colonials to create their version of polite society. These publics of manners, literature, and social accomplishment, the only kind open to women, stressed refinement and amiability. They were never intended to form a public for political or intellectual concerns nor were they able to recreate the intensity of the French salon.

Women might have gained the use of a bedroom but the mansion did not provide them with an equivalent of the gentleman's library. Younger women used bedrooms to entertain other young women and solidify intimate friendships that might have formed a public which judged the newly available novels and popular moralistic literature like The Spectator. Women also used this space to read alone and to write letters, which tied them together into a public of kinship and friendship but not a larger public of religion, politics or science.

The segregation by gender made possible by the evolution of the house from a hall and parlor structure to one of many rooms possibly increased among the wealthiest in the nineteenth century as well. Joan Cashin concludes that in the South, "the parlor, the drawing room, the hearth, the birthing chamber, [and] the porch" were designated primarily, although not exclusively, for women. [40] Among the wealthiest, however, men's spaces included not only libraries but smoking and billiard rooms. The logical conclusion of separate spaces, found in the largest of the nineteenth century houses, were separate bedroom apartments for man and wife as in Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, the Vanderbilt chateau created at the end of the nineteenth century.

The increasing distance between men's space and women's space in the eighteenth-century great house both made possible and reflected the increasing differences between elite men's and women's lives. The nineteenth century would see the expansion of house size filtering down the economic and social ladder to a growing upper-middle and middle class. For those social strata, women became responsible for parts of the house not relegated to men and during the first half of the nineteenth century formed a public of domesticity with other women. Parlors could now exhibit "elegance and the appearance of lady habitancy." [41] This female public would assume responsibility for furnishings and taste not given to women in the eighteenth century. It would also provide an audience for an ideology of domesticity which created an alternative literature of bourgeois manners and virtue--still another example of Habermas' public opinion--mainly directed at women.

During the eighteenth century the great house was a major part of a man's world. For women the public world inside the mansion increased to include formal parlors and dining rooms where she could meet with other elite men and women. She might have her own bedroom where she could entertain other women, and read and write. Yet, for women, the public world inside the great house also narrowed as all-male space excluded her from the very publics it allowed men to create. In the process it allowed for a worldview that increasingly excluded women from the political, economic, and intellectual world beyond the house, offered her only the more insular or superficial, and then judged her incapable of going beyond the domestic or the frivolous.

Department of History

Columbia, SC 29208

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Lawrence Glickman, Joseph Hawes, Jacqueline Reinier and especially Mark Smith for commenting on this paper.

(1.) Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1993); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (New York and London, 1984); Cary Carson, "The Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand," in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London, 1994), 483-697; Edward A. Chappell, "Housing a Nation: The Transformation of Living Standards in Early America," ibid., 167-232; Bernard L. Herman, Architecture and Rural Life in Central Delaware, 1700-1900 (Knoxville, 1987), chapters 2 and 3; Dell Upton, "Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," in Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens, GA, 1986), 315-335.

(2.) Carson, "Revolution in Colonial British America," in Carson, et al, Of Consuming Interests, 682-683. For a somewhat different take on the meaning of Mount Vernon and Monticello see Robert F. Dalzell, "Constructing Independence: Monticello, Mount Vernon, and the Men Who Built Them," Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (1993): 543-580. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 1-62, passim; Karen V. Hansen, A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England (Berkeley, 1994); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958, ppb. 1989). Habermas is in vogue these days. Two recent studies which use his ideas are T. H. Breen, "Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts," in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1997), 67-95, and Nancy lsenberg, "'Pillars in the Same Temple and Priests of the Same Worship': Woman's Rights and the Politics of Church and State in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 85 (1998): 98-128. Isenberg also discusses Hannah Arendt's work (see fn. 5).

(3.) Arendt, The Human Condition, 14.

(4.) For a discussion of the concept of "female culture" and a fine historiographic overview see Joan E. Cashin, ed., Our Common Affairs: Texts from Women in the Old South (Baltimore and London, 1996), 1-41. For an overview of the literature discussing "separate spheres" see Hansen, A Very Social Time, 15-19. It cannot be an accident that the middle classes took up these values at about the same time that America underwent a housing revolution which allowed for the construction of larger, less expensive houses. Partially the increase in housing size was due to new forms of building called "balloon" construction which allowed houses to be made of less massive, hence less expensive, framing, and which went up much faster.

(5.) This definition combines some of the insights of Habermas, and some of Hansen. For a critique of this part of Habermas's argument see David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), xv--xvii.

(6.) This paragraph develops its ideas from a number of sources. On the need to recognize the historical elements of contingency, see Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, tr. George Simpson (Glencoe, IL, 1960). For an understanding of the impermance of this kind of social entity see Victor Turner's discussion of communitas in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, 1977), chapters 3 and 4, and pp. 202-203. For an interesting discussion of the relativity of meaning in the context of the concept of culture see Michael J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville, 1998), 19-23.

(7.) For the importance of taverns see Gentleman's Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton 1774, ed. Carl Bridenbaugh (Chapel Hill, 1948); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban life in America 1625-1742 (New York, 1955), 109, 432, 267-268, 269; Kym S. Rice, Early American Taverns: For the Entertainment of Friends and Strangers (Chicago, 1983), 38-41; David W. Conroy, In Public Houses: Drink & the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill and London, 1995); Edward M. Cook, The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore, 1976); Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, chapter 5; [Lord Adam Gordon,] "Journal of an Officer who Travelled in America and the West Indies in 1764 and 1765," in Travels in the American Colonies ed. Newton D. Mereness (New York, 1961), 404, 397.

(8.) Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America: 1743-1776 (London, Oxford, New York, 1955), 164-165, 366-367, 168-169, 369-371; Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York, 1995), 116; Rice, Early American Taverns, 108-110.

(9.) Plantation homes often had housekeepers who worked with the plantation mistress. See The Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian 1773-1774: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish, (Williamsburg, 1965), xxx. Servants, rather than a house's mistress, used the kitchen for socializing (The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, ed. Elaine Forman Crane [Boston, 1991], l:xxvi).

(10.) There is a large literature on whether women's lives were getting "better" or "worse" in the eighteenth century. A lot depends upon definition. If we are talking about increasing opportunities, especially among the elite, than we can look at Cynthia A. Kierner "Hospitality, Sociability, and Gender in the Southern Colonies," Journal of Southern History 62 (1996): 449-480 and Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters, chapter 4. Recent arguments for declining opportunities are found in Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1996), chapter 9; Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, & Society in Connecticut (Chapel Hill and London, 1995); and Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York and Oxford, 1997).

(11.) For a discussion on household size see Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton, 1975, chapter 8). While it is impossible to know exactly how many great houses eighteenth-century colonists built, Thomas Tileston Waterman identified some forty-five in Virginia (Thomas Tileston Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia 1706-1776 [New York, 1945], 413-424). Of 708,550 houses surveyed in a 1798 federal house census the mean value of a house was $300 and the median $135. Some 3,808 were worth more than $3,000, 875 more than $6,000. The grandest mansion in the survey contained 15 rooms distributed over three stories and 8,757 square feet. It and only two other houses were valued at over $30,000. (Lee Soltow, "Egalitarian America and its Inegalitarian Housing During the Federal Period," Social Science History 9 [1985]: 199-213.) See also Soltow, "Housing Characteristics on the Pennsylvania Frontier: Mifflin County Dwelling Values in 1798," Penn sylvania History 47 (1980): 57-70; Billy G. Smith, "The Material Lives of Laboring Philadelphians, 1750-1800," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd. Ser., 38 (1981): 163-202; Sharon V. Sallinger, "Spaces, Inside and Outside, in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26 (1995): 1-31; Bushman, Refinement of America, 110; Kevin M. Sweeney, "High-Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite," in Carson, et al., Consuming Interests, 4, and "Mansion People: Kinship, Class, and Architecture in Western Massachusetts in the Mid Eighteenth Century," Winterthur Portfolio 19 (1984): 231-255.

(12.) The extent and timing of women's authority in colonial America is still much debated. See Lois Carr and Lorena Walsh, "The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., 34 (1977): 542-571; Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1986); David E. Narrett, "Men's Wills and Women's Property Rights in Colonial New York," in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, Women in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1989), 91-133; Dayton, Women Before the Bar; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs, chapter 9. For taverns or coffee houses see Conroy, In Public Houses; Jessica Kross, "'If you will nor drink with me, you must fight with me': The Sociology of Drinking in the Middle Colonies," Pennsylvania History 64 (1997): 28-55; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 109; Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters, 112. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 33 .

(13.) Information on Mount Vernon comes from Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia, 271-297, and Mount Vernon: An Illustrated Handbook (Mount Vernon, 1968). Richard Bushman, Refinement of America, 113; Mills Lane, Architecture of the Old South: South Carolina (Savannah, 1984), 63; George B. Tatum, Philadelphia Georgian: The City House of Samuel Powel and Some of its Eighteenth-Century Neighbors (Middletown, CT, 1976), 87. I am counting the downstairs hall as a room since it was used as such.

(14.) Carson, "The Revolution in Colonial British America," in Carson, et al, Of Consuming Interests, 620. My hierarchy of rooms was constructed by not only reading some of the literature about space but also by looking at eighteenth-century houses. See Bushman, Refinement of America, Carson, (above); Sweeney, "High-Style Vernacular," in Carson, et al., Of Consuming Interests; Upton, "Vernacular Domestic Architecture," in Upton and Vlach, Readings in American Vernacular Architecture. House books are mentioned in various footnotes in this article and also in Bushman, Refinement of America, 459, fn 15.

(15.) "Journal of William Black, 1744," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 1 (1877): 249. Cynthia Kierner also makes this point in "Hospitality, Sociability, and Gender in the Southern Colonies," Journal of Southern History 62 (1996): 471-474.

(16.) The quotes are from Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781 and 1782, ed. Howard C. Rice, Jr., 2 vols., (Chapel Hill, 1963) 1: 214, 176, See also pp. 119, 160. For the same observations see also "Journal of Jean-Francois-Louis, Comte de Clermont-Crevecoeur," The American Campaigns of Rochambeau's Army 1780, 1781, 1782, 1783 tr. and ed. Howard C. Rice, Jr., and Anne S. K. Brown, 2 vols., (Princeton, 1972), 1:21.

(17.) Fithian, Journal and Letters, 57, 59.

(18.) Hamilton, Itinerarium, 63, 173. Bayard's brother is not further identified.

(19.) Josiah Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy Jun. (Boston, 1825, repr. New York, 1971), 101-102,110.

(20.) Chastellux, Travels 2:392. It is now assumed that the various epics of Ossian, translated by James Macpherson beginning in 1762, were actually his composition, and not the early works that Jefferson and Chastellux believed them to be. See Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge, 1995).

(21.) Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 38; David Zaret, "Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres in Seventeenth-Century England," in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermos and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 212-235.

(22.) Graham Hood, The Governor's Palace in Williamsburg: A Cultural Study (Williamsburg, 1991), 211; Milton E. Flower, John Dickinson: Conservative Revolutionary (Charlottesville, 1983), 86, 187.

(23.) Lane, Architecture of the Old South: South Carolina, 30, 109; Alice R. Huger Smith and D. E. Huger Smith, The Dwelling Houses of Charleston, South Carolina (New York, n.d., repr of 1917 ed.), 138; "Nathaniel Russell House," Charleston County, National Register of Historical Places, Inventory, South Carolina State Archives; Gervase Wheeler, Homes for the People in Suburb and Country (New York, 1972, repr of 1855 ed.), 179.

(24.) Kevin J. Hayes, The Library of William Byrd of Westover (Madison, 1997), 37 and fn 111; The Great American Gentleman: William Byrd of Westover in Virginia: His Secret Diary for the Years 1709-1712, ed. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling (New York, 1963), 203; "Journal of William Black, 1744," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography I (1877): 407; Fithian, Journal and Letters, xxx, 7,45.

(25.) Dalzell, "Constructing Independence," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26 (1993): 574. Dalzell asks what public and private mean under these circumstances. Wendell Garrett, American Colonial: Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace (New York, 1995), 260.

(26.) Byrd, Great American Gentleman, passim; The Papers of Benjamin Franklin ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, 1959), 3:115, fn 4. Cadwallader Colden's papers are published as the New-York Historical Society Collections vols. 50-56 (1917-1923); Hannah Logan's Courtship: A True Narrative, ed. Albert Cook Meyers (Phildelphia, 1904), 139; Quincy, Memoirs, 133. However, Dickinson had already published his Farmer's Letters before he acquired Fair Hill. Milton W. Hamilton, "The Library of Sir William Johnson," New-York Historical Society Quarterly 40 (1956): 209-251. The "old study" is mentioned in Sir William's probate inventory, Papers of Sir William Johnson, ed. Milton W Hamilton (Albany, 1962) 13:650.

(27.) Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-174. For an overview of the literature see Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9-39; Cashin, Our Common Affairs, chapter 1.

(28.) Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 81-87; Fithian, Journal and Letters, 56; Kierner, "Hospitality, Sociability, and Gender," Journal of Southern History 62 (1996): 468-471.

(29.) Rodris Roth, "Tea Drinking in 18th-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage," Bulletin of the United States National Museum 225:14 (1961): 70.

(30.) James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, published in 1765, quoted in Kevin J. Hayes, A Colonial Woman's Bookshelf (Knoxville, 1996), 58-59. Fordyce was one of the most popular books of its kind in eighteenth-century England, going through fourteen editions by 1813. Kathryn Kirkpatrick argues that its intended audience was not the upper classes in England but the new middle class. ("Sermons and Strictures: Conduct-Book Propriety and Property Relations in Late Eighteenth-Century England," in Beth Fowkes Tobin, ed., History, Gender & Eighteenth-Century Literature [Athens, GA, 1994], 198-226); Kamensky, Governing the Tongue, 183, 184.

(31.) Chastellux, Travels in North America 1:301, fn 30. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney 1739-1762, ed. Elise Pinckney (Chapel Hill, 1972), 33. Pinckney probably read classical authors in the translations which became available at the end of the seventeenth century.

(32.) The Edenton cartoon and Iredell letter appear in Inez Parker Cumming, "The Edenton Ladies' Tea-Party," Georgia Review 8 (1954): 395, 391-2.

(33.) The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757, ed., Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker (New Haven, 1984), 257.

(34.) David S. Shields tries to make the case for Elizabeth Magawley as an American salonniere, but he does so by showing her desire for such an institution rather than her success at creating one. He does provide evidence for the conventional view of women as superficial and trivial, the "Coquets, Romps, Prudes, and Idiots" that Magawley is forced to admit exist among women, even as she suggests there are also "Women of Sense," and "Rakes, Fops, Coxcombs, and down-right Fools" among men. His discussion of the tea table emphasizes wit rather than substance. (Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite letters chapter 4, quote on p. 99). For a discussion of women in the salons of France see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Culture History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994). French officers' comments are found in The American Campaigns of Rochambeau's Army 1:21, 246, and Chastellux, Travels, 1:81.

(35.) Cumming, "Edenton Ladies' Tea-Party," Georgia Review 8 (1954): 389; Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill and London, 1992), 123, Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, 1989), 185.

(36.) "Journal of Jean-Francois-Louis, Comte de Clermont-Crevecoeur," American Campaigns of Rochambeau's Army, 82; Moreau de St. Mery's American Journey 1793-1798) tr. and ed. Kenneth Roberts and Anna M. Roberts (Garden City, N.Y., 1947), 289.

(37.) Nancy Tomes, "The Quaker Connection: Visiting Patterns among Women in the Philadelphia Society of Friends, 1750-1800," in Michael Zuckerman, ed., Friends and Neighbors: Group Life in America's First Plural Society (Philadelphia, 1982), 179; Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, 1:18; Nancy Ship pen Her Journal Book: The International Romance of a Young Lady of Fashion of Colonial Philadelphia with Letters to Her and about Her, ed. Ethel Ames (New York and London, 1968), 198-199.

(38.) The Spectator, No. 37, April 12, 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 1:152-159. Mount Vernon: An Illustrated Handbook, 70. For women s readings see Hayes, Colonial Woman's Bookshelf; Sally D. Mason, "Mama, Rachel, and Molly: Three Generations of Carroll Women," in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution, 272-273; Letters of the Franks Family (1733-1748) ed. Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, Studies in American Jewish History, 5 (Waltham, MA, 1968), 142, 50.

(39.) On the Delaware Valley poets see Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters, 126-140. David S. Shields, "'The Wits and Poets of Pennsylvania': New Light on the Rise of Belles Lettres in Provincial Pennsylvania, 1720-1740," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 109 (1985): 100.

(40.) Cashin, Our Common Affairs, 16.

(41.) Spain, Gendered Spaces, 123.