Not all Wives: Women of colonial Philadelphia. (Reviews).

Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. By Karin Wuif (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000. xvii plus 2l7pp.).

Karin Wulf's recent study Not All Wives announces a bold new interest in marital status as a category of historical analysis. Calling on early American historians to scrutinize the colonial conflation of "goodwives" with women, Wulf analyzes how cultural meanings attached to marital status contributed to constructions of gender in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Her work highlights the significance of single women's experiences for women's history, while demonstrating that attention to single women can reshape our understanding of everything from poverty policy to electoral politics. Relying on a diverse set of sources, from correspondence and commonplace books to tax and probate records, city council minutes, and institutional records, Wulf shows how single women's political access and economic options were reduced just as their numbers increased. Ultimately, she argues that ideas about spinsters, widows, and wives helped foster the emergence of a new masculine polity in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, on e which afforded expanded opportunities to white men of all classes even as it constricted those available to women of any class.

Wulf organizes her book around a series of elegantly intertwined essays, each centered on the experiences of a particular woman and touching on a different aspect of women's lives, from their attitudes towards marriage or their sense of self, to their commercial transactions or their political activities. This approach allows Wulf to create brief but vivid sketches of the lives of individual single women even as she discusses the broader implications of their experiences. And it puts to rest forever the idea that women's history must be written in terms of spheres; Wulf ably traces the criss-crossing paths that led women from home to market to courthouse and back, sometimes by way of the almshouse. Finally, Wulf's series of interlocking essays incorporates her own noteworthy original research with perceptive (re)readings of myriad secondary sources. Having bemoaned the failure of standard histories to integrate women's history into their narratives in her introduction, Wulf proceeds to go one better. She skil lfully blends previous findings from urban history and labor history into her version of women's history, in the process shedding new light on the work of even such established luminaries as Gary Nash and Billy Smith.

Wulf's first two chapters take up issues of mentality and identity. In the first, she challenges the idea that women idealized marriage and instead attempts to show the prevalence of contrary views that the liberated "single state" was preferable. Unfortunately, in her desire to demonstrate a widespread association between singleness and liberty, Wulf tends to homogenize the unambiguous celebrations of singleness advanced by select elite women poets and correspondents, the great majority of them Quakers, with the far more ambivalent critiques of marriage included in popular Philadelphia almanacs. In so doing she elides differences of class and culture which may well have been quite significant. Still, she partially overcomes this problem with an inspired presentation of evidence that some Quaker school-mistresses disseminated their views to a wider public by incorporating positive portrayals of the single life into dame-school curriculums.

Her second chapter also tempers the universalizing tendencies of the first with a thoughtful discussion of the particular ways in which Quaker theology opened up new possibilities for women to develop autonomous selves. She argues that Quaker women, as well as members of pietist sects, seized on their religions' theological emphasis on gender parity to create a new brand of "feminine individualism" based not on masculine materialism but on feminine spirituality. She concludes that women did not necessarily embrace a "relational existence" but instead preferred independence to a life defined by "domestic femininity." This chapter too contains some conceptual difficulties, not least of which is that the anti-materialism voiced by single Quaker women was actually a basic tenet of Quakerism embraced by men as well. What's more, Wulf's contention that single women rejected "domestic femininity" falters in the face of her own admission in the next chapter that never-married women, including the most articulate of h er elite Quakers, almost always lived and worked in the households of others. Only widows, who may or may not have deliberately chosen to remain single, ever headed their own households in significant numbers. In chapter three on household life, Wulf herself concedes "the centrality of domestic responsibilities for most women," including most single women. Still, Wulf is onto something important in unearthing the remarkable, recognizably feminist sentiments voiced by many Quaker women as early as the first third of the eighteenth century. Her arguments reinforce the findings of earliers scholars of Quaker women, such as Mary Maples Dunn.

Wulf's last three chapters on women's changing economic and political activities and access are especially strong. They burst with new evidence and insights on everything from the role of changing poor-relief practices in the construction of gendered ideas of dependence to the willful erasure of independent single women from public life, whether from tax lists (where even substantial single female property-holders were often overlooked) or from political prints (where illustrations of the bustling city market-place depicted no women at all). These chapters cull fragmentary evidence from a dazzling array of sources to create a compelling case that property considerations and political franchise were de-coupled as much to ensure that no women, not even those unconstrained by coverture, could lay rightful claim to political participation, as to open gates of civic life to all classes of men. By the end of the eighteenth century, Wulf explains, masculinity-not property-had become the key requirement for participa tion in political life.

Though Wulf's book is not without problems, the most significant-her reliance on the abundant manuscript sources left by Philadelphia-area Quakers-is one which faces all historians who come to work on the middle colonies. And in fact, Wulf succeeds better than most in trying to demonstrate the dissemination and influence of Quaker ideas, in this case about marriage and gender, on the culture of Pennsylvania colony as a whole. Overall, her forceful original arguments combined with her lucid synthesis and engaging style should ensure this book a prominent place on scholar's shelf and teacher's syllabus alike.