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In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon's archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women’s experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the "mere equals" of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Americans grappled with the competing issues of women’s intellectual equality and sexual difference.
In the new nation, a pioneering society, pushing westward and unmooring itself from established institutions, often enlisted women’s labor outside the home and in areas that we would deem public. Yet, as a matter of law, women lacked most rights of citizenship and this subordination was authorized by an ideology of sexual difference. What women and men said about education, how they valued it, and how they used it to place themselves and others within social hierarchies is a highly useful way to understand the ongoing negotiation between equality and difference. In public documents, "difference" overwhelmed "equality," because the formal exclusion of women from political activity and from economic parity required justification. McMahon tracks the ways in which this public disparity took hold in private communications. By the 1830s, separate and gendered spheres were firmly in place. This was the social and political heritage with which women’s rights activists would contend for the rest of the century.
Lucia McMahon is Associate Professor of History at William Paterson University. She is coeditor of To Read My Heart: The Journal of Rachel Van Dyke, 1810–1811.
"Mere Equals introduces us to newly independent Americans who engaged in a conversation that has as much significance for us today as it did for them. In the wake of the Revolution, they asked themselves if women who now had the opportunity for more advanced education were men's intellectual equals. And if they were, did they have the same right as men to claim economic and political power? Should older ideas about sexual difference and gender hierarchy be abandoned? Lucia McMahon takes us into the lived experience of a generation who grappled with the implications of women being considered equal to and simultaneously different from men. Bold and innovative, Mere Equals addresses a debate that remains crucial in the twenty-first century."
Catherine Kerrison, Villanova University, author of Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South:
"Mere Equals features an overarching narrative about the emergence of an idea of mere equality and its demise and reformulation into separate spheres. Lucia McMahon cleverly shows this process unfold over time (1790 to 1840) and over the seasons of her individual subjects' lives."
Jane Greer:
"By drawing upon some forty different collections of family papers, diaries, and other documents held at libraries, historical societies, and other repositories from Massachusetts to North Carolina, McMahon has artfully pieced together the intimate textual traces of the lives lived by less-well-known women. In doing so, she productively limns the nuanced roles that both Cupid and Minerva played for American women in this crucial period of history."
"In this engaging, thought-provoking book Lucia McMahon explores early national woman's education, highlighting how Americans simultaneously held notions of intellectual equality alongside belief in persistent, rigid sexual difference. They did so through their paradoxical belief that women were 'mere equals' and women's intellectual and social equality were allowed but political citizenship and participation were not."
C. Dallett Hemphill, Ursinus College, author of Siblings: Brothers and Sisters in American History:
"In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon explores the intellectual lives of middle- and upper-class white women in the early republic. While we know about the growth of educational opportunities for women in this period and about the somewhat fluid situation as regards women's ability to participate in politics, McMahon does signal service in showing the meaning of intellectual equality in the private lives of ordinary women. Her study advances the discussion of white women’s history in this pivotal era."
""McMahon follows the enhanced joys and unsettling challenges that learning brought to women's lives. Each chapter is built around a particularly rich body of personal materials that reveals the thoughts and actions of a pair of correspondents.... McMahon has provided an exceptionally developed picture of women’s agency during this time of socialculturaland political development. Hers is historical research and textual analysis at its bestpersuasively argued and elegantly written." —Marilyn J. Westerkamp"
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