Writing Republican Femininity: The Letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne

Essay Excerpt

"The letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne, a young New Englander whose correspondence with her family and friends was collected and published in the late nineteenth century, reveal some of the conflicts and difficulties faced by women of the early Federal era in trying to create identities for themselves as Republicans, Americans, and also feminine women. Writing at a time when most familiar models of femininity, whether domestic or Republican, were still British, but when Americans had already begun to insist vehemently on their national differences from Britain, Bowne represents her life in terms that attempt to satisfy two overlapping, but not identical, sets of cultural values. As she does so, she implicitly demonstrates that living in a Republic is not in itself sufficient to establish cultural differences between American and European women, however much writers such as Imlay thought it made a difference to men."​