Reconsidering the Place of Domesticity in the Early Republic

Abstract: Part of the forum, “Women at the Center,” which asks how historians can reframe histories of the early republic to place women and gender at the center of our historical narratives. Domestic life has long been a fixture in histories of women in the early republic. Yet placing domestic life alongside the state at the center of the early republic has the potential to transform our understanding of the meaning, experiences, and consequences of the American Revolution and the nation it created: by illustrating both how deeply embedded discourses of domesticity were in the politics, laws, and institutions of the early republic as well as the sprawling reach of domestic life and the power it represented beyond the confines of the so-called “private sphere.”