Mansions, Men, Women, And The Creation Of Multiple Publics In Eighteenth-Century British North America

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Jessica Kross

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]