“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender, Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic

This essay takes Angelica Schuyler—whose surname, following her husband’s, became Church in 1784—as a case study in the intersection between class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the revolutionary American republic. It argues that she and women like her held a distinctively dynastic attitude towards kinship, which shaped the norms of sociability that governed the emerging national state during the first decades of the federal government. Like other wealthy, well-connected, white women in this period, Schuyler Church disavowed the popular ideology of female domesticity and asserted power through the public display of feminine sexuality. The essay builds on studies of the so-called “republican court” in the United States, as well as scholarship on elite women’s role as powerbrokers in British and French society, to draw out the ways that their gendered experience of sexuality and family life interacted with strategies for reproducing and accumulating power. Like all other ruling classes, that of the United States depended upon women. That dependence drove the shifting political salience of gender and sexuality in the early republic.