Page 172 - American Stories, A History of the United States

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abigaiL aDaMs Benjamin Blyth painted this portrait of Abigail Adams, wife of the future President John
Adams, c. 1776.

If Knox accepted Lucy’s argument, he did so because she was a good republi-
can wife and mother. In fact, women justified their assertiveness largely on the basis
of political ideology. If survival of republics really depended on the virtue of their
citizens, they argued, then it was the special responsibility of women as mothers to
nurture the right values in their children and as wives to instruct their husbands in
proper behavior. Contemporaries claimed that the woman who possessed “virtue and
prudence” could easily “mold the taste, the manners, and the conduct of her admirers,
according to her pleasure.” In fact, “nothing short of a general reformation of manners
would take place, were the ladies to use their power in discouraging our licentious
manners.”
Ill-educated women could not fulfill these expectations. Women required educa-
tion that was at least comparable to what men received. Many female academies were
established during this period to meet what many Americans, men as well as women,
now regarded as a pressing social need. The schools may have received widespread
encouragement precisely because they did not radically challenge traditional gender
roles. The educated republican woman of the late eighteenth century did not pursue
a career; she followed a familiar routine as wife and mother. The frustration of not
being allowed to develop her talents may explain the bitterness of a graduation ora-
tion an otherwise obscure woman delivered in 1793: “Our high and mighty Lords . . .
have denied us the means of knowledge, and then reproached us for want of it. . . .
They doom’d the sex to servile or frivolous employments, on purpose to degrade their

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