“Life of George Washington — The Farmer,” painted by Junius Brutus Stearns ; lith. by Régnier, imp. Lemercier, Paris, 1853. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. By Lindsay Chervinsky In the preface to You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George… Read More
Íby Emily Sackett Emily Sackett was awarded an OI–Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation fellowship in spring 2019. She spent the month of September 2019 in residence at the Omohundro Institute and conducted extensive research in the collections at Jamestown Island. The OI offers numerous… Read More
“A Lady & Children,” mezzotint (1780), British Museum. This post accompanies “Motherhood in Early America,” episode 237 of Ben Franklin’s World. It was originally posted at the Junto and has been lightly revised. by Lindsay M. Keiter Human reproduction is simultaneously unchanged and radically different over time and across cultures. Read More
H.E. Hayward and Slave Nurse Louisa, Missouri History Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. This post accompanies “Motherhood in Early America,” episode 237 of Ben Franklin’s World. by Emily West Mother’s Day offers opportunities to reflect upon motherhood in relation to ethnicity and class. Racial discrimination and poverty mean that a narrow conceptualization of biological motherhood associated with domestic care and nurture is not applicable to all in the past or present. This is especially true when considering the lives of enslaved women, for whom motherhood was a double-edged sword and many of whom endured a complex relationship with mothering. Women knew that their babies held pecuniary value to slaveholders and that they might be forcibly separated from their offspring at any time. Maternal love for children therefore co-existed alongside more ambivalent attitudes towards motherhood among enslaved women who rightly feared that their children might be wrenched away or otherwise fail to survive under the slave regime. Read More
Today’s post accompanies “The Revolutionaries' Army,” episode 158 of Ben Franklin’s World and part of the Doing History 2: To the Revolution! series. You can find supplementary materials for the episode on the OI Reader app, available through iTunes or Google Play. By Holly A. Mayer Women have volunteered service in all American wars, but they have always been exempt from the civic obligation to serve in the military. As Linda Kerber has argued, that meant that they found themselves “outside the boundaries of [civic] reciprocity and entitlement.” If the definition of “citizen” included bearing arms as a communal obligation, but one could not or would not bear arms for the state, could that person be a citizen entitled to all attendant rights and privileges? When that question arose well after the Revolution in debates over giving women the right to vote, suffragists argued that the obligation entailed more than bearing arms: it was “risking one’s life for the republic, and that childbearing women repeatedly satisfied that obligation.” Rights activists then and later also contended that women preserved the republic in other ways.[i] Nonetheless, activists accepted the premise that willingness to meet the obligation to sustain the nation, meaning to risk life and property, was key to full citizenship. One may also argue that it was key to full representation in history. Read More