The fair sex

"Once the egalitarian passions of the American Revolution had dimmed, the new nation settled into a conservative period that saw the legal and social subordination of women and non-white men. Politicians, ministers, writers, husbands, fathers, and brothers entreated Anglo-American women to assume responsibility for the nation's virtue. Thus, although disfranchised, they served an important national function, that of civilizing non-citizen.

They were encouraged to consider themselves the moral and intellectual superiors to non-whites, unruly men, and children. These white women were empowered by race and ethnicity and class, but limited by gender. And in seeking to maintain their advantages, they helped perpetuate the system of racial domination.".

"Schloesser examines the lives and writings of three female political intellectuals - Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, and Judith Sargent Murray - each of whom was acutely aware of her tenuous position in the founding era of the republic. Carefully negotiating the gender and racial hierarchies of the nation, they at varying times asserted their rights and deferred to male governance.

In their public and private actions they represented the paradigm of racial patriarchy at its most complex and its most conflicted."--BOOK JACKET.