Reading Liberty's Daughter's: Charlotte and Eliza

I have read pieces of Norton’s Liberty’s Daughters before, but it’s been a long time. When I saw it on the syllabus I figured that I already knew the gist of her argument—women had repetitive, domestic lives and found it difficult to fantasize a reality outside of that (sometimes unhappy) married realm—but there is, of course, more. One aspect that I had completely glossed over in my memory (and this seems a little silly given the title) was the emphasis on daughters. Ever since the AAUW published their study Where the Girls Are: The Facts about Gender Equity in Education, which feeds into the recent Girl’s Studies movement, I’ve been thinking about the experiences of young girls, both in early America and contemporary society. And I'm not the only one. I mean, even Barbie is getting on board (with the help of Amy Pholer):



Ok, so Amy and Ruby don't talk about the experiences of girls in early America, but Mary Beth Norton does. And so do Hannah Webster Foster and Susana Rowson, though until now I had never read Liberty's Daughters, The Coquette, or Charlotte Temple as about "girls." In my mind they were always simply texts about early American "women," which is a fine way to read the material, but I wonder how our readings of the primary and secondary material may transform when we make this differentiation. As I've re-read The Coquette and Charlotte Temple this week, I've been thinking about the transition from girlhood to womanhood in early America, and it all seems to center around one thing: marriage.

In Liberty’s Daughters, Norton directly addresses the social construction of an early American women’s “private” sphere. Her first chapter discusses the work girls did around the house in service to their mothers; however, these chores of spinning, cleaning, and cooking were more than simply a way to contribute to the maintenance of a household. They were part of a larger domestic training. Girls were taught about “’the mysteries of housewifery’ by conscientious mothers,” so that they could become good housewives and active mistresses of their families (25). There was, of course, a class divide between the motivations for this type of instruction: “Farm daughters learned to perform household tasks because their family’s current well-being required their active involvement in daily work, whereas city girls acquired domestic skills primarily so that they could eventually become good wives and mothers” (25). Even though these two groups of girls learned these skills for different reasons, the common feminine curriculum points to a skill-set deemed appropriate for early American women-- a skill-set always relegated to the domestic realm.

Norton uses the terms “girls” and “daughters” interchangeably, and “women” and “wives” are used in a similar manner. In our contemporary society this distinction may seem obvious, but in the late 18th-early 19th century when girls were marrying earlier, we cannot rely on age as a determining factor. And the ages of Charlotte and Eliza are so dissimilar that we can't really use that as a gauge either. Charlotte Temple was barely 15 when she became pregnant and Eliza Wharton was in the “37th year of her age” when she died in childbirth, but both are described in their respective texts as “girls,” marking the transition from girl to woman as not biological but socially constructed for it happens through marriage and not motherhood. Norton discusses this marital-based transition explicitly in her second chapter, describing married and unmarried women as members in “two different, equal, and exclusive clubs” (40). But what do we make of girls like Eliza Wharton and Charlotte Temple who were having the lived motherhood experiences of “women” and are yet still described textually as “girls”? These characters seem to occupy a liminal position in the trajectory of femininity.

In the early pages of the novel, Charlotte Temple is described as a “tall, elegant girl” and “the sweetest girl in the world” (3). Likewise, in the retelling of her parents’ courtship, Lucy Temple is described as a “love-sick girl” (25). After her marriage to Temple, however, Lucy is described as a “wife,” “mother,” and “woman.” The Coquette's Eliza Wharton is described as a “foolish girl,” while Mrs. Richman is called a “poor woman” and “matron” (6). And even after their childbearing and subsequent deaths, these main characters are referred to, respectively, as girls. At the end of Charlotte Temple, as a stranger describes Charlotte’s death to Montraville, he depicts Charlotte as a child: “ ‘tis a poor girl that was brought from her friends by a cruel man, who left her when she was big with child, and married another” (117). Even after motherhood and death, Charlotte is still described as a “girl.” The same is true for Eliza Wharton. In a letter to Charles Deighton, Sanford laments Eliza’s death and his own miserable situation: “Thus, that splendor and equipage, to secure which, I have sacrificed a virtuous woman [his wife], is taken from me; that poverty, the dread of which prevented my forming an honorable connection with an amiable and accomplished girl [Eliza], the only one I ever loved, has fallen, with redoubled vengeance, upon my guilty head; and I must become a vagabond in the earth” (165). Let’s ignore for the moment Sanford’s (typical, for his character) selfishness, and focus on his differentiation between the women and girls in his life. The married counterpart is termed “woman,” whereas Eliza remains an accomplished “girl,” even though she died giving birth to Sanford’s child.

There are, obviously, many reasons for the distinction between women and girls in print culture. The conventions of marriage dictated, and still do to a certain extent, a lady’s title. And there are clear rhetorical strategies for referring to a victimized, fallen woman as a “girl” in the sympathetic seduction genre. But I wonder how much we, contemporary readers, can infer about the lives of early American girls, especially “fallen” girls like the one in this week’s novels. These characters are experiencing “womanhood” by contemporary standards, and yet they’re described as juvenile in print culture. I have to wonder if this liminal, gendered position is part of the reason why Eliza and Charlotte (and like characters) never seem to live past the end of the novel; they don’t fit into any prescribed definition of “woman” or “girl” and, thus, cannot remain alive and fixed in a text. Contemporary women (girls?) seem to have similar problems in a cultural narrative, though they are no longer subject to certain death. I can think of one telling example: Britney, singing in her early, pre-fall days, “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman.”