http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/95.1/steele.html
Thomas Jefferson's Gender Frontier
Brian Steele, assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Scholars have long emphasized Thomas Jefferson's cosmopolitanism in ways that obscure his nationalism. But simply recovering Jefferson's particularistic nationalism and juxtaposing it to his well-known universalist cosmopolitanism is too easy. These were not readily separable elements of his world view. Jefferson frequently expressed his nationalism in capacious terms precisely because he understood the universal to be exemplified in his nation. / 1To be sure, Jefferson relished his reputation as an Enlightenment citizen of the world, and during his five years (1784–1789) as American minister to the court of Louis XVI, he acquired an association with France that his political enemies used ad nauseam to question his patriotism. Historians, too, have argued that Jefferson became a kind of internationalist, an "Apostle of European Culture," while in France. His stint in Europe, in other words, somehow "freed [Jefferson] from provincial notions about the superiority of American life."1 That interpretation is not so much wrong as in need of considerable qualification. While Jefferson was in France, his aesthetic evolved appreciably, and he embraced cultural refinements that his own nation lacked, becoming an enthusiastic connoisseur of European architecture, sculpture, painting, food, clothing, and music. He also enjoyed the pleasures of the salon and the companionship of a circle of Frenchwomen (and Frenchmen). Many of his letters from this period gush over the pleasing sociability and refined manners of French society. He was an enthusiastic participant in the transatlantic "republic of letters," which he described in 1809 as "a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth" whose "correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation."2 / 2
But, as he was quick to remind anyone who would listen, there was more to Europe than high culture. In Jefferson's imagination American values and cultural practices uniquely embodied universal standards. And that outlook frequently clashed with cultural practices of other nations, practices that he took to be "unnatural" and that heightened his skepticism about the ability of other peoples to create enlightened societies. The overwhelming burden of Jefferson's correspondence from his years in France emphasized American difference from, and superiority to, the Old World and his fears of the potential corrupting effect of European mores on American people and institutions. / 3
These concerns manifested themselves in many areas, but in none more strikingly than in discussions of gender. Jefferson's correspondence from France suggests that his conception of gender and sexuality was not merely tangential to his republicanism or to his understanding of America's uniqueness. Jefferson's ideal society embraced female domesticity as part of the natural order of things—an order, he came to believe, realized only in America. The shock of his encounter with difference in France clarified this conviction and compelled Jefferson to make explicit the gendered underpinnings of his nationalism.3 / 4
Although Jefferson's embrace of domesticity as essential to the new republican order should not surprise any student of revolutionary America, historians have been conflicted about Jefferson's views on gender relations, particularly his representations of women. Some have identified a pattern of misogyny in Jefferson, a lack of comfort with women, if not worse—Kenneth A. Lockridge, for example, depicted a frustrated Jefferson full of a "patriarchal rage" triggered by his mother's legal control over his property and destiny after his father's death. Fawn M. Brodie also suggested that Jefferson's preferences for women who were "gentle, feminine, and yielding" originated with a deep hostility to his mother. Winthrop Jordan described a Jefferson fearful of women, whose uncontrolled passion and sexual aggression, he believed, threatened his masculine self-control.4 Other scholars have shown, by contrast, that although he tended to recoil from women he considered unreserved or aggressive, Jefferson enjoyed the company of particular women whose friendships he cultivated, women who, in turn, generally enjoyed his attention. Far from being uncomfortable in their presence, such scholars have suggested, Jefferson believed women were essential to the social life that made the world of politics workable and endurable. He clearly saw his wife, Martha, as a crucial (and fully engaged) figure in the salonlike world he created at Monticello. Although he explicitly excluded women from participation in what Lawrence E. Klein has called the "magisterial public sphere," Jefferson hardly wished that women be ignorant or "politically uninformed." As such arguments suggest, a binary juxtaposition of public and private spheres conceals the protean nature of those concepts. The exclusion of women from the realm of state—from formal politics and "the world of office-holding"—did not preclude their engagement in the broader spaces understood as public in the eighteenth century. So Jefferson's conception of proper gender roles afforded American women variety in behavior and visibility, but rarely, if ever, most scholars seem to agree, did such indulgence challenge the patriarchal order.5 / 5
But scholars have for the most part overlooked the centrality of gender to Jefferson's conception of American national identity. For ultimately Jefferson's assertions about American men and women were claims about the nation. The gender contrasts he drew manifested themselves in national terms. In France "Jefferson the Virginian" became the American in Paris, the postcolonial nationalist who recognized in gender roles yet another sign of republican purity and American difference from Europe. While in France Jefferson revealed the gendered foundations and boundaries of his own "imagined community" and inaugurated a long national tradition of resting American superiority on its domestic order.6 / 6
Civilization, Equality, and Gender
Jefferson first revealed his assumptions about the intersection of national identity, household economy, and gender roles in a largely overlooked passage from his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781–1784, before he journeyed to France. In American Indian cultures, Jefferson observed, "The women are submitted to unjust drudgery." Of course, he added, that was true of "every barbarous people." Among savages "force is law," so it was no surprise to find the "stronger sex" dominating the "weaker." In fact, Jefferson argued, such domination was the rule that proved the exception: "It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality."7 / 7In that brief passage, Jefferson made several claims. The most obvious is the familiar assertion that Native Americans were less advanced than Europeans in the scale of civilization. But Jefferson's critique of Native Americans came in a defense of them against pseudoscientific charges that they were inferior by nature. So it is a mischaracterization of Jefferson's argument here to call it a critique at all. Jefferson understood himself to be defending Indians by arguing that, although they were indeed inferior, they were so only because of a deficient culture—a culture Jefferson hoped to see changed and one that was pliable, not natural and rigid, as some European scientists had asserted. For example, he argued, "An Indian man is small in the hand and wrist for the same reason for which a sailor is large and strong in the arms and shoulders, and a porter in the legs and thighs." Indian males, in other words, were weaker than white men because they refrained from hard work in the fields. Their dependence on hunting and gathering kept them "badly fed" at certain times of year and, as a consequence, rendered them less sexually active and less reproductively effective. Indian women were stronger than white women because they performed hard physical labor, while Jefferson's ideal civilized woman did not. Indian women bore relatively few children compared to civilized women, not because they were unable to, but because of their prolonged participation in hard labor, their use of abortifacients, and their experience of annual famine, which Jefferson believed dulled sexual passion.8 / 8
So it was artificial—historically contingent—culture, not nature, that kept Native American men weak and Native American women strong, not to mention free of bodily hair, an absence that Jefferson spent some time contemplating. "Were we in equal barbarism," he asserted, "our females would be equal drudges." Civilization would change all this: Indian men would be strong; Indian women would be domesticated; and hair would grow freely on all. "Nature," Jefferson concluded, "is the same with [Indians] as with the whites." Remove the culture, and you will discover human nature.9 / 9
Jefferson's second broad claim was related to the first: There was nothing natural about the subordination of women to men—at least as Jefferson understood subordination. We can read this as a liberal critique of artificial hierarchies, and that is clearly the way Jefferson intended his readers to understand the passage. Civilization, he asserted, "teaches us to subdue the selfish passions, and to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves." But a vast corpus of scholarship over the past generation has highlighted the ways liberalism itself can be ethnocentric, privileging as natural a specific culture. Eighteenth-century European observers of other societies tended to understand difference as absence and, inevitably, as inferiority. Jefferson followed a similar trajectory here; a culture with different ways of understanding proper roles for women and men must be not merely different but "barbarous." As the literary scholar Christopher L. Miller has suggested, such universalism makes demands that clash with its ostensibly liberal ends, proposing: "You can be equal to me when you become like me." This is ethnocentrism dressed in the guise of the universal.10 / 10
Because Indian women performed, or (as Jefferson imagined it) were forced into, agricultural labor, he claimed that they did not enjoy the equality of condition with men that civilized white women experienced. Here Jefferson drew on familiar eighteenth- century assumptions about women in "savage" communities. French and especially Scottish writers first refined the notion, later adopted by most American thinkers, that societies passed through several clearly discernible stages of social and economic development. The number, characteristics, and desirability of the stages varied from writer to writer, but all proposed an evolutionary progression, from what Drew R. McCoy called "'rude' simplicity to 'civilized' complexity." Jefferson in the Notes, for example, tended to adopt the comte de Buffon's reductionist juxtaposition of savagery and civilization, though his later reflections on France were more complex. But all versions of the theory proposed that the social and economic characteristics of each stage facilitated a distinctive pattern of human behavior. "Manners, habits, customs, and morals changed," McCoy wrote, "as society advanced." The status of women, most philosophes agreed, improved with each successive stage of civilization and could be used as a principal barometer of a society's progress. So Jefferson's assertions about women's equality in a stage of civilization were hardly unique to him.11 / 11
But the meaning of women's status and equality depended on the observer's assumptions about gender roles. What Jefferson meant, as we will see, was not that women in the abstract were naturally equal to men in all the ways many moderns accept, but that Indian women were denied the "natural equality" as women in relationship to men that women in a civilized society enjoyed. In short, they were not allowed to be domestic as white American women ideally were. If women were naturally domestic, it was through domesticity that they could achieve their highest potential and realize their longed-for happiness, a happiness men pursued in the public sphere. As Jefferson later told George Washington, female exclusion from the public rights of citizenship would not merely ensure the better functioning of society and more harmonious family relations (though it was essential to both); women's own happiness depended on their embrace of the private sphere. From Jefferson's perspective, then, domesticity was no exclusion of women from their "self-evident" right to pursue happiness. Rather, it was the fulfillment of the right to enjoy what was natural, a right undermined in societies that allowed or forced women to practice formal politics or do men's work in the economic sphere. Only civilization protected women from the oppression to which they were liable in primitive communities, affording them their natural equality and happiness. Unless transformed, Jefferson suggested, such unnatural arrangements would continue to keep Indians beyond the pale of civilization and from incorporation into the new American nation, which alone allowed women to fulfill their natural potential.12 / 12
For Jefferson, then, the natural equality of women as women was a signpost of civilization, which apparently entailed the removal of all the artificial hierarchies and shackles that prevented men and women from achieving their highest natural potential. In Jefferson's view, the dawning of civilization would produce proper gender roles, and the practice of proper gender roles would produce civilized people. In his implicit reasoning, gender roles—especially the status of women— became both sign and cause of relative standing in the hierarchy of peoples. If "civilization alone" granted women their natural equality and if such equality for women guaranteed their domesticity, then civilization could be measured by the extent of women's domestication. The corollary might also be true: Corruption in a society might be measured in part by women's power and activity in the public sphere, whether this took the form of hard labor, as in Indian communities, or, as he discovered in France, political engagement and sexual license. Jefferson's underlying assumption, then, was that civilization could be recognized where people expressed natural gender roles. / 13
This universalist argument ultimately served the ends of Jefferson's nationalism, for only in America were natural gender roles uninhibited by artificial culture. This claim distinguished Jefferson's thought from typical Enlightenment commentary about manhood and womanhood. Unlike the many European writers who consciously prescribed the transformation of gender roles to conform with nature, Jefferson confidently proclaimed that the United States already provided the cultural, political, and economic environment in which natural roles could flourish. Other societies (Native American and European) needed change, but Americans practiced gender in accordance with nature. For Jefferson, then, appropriate expression of universal manhood and womanhood was part of what it meant to be an American. American masculinity and femininity were both expressions of a particular national identity and the fulfillment of natural human gender roles.13 / 14