According to diarist Elizabeth Drinker, on August 28, 1793, one of her servants Joseph Gibbs became ill and had "gone away sick to some Negro House, where they have promised to take care of him."[1] This anecdote, along with many others, demonstrates, at the most intimate level of social dynamics, a change in family identity that was occurring in Philadelphia during the latter half of the eighteenth century. While definitions of family, ranging from one that encompassed everyone who lived under one roof to a meaning that excluded servants and often relegated anyone other than the father, mother, and their children to a secondary position within the household, it is clear that a person's race, class, gender, and marital status were major determinants of where he or she ranked in terms of this family hierarchy. For example, the position of unmarried or widowed sisters was more precarious than that of wives, as unattached females often filled roles that were more akin to servants than did their married counterparts.
The aim of this paper is to relate how the severity of the epidemic compelled people to define the family more clearly and carefully. Attempts made by Philadelphia masters and mistresses to create boundaries between family and non-family members of their households, an event that took several decades elsewhere, was shortened in Philadelphia under the force of the yellow fever crisis. I will examine this process during the epidemic in order to capture people in the act of sorting out their human relationships in this rather contracted domain, and to reveal some of the values, assumptions, and expectations that were implied, but not often made explicit, in those relationships.
Historians have long pointed to the post-war era as the period when the affective, middle-class family and individualism were increasingly touted as the ideal social and political forms upon which the new nation would be built. For instance, Ruth Bloch has provided evidence for this change in her essay on the privatization and feminization of ideas about virtue, which documents how these notions shifted from an emphasis on military courage and civic glory to a meaning that located virtue in churches, schools, and families[2]. The view that women as wives and mothers were to be guardians of this virtue in the new republican state has been discussed by a number of scholars[3]. It is my contention, however, that at the same time that political theorists were locating community in the home, masters and mistresses were denying their servants and non-nuclear kin membership in their families. Consequently, this change narrowed the scope of communal responsibility.
Labor historians, who have primarily focused on social relationships surrounding craft production, have paid very little attention to non-craft workers[4]. Because domestics and non-nuclear kin lived on such intimate terms with the nuclear family members, they were the last group of workers to experience the consequences of the evolution of the household from a public institution that served as the seat of economic production, with all the political and social functions that such a structure entailed, to a more privatized realm whose central purpose was childrearing. It is, therefore, important to remember that this transition was closely related to the formation of the middle-class sense of family identity.
My contribution to this literature is threefold. First, I will examine
some of the critical elements of middle-class family formation, including
the desire on the part of the middle class to distance themselves from
the lower sorts, while simultaneously advocating the glories of companionate
marriages and promoting the benefits of love and affection as the glue
that would bind family members together. Second, I will consider the interaction
of gender construction and class formation by looking at what the relatively
higher status of wives and mothers meant for the other members of the household,
particularly for servants and unmarried female kin. And third, I will evaluate
Mary Beth Norton's assertion that women are "the keepers of the nation's
conscience, the only citizens specifically charged with maintaining the
traditional republican commitment to the good of the entire community"
in light of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia[5].
Because the domestic sphere was the location where people dealt with these
issues on a personal level, that is the place to which we must turn.
ENDNOTES
1. Elizabeth Drinker, The Diary of Elizabeth
Drinker, 3 vols., ed. Elaine Forman Crane (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1991), Aug. 28, 1793, I: 497.
2. Ruth H. Block, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs 13 (1987): 37-58.
3. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton & company, 1986), 265-88; Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689-721; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1980), 228-99.
4. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Ronald Schultz, The Republic of Labor: Philadelphia Artisans and the Politics of Class, 1720-1830 (New York: Oxford, 1980); and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford, 1984). Christine Stansell did devote a chapter of her study, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 155-168, to domestic service, focusing almost exclusively on female Irish immigrants.
5. Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review 89 (1984): 617.