ORCID ID
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1094-7209
Date Awarded
2023
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
History
Advisor
Hannah Rosen
Committee Member
Nicholas Popper
Committee Member
Joshua Piker
Abstract
Convincing the Lady: Courtship, Marriage, and the Creation of the American Man This paper examines the 1746 text, Reflections on Courtship and Marriage: in Two Letters to a Friend, published by Benjamin Franklin. Through an investigation of the prescriptive text’s courtship and marriage discourses, I argue that elite, white men possessed a large stake in defining appropriate courtship norms in colonial America. Such norms range from the clothing women wore and the type of education they received to the shaping of their personalities. By establishing a patriarchy with strict gender roles, these men established themselves as powerful heads of households and assumed the role of American man. The Charms of Our Sex: Defining the Collective Female Sex in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers This paper traces the use of the phrase “our sex” by female writers in eighteenth-century American newspapers. To both historicize gender and see the emergence of gender as a personal identity, close attention is given to how members of the collective female sex defined themselves and others they believed to be like themselves. Emerging on the pages of newspapers already rife with discourses on enslavement and a trend of men adopting female personas, female writers crafted their own meaning of what it meant to be a woman. Such a definition includes the role of wife, oeconomy, whiteness, and morality.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-s76w-9r18
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Garrison, Taylor Marie, "Convincing The Lady / The Charms Of Our Sex" (2023). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1697552668.
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-s76w-9r18
