Womens Experiences and Material Things in the Early Republic

Suggested Readings/ Websites/Primary Sources:

Compiled by Jennifer Van Horn, Prof. George Mason University
(jvanhorn@gmu.edu)


Womens Lives in Early Washington D.C.
Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a
Government (University of Virginia Press, 2000)

Taylor, Beth. A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons (Palgrave MacMillan
2012)

Lewis, Charlene Boyer. Domestic Intimacies: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

Kierner, Cynthia. Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello: Her Life and Times
(University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Kierner, Cynthia. Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jeffersons America (University
of Virginia Press, 2006)

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary
America (W.W. Norton & Company, 1980)

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in New England,
1650-1750 (Vintage, 1991)

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. Furniture as Social History: Gender, Property, and Memory in the
Decorative Arts, American Furniture available through the Chipstone Foundation
(http://www.chipstone.org/html/publications/1995AF/index1995ulrich.html) Note: to
scroll through the images click on the arrow in the left margin below the first image

Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Womans World in the Old South (Pantheon, 1984)

Earman, Cynthia D. Remembering the Ladies: Women, Etiquette, and Diversions in
Washington City, 1800-1814. Washington History 12 (2000): 102-117.


Dining and Material Artifacts
Carson, Barbara. Ambitious Appetites: Dining, Behavior, and Patterns of Consumption in
Federal Washington (Octagon Research Series, 1990)

Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (Vintage, 1993)

Hutchins, Catherine E., ed. Everyday Life in the Early Republic. (Winterthur: Henry
Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1994).



Primary Sources Womens Lives in DC

Smith, Margaret Bayard. The First Forty Years of Washington Society, ed. Gaillard Hunt
(Frederick Unger Publishing Company, 1961).

Callcott, Margaret Law. Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier
Calvert. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

The Dolley Madison Digital Edition ed., Holly C. Shulman (first ever complete edition of all
Dolley Madisons correspondence)
(http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/DYMN.html)


Electronic Catalogues/Websites about Womens Material Goods

1812: A Nation Emerges (Recent Exhibition Smithsonian American Art Museum/National
Portrait Gallery) see especially Dolleys Court
http://www.npg.si.edu/exhibit/1812/

Gildern Lehrman, Assessing Change: Womens Lives in the American Revolutionary Era
(includes images and lesson plans)
(http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/early-republic/resources/assessing-change-
womens-lives-american-revolutionary-era)

James Madisons Montpelier
(http://www.montpelier.org)

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Martha Washington: a Life
(contains lesson plans as well as transcriptions of some of Martha Washingtons letters)
(http://chnm.gmu.edu/martha-washington-a-life/)

George Mason University and Gunston Halls Probing the Past Database
(searchable database of Virginia and Maryland probate inventories 1740-1810)
(http://chnm.gmu.edu/probateinventory/)

Metropolitan Museum of Art online collection catalogue
(http://www.metmuseum.org/collection)

George Washingtons Mount Vernon online collection catalogue
(http://emuseum.mountvernon.org/code/emuseum.asp)

Winterthur Museum online collection catalogue
(http://museumcollection.winterthur.org)

Laurel Ulrichs site on Hannah Barnards cupboard with related images
(https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/ulrich/desktoptable.html)