Overview

In the Age of Revolution, how did American women conceive their lives and marital obligations? By examining the attitudes and behaviors surrounding the contentious issues of family, contraception, abortion, sexuality, beauty, and identity, Susan E. Klepp demonstrates that many women - rural and urban, free and enslaved - began to radically redefine motherhood. They asserted, or attempted to assert, control over their bodies, their marriages, and their daughters' opportunities. Late-eighteenth-century American women were among the first in the world to disavow the continual childbearing and large families that had long been considered ideal. Liberty, equality, and heartfelt religion led to new conceptions of virtuous, rational womanhood and responsible parenthood. These changes can be seen in falling birthrates, in advice to friends and kin, in portraits, and in a gradual, even reluctant, shift in men's opinions. Revolutionary-era women redefined femininity, fertility, family, and their futures by limiting births. Women might not have won the vote in the new Republic, they might not have gained formal rights in other spheres, but, Klepp argues, there was a women's revolution nonetheless.

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9780807833223

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Reviews

Fascinating . . . . an exciting book. -- William and Mary Quarterly

Outstanding. . . . [An] admirable book. <br>- Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

The heart of the book . . . focus[es] on cultural reinterpretation of fertility and the technologies of family limitation. Here, Klepp makes her most original contribution and persuasively presents women as a constitutive force in this sea change. . . . Joins a growing body of scholarship in demonstrating that gender conventions were debated and transformed in the age of revolution. <br>- Journal of American History

Fascinating . . . . Klepp has added an exciting new idea to the debate about whether and how the American Revolution affected women's lives. <br>- William and Mary Quarterly

Through an exhaustive examination of an enormous variety of qualitative sources . . . Klepp is able to reconstruct important shifts in how people thought about these sensitive issues. . . . Fascinating. . . . A true example of interdisciplinary work at its best--rigorous yet imaginative, nuanced yet sweeping. <br>- Journal of Interdisciplinary History

Author Information

SUSAN E. KLEPP is professor of history and affiliated professor of women's studies and of African American studies at Temple University. She is author or coeditor of six books and editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.

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