The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900

by Caroline Winterer

In The Mirror of Antiquity , Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom. In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope's Iliad and Odyssey ; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol's architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome. Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time―the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society―this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Education

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jennie]

Pros: This book covers a topic that not very many people talk about on the regular. We're all usually so wrapped up in the men of this period, or entranced by women who are exciting and dramatic and sexy. Now, some of these women are exciting and dramatic and sexy, but many of them are not, and I think it's fascinating how learn all different types of women would use the classical idiom to express themselves for a wide variety of purposes.

This book is also comparatively readable. Classicists seem to think that if a scholarly work doesn't take the reader at least five minutes a page, and if it doesn't put the reader to sleep every ten pages, then it's not professional enough. While this book is no mile-a-minute pager-turner, it is definitely accessible and engaging. Also, the pictures are totally kickin'.

Cons: I feel like this happens a lot in academic writing, but I'm not sure the whole piece ever really gels. It feels a little bit like going to a zoo, or a very large museum--there is lots of information to take in, and it is all very interesting, and much of it is thought-provoking and well-researched, and there is a sort of general theme around which it is all centered, but in the end the experience just doesn't feel quite unified. I don't know whether it's the nature of history, of the source material, of some fault of the author's, or of some fault of my own (Lord knows, I'm not a model reader). It just never felt like all the disparate pieces ever quite clicked into place.

[Erica]

Another fun and thoughtful book, if still utterly academic, by Winterer. I wish I had read it before embarking on my dissertation--there are things I would have figured out far earlier about the quality of classicism and the obsession with grapes in women's lives in early America, had I known about it earlier. Especially loved Ch 4, Grecian Luxury, 1800-1830. Great material culture reading of Grecian Robes (Empire/Umpire Waist dresses) and Greek "Sophas" in early America. Unfortunately, she cops out on the Epilogue. I like her ending with motioning to the "New Colossus"/Statue of Liberty, but two paragraphs and Lazarus' way too well-trod poem without comment? Seriously? A book of this strength and type and possibilities for modern parallels deserves a far better ending, and convinces me that every painful minute I spent on my own book's Epilogue (I too loathe writing conclusions of all kinds) will be well worth it.

[Lauren]

This book offers an incredible, detailed discussion of how elite 18th and 19th century women incorporated classical learning and Greek and Roman mythology into their understanding of their place in the early American republic. I'm totally blown away and I'm not even halfway through it.