Like the early-modern European advocates of free enterprise, Americans of the Fullers’ generation thought of their economic careers as making a moral and political statement on behalf of freedom. Despite the continued exclusion of women from the “public sphere” of politics, wives laid (a modest) claim to the gratitude of the commonwealth, for were they not “republican mothers,” responsible for rearing future citizens?60 It is no accident that the word “liberalism” came to have both an economic and a political meaning—although our generation often finds this a confusing ambiguity. In early
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