Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic. Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Summary
This book examines women’s work and women’s words and the difference they made during the Revolutionary years. It challenges the idea that the “real” story of the Revolutionary years has been thought to lie in accounts of battles or constitutional conventions, which women were absent from. However, women were key to the sustenance of the war effort: as a civilian source of food and shelter, a contributor of funds and supplies, and the sole protector of farm and industry; thus they were fundamental to the American Revolution. Kerber thus argues that Women were challenged to commit themselves politically and, in effect, the war raised the question of whether a woman was a political person. The war was a politicizing experience for women, yet, the newly created republic made little room for them as political beings. As a result, women began to articulate a “Republican Motherhood” in which the “female virtues” could fit comfortably with the civic virtue of the new country. This new identity reconciled politics and domesticity and justified continued '''political education in the context of domesticity'''. She concludes that Republican Motherhood, forged by women, was “a very important, even revolutionary, invention. It altered the female domain in which most women had always lived out their lives; it justified women’s absorption and participation in the civic culture.” (284) Despite its contradiction, it redefined female political behavior as valuable rather than abnormal, and as a source of strength to the Republic. Yet, the promise of the republic had yet to be filled. In this sense, restricting women’s politics and civic participation to the domestic sphere was one of a series of conservative choices that Americans made in the postwar America.

Example: Republican ideology opened up discussion about educational opportunities for women, but the continuity of domestic ideology shaped the idea education for women as one that would prepare women to stay in their homes and, in doing so, shape the characters of their sons and husbands in the direction of benevolence, responsible independence, and civic virtue. ''“Domesticity was treated as a vocation, motherhood a profession” and thus the curriculum was designed to serve this purpose, with very little emphasis on classics, natural philosophy or other forms of education offered to men."''

See also: Douglas Egerton,