| This dissertation explores the vital roles that upper-rank women played in creating and maintaining an elite in colonial Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1720s and 1730s, wealthy merchant families worked to model themselves into a colonial counterpart to London elites, thus buffering themselves against the challenges of middling- and lower-rank people. Wealthy Philadelphians starting building their rank through dynastic marriage and consumption of luxury goods, two strategies which depended on women's involvement. At a time when women were gaining increased power in courtship, they used that control to help shape a complex, interconnected set of family trees that defined membership boundaries for the new rank. Women also assumed responsibility for acquiring textiles, a key category of status-giving goods in the eighteenth century. Next, women used elite British prescriptive literature to gain substantive---rather than ornamental---education. By reading widely in the arts and sciences and exploring the social and natural worlds, upper-rank women cultivated the qualities of reason, rationality, and taste to mark their elite status. Women also took on important roles in creating an exclusive, upper-rank social world modeled on the British notion of "town and country." In the city, they participated in social and intellectual organizations, while in the hinterland, they were the backbone of country estates, spa culture, and estate tourism. Finally, women's work in these class-based activities not only made them key agents in elite formation, but it gave them far greater entree into the political world than historians have previously recognized. This is just one way that this dissertation revises understandings of gender in early America. This project also shows that women---not just men, as scholars have tended to assume---consciously engaged in activities and behaviors to build and maintain their social rank. Moreover, it demonstrates that defining gender roles lay at the heart of this process of class formation in early America. To build an elite, wealthy Philadelphia men and women pursued fairly similar modes of marriage, property management, education, and sociability. Finally, women's class activities show that social rank, as much as sex, profoundly shaped women's status in colonial America. |
