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The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America

Ruth H. Bloch

in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800

This chapter takes on a more specific and fundamental question about American revolutionary ideology: how political understandings of “virtue” became in the late-eighteenth century increasingly ... More

This chapter takes on a more specific and fundamental question about American revolutionary ideology: how political understandings of “virtue” became in the late-eighteenth century increasingly private and feminized. It also tries to uncover the latent assumptions about gender informing American Revolutionary thought. It argues that an examination of the multivalent meanings embedded in the term virtue leads to a more complex and dynamic understanding not only of gender but also of Revolutionary ideology itself. According to literary sentimentalism, virtue was above all a feminine quality. American Protestantism, Scottish moral philosophy, and literary sentimentalism opened the way for the feminization of ideas about public virtue. The transformation in the meaning of virtue during the Revolutionary period sharpened the social boundaries between the sexes in ways that continue to deny power to all classes of women.Less

The Production of Compassion

Andrea Muehlebach

in The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy

This chapter reflects on the state—how it has inscribed compassion into its own rationalities through a legal regime surrounding voluntarism, and how it has hyperinvested in the production and ... More

This chapter reflects on the state—how it has inscribed compassion into its own rationalities through a legal regime surrounding voluntarism, and how it has hyperinvested in the production and standardization of an empathetic figure and sector while at the same time withdrawing its welfarist functions. The production of a sympathetic citizenry is, in short, accompanied by a corollary process whereby the state (embodied not only by the law but also, for example, by the social workers among whom the author conducted research) makes itself appear as dispassionate. This is not to say that the state has withdrawn altogether, but that its public moral authoritarianism around voluntarism is matched by a concomitant relativization of its own commitment to care. Put differently, state absence must be actively produced by the state itself. The effect is a humanitarianized public sphere that makes individual compassion and private empathy primary public virtues.Less

Let the People Vote

Tula A. Connell

in Conservative Counterrevolution: Challenging Liberalism in 1950s Milwaukee

This chapter details the strategies involved in a 1951 campaign by a coalition of small property owners and anti-tax proponents who sought to halt creation of public housing through a ballot ... More

This chapter details the strategies involved in a 1951 campaign by a coalition of small property owners and anti-tax proponents who sought to halt creation of public housing through a ballot referendum. Leading the coalition is long-time civic activist and savings-and-loan official William Pieplow. Pieplow's elevation of individual rights was tempered by a belief in “public virtue”—a willingness to sacrifice private to public interests, a characteristic championed in the early days of the nation's founding as essential for republican government. Although the referendum campaign received some support from the national housing and builder associations, which vehemently opposed the 1949 Housing Act, the movement Pieplow and his cohorts spearheaded was a genuinely grassroots expression, one that sought to defend against the perceived loss of individual rights that would result from the provision of public housing.Less

“Effective Men” and Early Voluntary Associations in Philadelphia, 1725–1775

Jessica Choppin Roney

in New Men: Manliness in Early America

This chapter examines how understandings of white masculinity in eighteenth-century Philadelphia fueled charitable and philanthropic (white) men's societies in a host of venues. It argues that the ... More

This chapter examines how understandings of white masculinity in eighteenth-century Philadelphia fueled charitable and philanthropic (white) men's societies in a host of venues. It argues that the growth of voluntary associations in the eighteenth century reinforced masculine dominance in public life. Virtuous manhood came to be associated with service; public service became doubly associated with men and masculinity. Although women might engage in individual acts of moral virtue, for men the enactment of virtues like charity could now become collective and public. Voluntary organizations created a powerful space for the performance of masculine public virtue, connected increasingly with political participation and manly civic service.Less

The Politics of Pride in David Hume and David Simple

in The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science

In the act of self-constitution that David Hume describes in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), the soul is revealed in its basic vulnerability. For the very passions such as love and hate, pride and ... More

In the act of self-constitution that David Hume describes in A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), the soul is revealed in its basic vulnerability. For the very passions such as love and hate, pride and humility that constitute personal identity turn out to be political in the most literal sense, woven as they are in particular relations of “government and subordination.” So what exactly are the politics of pride and humility according to Hume? How do pride and humility map onto available regimes of government and subordination? Answering these questions helps to historicize particular forms of self in the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. This is also demonstrated by Sarah Fielding's novel David Simple (1744). In broad terms, this chapter focuses on the emergence of specific complementary and gendered selves in the English culture of sensibility, and the consequent demise of passivity as a public virtue.Less