REDISCOVERING CROCKER

Crocker (1752–1829) came of age during the decade of the American Revolution, but the postrevolutionary era was the crucible for her most significant writings and activities concerning the divisive question of women's rights. In the late 1770s, Crocker founded a private society devoted to female education in Boston, St. Ann's Lodge, which she defiantly modeled after the all-male Masonic lodges that espoused egalitarian ideals yet excluded women. Through her sermons and published writings, she acted as a public critic on the major social and political issues of the postrevolutionary era, such as the education and civic participation of women in the new republic, Shays's Rebellion of 1786–87, and the War of 1812. Her trio of works published in Boston during the 1810s—A Series of Letters on Free Masonry (1815), The School of Reform, or Seaman's Safe Pilot to the Cape of Good Hope (1816), and the Observations—established Crocker as the leading American political theorist to sustain public discourse on women's rights in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Despite the range of her accomplishments, Crocker has undeservedly become a forgotten figure in United States history.

Even with much recent attention to America's “revolutionary mothers”—such Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren—there have been two reasons for the continued and unfortunate neglect of their contemporary Crocker (e.g., Berkin 2005; Schloesser 2002; Zagarri 1995). First, a published collection of her writings has not yet been produced. Only one of Crocker's works, the Observations, has been reprinted in selections since her time and only once in its entirety (Crocker 1974; Harris 2003; Kraditor 1968). The remainder of her published works—her poetry published in newspapers and the Letters on Free Masonry and The School of Reform—have been preserved in microform. Yet the vast collections of her unpublished writings, including her book-length history of eighteenth-century Boston, the Reminiscences and Traditions of Boston: being an Account of the Original Proprietors of that town & the Manners and Customs of its People (1827), are available only in archives.³

Second, Crocker was missed or only briefly mentioned in twentieth-century historical accounts of early American women's rights discourse (e.g., Flexner and Fitzpatrick [1959] 1996, 23–24; Kerber 1980; Smith 1997, 186).The roots of her neglect by twentieth-century historians probably originated in the portrayal of her philosophy as conservative and even “patronizing” toward women in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage's History of Woman Suffrage (1886)—a major source for later scholarship on the genesis of the women's rights movement in America (Ginzberg 2005, 10; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage 1886, 303). Although recent scholarship has addressed the textual sources for the Observations (Botting and Carey 2004; Post 2005) and Crocker's early support of women's reading circles, women in Masonry, and women's history (Harris 2003, xi, xx; Kelley 2003, 164; Ward 1999, 231), her philosophical contribution to American women's rights discourse has been downplayed. Most characterizations of Crocker's political thought have usually been based on a few passages of the Observations that have a more conservative tone, leading scholars to think they were representative of the entire book or the author's oeuvre. For example, Aileen Kraditor's widely read anthology of nineteenth-century protofeminist thought, Up from the Pedestal (1968), used a handful of quotes from the Observations to portray Crocker as a “step backward” from the radicalism of Enlightenment theorists of women's rights (40). Perhaps as a result of exposure to Kraditor's anthology and other works influenced by it, recent scholars have commonly presented Crocker as a conservative Christian critic of theories of women's rights proposed by Enlightenment thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft (e.g., Bennett 2003, 50; Cott [1977] 1997, 203; Harris 2003, xxv).

Through the first analysis of her corpus of published and unpublished writings, we have challenged this dominant view of Crocker's political thought.⁴

Crocker philosophically questioned the premises of separate spheres discourse by arguing for women's right to lead and participate in reform-oriented benevolent and educational associations. She also contended that women could and should shape politics as rational advisors to men and as direct economic and political actors when society permitted or necessity demanded it. Crocker promoted the unconventional idea that women were not only rational equals to men, but also less enslaved to passion than men. On the basis of this understanding of women's superior capacity for rational self-rule, she argued that women ought to be the robust advisors, role models, and informal leaders of men not only through their roles in the family or women's associations but also in matters of politics, especially national peace and security. Crocker's own work as a public critic—as published writer, preacher, and educational reformer—was itself an example of how she thought women of her time could and should steer the direction of the American polity and their roles within it through the guidance of their male counterparts. As Jane Mansbridge (1996, 147; 1998, 119) has indicated, Crocker blended “equality,” “difference,” and “nurturance” arguments in her case for why women had to use “reason and persuasion”—their only real means of political influence—to pilot men in social and political matters and ultimately affect any serious change of their subjugated status.

The cost of scholarly inattention to Crocker's oeuvre has been to misunderstand not only her protofeminist political thought but also the place and performance of women's rights arguments in the early national period. Her writings reveal that American consideration of women's rights did not entirely lie dormant, remain in the private sphere, or reify separate spheres discourse between the 1798 publication of Judith Sargent Murray's literary compendium The Gleaner and Charles Brockden Brown's philosophical dialogue Alcuin, and the 1819 publication of Emma Willard's pamphlet “An Address to the Public; Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education” and Frances Wright's books and speeches on women and American society in the 1820s. Further scholarly analysis of Crocker's corpus can help chart the complex evolution of women's rights discourse and women's activism between the rise of Francophobe and antirevolutionary politics in the late 1790s and the growth of women's participation in temperance, labor, and abolition movements in the 1820s and 1830s (e.g., Boylan 2002; Isenberg 1998; Zagarri 1998).

CROCKER AS RHETORICAL STRATEGIST

At the turn of the nineteenth century, women's rights discourse—which briefly flourished during the era of the French Revolution—became more opaque and often less radical in its publicly disclosed commitments and aspirations (Caine 1997, 53–87; Offen 2000, 68–85; Rendall 1984, 66–72). Paranoid, aggressive, anti-Jacobin discourse, which proliferated in the late 1790s and the early nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, defined itself against revolutionary-era radicals such as Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, and Condorcet who supported equal civil and political rights for the sexes (Brown 1995). A general silence regarding this controversial political ideal reigned in American and European public life between the late 1790s and the 1848 Seneca Falls convention—a silence known to be broken only briefly and ineffectually by the Irish socialist William Thompson in 1825, a handful of petitioners for women's suffrage in Britain in 1832 and New York in 1846, and a small minority of the radical British socialist and Chartist movements (Ginzberg 2005, 6–8; Offen 2000, 94; Taylor 2003, 248).

Caught between the revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth century and the reactionary retrenchment of the early nineteenth century, Crocker used rhetorical tactics that initially conceal and only gradually reveal her more radical beliefs to her readers, to challenge the notion of separate spheres and continue the philosophical consideration of egalitarian women's rights discourse during a time of backlash against it. Karen Offen has argued that the understated nature of British and European women's rights discourse in the midst of the antirevolutionary culture of the early nineteenth century was “marked as much by what had to be read between the lines as what was said, as the ostensibly nonpolitical novels of Jane Austen amply testified” (2000, 74). Historians who have studied the participation of American women in all-female benevolent and temperance societies in the nineteenth century have likewise paid close attention to the “rhetorical strategies” that those women used to defend women's rights within the purview of their groups' reform missions (Ginzberg 1990, 11–35; Mattingly 1998). As Mattingly argued in her study of nineteenth-century American temperance rhetoric, “Temperance women nearly always presented non-traditional ideas in a manner carefully crafted to appeal to a widely diverse audience. In doing so, they incorporated both traditional and progressive ideas within their presentations, a strategy scholars often misinterpret as conservative” (1998, 5). Building on these historians' attention to the rhetorical presentation of women's rights arguments, we used this interpretive perspective to illuminate the radical dimensions of Crocker's political thought.

Writing as a public critic and a protofeminist theorist in the postrevolutionary era, Crocker used an array of rhetorical techniques. She chose genres—such as poems, allegories, private documents, and the fictional epistolary treatise—that subtly conveyed or exposed only to a limited audience her controversial views on women. She employed the tactic of beginning an argument with a traditional, though unelaborated, viewpoint to distract the reader from its more radical conclusion. She used symbolism, allegory, and pseudonyms to endow a text with multiple levels of meaning. She cited traditional writers and texts at the beginning of her works to appear, at a superficial glance, more conformist than she was, before she dismantled their ideas later in her argument. She indirectly referenced or treated with a mix of mild criticism and general favor the ideas of radical writers. A more guarded and reserved style characterized her published works than her unpublished documents. Finally, she peppered her texts with suggestive silences and shifts to an ironic or satirical tone.

To demonstrate how Crocker applied these rhetorical strategies to disclose her protofeminist political thought, we have employed a comparative and thematic approach to our close textual analysis of her oeuvre. The comparative approach has showcased the range of the styles and genres that Crocker used across her published and unpublished texts to convey in different and subtle ways her more radical arguments. The thematic approach has allowed us to draw parallels among arguments across her corpus, while remaining attentive to the historical period in which they were written. This comparative and thematic approach has underscored the consistency, across Crocker's writings, of her views on human nature and sex equality, education, marriage and family, and women's roles in civil society and politics. The core of this article has charted how she wove her views on these four subjects into a distinctive and comprehensive theory of the capacities, rights, and duties of women. The conclusion has addressed the enduring relevance of Crocker's political thought for scholars of social movements, political rhetoric, and feminist theory.

CROCKER ON HUMAN NATURE AND SEX EQUALITY

Crocker was a profoundly religious thinker who used theological and scriptural arguments to construct her protofeminist theory of human nature and sex equality. The Puritan theology of her great-grandfather Increase Mather and her grandfather Cotton Mather shaped but did not define her mind. Although she maintained silence on Cotton Mather's role in defending the Salem witch trials, she noted in her unpublished Reminiscences the irrationality that characterized the Puritan belief in witchcraft and upheld modern science as an antidote to such “foolish” superstition (1827, 11). Although her unpublished theological essays and sermons often identified her as “the grand-daughter of Cotton Mather” or used the pseudonym “Increase Mather Junior of the Inner Temple” (Crocker 1812, 1813, 1814b, 1814c), in one of these unpublished essays she opposed their orthodox Calvinism by defining herself as an Arminian, thus rejecting predestination (1814a, 30). Her published essay The School of Reform concluded with a poetic tribute to the rational Christian autonomy that informed her philosophy: “Support, surmount, subdue your fate, And quit destruction ere too late; Let reason guide, religion sway, /Your head to govern night and day” (1816, 12). Crocker's robust account of human agency served as a foundational premise of her defense of women's right and duty to use reason to advise men to take the best path in all matters of morality and politics.

Crocker used a protofeminist reading of Genesis 1-3 as the basis of her understanding of the equality of the sexes. In both the unpublished essay “The United Trinity” and the Observations, she recounted the first creation story, in which God created “male and female” in “his own image,” to affirm the equality of all souls: “there is no spiritual distinction of sexes” (Crocker 1814a, 2; 1818, 7, 72). Furthermore, she argued that the creation of the human soul in the image of God gave men and women the same mental capacities, which enabled them to be autonomous beings: “the wise author of nature has endowed the female mind with equal powers and faculties and given them the same right of judging and acting for themselves as he has to the male sex” (1818, 5). Because God had given them this rational capacity, women had the “duty” and “privilege” of using their powers of “reason and persuasion” to “convince” and “steer” others—particularly men, who were more subject to “turbulent passions” (Crocker 1818, 15). Although Crocker opened the Observations with the disclaimer that her intent was not to profess the “superiority” of either sex, she indicated by chapter two that women were, at least potentially, superior to men in one pivotal sense: their ability to use their God-given rational capacities to tame the passions, in themselves and in others, more effectively than their male counterparts (1818, 5). Her opening disclaimer rhetorically distanced her from the radical conclusion of her argument that women possessed the intellectual and moral capacities to lead men not only in the domestic sphere but also in civil society and politics.

Crocker's protofeminist reading of the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve also contributed to her theory of sex equality. Dismissing the Observations as “disappointing to anyone looking for feministic radicalism,” Riegel (1963) mistakenly contended that Crocker “accepted the ordinary assumption that Eve and her daughters had been made subservient to men because of Eve's sin” (8). Yet a careful reading of the Observations reveals that Crocker interpreted the story of Eve's disobedience to subvert the traditional view that women were inescapably determined to be subservient or inferior to men. Although the Observations admitted that Eve's initial disobedience of God and temptation of Adam meant that she was “in some measure, the cause of their fall,” the qualifier “in some measure” mitigated Eve's guilt (1818, 13). More tellingly, in both the Observations and the unpublished essay “The United Trinity,” Crocker insisted that the “mutual folly” of Adam and Eve rendered them “equally culpable” for the Fall of humanity (1814a, 3; 1818, 10). Crocker contended that it was Adam who received the divine injunction concerning the forbidden fruit, and then failed, after Eve was created from his rib, to relay to her adequately the content and importance of God's command (1818, 8).

Crocker thus rejected the common Christian justification of patriarchy that Eve's primary responsibility for the Fall validated the subjection of women by men for all time. Instead, she distinguished between the positions of women in the era of the Old Testament and the Christian era. Crocker explained the inequality of Eve and her daughters during the Old Testament era as a result of God's more “severe sentence” on women (1818, 10). She argued that God punished Eve by making her subject to Adam's rule not because of Adam's relative innocence or any of her inherent moral or physical traits but because He was displeased with her act of disobedience. Crocker accepted Eve's reception of a more severe punishment than Adam, despite their mutual responsibility for the Fall, as an expression of the “wise and just” will of God (1818, 10). Yet, Crocker contended that God never intended that men should treat women as harshly as they did, arguing in the Observations that Adam “fell a prey to his own credulity, and sunk his posterity in depravity” by tyrannizing over Eve and her daughters, contrary to what God had wished (1818, 11). Because women were “commanded to be the slave to man” and men abused their roles as masters, women were generally victims of a severe social and political inequality during the era of the Old Testament (Crocker 1818, 14). Crocker nonetheless maintained that the Fall did not cause women to lose their moral or intellectual equality with men or their capacities to contribute to their polities. Crocker cited the judge and prophet Deborah as an example of how women of the Old Testament era could still exhibit “public virtue” despite the overall oppression of their sex (1818, 29).

Like Hannah More, to whom she dedicated the Observations, Crocker interpreted the “Christian era” as the end of the divinely sanctioned “slavery” of women to men, because Jesus' “offers of divine grace are equally tendered to both male and female; and all have an equal right to accept the blessing” (1818, 14, 20). Both authors understood the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the beginning of a new era that restored the sexes to their Edenic equality by the universal offer of divine grace through faith in the Messiah. Yet Crocker offered a distinctive view of the role of Mary, explaining that when she was exalted by God to give birth to His son Jesus, she “restored” women to their “original dignity” and equality alongside men (1818, 14).

Crocker then turned to the troubling question of why women, even if no longer subjected to a divinely sanctioned patriarchy and enslavement, remained socially and politically unequal to men in the Christian era. Initially the Observations offered a combined biological and cultural explanation and justification for continuing sex-role differentiation: “There must be a moral and physical distinction of sexes, from the organization of the human frame, as well as from their different modes of life and education, as from their different appropriate duties” (1818, 14). Yet, Crocker did not specify in this passage whether it was differences in the “human frame,” “modes of life and education,” or “appropriate duties” that were primarily responsible for sex-role differentiation. The Observations built to the provocative conclusion, however, that society and education primarily set the bounds within which women's capacities were developed and practiced in all postlapsarian cultures, whether of the Old Testament or Christian eras.

Crocker's praise of ancient Egypt's equal treatment of the sexes indicated that she saw sex roles largely as a product of social norms and practices, not as a straight reflection of women's inherent capacities as human beings. She discussed how ancient Egyptian men and women were trained for “the same” employments in “managing the affairs of trade and commerce” (1818, 27). Her favorable account of this model of education suggested her sympathy with it and offered a striking example of a pre-Christian culture that permitted women to achieve equality with men in social and economic roles. After she noted the “high estimation in which women were held” in ancient Egypt, Crocker concluded, “Whatever moral or physical distinction they allowed is uncertain; but there is no doubt that they fully appreciated the judgment of the female sex” (1818, 27). Her admission of the historical uncertainty of the ancient Egyptian view of the “moral and physical distinction” of the sexes paralleled her reluctance to rigidly define the causes of the “moral and physical distinction” of men and women of her own time (1818, 14).

On the more immediate and controversial question of how nature and society may have affected the intellectual capacities of the sexes in America, Crocker delivered her views obliquely. She often composed arguments that began with a traditional viewpoint that functioned as a rhetorical decoy to distract the reader from her more radical conclusion. In one often-quoted passage, Crocker wrote, “Much abstruse study or metaphysical reasoning seldom agrees with the natural vivacity or the slender frame of many females,” yet concluded in the same breath that “if the powers of mind are fully equal,” women “hold an equal right with [men] of studying every branch of science, even jurisprudence” (1818, 19–20). Smith (1997, 186) and Flexner and Fitzpatrick ([1959] 1996, 23) inferred from this passage that Crocker had reservations about women studying metaphysics or other abstruse topics. Yet, all depends on the “if” clause. One might interpret the “if” clause to mean that only a certain group of exceptional women who are equal to men in intellect “hold an equal right with [men] of studying every branch of science.” Crocker's other pronouncements in the Observations strongly suggest that she did not intend this meaning. Earlier in the treatise she established that “the wise author of nature has endowed the female mind with equal powers and faculties” with “the male sex” (1818, 5). Her larger work, particularly on education, made it clear that although she was fully aware of the differences among people in intellectual ability, she did not have only exceptional women in mind when she insisted on God's gift of “equal powers” of mind to women and men. As for women's capacity to perform “metaphysical reasoning,” she provided her own case as evidence. She described herself as a “philosopher” later in the Observations (1818, 64). In a symbolic public act, she donated her unpublished essay “The United Trinity”—a 70-page metaphysical argument on the nature of God—to the all-male American Antiquarian Society in 1814. Although she acknowledged that not all women would exhibit a talent for philosophy or a “superior genius,” she thought that the exceptional abilities of some helped to demonstrate the intellectual capacities of the sex as a whole (Crocker 1818, 27).

In chapter six of the Observations, Crocker surreptitiously allied herself with Wollstonecraft's thinking concerning the basis of sex difference by closely paraphrasing, without direct reference, a lengthy quotation from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): “As the care of children naturally devolves on the women, and is one of the important duties annexed to the female character, this relative duty may afford forcible arguments in favor of female education. To strengthen their understanding, and fit them, if necessary, to obtain their own living, only let it be properly considered” (Crocker 1818, 58). Crocker's statement is virtually identical to a passage in chapter ten of the Rights of Woman, except that Crocker made two covert, but illuminating, changes.⁵

Crocker's circuitous style of argument eventually led the reader to the conclusion that education, culture, and law have kept women socially and politically unequal “in the Christian era” rather than divine injunction or biological difference. The problem was not that women are morally, intellectually, or physically incapable of the same roles as men, but that “women for the most part are not called to make the same exertions in life” (Crocker 1818, 14). Crocker devoted chapters three and four of the Observations to recounting historical examples of women—such as Elizabeth I, Martha Washington, and Madame de Staël—who had proved their capacity to match or exceed men's achievements in all spheres of life. Crocker thus demonstrated that women could make the same exertions as men if their societies called them to do so.

CROCKER ON EDUCATION

Crocker explicitly claimed that human beings were not endowed by nature with different mental and rational capacities on the basis of their sex. In the words of her contemporary Judith Sargent Murray, nature was not “partial in her distributions” (Murray [1790] 1998, 177). Rather, the unequal educations of the sexes had produced the differences between their pursuits and achievements. In this way, Crocker drew on the philosophical legacy of John Locke, who held that men “are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education” (Locke [1693] 1996, 10). Moving beyond Locke, however, Crocker focused her theory of education on the problem of sex inequality. Calling to mind Wollstonecraft's question, “Where is then the sexual difference, when the education has been the same?”, Crocker concluded in the Observations that “There can be no doubt but there is as much difference in the powers of each individual of the male sex, as there is of the female; and if they received the same mode of education, their improvement would be fully equal” (Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995, 92; Crocker 1818, 56). Staunchly condemning the female obsession with dress, “vain and frivolous conversation,” and empty social ritual, Crocker maintained, with Wollstonecraft, that the superficiality for which women were justly criticized was not “natural” but a product of a distorted, gendered education (Crocker 1818, 53; Wollstonecraft [1792] 1995, 113). For Crocker, reform of female education would eventually eliminate any appearance of systematic, innate differences in the intellectual capacities and interests of the sexes: “cultivate the mind and trifling in dress will soon appear in its true colors” (1818, 18).

In addition to her critical claim that women's lack of education was responsible for the varying achievements of the sexes, Crocker constructed several positive arguments for education as a precondition for the performance of moral and civic duties. She argued that all human beings have the responsibility to educate their minds in accordance with their dignity as human persons made in God's image. To leave the mind uneducated was a sinful waste of God-given rationality. In her unpublished essay on “Antiquarian Researches,” Crocker wrote, “For no rational being can even suppose that the wise author of nature has created and placed us in this world only to perform the common duties of life; if we do nothing more in what do we exceed the animal creations[?]” (1814d, 2). She further maintained that God required human beings to use their reason to improve the society around them: the “mind ought to be cultivating something valuable for the benefit of mankind and [the] dignity of human nature” (1814d, 2).

In her mid-20s, Crocker attempted to implement her ideas on female education by founding St. Ann's Lodge, a private educational society for women modeled after all-male Masonic lodges. Because women were excluded from Masonry in America, St. Ann's Lodge was not an official Masonic institution. Crocker instead described it as a “similar institution, consisting of females only” (1815, 8). St. Ann's Lodge was one of a handful of private societies and salons in America—run by women such as Elizabeth Ferguson and Milcah Moore—that encouraged female learning during the mid to late eighteenth century but it was the only one to appropriate Masonic rituals (Kelley 2003, 165).

In her Letters on Free Masonry, anonymously published in 1815, Crocker recounted how she felt obligated to reform the disgraceful state of education among the women in late eighteenth-century Boston: “At that period, female education was at a very low ebb. If women could even read and badly write their name it was thought enough for them, who by some were esteemed as only ‘mere domestick animals’” (1815, 8). Crocker herself had been educated in literature, history, and languages in accordance with the principles of her grandfather Cotton Mather, who strongly encouraged the education of women and taught his own daughters (Ulrich 1976, 24). As an antidote to prevailing customs of female education, Crocker designed St. Ann's Lodge as a literary society in which women could read serious works and study languages because “the aspiring female mind … could no longer bear a cramp to genius” (1815, 8). In the Letters, Crocker advocated the further establishment of female literary societies because they had the potential to “promote SCIENCE and LITERATURE” and “enlarge the mind” (1815, 9–10).

The Letters were apparently written at the behest of Thaddeus Harris, a Boston minister and Freemason, who hoped that the publication would help to assuage the fears and rumors that generally surrounded the institution of Freemasonry as a result of its secrecy and gender exclusivity (Lipson 1977, 197). Yet Crocker—identified only as “A Lady of Boston” and “P. Americana”—diverged from the general questions about Masonry posed by her (likely fictional) male correspondent and instead turned their conversation toward female education (1815, i, ii). In an aside midway through the work, Crocker wryly acknowledged this calculated shift in argument: “I think I hear you say, ‘this letter is rather a little essay on female education, than your ideas of Masonry’” (1815, 10). Embedded within the Letters was Crocker's admission of her disappointment with the Masons' refusal to admit and educate women.

Crocker nonetheless expressed her general approval of the guiding principles of Freemasonry, writing, “I have no doubt that the principles are good, the Corner Stone well laid” (1815, 7). She especially praised the Masons' dedication to the attainment of enlightenment through the rule of reason. In 1778, Crocker published several poems in the Boston Centinel as the “Mistress of St. Ann's Lodge” that she later reprinted at the end of the Letters. In the poem entitled “A Song” she revealed the source of her attraction to Freemasonry: “But then we'll be,/ as Masons free,/ To think, and speak, and reason” (1815, 22). However, the Letters also suggested that the Masons “have deviated from their original plan” by not letting women pursue rational enlightenment in their society (1815, 10). In the poem entitled “A Short Address,” Crocker both lamented that the male Masons had unfairly withheld their “sacred” teachings from women and implied that the members of St. Ann's Lodge had used their reason to access these forbidden truths nevertheless: “That sacred plan/ Held here by man/ As far above our reach,/ Shall to each fair/ Within due Square/ Their love and duty teach” (1815, 21).

As we have seen, the Observations expanded the discussion of women's education to its benefits for society at large, particularly through motherhood. Like many of her time, Crocker argued forcefully that women must be educated in order to raise their children properly: “As women generally have the forming of the infant mind, it is necessary [that] their own minds should be cultivated, [so] that they may be capable of enlarging the minds of their pupils” (1818, 68). Moreover, like postrevolutionary advocates of female educational reform such as Benjamin Rush and Judith Sargent Murray, she also connected the proper education of children to the health and security of the new American republic (Skemp 1998, 88). It was the duty of republican women to form sensible and virtuous citizens: “There is nothing [that] can make better subjects for a republican government, than to give children an early education, and train them in habits of prudence and industry” (Crocker 1818, 67–68). Such an education was even more important in a republic like the United States because the government could be maintained and strengthened only through the patriotism and virtue of its citizens. Crocker's reasoning here reflects the postrevolutionary ideal of republican motherhood that relegated women to a vicarious experience of citizenship through the formation of patriotic values in their children (Kerber 1980, 11–12; Landes 1988). However, Crocker took her argument in the Observations a step beyond this ideal by implying a necessary link between the health of republican government and the education of women, not only in their capacity as mothers but also in their capacity as citizens and rational advisors.

Crocker moved outside of the paradigm of republican motherhood when she maintained that the “success and independence” of a nation required “women [who] were free and honored by men” (Crocker 1818, 48). She even hinted that the mental restriction of women might contribute to political tyranny by destroying the love of ordered liberty that upheld the federal republic: “The same virtue, energy and fortitude must be called into continual exercise as long as we continue a free, federal, independent nation. The culture and improvement of the female understanding will strengthen the mental faculties, and give vigor to their councils, which will give a weight to any argument used for mutual defense and safety. No nation nor republic ever fell prey to despotism, till by indolence and dissipation, it neglected the arts and sciences and the love of literature” (1818, 48). By portraying women as vital political councilors for the “mutual defense and safety” of the republic, Crocker provocatively suggested that the great experiment to see whether or not government can be founded upon “reflection and choice”—as Hamilton put it in Federalist 1—would be undermined if its principles of equality and liberty were not universally applied and realized among the sexes, first and foremost in matters of education (Hamilton [1787–1788] 1961, 33).

CROCKER ON MARRIAGE AND FAMILY

Crocker also criticized the corrupt practices of marriage and family life that harmed the women of her time. In her unpublished Reminiscences, she addressed the problem of female subjugation in marriage by citing the case of her friend Phillis Wheatley, the famed African American poet and slave. Crocker hinted at the irony that Wheatley “never was looked on as a slave” by her owners, but was seen as a slave by a husband who “did not treat her well” and caused her decline in health and untimely death (1827, 103). Unlike many elite white women of her era, Crocker explicitly condemned slavery in her unpublished yet publicly delivered 1813 sermon “An Humble Address” (Crocker 1813, 10; Schloesser 2002). Moreover, her account of Wheatley emphasized the solidarity of all women, regardless of race or class, within the slavery of oppressive marriages. This far-reaching critique of slavery and patriarchy anticipated protofeminist abolitionists like Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Crocker supported the reform of marriage so that it might be used as a platform for women to further assert their rights in family, civil society, and politics.

Crocker's proposals for the reform of marriage centered on her reinterpretation of the concept of a “help meet.” The title page of the Observations displayed, under Crocker's name, the passage from Genesis which described Eve as a “help meet” for Adam. Yet the book itself subverted the traditional biblical notion that woman was created to serve man. By chapter six, Crocker was arguing that a wife should be a “rational companion; not only a help meet, but a woman capable of reasoning and giving advice for mutual happiness. This is woman's reasonable right” (1818, 59–60 [emphasis added]). Thus Crocker did not entirely reject the notion that a woman should be a “help meet” for her husband; she simply insisted that this was not her “only” role in the marriage and implied that her higher calling was to be the “rational companion” of her spouse. In her anonymous published essay, the Letters on Free Masonry, she had felt safe to make the same point more strongly: women were “not only helps-meet, but associates and friends, not slaves to man” (1815, 8 [emphasis added]). Crocker envisioned women becoming a new kind of “help meet”—morally autonomous persons who aided not only their husbands but also the broader political society through the application of their rational capacities.

The radical roots of Crocker's reformulation of the “help meet” ideal originated in the unpublished “North square creed,” an oath for husbands she composed in 1787 and preserved in three copies (Crocker 1814e; 1827, 361, 457). The oath was probably intended for the husbands of the women in St. Ann's Lodge, since “North square” was a Masonic reference. In the Masonic code, “North” was a “symbol of the profane world” and a “square” was “a symbol of the morality of the strict performance of every duty” (Mackey 1947, 349, 357). “Profane” did not necessarily have the derogatory connotation of irreligious or irreverent for Masons; it simply meant unenlightened or ignorant of the mysteries of Freemasonry (Mackey 1947, 353). Thus, by calling this oath the “North square creed,” Crocker employed the symbolism of Masonry to identify her oath as a guide for the performance of husbandly duty in the “profane world” outside the Masonic Order, as in Masonry marriage and women were considered to be literally “outside of the temple” [pro fanum].

Likely in response to women's formal exclusion from Masonry, Crocker composed this oath for the husbands of her group of friends that codified and celebrated the power of women within marriage. The oath defined a wife as a husband's “help meet,” “best friend,” and the “source” of his “happiness;” it demanded that a husband not only listen to the “voice and advice” of his wife, but also “believe in all things as his prudent wife wishes him to believe … [and] believe no prudent woman will ever lead her husband astray” (1814e). In short, the oath called for a husband's respectful acceptance of the superior judgment of his “prudent wife” in all matters. Crocker's husband of 18 years, Joseph, possibly took the oath before he died in 1797, because the initials “JC” were included on the extant copies. If so, this Revolutionary War captain was, at least outwardly, respectful of the broad scope of his wife's prudent counsel. Crocker apparently left no written discussion of her marriage, but she was proud of the ten children it produced, described herself as a widow, and never remarried (James 1971).

The “North square creed” set the stage for Crocker's understanding of how women, through the exercise of their rational capacities, ideally served as not merely the helpers but the prudent advisors and leaders of men, in not just the family but also civil society and politics. Crocker employed the pseudonyms “Prudencia,” “Prudentia Americana,” or “P. Americana” in several of her published and unpublished works, including the 1787 “North square creed” (Crocker 1815, 1816, 12; 1827, 457). These pen names intentionally conflated the roles of the “prudent” woman, wife, writer, and patriot to indicate the overlap between the domestic and public realms.

The Observations envisioned the prudent wife as the leader of a well-regulated household, or “her garrison” (1818, 21). Crocker's experiences of war—especially the British setting fire to her home during the American Revolution—may have contributed to her sense of the family as a garrison in need of defense by women (Crocker 1814f). Crocker endowed the prudent wife with a power of “prerogative” in her garrison (Crocker 1818, 20). It is striking that Crocker used the word “prerogative,” which a reader of Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690) would identify as the monarch's right to make executive decrees outside or against established law. Yet like Locke's ideal prince in the Second Treatise, Crocker's prudent wife used executive prerogative only for the public good, not for tyrannical ends. Crocker's prudent wife exercised her power of executive judgment to “regulate” the moral, intellectual, and civic education of her children and “secure” the “undivided” devotion of her husband, the “generalissimo of her affection” (1818, 20–21). A “generalissimo,” in the early nineteenth century, was the supreme commander of a nation's army and navy who was subordinate to the king or president whom he served. Crocker's witty domestication of this military term implied that as the “generalissimo of her affection” a husband submitted to his wife's prerogative both in matters of childrearing and in the bedroom. In her garrison, the wife fended off the threat of male infidelity by keeping her husband's “troops” “well disciplined” and without “reason to seek other quarters” (Crocker 1818, 20–21). Having gained the “victory” of drawing the “other sex from the nocturnal ramble to the more endearing scenes of domestic peace and harmony,” she ensured that no “murmur or beat” would be heard in “the garrison, except that of the heart vibrating with mutual affection, reciprocally soft” (Crocker 1818, 21).

At the conclusion of her extended meditation on the well-regulated family garrison, Crocker described the use of female power to “regulate” husbands, children, and the home as part of the “rights of woman” (1818, 20–21). In a brief commentary on this passage, Wallace (1990, 210n) compared Crocker to Catharine Beecher, who portrayed the family as a besieged, private space under threat from the outside world in order to reinforce the discourse of separate spheres. Yet Wallace's isolated reading of Crocker's usage of the garrison metaphor did not take into account how the military image underscored the connections between female leadership, family, politics, and war in her broader theory of the “rights of women.” Unlike Beecher and other domestic economists of the era, Crocker was a sarcastic critic of the mind-numbing quality of women's household labors. She mocked those thinkers of a “weaker class” who argued “it is enough for woman to … exercise her extensive capacities in knitting and sewing” or “compound a good pudding, pie, or cake, for her lord and master to discompound” (Crocker 1818, 17). Instead, she encouraged women to use their rational capacities to not only advise but also lead men in matters of both familial and national governance, even in matters of war.

Her unpublished “Fast Sermon” illustrated this point on two levels. First, she stated on the cover page that she “Preached” the sermon in August 1812, yet used the gender-bending pseudonym “Increase Mather Jun. of the Inner Temple” instead of her own name. With these notations, Crocker presented herself as the latest practitioner of the Mather family vocations of public speaking, church ministry, and political leadership. Second, in the “Fast Sermon,” Crocker spoke directly to the grave political issue of the day, the War of 1812. Crocker's “Fast Sermon” called for the nation to prioritize moral and domestic reform over and against an unjust war. She advised her audience, “Let me beg of you to begin by paying more regard to family government. If we do not tis greatly to be feared our children will not be found walking in the path of our venerable ancestors” (Crocker 1812, 11). Here, as in the Observations, Crocker significantly combined family and government into a single term—suggesting that the proper governance of the family was integral to maintaining the just governance of the nation and vice versa (1818, 54). Ultimately the war must be forsaken in order to save the family—and the next generation of citizens it harbors—from the morally corrosive effects of unjustified military aggression. Crocker thus suggested that women like her play a vital role in politics, not only as defenders of the family garrison, but also as leaders in civil society who can exercise their rational faculties to directly shape public opinion and political events through their sermons and writings.

CROCKER ON WOMEN IN CIVIL SOCIETY AND POLITICS

We have shown how Crocker's discussions of human nature, education, marriage, and family all led to considerations of women's potential and actual contributions to civil society and politics at various points in human history. Yet she opened the Observations, immediately after claiming that men and women have equal powers of mind, with a seemingly rigid delineation of their spheres of action: “we shall strictly adhere to the principle and the impropriety of females ever trespassing on masculine ground” (1818, 6). Other lines like this punctuate the early pages of the Observations, like stop signs intended to somehow prevent the movement of women into traditional masculine roles (1818, 15, 16, 20). Most strikingly, she denied her fellow American women of the early national era access to certain formal and public types of political participation: “it would be morally improper and physically very incorrect, for the female character to claim the statesman's berth, or ascend the rostrum to gain the loud applause of men, although their powers of mind may be equal to the task” (1818, 16). These statements would not appear to leave much room for women in discussion and action in the political realm. Scholars have generally cited them as conclusive evidence that Crocker was uniformly antagonistic toward the idea of women entering the spheres of civil society and politics (e.g., DuBois 1981, 3; Harris 2003, xxv; Zagarri 1998, 220).

This seemingly straightforward exclusion of women from politics, however, did not reflect the complexity of Crocker's philosophy. The period of the publication of Crocker's three major works coincided with the growth of separate spheres discourse. Common in prescriptive literature, this popular discourse sought to confine women to domestic roles and possibly represented “a conservative reaction against women's more extensive involvement in the nation's political life” since the revolutionary era (Zagarri 2004, 123). The Observations's restriction of women from formal political roles such as office holding, voting, and “pleading at the bar” was probably partly a concession to the rise of this “discourse of domesticity” as well as a realistic reflection of what the law and moeurs of the time permitted (Cott [1977] 1997, xv; Crocker 1818, 20). Under cover of this conservative rhetoric, however, Crocker nevertheless vindicated the right of women to continue to influence political outcomes through both indirect persuasion and direct although informal political activities. By the end of the Observations, Crocker argued that it was a woman's right and duty to act directly in the political realm when it was socially accepted or urgently necessary, to persuade and advise men in authority through expressing her political opinions in print and conversation, and to organize private benevolent and educational societies for the reform of the broader community. By deliberately blurring the lines between advice and action, public and private, and masculine and feminine, Crocker legitimated the ongoing informal political participation of women in postrevolutionary America and challenged the separate spheres discourse that aimed to restrict it.

Crocker quite candidly insisted that women were not only able to act in the political realm under conditions of necessity but also that they had a positive obligation to do so. Her Observations recounted at great length the “frequent instances of women [who], when called in providence to trial, have made as great exertions as men” (Crocker 1818, 14). She devoted several pages to women's activities in the American Revolution, mentioning with distinction Martha Washington and Mercy Otis Warren whose History of the American Revolution (1805) she paraphrased at length. In her unpublished Reminiscences, Crocker gave an account of her own actions, when necessity demanded, in furthering the cause of the revolution. When the British occupied Boston in 1775, and the 23-year-old Crocker was allowed to leave the city along with other civilians while her father remained behind as a prisoner, she smuggled some military dispatches, hidden beneath her clothing, from her father to General Warren. More than 50 years later in her Reminiscences, Crocker could not conceal the glee with which she remembered her outwitting the British officer in charge of evacuating American civilians from Boston. Perhaps with some embellishment, she recalled how she taunted the officer by provocatively alluding to the hiding place of the dispatches in her bosom: “You may search trunks, but don't storm my breast works” (1827, 43). When the officer did not consider it necessary to search a lady thoroughly, the young Crocker managed to deliver her messages safely to the American camp.

Apart from such exceptional circumstances, Crocker argued that women had a right and a duty to exercise an indirect influence on political matters through reasoned persuasion. Based on her egalitarian view of human rational capacities and her claim of women's superior control of the passions, Crocker believed that women had an ability—similar to or even greater than men's—to exercise sound judgment in all areas of life including the “subject[s] of law, politics or religion” (1818, 15). Accordingly, Crocker called on women to use their sound political judgment to “convince by reason and persuasion” rather than relying on their feminine charms (1818, 15). She even argued that the enduring stability and freedom of a republican government required that women have the “right of mutual judgment” alongside men and the right of “joining with the other sex in every prudent measure for their mutual defense and safety” (1818, 67). Crocker did not advocate that women turn inward to the home and away from political debates, but rather asked them to rise above “masculine contentions” such as partisan infighting and let reason alone guide their political judgments (1818, 20).

Crocker's writings on a wide variety of political subjects represented her own attempts at reasoned persuasion on a public scale and illustrated the scope of her involvement in the political concerns of her time. For example, in the appendix to her unpublished Reminiscences, Crocker included a poem dated December 13, 1786, and entitled “Some satire, wit and glee on taking the rebel Shayes [sic] and defeating the rebel army” (1827, 370). Through her use of exaggerated heroic language, Crocker mocked the three hundred cavalrymen sent by the governor of Massachusetts to capture a ragged band of five of Daniel Shays's followers. By transposing familiar biblical references, she compared the few rebels to giant Goliaths and the captain of the huge cavalry regiment to the young David, in order to moderate what she considered the unnecessary public hysteria in response to Shays's rebellion. By publishing the poem (without the satirical title and under a female pseudonym) in the Boston newspaper The Massachusetts Centinel in December 1786, amid a series of articles sensationalizing the danger posed by the rebels, Crocker exercised her duty to add a rational and temperate voice to politics (Frost 1786).

Crocker also preserved three unpublished sermons that address her objections to the War of 1812—the “Fast Sermon” already discussed, the “Thanksgiving Sermon,” and “An Humble Address to the reason and wisdom of the American Nation” (Crocker 1812, 1813, 1814c). Although she did not record where she gave the sermons, in delivering them Crocker took her place among over a hundred American women who preached between 1790 and 1845 (Brekus 1998, 119–20). Crocker cleverly used these sermons as a vehicle for the vocal and public expression of her political views, without formally ascending the “rostrum” for political speeches that she, in accordance with convention, reserved for men (1818, 16). The language of these sermons revealed Crocker's Federalist understanding of the nature of the American union. In the undated “Humble Address,” Crocker described the United States as “formed in one federal bond for the joint interest of the body politic” and sharply contrasted it with the “many headed monster” of pure democracy (1814c, 11). Political debate in the early nineteenth century saw an intense war of words between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans over the true meaning of the terms “democracy,” “federalism,” and “republicanism,” with each side claiming that their definitions represented the true ideals of the American Revolution (Kerber 1970, 193–97). Crocker's equation of democracy with anarchy and her insistence in the “Fast Sermon” that America's dedication to liberty was not an invitation to “licentiousness” placed her in the Federalist camp (Crocker 1812, 11). Although she never directly referenced any Federalist writings, her sermons echoed all the major concerns of Federalist opposition to the War of 1812. The practical objections to the war stated in the “Humble Address”, such as the weakness of the American navy and the war's possibly detrimental effect on commerce, were typical of the Federalists (Cress 1987, 127, 132; Crocker 1814c).

The debate surrounding the War of 1812 was intensely partisan and polarizing, involving women as well as men (Zagarri 2004, 114–19). Like many Federalist sermons of the time, Crocker's “Fast Sermon” of 1812 took the form of a jeremiad that portrayed the war as a punishment from God for the sins of the nation (Cress 1987, 129–30). But Crocker's rhetoric of sin and repentance was comparatively moderate in tone; she did not condemn supporters of the war but instead called upon her audience to rise above passionate partisanship and approach the debate with a reasonable tolerance for the diversity of opinions. Reflecting the Federalist concern that “party spirit” and faction destroyed moral and civic virtue, Crocker reminded her audience that “we can no more make men think alike than we can make them look alike” (Cress 1987, 127; Crocker 1812, 10; Kerber 1970, 202). In the face of severe partisan conflict, Crocker saw her role not as withdrawing from the field of politics but as appealing beyond partisanship to reason and tolerance. Crocker's sermons demonstrated that women, as rational advisors of men and public actors in civil society, could help promote peace, toleration, and stable federal government and help discourage faction, licentiousness, and unjust and imprudent offensive wars. Thus, although Crocker adopted the peace-making role that separate spheres discourse assigned women in the wake of the War of 1812, she firmly resisted the standard prescription in that discourse for women's retreat from politics (Zagarri 2004, 123).

The most enigmatic of her three major published works, The School of Reform, or Seaman's Safe Pilot to the Cape of Good Hope (1816), presented yet another example of Crocker's view that “women should display their talents by taking the helm, and steer [men] safe to the haven of rest and peace” (1818, 15). This essay ostensibly began as a temperance argument directed specifically at sailors but its scope ultimately extended far beyond the dangers of liquor. Although temperance was a popular subject for nineteenth-century American women's rights advocates, Crocker did not refer to it in any of her other works. Indeed, in the Letters on Freemasonry and her unpublished play “Midnight Beau,” she looked on the subject of drinking with a sort of amused tolerance (Crocker 1815, 13; 1819). The resolution of this seeming contradiction can be found by deciphering the allegory of the essay.

Crocker structured The School of Reform around an extended metaphor of a ship that first represented the course of individual men's lives and later the ship of state. The ship—whether a man or a state—must be guided by reason, which would help it hold a steady course through rough passions: “We find it just so in every occurrence of human life; if reason is not at the helm to steer and guide the turbulent passions of men…the vessel bilges on some rocks or shoals” (Crocker 1816, 4–5). The intemperance she discussed appeared to apply not just (or even primarily) to drink, but to all the passions that might overcome reason. Throughout the work, Crocker played with the idea of intemperance, sometimes expanding it to enslavement to all forms of passion and at other times narrowing it specifically to intoxication. As the narrator of The School of Reform, Crocker served as the rational guide to men who were slaves to passion and must be reminded how to live temperately.

Toward the end of the work, Crocker broadened the ship metaphor to become the ship of state. She wrote, “too free use of ardent spirits will keep the body in a continual fever and inflame the mind and produces most of the political altercations that arise among the citizens. Most of the political squabbles and frenzies of the brain originate in this obnoxious practice which produces an heated imagination that ends in a fever of the spirits” (1816, 10–11). Although on one level, the phrase “ardent spirits” undoubtedly referred to liquor, her language in this passage also recalled her warnings against “party spirit” in the unpublished “Fast Sermon” of 1812. She began the next paragraph by shifting her address from male sailors to the wider audience of her “Fellow citizens” (1816, 11). Then she specifically singled out “that class of men who steer through life on the mighty ocean”—namely, the politicians who guided the ship of state (1816, 11). Crocker thus subtly suggested that her role as a woman was to rationally guide the men who were her fellow citizens toward the goal of political moderation. Here, in one of her few published works, Crocker's foray into the arena of politics was more guarded than in several of her unpublished sermons and poems protesting the War of 1812 and historical accounts of the Revolutionary War in the Reminiscences. Her support for women's role in promoting political moderation through rational guidance of men was enclosed within a seeming dissertation on the evils of alcohol. Crocker's rhetorical strategies in The School of Reform were akin to those of later activists who embedded their defenses of women's rights within more conventional arguments for the temperance cause (Mattingly 1998, 21).

Beyond the rights to judgment and rational persuasion, Crocker claimed a political right for women that bridged the divide between private and public action. The Observations asserted that “Women have an equal right, with the other sex, to form societies for promoting religious, charitable, and benevolent purposes. Every association formed for benevolence must have a tendency to make man mild, and sociable to man” (Crocker 1818, 19). The duty of women to use their reason to improve society, she argued, should be fulfilled through active participation in all-female benevolent and educational societies. Anticipating Tocqueville, Crocker advanced a robust vision of the role of private associations in reforming civil society and had great faith in the benefits of this peculiarly American phenomenon. In all three of her major published works from the 1810s, she argued that women should organize benevolent societies to provide charity and make men better fit for acting in society and governing it, placing special emphasis on those societies designed “to cultivate the mind[s]” of their members and the people they served (Crocker 1815, 9; 1816, 10).

Crocker's insistence on women's right and duty to form benevolent societies was an attempt on her part to reconcile the conflicting claims of theory and practice with regard to women's rights. In the Observations, Crocker contended that she found Wollstonecraft's philosophical defense of the “total independence of the female sex,” including their possession of equal civil and political rights with men, “unfit for practice” (1818, 41). Crocker's position here is unsurprising given that none of her American contemporaries publicly and directly defended equal civil and political rights for the sexes and this issue was still highly controversial at the Seneca Falls convention thirty years later (Isenberg 1998, 5).Yet, even as she acknowledged the obstacles to putting Wollstonecraft's ideas into practice in her time, Crocker did not deny the logic of her predecessor's argument. Having insisted on the equal rational capacities of the sexes, Crocker found it difficult to deny women social and political forums in which to exercise that reason. Although women's organization of and participation in benevolent societies did not constitute full and formal political participation through voting or office holding, it moved beyond indirect persuasion, on either a private or public scale, into the realm of direct and organized political action. Benevolent societies opened up the possibility of societal change that was more expansive in its effects than the private, educational, and advisory impact of the republican mother (Kerber 1980). The purpose of benevolent societies—the education of women and children, the socializing of men, and the charitable relief of human suffering—could fit into the conventional feminine province, but their existence as a forum for concerted action in, and reform of, civil society and politics blurred the gendered distinction between public and private.

THE LEGACIES OF HANNAH MATHER CROCKER

Hannah Mather Crocker left three important legacies for political scientists, philosophers, and historians interested in social movements, political rhetoric, and feminist theory. First, Crocker endorsed the gradual mobilization of women in the reform-oriented associations that were organizational springboards for women's civic and political participation in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States (Ginzberg 1990; Skocpol 1992, 321–72). Although Crocker's ideas did not point in a deterministic, linear direction to the formal women's rights movement, her political theory, when examined in retrospect, can be understood as contributing to certain philosophical and practical foundations for that movement. Crocker understood the limitations of intellectual means of resistance, especially for women's rights advocates like herself who had small or hostile audiences for their writings and no formal access to political means of reform (Mansbridge 1998, 147–57). She thus envisioned reform-oriented associations as an alternative to the isolation of lone and scattered political advocates and critics; these models of collective action could provide women a concerted and thus more effective forum for developing their rational faculties and deploying those faculties towards social reform and the prudent persuasion of men with formal political power. Unlike many evangelical advocates of female benevolent and educational societies in the 1810s who actively avoided a reformist agenda and comfortably defined their charitable work within the bounds of separate spheres discourse, Crocker distinctively defended these groups as agents for both reform of society and the reinforcement of women's roles as informal political actors in it (Boylan 2002, 8). Crocker's conception of women's leadership in reform-oriented associations thus moved beyond her peers and anticipated the thinking and activism of later abolition, labor, and women's rights advocates like Frances Wright and the Grimkés in the late 1820s and 1830s.

Second, the rhetorical sophistication of Crocker's oeuvre renders it ripe for further analysis by scholars interested in how hostile political contexts affect the writing and reception of texts. Alongside the cryptic prose style of her fellow early American women's rights advocates Charles Brockden Brown and Judith Sargent Murray, Crocker's rhetorical strategies illustrate the oblique engagement of contentious political topics. Crocker's moderate rhetorical approach to the vexed question of women's rights made it possible for her to escape the infamy and persecution that would face Frances Wright and the Grimkés in the 1830s yet shape the popular discourse on women's rights in her time. For example, several prominent—even front-page—advertisements for the Observations ran in New York, Boston, and New England newspapers between 1818 and 1820, including a few with the heading “RIGHTS OF WOMEN” (Anonymous 1818). Further evidence of Crocker's immediate impact on popular discourse on women's rights has been found in an 1827 letter published in Freedom's Journal, the first Black newspaper in the U.S. The author, Matilda, argued for the expansion of educational opportunities for her fellow free Black women by closely paraphrasing the Observations's disdain for women's mundane domestic roles and its defense of the equal moral and intellectual capacities of the sexes (Sterling 1984, 98–99). In the long run, however, Crocker's subtle rhetorical style likely contributed to the misunderstanding and oversight of her work by later women's rights advocates, who grew ever more distant from the political context that made her rhetorical strategies both smart and salient in the 1810s and 1820s. In the last half of the nineteenth century, leading American women's rights advocates such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harriet Robinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony perceived the Observations as most readers have since: straightforwardly conservative, not subtly subversive. As a result, Crocker came to be briefly noted as a curious antecedent, rather than a philosophical pioneer, of the American women's rights movement. Crocker's mixed reception history demonstrates both the costs and benefits of her rhetorical tactics: she gained a political voice in her time, but she lost the attention and understanding of most of her posthumous audience.

Finally, contemporary feminists should challenge Crocker's forgotten status and claim her oeuvre as an important philosophical resource. Crocker developed Judith Sargent Murray's fruitful linking of the issue of women's rights to the question of “female abilities”; what girls and women were able to do should shape what rights or freedoms they were permitted in society (Murray [1798] 1998, 144). Although neither thinker exploited the radical potential of the “female abilities” argument to defend women's formal political incorporation, Crocker offered a complex justification for this seeming contradiction. On a metaphysical level, Crocker understood women's rights as rooted in, and expressions of, basic and defining human capacities: most importantly, the capacity for reason entailed the right to education. On a pragmatic and political level, however, Crocker accepted that women's rights were practiced and institutionalized in particular and often confining social and political contexts. Thus, although she conceded certain limits on the implementation and realization of rights, Crocker used her metaphysical conception of rights as a normative standard by which historical definitions of women's rights could be judged and gradually reformed. By defining women's rights as ultimately human rights, Crocker embodied what Susan Okin called the feminist quest for a “humanist justice” (Okin [1989] 1991, 170; Okin 1999, 131). She also anticipated some of Martha Nussbaum's recent work on how a philosophical conception of universal human capabilities provides the strongest available foundation for promoting women's rights within and across particular classes, ethnicities, and nationalities (Nussbaum 2001). Crocker built an early bridge between a particularistic and historical perspective on women's “real” or available rights and a universalistic and egalitarian conception of their “potential” or human capacity-based rights. By looking back to Hannah Mather Crocker, political theorists may see new ways of drawing the line of equality between the sexes that pay heed to their cultural horizons without losing sight of the possibilities that lie beyond them.