| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.1

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 130.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. By Susan M. Stabile. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiii, 284p. Illustrations, notes, index. $34.95.)

Histories of women in the early republic have focused on the birth of the new: romance and novels, egalitarianism and sensibility, reform and rights, organizations and opportunities. Susan M. Stabile's Memory's Daughters pays scant attention to these themes. This book looks backward as women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remembered, reminisced, and preserved. Her primary subjects belong to a coterie of exceptionally well-educated women poets from wealthy and politically influential families—Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Elizabeth Fergusson, Annis Stockton, and, especially, Deborah Logan. The neoclassicism of their education connects their thoughts, writings, actions, and selected possessions to a tradition that Stabile locates in dazzling expositions of classical, renaissance, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and material culture. This is an erudite intellectual and cultural history of a feminine practice of the living memorializing "the local, the particular, the domestic." It is particularly feminine because these women "aimed at accurately re-creating the historical record rather than invoking [as men did in historical archives] the past to fashion the future" (p. 4).

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