From Republican Mother to Traditional Wife: Assemblages, Uptake, and Ideological Storytelling

Abstract

This dissertation explores the roles of gender and labor in spreading political ideologies in historical and contemporary everyday contexts, such as cookbooks, etiquette manuals, and social media. As a throughline I attempt to trace the figure of the Republican Mother across these genres, a nineteenth century rhetorical trope used to depict women’s labor as wives and mothers as the most effective way for them to contribute to a growing nation. Because nineteenth century depictions of the Republican Mother rely heavily on idealized narratives and images, they are useful companions for chronotopically analyzing conservative arguments about the role of women and domestic labor today, in a political environment characterized by emotional and narrativized appeals, especially from conservative actors. Understanding these connections between contemporary and historical political rhetorics, in particular as they intersect with domesticity, labor, and women's rights, is vitally important because it gives an ideological lineage to current conservative talking points and highlights rhetorical patterns focused on the role of the heterosexual family unit in maintaining the state. This work contributes to the field of rhetoric in two key ways. First, my approach to analysis demonstrates a method for analyzing the affective and narrative dimensions of multimodal everyday texts by bringing together scholarship from rhetorical genre studies, new materialism, feminist, and sophistic rhetorics. Second, in a broader sense, my dissertation’s engagement with nineteenth-century primary documents deepens the field’s understanding of historical rhetorics, particularly the ways in which they provide context for current political discourse around gendered domestic labor.