The Republican Court and the Historiography of a Women's Domain in the Public Sphere

In particular Dena Goodman's work on the salons of ancien regime France has recovered the public work of women in the private institutions of sociability that operated in distinction to court and state.1 Goodman's understanding of the public sphere is Habermasian in that it understands the public to have been a highly ramified ideal, entailing the antique concept of publicum as the depersonalized authority of state, the idea of public as a discursive space in which the vox populi can speak in distinction to the dictates of the state, and as an array of private institutions-clubs, coffeehouses, tea tables, salons-that constituted an autonomous region of political and cultural power. [...]the rise of the progressive historians early in this century, the Republican Court and its doings were matters of common knowledge among literate Americans.3 4 5 6 7 8 The Republican Court organized in 1789 in New York City and reconsolidated in 1790 in Philadelphia around Martha Washington's Friday night drawing-room gatherings.