“The Cornerstone of a Copious Work”: Love and Power in Eighteenth-Century Courtship

Examination of eighteenth-century courtship correspondence from colonial Pennsylvania reveals that men generally sent love letters to the friends and family of the women they wooed, rather than to the women themselves. Women, meanwhile, though expressive and affectionate in letters to each other, seldom if ever wrote love letters to their suitors. Analyzing who expressed what emotions when and to whom unveils much about the status calculations and power negotiations that underlay eighteenth-century marriage decisions. As young adults in their mid to late teens, both men and women stressed the importance of privacy and secrecy in courtship. Yet as time went on, women continued to emphasize privacy, while men made public declarations of love. This divergence can be explained by the different stakes courtship held for each; while men who married gained new and enhanced status as household heads, their wives contracted life-long masters. So while elite young women had incentives to delay marriage as long as they could without endangering their overall chances of marrying, young men were eager to win wives. Men's and women's unequal desire to marry conferred an unaccustomed measure of power on women during the courtship years. Young men and women alike made oblique references to this temporary reversal of gendered power in joking metaphors for marriage; young women also discussed their new power-and its fleeting nature-directly amongst themselves. Romantic rhetoric arose as a means of cloaking these tensions. Public declarations of love allowed young men to appear to negotiate with young women merely for love, not for the right to become household masters. Meanwhile, women who eventually silently accepted this love effectively renounced power for passion. Romantic rhetoric helped conceal the impact of eighteenth-century courtships on economic and community status; thus were love and power intimately interwined.