In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mothering
practice provided women an alternate route to citizenship.
Although they could not own property or vote, women could and
did care for children in their homes. Mothering
practice/theory/rhetoric was bound up in the ideology of
republican motherhood. Women (white, wealthy women, anyway)
became citizens by proxy when they raised their sons and
daughters, future citizens and future nurturers of citizens.
During the time of the American Revolution and the years
following it, mothering gradually became a more respectable
practice, one that was eventually seen as needing education and
training. Mothers, thought to be morally superior by nature,
were responsible for teaching their children right from wrong
and for creating democrats who would vote, own land, and hold
public office. Republican motherhood argued that while women
could never be citizens, they could enact citizenship through
the distinctly female practice of mothering. By the twentieth
cent