I Hate Commitments but Here's My Revised Proposal

A Cross-dressed Republican Mother Embodied in Rhetorical Drag:


Elements of Feminist Text in Herman Mann’s The Female Review

While Deborah Sampson’s successful enlistment and service as a Continental soldier is often called extraordinary by historians, Herman Mann’s 1797 biography of Sampson, The Female Review, is accepted as anything but accurate or eloquent. Feminist scholars generally agree that Mann’s inaccuracies, exaggerations and excessive qualifications for Sampson’s gender-transgression leave her real personality indecipherable. The factual Sampson served in the light infantry in harsh weather, received a wound in battle and lived with men as a man. Unfortunately, Sampson’s perspective on her life remains engulfed in a discourse of apology for her gender transgression.

Though Sampson’s voice will never tell her story, I believe she sacrificed agency of her story in order to assist in writing a text that would be accepted by mainstream society and reach an audience of women with a message of productive feminine resistance. At first glance, The Female Review appears a poorly written, inaccurate biography that deprives a woman of her own historical agency and paints her as a reluctant yet patriotic icon. However, I believe it is the product of the intersection of shifting post-revolutionary gender identities. Feminist scholar Judith Hiltner points to evidence of Mann’s deliberate fabrication of and alteration of Sampson’s story arguing that Mann fashioned Sampson as an icon of American pride to further his own political agenda. She even scrutinizes Sampson’s speaking tour following her discharge from service and proposes that Sampson is merely a vehicle for Mann’s politics. Weyler theorizes that Sampson was a willing participant in the alteration of her war stories because she was acutely aware of the power of print in shaping public opinion. Weyler suggests Sampson’s skillful development of her public persona, through performance of gender, contributed to her reception as an American heroine instead of facing jail time or public rejection as a “whore,” like the two other women who enlisted as men.

At the center of this rhetorical and ideological nexus stands another possible Sampson, a skillful early American feminist who performs gender to her advantage. In pre-Enlightenment America it was not standard practice to teach women to write because it was not encouraged or largely accepted. According to the Puritan tradition, unless female authors were endorsed by a male, religious leader they would be labeled unruly and face severe consequences. As feminist scholar Lisa Logan explains, narrative cross-dressing would have freed a text from obstacles imposed upon it if authored by an early-American woman.

Under the layers of narrative qualification of cross-dressing and reifications of normative female behavior exists a disguised feminine rights text. In the same way that Weyler claims to discover a truer Sampson by interpreting her real-life actions and skillful performance of gender, I contend that Sampson indirectly authored Mann’s text through narrative cross-dressing. Feminist scholar Tamara Harvey says that identifying gynesis instead of misogyny is a more productive way of applying feminist theory to pre-Revolutionary America because women’s rights were not viewed as inherent. Michel Foucault explains that power in discourse does not flow only one direction; instead, “We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (1632).

My essay seeks out the gynesis and resistant discourse to identify a productively resistant, feminist Sampson. I will analyze her actions within Mann’s narrative with a feminist lens, focusing on the tension between Sampson’s actions and the narrator’s contradictory lectures on feminine behavior. I argue that Sampson collaborated with Mann because she knew a male author would empower her story and allow her a platform to reach women with a message about female potential. This interpretation raises larger questions about how early American women worked within hierarchal structures to convey what we might today consider a feminist message. Uncovering Sampson’s hidden feminist text adds a previously undiscovered early American woman’s voice to the history of feminist scholarship and positions her as one of the first American feminist writers.

OK...now everyone grab you binoculars and let's go find Sampson.  Well, no viewing her with a male gaze or, as Laura Mulvey might say, you will objectify her.

~Blake