The Genius of Democracy. Victoria Olwell

      The Work of Genius

      IN an 1855 speech, the labor and women’s rights advocate Frances Gage argued in support of married women’s control over their own earnings, hoping to nullify married men’s legal ownership of their wives’ wages. At her rhetorical zenith she proclaimed, “Let us own ourselves, our earnings, our genius.”¹ Within the familiar idiom of liberal democracy, Gage’s exhortation is exactly two-thirds intelligible. Gage’s first two demands, that women own themselves and their wages, clearly spring from the Lockean framework of possessive individualism, under which freedom is grounded, in Locke’s words, on the premise that “every man has a property in his own person” and that the “labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.”² By invoking possessive individualism, Gage shows here that she understands married women’s ownership of their wages to have larger implications than merely giving women control over the money they earn, although she respects that goal. She also is asserting that owning wages will bring women closer to the condition of full democratic citizenship as it was understood within the main tradition of liberal political philosophy and had been recently expanded to include men of small property and male laborers.³ She asks that married women—and here she means specifically free working-class women, since enslaved women had neither legal self-ownership nor wages and upper-class white women’s wealth generally derived from property rather than work—be assimilated to the same form of citizenship that free working men enjoyed.

      But she also breaks this frame. She adds to her philosophically familiar call for women workers to own themselves and their wages another demand, that they own their “genius.” What could she mean by this? Gage creates a syntactical equivalence, but “genius” differs from her other terms in striking ways. A married woman’s ownership of her earnings could be accomplished by changes in the law, and slowly it was. Owning “ourselves” is a related, more abstract political-philosophical goal, but also one widely asserted and theorized. Owning “genius,” though, is an aspiration beyond the remedies of the law and outside of the main idiom of post-Lockean democracy. Given how urgently women’s rights activists felt the need to alleviate wage-earning women’s economic powerlessness and exclusion from the forms and privileges of full citizenship, why would Gage spend any breath on “genius”? What is “our genius,” and how could “owning” it assert, as she says, “our right to be free”?

      This book recovers the topos on which Gage’s last demand—and many other discussions of women’s citizenship couched in similar language—becomes intelligible. “Genius” was a familiar term in struggles over women’s state citizenship and public presence more generally in the United States during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, a time when gender and public life were together transformed by the forces of political, economic, and cultural modernity. Over this time period, “genius” never designated a monolithic conception. Rich and diverse, references to “genius” were poised atop a highly elaborated set of inquiries into creativity, innovation, and the nature of the mind, most often explicitly in relation to some scene of public life, including such specific entities as audiences, readerships, and political meetings, as well as more abstract projections such as national culture, national character, or universal humanity.

      Viewed through a wide lens, discourses on genius contributed to many different cultural and intellectual projects and had effects on aspects of American culture too numerous to list. My major contention here is that the discourses of genius exerted a shaping force over controversies about women’s identity, civil status, and participation in public life. In an obvious way discourses on genius provided a location, among many cultural locations, for debates about what women were and what they could or ought to do in the world. Debates raged over whether or not women could possess something called “genius” and how possessing it (or not) might matter (or not) for settling questions about their nature, destinies, opportunities, or access to such benefits of full citizenship as voting. Debates about women’s possession of genius, however, stood apart from debates about other characteristics that were used to establish sexual difference. Conceptions of genius had a special status in a long history of thinking about the connections between cognitive experience and democratic