SOURCE: "Two Visions of the Republic" in Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 17-37.

In the following excerpt, Bardes and Gossett note the importance of community and comment on the role of women in Hale's novel Northwood.

Six years before Tocqueville makes similar observations on the status of American women, Squire Romelee, the voice of wisdom in Sarah Josepha Hale's Northwood, comments:

I presume you will not find, should you travel throughout the United States, scarcely a single female engaged in the labors of the field or any kind of out-door work as it is called. And the manner in which women are treated is allowed to be a good criterion by which to judge of the character and civilization of a people. Wherever they are oppressed, confined, or made to perform the drudgery, we may be sure the...