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The first two parts of Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin received scant notice when they were serialized in the Philadelphia Weekly Magazine m March and April 1798 under the title "The Rights of Women." Written in the form of dialogues between a young schoolteacher and a widowed socialite, Alcuin is now recognized as the first published fictional work by the first major novelist of the United States. In this seminal work, Brown affirms Mary Wollstonec raffs compelling vision of the equality of the sexes, while exposing the patronizing tone of contemporary male discourse on women and the continued oppression of women m late eighteenth-century United States.
The critical neglect of Alcuin lasted nearly two centuries. As recently as 1974, William Hedges deemed Alcuin "an extremely clumsy work," claiming that Brown "had trouble managing the dialogue form in such a way as to make his own point of view consistently clear" (115). However, Brown never intended Alcuin to be a philosophical tract. Within the last few decades his dialogue has come to be understood as a deft piece of literature which undermines faith m the apparent enlightenment of its time.
Alcuin appeared at a time of contentious debate regarding the education and rights of women. Although forty new monthlies emerged m the United States between 1783 and 1800 (Clark 9), few editors advocated political and social equality for women. As a young aspiring writer, Brown needed to be circumspect. James Watters, the editor of the Weekly Magazine, objected to anything that would "offend the delicacy of his readers" (Arner 291). During the late 1790s, as Brown and his friends were well aware, many of the ideals associated with the American and French Revolutions were losing popular support m the United States. The American merchants and landowners who had achieved freedom from taxation by the British crown were disinclined to free slaves and emancipate women, since it was not m their economic interest to do so. Freedom had its limits.
Although some local courts and state legislatures modified legal restrictions, the vast majority of married women could not own property, enter into contracts, or vote m late eighteenth-century United States. Married women usually depended on their husbands for their sustenance, and single women were expected to live with...