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In her excellent study, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women, Marion Rust discusses the paradoxes inherent in the condition of women in the early American republic as reflected in Rowson’s literary career. “In attempting to determine the degree to which American sentimental discourse makes a mockery of human agency or makes it possible,” Rust states, “we have emphasized either [Charlotte Temple’s] demise or Rowson’s success without acknowledging the mutual indebtedness of both constructs” (2008, 32). To properly appreciate the work of Rowson and other early American women, according to Rust, we must “grasp the seemingly oxymoronic means by which agency and submission, autonomy and subjection, choice and mechanism cohere into a single, if unstable, whole” (32). I agree with Rust that Rowson was particularly attuned to the contradictions that governed women’s lives and demonstrated considerable ingenuity in working within and through them. In this essay, I argue that one of the major paradoxes that Rowson tackles is that of republican motherhood, a model for female civic engagement that extolled women’s cultural influence while relegating them to the domestic sphere. According to Linda Kerber, “The model republican woman was a mother . . . [her] life was dedicated to the service of civil virtue; she educated her sons for it; she condemned and corrected her husband’s lapses from it” (1976, 202).1 In her novels Charlotte Temple and Mentoria and in her work as a teacher, Rowson envisions women operating within and beyond the contradictory paradigm of republican motherhood by disassembling the ideology into its conservative and progressive parts, which she represents through two distinct and interdependent characters: the apolitical, domestic, and biological mother, embodied by characters like Lucy Temple; and the political, public, textual mentor, represented by the narrator in Charlotte Temple, the title character in Mentoria, and Rowson herself.2 The problem with the concept of republican motherhood, Rowson suggests, is that the strength of the maternal bond prevents mothers from being the teachers that republicanism requires because their unconditional love interferes with their ability to instruct and discipline their daughters. Mentors, who are not bound to their bodies, are more qualified to prepare young women for the real world. The mentor’s power is textual—that is, conveyed through print...