Catherine Allgor

Redefining "Party Politics"
For Early Americans, the Political Was Personal
Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly, Spring 2003
By Emily Harrison Weir

“All of us are politicians, though few of us have access to the official political sphere,” says Catherine Allgor FP’92, a historian of early America. In America’s early days, her research shows, women’s unofficial role in politics was much more influential than previous scholars realized. Catherine AllgorThe assistant professor of history at the University of California at Riverside is a Radcliffe Institute Fellow this year, working on a political biography of Dolley Madison, the quintessential socialite-politician. Madison was also a central character in Allgor’s award-winning 2000 book Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government.

“Those women couldn’t vote, they didn’t own their own bodies; they practically didn’t exist as legal entities. Yet they politicked because we humans must politick,” she says. Though women were banned from holding political office and from official life generally, Allgor discovered that upper-class women skillfully used ostensibly social events to influence political policy. In America’s first decades, “there was so little government structure that the social sphere became the way to do things.”

Allgor first took a look at “parlor politics” for her MHC senior thesis on Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, wife and political partner of President John Quincy Adams. Judging from their diaries while ambassadors at the Russian court, Allgor says, “you’d think they never went to work! There were no official meetings, only parties, but things were getting done.” She realized that diplomacy—essential to government—depends largely on what happens at social events. “These events were not only attended by women, but women were often quite crucial to them.”

She initially assumed the situation would differ in America, where good politicians were supposed to avoid European court traditions. But she discovered that the social sphere was even more important in Washington than in the Russian court. “An emperor can just order stuff to be done, but in a democracy, people need to work together.” But since men couldn’t use personal influence for political gain without looking too “European,” officials’ wives, mothers, and daughters took over critical political tasks of forming alliances, lobbying, and currying political favor.

The ladies exercised power politics at parties. First Lady Dolley Madison was famed for hosting fashionable weekly “squeeze parties” attended by all the political players. Until Allgor, historians believed Dolley did this because she was “just naturally gregarious.” Allgor took another look, and concluded something quite different. “I uncovered a system of politics that women didn’t just contribute to, but which they helped build,” she says. “It was a gendered system with [separate] male and female [roles], but you needed both the official male and unofficial female spheres to make politics work.” Laws were made in Congress by men, Allgor explains, but the deal making happened at parties thrown by women.

“It was a gendered system with [separate] male andfemale [roles], but you needed both the official maleand unofficial female spheres to make politics work.”

Dolley Madison’s famed redecoration of the White House is a case in point. “That seems a very personal, aesthetic act, but what she did wasn’t about having good taste,” says Allgor. “She and architect Benjamin Latrobe restructured the White House [to become] a symbol for the nation and a place for the Washington communities to come together to do politics.” Dolley Madison made the White House the place where everyone in Washington went. “Style,” Allgor told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “was (and is, she’ll say if you press her) a manifestation of the right to rule.”

And Madison wasn’t the only woman wielding considerable political power. “The problem with the women I study is that they’re seen as exceptional. Lots of women you’ve never heard of were politicking; Dolley was very typical of a certain kind of woman.” For many upper-class Washington women, politics was the family business. “They’re not feminists; they’re conservative wives, mothers, and daughters who [commonly] spoke about their very considerable political efforts in terms of family [not politics],” she explains. For instance, a woman might say she got her brother a job with the president because he has two babies to support, or that she helped get her husband elected because that’s what a good wife does. (Allgor believes, for example, that Louisa Catherine Adams is the reason John Quincy won the presidency.) “It’s not that they succeeded despite being women; they succeeded because they were women and women had a certain kind of role.” That didn’t last long. By the 1830s, more white men of all classes were included in the political process, and the male official sphere dominated the female-driven social arena.

This 1901 Puck illustration of Dolley Madison serving a gentleman at a political party illustrated a poem praising that less sedate era. The poem concludes, “Ah! Sad’s the change throughout the nation/ Since Madison’s Administration!”

“It used to be that women only held unofficial power. Today women can be official [politicians] too, but [some Americans] are still uncomfortable with women in official positions of power,” Allgor says. “So I look back at these early women because they can tell us something about how power is constituted and the role that women and gender play in that power.”

Finding Her Place, in History

Fittingly, Allgor came to her study of political history by a nonpolitical route. An actress in her twenties, she spent six years touring as Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst. Researching the poet’s life awakened a love of history that Allgor came to MHC at age thirty-one to pursue.

While blazing through MHC and then Yale graduate school, her research proved that women were important political beings even when the women themselves denied they were being political. “By learning the language of denial, I found the political discussions other historians had passed over,” she told The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Sometimes sexist editing of historical documents was to blame. Allgor notes one letter from Dolley to James Madison in which all political references were replaced by ellipses. “Another reason this evidence went previously unexamined is that the unofficial sphere works well when everyone can pretend it’s not important.” By floating a policy idea at a party, for example, politicians could collect public opinion on ideas that would never have been presented on the floor of Congress. If reaction was negative, the speaker could always deny he was serious—after all, it was “just a party.”

“Maybe it’s a testament to MHC that I’ve ended up studying social events and communities,” says the 2002 Mary Lyon Award recipient. “Perhaps it’s no coincidence that I study powerful women serving refreshments in a community setting. After all, at Mount Holyoke—home of powerful women—there’s never an occasion without a cookie in it!”