{"id":1278,"date":"2018-05-11T18:30:17","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T18:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1278"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:40:34","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:40:34","slug":"caroline-wigginton-in-the-neighborhood-womens-publication-in-early-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/05\/11\/caroline-wigginton-in-the-neighborhood-womens-publication-in-early-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women\u2019s Publication in Early America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women\u2019s Publication in Early America<\/h1>\n\n
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Editor<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women\u2019s Publication in Early America.<\/a><\/em> Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 240p., ill. ISBN 9781625342225. US$ 25.9<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In August 1749, Creek diplomat and trader Mary Bosomworth (also known as Coosaponakeesa) led a march of her tribesmen to Savannah. She had spent many years helping the English to establish a settlement in Georgia, and now she sought recompense for her services. Her march culminated in a meeting with Georgia\u2019s council where she declared herself an \u201cempress\u201d representing her people. Bosomworth produced letters and petitions, but this scene of procession, spectacle, and conversation equally served as an embodiment of her authority and was meant to maintain her status within her neighborhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coosaponakessa\u2019s march is just one example from Caroline Wigginton\u2019s ambitious In the Neighborhood<\/em>. The book seeks to expand our understanding of early American women\u2019s publications and to provide an analytical framework for them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As this anecdote demonstrates, Wigginton embraces a capacious definition of \u201cpublication\u201d as \u201can embodied act of information exchange\u201d (4). This broad view builds upon work in Native American studies, such as Lisa Brooks\u2019 The Common Pot<\/em><\/a> (2008) and Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Glover\u2019s Colonial Mediascapes<\/a> <\/em>(2014). In turn, Wigginton uncovers additional sources for exploring women\u2019s expression in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She coins the term \u201crelational publication,\u201d which \u201ccould mobilize a variety of technologies \u2013 scriptive, print, performative, material \u2013 to negotiate and reimagine a neighborhood\u2019s particularities\u201d (6). Wampum belts, engravings, sartorial choices, manuscripts, and conversations are all public forms of expression that women used to influence interpersonal relations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Neighborhood<\/em> also responds to the scholarly focus on republican print and the perceptions of its audience as male, property-owning, and white. Treating republican print as synonymous with publication, Wigginton argues, \u201cpreemptively excludes the kinds of publications in which women actively engaged\u201d (20). Republican print, and its emphasis on anonymity, was not the only kind of publication to forge bonds among Americans. In contrast, relational publications are rooted in the intimacy of neighborhoods \u2013 in the familiarity and bondedness among those who the publications reach. Wigginton\u2019s emphasis on the neighborhood, where there were a mix of diverse peoples and kinds of spaces, moves away from binaries of public and private or political and literary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In four chapters, she examines examples of women\u2019s information exchanges to demonstrate how they used relational publication practices to shape and reshape neighborhoods. The definition of \u201cneighborhood\u201d here is capacious as well, in some cases meaning those down the street and in others meaning transatlantic correspondents. Wigginton provides fresh readings of familiar texts like Phillis Wheatley\u2019s poems, Sarah Osborn\u2019s spiritual diary, and Milcah Martha Moore\u2019s commonplace book. There are some very compelling close readings of relational publications, such as the tracking of the idea of friendship through Moore\u2019s commonplace book. Wigginton also deftly incorporates historical context in places, such as her reading of Coosaponakeesa\u2019s red petticoat in the cultural context of indigenous diplomatic practices and of Wheatley\u2019s elegies in the framework of beliefs about death in African slave culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A commonality among these diverse examples is each woman\u2019s role as a node within a network that then allowed for the recording of their relational publication practices. Coosaponakeesa was a trader and translator between a colonial power and Native tribes. Wheatley was an enslaved woman who wrote elegies for whites in mourning. Moore compiled the literary output of multiple correspondents. Their key roles at the intersections of communities and correspondents raise some questions in this historian\u2019s mind about marginality, access to relational publication practices, and recovery. Textual, scriptive publication remains a central element here \u2013 whether to recover the evidence of performative publication or as the primary evidence itself. But overall, scholars of early American women\u2019s literature, history, and material culture will find Wigginton\u2019s concept of relational publications to be a valuable framework for thinking about how women exchanged and circulated ideas and arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amy Sopcak-Joseph
University of Connecticut<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caroline Wigginton. In the Neighborhood: Women\u2019s Publication in Early America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. 240p., ill. ISBN 9781625342225. US$ 25.9 In August 1749, Creek diplomat and trader Mary Bosomworth (also known as Coosaponakeesa) led a march of her tribesmen to Savannah. She had spent many years helping the English to establish a settlement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1281,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1894,1917,1929,1940,1942],"class_list":["post-1278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-15th-17th-centuries","tag-commonplace-books","tag-epistolary-culture","tag-material-culture","tag-north-america"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1278"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5724,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1278\/revisions\/5724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}