Territorial Agency: Negotiations of Space and Empire in the Domestic Violence Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey and Anne Home Livingston

Abstract

Regarding “the most frequently quoted piece of writing by a female Patriot,” Abigail Adams’s 1776 letter requesting husband John to “Remember the Ladies” in the “new Code of Laws,” historian Ruth H. Bloch observes that scholars pay “surprisingly little attention … [to the] issue most on Abigail Adams’s mind when she objected to ‘the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and impunity’—that is, domestic violence” (229). Bloch’s analysis of Revolutionary era “judicial decisions, legal treatises, and justice of the peace manuals” (230) links public policy with personal, lived experience, especially in families. Reading Adams’s famous letter with a renewed attention to domestic violence reminds us that “the personal is political”; implicit in Adams’s plea and in Bloch’s reading of it is the consciousness that “[p]olitical decisions are scripted onto material bodies.” As Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman write, “these scripts have consequences” for women—material and discursive (np). This chapter explores how two contemporaries of Adams, Abigail Abbot Bailey (1746–1815) and Anne Home Livingston (known to loved ones as Nancy Shippen, 1763–1841), represent their lived experiences of and bodily practices around domestic violence in their personal writings. To analyze The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey (1815) and Anne Home Livingston’s Journal Book (1783–1801), this chapter draws on feminist theories of space to illuminate how empire, domestic violence, and embodied experiences intersect, showing that empire-building practices and policies (and empire’s concomitant maintenance through these practices and policies) extend not just outward to other territories and nations but inward to the intimate spaces of the home.