Cottonus Matherus S. Mezzotint. 1728. (Restrike) of work by Peter Pelham. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

During the period of European colonial settlement of America, the colonists' image of their new country derived from their home countries. Travel and missionary accounts continued to depict Indian customs, lifestyles, and, increasingly, territorial conflicts with white settlers.16 It was not until well toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, several generations after the arrival of the first European settlers in New England and along the mid-Atlantic coast, that American artists and engravers, conscious of their newly separate nationality, began to build a substantial visual record of American life and cultural and political attitudes. Although printing presses had been established in the British colonies by the mid-seventeenth century—and even earlier in the Spanish colonies, the economy and the ideological climate were not yet ripe for the making or printing of images in colonial America. The earliest printed portraits made in America in the early eighteenth century were of men, including a mezzotint of the Congregational minister Cotton Mather, an authoritarian with strong views on women's roles.17

Despite the fact that women had shared with men the religious persecutions and economic depressions that had driven them to settle British North America, European immigrants—with the notable exception of Quakers—believed explicitly in women's inferiority, intellectually, spiritually, and legally. Students of American women's history, including nineteenth-century suffrage leaders, have remarked on the difference in attitudes toward European women, who, through the feme covert tradition of English common law governing married women, could neither own property in their own right nor make decisions about their children independently of their husbands (see Property Law in the Law Library section), and the apparent sharing of power and division of labor between women and men in many Indian tribes.18 In the matrilineal Iroquois Five Nations, for example, the household and land up to the forest's edge were the women's domain, giving them economic heft and authority in their tribe, and older women had the right to nominate the council of elders and depose chiefs.19 Men's work—war, trading, hunting, and international relations—was generally carried out in the forest.

Another factor in the retardation of American-made imagery was that the Protestant sects that came to America tended to shun graven images. As people of the Word, they relied on the sermons of ministers or church elders for definitions and allegories of ideal or dangerous womanhood. Dissidents such as Anne Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, and other “disorderly women,” like Eve, were often demonized, and put to trial, executed, or banished.20 Women who fulfilled traditional roles as good wives were idealized by the Puritan community.21 Although women's essential contributions as managers of the domestic economy were more valued in the struggling colonies than they might have been in England, men were imbued with a fear of assertive women that had its roots in Judeo-Christian doctrine.22 By contrast, religious icons were central to the Spanish conversión of Indians to Christianity—specifically Catholicism—in the Southwest between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Symbols of the Madonna, the metaphysical image of the Mother Church—especially the ubiquitous Virgin of Guadalupe—and female saints were there revered and held up as exemplars of ideal womanhood. Catholic women generally remained in their submissive place, however, and outspoken, immoral, or otherwise unconventional women risked being singled out for punishment by the Spanish Inquisition.23

During the seventeenth century, New England colonists intermittently suffered devastating losses from territorial wars with Northeastern Indian tribes and frontier attacks, while the Indians themselves were decimated by war and disease. Ironically, it was often white women—or men writing in their name—who published accounts of their captivity and the murder of their children by vicious savages who mocked white settlers.24 These descriptions became an influential force in the creation of the American antithesis of the noble savage image promulgated by Europeans. In the meantime, European mapmakers were depicting America in cartouches as an increasingly noble Indian queen, with the trappings of natural wealth and Caribbean culture.25

As noted earlier, the symbol was initially based on the native women of South and Central America because those areas of the Western Hemisphere were the first to be described. As England began to reap the benefits from trade with its increasingly prosperous colonies in North America in the early eighteenth century, mapmakers began to differentiate and use a separate symbol for those colonies, an Indian princess pictured before a seaport. This evolution from the queen-as-continent to the colonial princess can be traced in many different map cartouches found on the Geography and Map Division's rare maps (see Graphic Images on Maps in Geography and Map "American Women" guide).

The casting of women as universal abstractions for civic virtue and geographical spaces in Europe originated with the classical republics of Greece and Rome, whose political and intellectual elite assigned lofty ideals to womankind while excluding real women from the public and political realm. Marina Warner asks how it is possible to equate Aristotle's claim that woman is a defective male, considered by Greek law to be incapable of running her own finances or bearing witness in a court of law, with the fact that ideals of civic virtue were expressed in the feminine. The answer to this paradox, she says, was to render the female form as generic and universal, removed from all connection to individuality, whereas the male form retained individuality even when it was used to express a generalized idea.26

As intellectuals and artists inspired the renaissance of classical ideals in Europe in the fifteenth through sixteenth centuries, a long tradition of symbolic imagery became standardized, along with more recent innovations, in a series of emblem books and dictionaries. Among these, the most influential were Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (from 1603) and George Richardson's Iconology or a Collection of Emblematical Figures (1779, found in the Rosenwald Collection), based on Ripa's compositions and published in time to ride the tide of neoclassicism.27

European mapmakers made ample use of the emblem books, but the books were also at hand for political and intellectual leaders, artists, journalists, printers, or anyone else in search of effective ways to express revolutionary ideas to a largely illiterate populace as America began to loosen “her” bonds with England and England battled to hold onto “her” rich offspring. Following the Stamp Act of 1765, Boston craftsman Paul Revere taught himself the art of engraving and began to produce a number of propagandistic cartoons in support of the American colonies' protest against taxation without representation. Several of these can be seen in the print collections in the Prints and Photographs Division. Revere is credited with introducing the Britannia figure with liberty cap and pole as a symbol of the American rebellion, which the Sons of Liberty—still British subjects—were quick to adopt.28 The Liberty/Britannia figure soon became part of the iconography of the American Revolution.29

Switching to fashionable and lofty neoclassical imagery allowed American leaders to avoid associating the newly independent American colonies with now threatening indigenous tribes.30 Some of the most powerful Indian tribes on the northwest frontier had seized the opportunity to ally with the British and ravage frontier settlements. Europe's “noble savage” again became the colonists' enemy. Even so, the positive equation of Indians with freedom may have prompted the Sons of Liberty to dress up as Mohawk Indians for the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

Would the Sons of Liberty have seen the irony, however, if they had been told that the liberty cap and pole had their origins in an ancient Roman ceremony for the manumission of a slave? 31 Freedom was unknown to the African slaves who had been brought to North America to labor for white owners, particularly in the tobacco-growing southern colonies. A jarring juxtaposition in the Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 2, 1776, of an advertisement for a runaway slave alongside a brief announcement of the Continental Congress's resolution to declare independence, reminds us that slaves—along with free Euro-American women and Native Americans—were ignored in the Declaration of Independence. Many of the runaway advertisements and broadsides that blazoned “Negroes for Sale,” while often providing individual characteristics in the text, were illustrated with crude, cookie-cutter icons representing the actual men, women, and children whose bondage made a mockery of the language of and fight for freedom from the 1760s to the 1780s (by contrast, see the Phillis Wheatley illustration).32

While Revere was leading the way in establishing an American school of political cartooning, America's friends in England, particularly the merchant class, supported a storm of political propaganda in the form of allegorical prints as the conflict reached hurricane force. These can be seen in pamphlets and magazines in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division and in the British Cartoons collection in the Prints and Photographs Division. The Indian princess remained the preferred English symbol for America, even among her English friends, but she was increasingly shown with the attributes of liberty, alienated from her mother Britannia. In Britain, America, at Length Be Friends, from the January 1774 issue of the London Magazine, the Indian princess wears a feather bonnet and bears a cornucopia representing natural bounty, but her robes are becoming classicized and the goddess Concord is shown trying to reconcile Britannia and her daughter on the wharf of a busy port [picture].33

The able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught. Etching. From the London Magazine, May 1, 1774. British Cartoon Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Three months later, however, the same magazine offered the shocking image The able doctor, or America swallowing the Bitter Draught, which was also issued as a separate print. It was quickly copied and signed by Paul Revere for publication in the June issue of Boston's Royal American Magazine.34 On this occasion, he was apparently more taken by the depiction of America's hapless plight than he was wedded to his own preference for the Liberty figure as symbol of America.

But although Liberty was the seceding colonists' new sign for America, the “daughters of Liberty” themselves had no independent political rights, despite the many calls that were made on their own patriotism before and during the Revolutionary War in the form of boycotting English household goods, managing and defending farms and estates in their husbands' absence, and materially supporting the American soldiers.35