From the Fair to the Brave: Nostalgia, Gender, and the Bunker Hill Monument

In honor of the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company produced a colorless commemorative cup plate. Text emblazoned around an image of the obelisk celebrated its beginning: “Cornerstone Laid by Lafayette, June 17, 1825,” a reminder that the illustrious French general visited Boston to lay the cornerstone upon the fiftieth anniversary of the battle. The designer also marked that nearly two decades had passed before the monument was “Finished by the Ladies, 1841,” a reference to a smashingly successful bazaar in September 1840 spearheaded by well-known magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale.

This commemorative plate, and the Bunker Hill Monument itself, were born of nostalgia about the Revolutionary War. However, the path from 1825 to 1841 was dominated by questions about who could rightfully participate in that nostalgia and commemoration. What exactly were the parameters for women’s public activities related to honoring the patriotic dead and the founding of their nation? New England women actually had undertaken two campaigns to raise funds when the official Monument Association ran out of money. Hale had also led a campaign in 1830 aimed at readers of her monthly Lady’s Magazine, and that effort incited sharp criticism in the local press of the idea that women could or should raise the necessary funds when men could not. This paper argues that the fundraising campaigns for the Monument not only contributed to evolving cultural conversations about women’s roles and sphere in the 1830s and beyond, but also were key experiences that influenced Hale’s gendered rhetoric in her popular writing. The historical memory of the American Revolution has been of great interest to historians, but these fundraising campaigns offer a window onto the intersections of historical memory, gender, and the public sphere as the new republic aged.