Book Review: The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson

Anne M. Ousterhout, The Most Learned Woman in America: A Life of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Photos, 394 pps., $35.00.

Recent years bear witness to an inordinate and pervasive coverage in books and through other media of America's "founding fathers" and the ethos of the nation and society they wished to create. In fact, the treatment is so extensive that critics are debating why such an increase in fascination now and what does it say about ourselves and our nation. Books such as the Founding Fathers by Joseph Ellis, John Adams by David McCullough, Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson and Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow are enjoying a surprisingly positive reception even among the general reading public. However, excepting a few books devoted to Abigail Adams and Cokie Roberts' most recent and popularly-directed publication, Founding Mothers, scant attention is directed to those women who contributed significantly to the political and cultural founding of the United States.

Anne Ousterhout attempts to correct this marked imbalance with her scholarly and thoroughly readable biography of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson. In an age when women were excluded from higher education and public engagement with politics, Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson represents a conspicuous exception. Delineating her extensive learning and her substantive political correspondence with many of the leading male revolutionary figures of her day, Dr. Ousterhout most convincingly argues for Mrs. Fergusson as an integral contributor to intellectual dialogue that forwarded the founding of the United States. Ousterhout takes the reader skillfully in chronological order through the life of Mrs. Fergusson-a life marked by sorrow, loss, unhappiness in isolation, marital disappointments, financial constraint and political intrigue. Through all of these seemingly bitter challenges, Mrs. Fergusson was a prolific poet and translator who, exceptional for her time, sought successfully to have her work published and discussed by both men and women.

She also engaged in lengthy and highly sophisticated correspondence with the likes of Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and founder of Dickinson College in Cumberland County. She analyzed, amended, corrected and reinterpreted Dr. Rush's political, social and religious ideas with frequency and thus displayed exceptional intellectual confidence for a woman of the late eighteenth century. The content of the correspondence was mature and respectful from both parties and demonstrated that Dr. Rush valued her as a full intellectual participant in those religious and political ideas out of which the American experiment in democracy would emerge. There is further evidence that Dr. Rush considered Mrs. Fergusson not just an intellectual equal, but actually superior to him. Dr. Rush was so enamored of her spirit and contribution to the intellectual dialogue of the age that he wrote a short biography of her entitled, "An Account of the Life and Character of Mrs. Elizabeth Fergusson."

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