Kaitlin Tonti is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, Burning Letters, Keeping Diaries, and Circulating Poetry: Conceptualizing the Fluidity of Spheres in Early American Women’s Life Writing 1750-1810, considers how life-writing provided early American women more agency through journals, diaries, and manuscript culture, which allowed them textual fluidity between the public and private spheres.

Transatlantic studies have been increasingly popular as early Americanists look outside the New England experience to understand 17th and 18th century culture. In the Wainright family papers in The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, letters addressed to Eliza Mayhew Wainwright offer some insight into early Americans' conceptualization of women in international cultures, and their own domestic roles in America.

Four letters sent from Havana, Cuba, addressed to "Dear Sister" and signed "H.B. Howard" between December 23, 1809 and March 17, 1810 reveal Howard’s condemnation of Spanish women, but also how she views American women as superior in juxtaposition with her international sisters.

Her first description of Cuban women references their appearance, as she notices that women do not walk the streets during daylight hours unless fashioned in black, churchgoing attire. She writes, "it is conceived… improper to appear in the street in any other habit you are liable to be insulted if you do." Later, in the same letter, she makes the point of stating that the wife of her American host, Mrs. Gorhms, has "never had the smallest acquaintance with any of the Spanish women." Howard’s later descriptions are consistent with her first analysis of Spanish women as inapproachable, oppressed, and limited in their public appearances.

Howard’s fourth letter is particularly ostentatious in her descriptions and disdain for Spanish women, as she claims they have no maternal instincts in juxtaposition with American women. She begins by observing that babes often cling to exposed breasts of black women, "while their mothers are at a great deal of trouble to get rid of the nourishment which nature kindly gave for the support of their offspring." Howard adds that because of what she perceives as a lack of maternal nature, the Spanish are a "groveling set of people."    

Addressing her several observations of Spanish culture, Howard insists that Spanish people are entirely consumed by "church and the card table" and that they "do not surpass" the United States in appropriately pricing their meat, fruits, and vegetables. One might read her letters as simply indicative of a white woman’s view on race in the early 19th century.

However, it is through her contempt of Spanish women—specifically, their maternal instincts—that makes evident her own insecurities concerning her role as an American woman. By 1810, the Republican Motherhood ideal attempted to define women’s identity in the new Republic; thus, when Howard decries that Spanish women do not feed their own babies, she is likely confused as to how she should perceive their contributions to the larger public. Howard might have also realized that if her role as mother were taken from her, she would lose what contributes to her political, social, but most significantly, national identity.

Howard’s letters to Wainwright depict a transatlantic communication that explores Spanish culture from a New Englander’s perspective. Early Americanists, feminist scholars, and researchers interested in the complicated nature of transatlantic observations and correspondences would do well in visiting the New York Public Library to view this communication.

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