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of the civic public. In comparing colonial Virginia with Habermas’ pre-modern
Western Europe, we can view the royal governor and his counselors (the gentry) as
the colonial equivalent of the King and court, without any truly public discourse at
all in the early years of the colony. A wider range of influential people (including a
newly rising middling sort of lawyers, tradesmen, and smaller farmers) eventually
undermined the elite’s political authority. The new group used the newly available
print discourse to establish their social authority. Out of this burgeoning print
culture emerged the first actual civic public in Virginia. Its emergence and character
diverge somewhat from the bourgeois transformation Habermas described in
Western Europe. 73 His theory of a civic public assumed—without presenting any
solid evidence—that women and the more plebian members of society were not
involved. The findings here suggest that in Virginia some women were indeed
involved. 74 Published accounts of politics within an emerging print culture are
viewed as a crucial precondition of any such civic public. To take part in Habermas’
public discourse, however, required taking part not only in printed debates but also
in oral discussions in taverns, coffeehouses, and other public spaces, activities that
typically excluded women. 75 Women did form active political groups that could be
considered a female civic public, debating and taking action over non-consumption
and non-importation in the years leading to the Revolution. While no evidence of
73 Rawson, “ ‘Guardians of their Own Liberty’,” 79, fn 17, suggested that in colonial Virginia,
rather than a public sphere, there was a tight elite he described as a closed socioeconomic oligarchy
that thought of itself as “the public.” He wrote that new economic, political, and cultural elites
used print to establish a new authority and Virginia’s first real public sphere. This research
suggests that instead of a pseudo-public, the original elite structure relates more to a pre-modern
monarchy, and a totally private discourse. We agree that out of the new print culture emerges a
public discourse, which he describes as a “sphere.”
74 Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, (Cambridge: MIT, 1992). This
supports the conclusions of Kierner, Beyond the Household, xi, and 213.
75 Sharon Salinger, in Taverns and Drinking in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2002), noted that women, especially the lower sort, took part in drinking and
tavern discussions, but Salinger also suggested that gender and class differences were actually
accentuated, not broken down, by tavern custom.