During a period when the American social landscape was rapidly changing, Tabitha Gilman Tenney, like Hannah Webster Foster and Susanna Haswell Rowson, examined the relation between private and public virtue, stressing women's crucial role as guardians of family virtue and molders of republican citizens. Tenney's schoolbook, The New Pleasing Instructor (1799), and her novel, Female Quixotism (1801), are indictments of moral peril in Jeffersonian America, at a time when many Americans saw their new nation as plagued by avarice and self-interest. Tenney warned women that to give way to these vices was to strike a blow at the republic itself.

Tabitha Gilman was born and raised in Exeter, New Hampshire, where her family was active in politics. Her father, Samuel Gilman, was an old-line New Englander whose ancestors had arrived in 1638. Her mother, Lydia Robinson Giddings (or Giddinge) Gilman, was said to be forceful and educated, and she raised Tabitha...