In January, 1856, Stephen Allen Benson was inaugurated as the second president of the Republic of Liberia. While this milestone marked an ostensibly political affair, the organizers of the event maintained they were “not among the exciting scenes of public life.” These organizers were the women of the Ladies’ Literary Institute of Liberia, a benevolent organization comprised of elite settler women interested in the intellectual and moral development of the Republic.
American-descended settler women in Liberia were expected to uphold the family and promote republican values in the domestic sphere. While settler women had property rights, the ability to apply for divorce, and other protections not uniformly awarded to white or Black women in the U.S. during the same era, they lacked political recognition – most notably, voting rights. Yet, as in occasions like Benson’s inauguration, the bounds of women’s comportment were stretched to include participation in civic life. The complex positioning of women such as those who joined the Ladies’ Literary Institute also served to illustrate the freedoms women enjoyed in Liberia’s republic. Indeed, the treatment of women in Liberia’s Republic was one way in which the settler elite sought to distance themselves from Indigenous West Africans.
Within the framework of Euro-American empire, perceptions of African gender relations shaped how Euro-American audiences viewed Africans. Key among these views was the idea that African women were, especially due to polygamy, repressed. Normative notions of the monogamous patriarchal family, enshrined in Liberian law, were deployed by settlers to characterize Africans as “uncivilized” and unsuitable for incorporation into the republic. In reading settler women’s sources in conjunction with settlers’ depictions of Africans, this paper examines how ideas about womanhood shaped the territorial and ideological expansion of the Liberian Republic in the mid-nineteenth century.