“Suppose Such a Colony”: Finding Postliberalism in American Domestic Reform

This paper turns to a set of sources by white women engaged in domestic reform to propose an alternative genealogy of American liberal critique and Christian postliberalism; in them are Christian idioms of mastery that are feminine in perspective and deeply creative in the ways they imagine the family-state dyad. By refocusing on a genre and demographic not commonly engaged in postliberal discourses, this paper brings a different picture of the postliberal state into view with two key features: that the family has always been a malleable, mutable figure in critiques of the individual, and that women are architects of Christian nationalisms that do not require their subjection.