“Petticoat Government”: The Eaton Affair and Jacksonian Political Cultures

Abstract

Though typically trivialised by historians, the Eaton Affair preoccupied Andrew Jackson throughout his first presidency and lived on in nineteenth-century popular memory. This thesis sets aside dismissive, partisan and elitist scholarship, revisiting the contemporary evidence to demonstrate the Eaton Affair comprised two distinct scandals. In doing so, a heretofore unexamined dissonance between the place of women in mass and elite Jacksonian political cultures is also revealed. The clash of these cultures in the Eaton Affair would shape both for years to come: stigmatising “petticoat government” among the masses while severely curtailing its practice within the informal politicking of Washington.