Rods and Reels Social Clubs and Political Culture in Early Pennsylvania

Through the story of Philadelphia's dancing and fishing clubs, this article explores the intersection of elite Anglo-American social institutions, gender relations, and political culture in the late colonial and early national periods. These exclusive, invitation-only organizations provide a case study and window onto the shifting relationship between elite sociability and politics across the period. From the clubs' origins in the 1730s and 1740s through their function on the eve of the Seven Years' War to their careers in the early republic, their position and composition suggest that they evolved from integral components of colonial political culture to something more insularly social-from the auxiliaries of governance and diplomacy to their counterpoint. This trajectory shows that one way in which local men of wealth and lineage may have adapted to the gendered, ethnic, and political challenges fired in the forge of imperial crisis, revolution, nation making, and democratization was by closing their social ranks.