Until the 20th century, women’s role in the American political sphere was greatly restrained by lack of suffrage. Nearing the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, women were able to exert a minor influence on the politics of the developing nation through their image as, “trusted repositories of America’s treasured revolutionary ‘virtue’,” (Cogan 398). Through an analysis of “The Reynolds Affair and the Politics of Character” by Jacob Katz Cogan and “One Woman So Dangerous to Public Morals: Gender and Power in the Eaton Affair” by Kirsten E. Wood, this paper seeks to explore how a scandal perpetuated by men, as in the Reynolds affair, and a scandal perpetuated by women, as in the Eaton affair, can impact
