What are some of the gender and political issues in Irving's "Rip Van Winkle"?

Washing Irving was a Romantic, yet he was also a satirist.  In his legendary story, "Rip van Winkle," there are several people who are the target of Irving's satire.  One of these is the wife of Rip van Winkle as well as Winkle himself.  Certainly, Irving has his fun with the shrewish wife of van Winkle.  For, rather than overtly castigate Rip, Irving, as narrator, comments satirically that henpecked men

 are most apt to be obsequious and conciliatory abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers doubtless are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation, and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering.  A termagant wife may therefore in some respects be considered a tolerable blessing--and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed. 

Clearly, Irving has fun with the relationship of van Winkle with his wife, making her the brunt of criticism by the "evening gossips."  Likewise, Irving satirizes the newly post-revolutionary society, which he suggests may be too argumentative, rationalistic, and dogmatic.  As a Romantic, Irving expresses through the character of Rip a nostalgia for the stability, calm, and natural beauty of the colonial village:

the very character of people seemed changed.  There was a busy, bustling diputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquillity.  He lloked in vain for the sage Nicholaus Vedder...uttering clouds of tobacco smoke instead of idle speeches.

While "Rip van Winkle" by Washing Irving suggests a certain nostalgia for the colonial past, some critics see a symbolic level to the story's meaning.  Rip's domination by his wife parallels the country's colonial past; his awakening to a new life suggests the new condition of the United States.  The happy ending hints at Irving's optimisim about the future of America.