Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics.

By Michael D. Pierson. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 250. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5455-7: cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2782-7.)

The central themes of Michael D. Pierson's Free Hearts and Free Homes emerge most clearly in the book's second half, when Pierson, using newspaper accounts and partisan speeches, explicates how gender politics and antislavery rhetoric coalesced in the 1856 election. In the figures of John C. Fremont and his wife Jessie Benton Fremont. Republican Party strategists found a means to symbolize their party's commitment to "tree hearts and free homes," as well as free labor and free soil. It helped, of course, that Fremont's opponent, James Buchanan, could be pilloried as "'the bachelor, wrinkled and gray ... by nature cold and selfish'" and contrasted with "'the gallant young Fremont ... the daring, the free and the bold'" (pp. 126-27). Fremont was represented as manly, courageous, and independent, while the bachelor Buchanan supposedly suffered from timidity and downright wimpiness; if Buchanan lacked "'the courage to take a wife.'" Republicans charged, how could he exhibit "'true manhood'" (pp. 124, 122)? Despite such questions, Buchanan won the campaign, as Democrats played the game by representing Fremont as the candidate of "'Free Soil, Freemen, Free women, Free Love'" (p. 146). Readers reflecting on the gender politics of the 2004 presidential election campaign will no doubt experience a jolt of recognition, reinforcing Pierson's point about how gender analysis can enrich the study of politics.

"Enrich" is the operative word. Pierson does not claim that gender was the only, or even the most important, factor shaping partisan allegiances or determining electoral outcomes during the 1840s and 1850s. But he does contend that the parties' opposing stands on "gender roles and family practices" became so widely recognized that "many people who assumed a partisan identity did so in part because they understood the party's gender culture and identified themselves with that worldview" (p. 3). Whereas the Democrats consistently "upheld a traditional, patriarchal vision of masculine rights and feminine submission," the antislavery political parties (Liberty, Free Soil, Republican) engaged in internal debates over women's public place and women's and men's familial roles, leading to their embrace of "a new ideology" that Pierson terms "domestic feminism" (pp. 6, 11). By 1860, he argues, "Republicans and Democrats supported quite divergent family ideals"; Lincoln's election was "a victory for a new set of gender ideologies" enfolded within the Republicans' larger antislavery "worldview" (pp. 19, 7).

Pierson makes his case through content analyses of antislavery (as opposed to abolitionist) newspapers and novels, along with political speeches and correspondence. Some of the analysis is interesting and convincing, but at times it suffers from slippery use of language and categories. In covering antislavery women's critique of slavery's destructive effects on slave families, Pierson offers fresh readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe's, Jane Grey Swisshelm's, and Clarina Howe Nichols's writings and demonstrates that they articulated "arguments and timetables for abolition" that were "more radical" than those of Free Soil and Republican men (p. 47). He also describes cogently their unwillingness to endorse the natural rights arguments of the emerging women's rights movement. But his use of the term "domestic feminism" to encapsulate antislavery activists' views on women's social roles contuses more than it enlightens, since the term is simply a variation on concepts such as the "cult of domesticity" (p. 193n22). Defined as "a middleclass, urban vision" in which "men and women would lead very different" but complementary lives and in which women could legitimately take part in public affairs related to other women and their children, the term covers the social views of individuals from such widely varying political and partisan positions--including northern Democrats--that it loses all utility (p. 12). Moreover, by suggesting that the Democrats were somehow alone when they "linked gender hierarchy to social and political stability," Pierson understates the widespread acceptance of such ideas in the nineteenth century (p. 100). And when he sharply contrasts the Democrats' devotion to "women's complete submission" within families with the Republicans' "commitment to enlarging women's sphere beyond the household," Pierson dichotomizes too broadly and appears to accept as descriptive the malleable category of "women's sphere" (p. 162).

Pierson ends with the 1860 election, when some Republicans articulated a fierce attack on the abuse of enslaved women within a patriarchal institution but when the national party itself retreated from the losing "John and Jessie" campaign of 1856 and "embraced a more traditional family vision" (pp. 168, 172). The party represented Lincoln as "Father Abraham" and relegated Mary Todd Lincoln to the supporting role of gracious hostess (p. 168). Fair enough. But in Pierson's rendition, the power of gender analysis to explain or enrich historical understanding of why voters chose Lincoln over his three opponents remains decidedly murky.

University of Delaware 

ANNE M. BOYLAN