Reforming Men & Women: Gender in the Antebellum City.

Reforming Men & Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. By Bruce Dorsey (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 299, notes, index).

Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Elaine Frantz Parsons (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 241, notes, essay on sources, index).

Historians have extensively documented the connections between notions of femininity in general and women's rights in particular and many nineteenth-century reform movements, such as anti-slavery or temperance, for example. Yet, attempts to broaden this approach to a history of gender have been limited. The books by Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, and Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost, intervene in and add to these debates. Both books make important contributions to our understanding of changing constructions of gender in the nineteenth-century United States and the role they played in social and political change.

Focusing on antebellum Philadelphia, Dorsey sets the framework of his book with an examination of the connections between notions of manliness and womanhood and critical political and cultural issues. The chapters of his book are devoted to investigations of the critical importance of notions of gender in antebellum reform debates, such as charity and poor relief, alcohol consumption and temperance, slavery and anti-slavery, and immigration. Parsons' book, while it focuses more specifically on one, singular issue--temperance--takes an extensive look in time from the 1830s to the 1890s, highlighting temperance debates in the Midwest.

Dorsey's study starting point is a shift in understanding between the better ranks of society and the less fortunate in a social order that combined hierarchy and mutuality. By 1820, this understanding and a sense of care had nearly vanished. Dorsey ties this to changing notions of gender. Dorsey traces the changing construction of gender that took place with the formation of a new middle-class that emerged with the onset of the market revolution in 1820. As a result, the gendered perceptions concerning the poor, alcohol consumption, slavery, and immigrants changed according to the ideological needs of this middle class and its changing constructions of gender. While public politics had always been a masculine domain, women were able to engage in public politics especially in the revolutionary era. After the revolution, a new matrix of gender evolved that reserved independence and public politics for (white) men and dependence and the private domain for women, but also assigned this to other populations.

The first to experience that shift were the poor. After 1820, the poor were no longer considered in material need--those needs, the middle-class felt, should be fulfilled in a free and open market place--but in spiritual need. Not firewood but bible tracts. In turn, charitable societies that provided material assistance declined as new societies that sought to improve the spiritual needs of the poor came to the forefront. These societies immediately encountered a problem connected to notions of gender. They sought to promote a sense of entrepreneurial independence among the poor and they saw the primary need in making men capable, employed providers. However, the vast majority of the poor were women and children--individuals marked by gender and age as dependent, as people who should rely on a male wage earner. The problem was that many of them were poor because the husbands and fathers had abandoned them. The new charitable societies sought to address this problem by offering them work. Since women were not expected to be independent wage earners, they offered wages often below those offered by factories. In short, these charitable workplaces became sweatshops.

Drink similarly invoked gendered notions of dependence and independence and race. For the generation of men who formed temperance societies, the issue of drinking was as much about gender as about class and generational conflict. A true man was independent and drink enslaved him. Temperance was also a means to differentiate oneself from the lower orders and reinforce emerging class differences: in the era of the revolution, marked by social mutuality across class lines, drinking with men of a different rank in the social order reinforced these homosocial bonds. In addition, temperance reformers belonged to a younger generation of entrepreneurs that was rising with the market revolution and sought to differentiate themselves from an older generation of businessmen and their social habits. For women and blacks the situation was complicated. Women sought to use their association with the private realm they were bound to protect to justify temperance work, whereas male reformers sought to relegate women to that very private dependent realm and out of public politics they wished to control. For African American men the situation was difficult as well. Gaining respectability and displaying virtue required them to abandon possible links with working-class and immigrant men and to abandon a concept of racial unity, as they had to argue against intemperate black men.

Possibly the most exciting chapter is the one that deals with slavery and gender. Free blacks, white men and women "actively produced a comprehensive gendered discourse as they struggled to respond to the powerful forces of slavery and race in antebellum America" (140). And notions of independence and dependence again played a critical role. Pro-colonizationist white men believed that the only way for black men to ever achieve independent manliness was to return to Africa. Similarly black colonizationists believed that to achieve manly as well as racial independence, they had to return to their continent of origin. Women, considered as dependent, played only a limited role in the colonization movement. In turn, the political position of women abolitionists became more radical. They opposed colonization and demanded equality among the races. Most importantly, they presented "slavery as a problem that affected the domestic realm that women could claim as their own, thus making antislavery activism an expression of a woman's familial concerns and influence" (171). By doing so, women claimed the private sphere as a site of public politics.

Immigration was an issue where women were able to play a somewhat more important role in the debates. Immediately after the Kensington nativist riots in 1844, "women nativists exploited a political rhetoric and domesticity to forge a bold claim for their role in the body politic. They then used their public political voice to advance a form of racial nationalism in an age of Anglo-Saxon expansionism" (199). These women, who were expected to have 'influence' but no voice in public politics, could point to the 'foreign influence' of the Catholic church without being open to accusations that they were transgressing their realm, even though they were.

Irish immigrant men, too, participated in this process of redefining manhood. Familiar from Ireland with similar social and political processes that were transforming the United States at the time, they defined new identities for themselves. By adjusting and adapting "clan-based and recreational violence" Irish men identified themselves "as part of a white working-class that defined its opposition to respectable white bourgeois manliness through a violent street life and sporting culture" (224).

Parsons' monograph discusses issues not unlike those discussed by Dorsey. Where Dorsey speaks of independence, dependence, and influence, Parsons traces the transition from notions of an autonomous masculine self, fully capable of exercising its free will, to a "framework out of which new, more inclusive, ideas of gender and power would grow" (183-184) through themes of women's rights and temperance. Relying on drunkard narratives and civil damage suits in particular, Parsons uses temperance reform to show how "Americans harbored serious concerns that individuals were so influenced and shaped by their environment that they had little control over their own character and actions" (4) and how they grappled with that predicament. Ultimately, the complex of temperance discourse and women's rights "proposed a gendered solution to a universal crisis of the individual. In so doing, it challenged and reconstructed 'manhood' in both its gendered and its broader sense" (13-14).

Obviously, drinking and intoxication by alcohol complicated notions of individual autonomy and free volition. A man may exercise his free will by lifling a glass, but once intoxicated, his free will is in question. That was especially complicated since "men had both a privileged relationship to volition and a weighty responsibility to preserve their volitional independence" (54-55). At the same time, Americans commonly agreed that women, living with the private sphere of the home, had "a privileged relationship to interiority" (55) and that would include exercising their influence over intoxicated men. That "influence," though, in turn, "called men's volitional independence into question" (56). The solution according to nineteenth-century contemporaries was "contentment"--a balance of human faculties, associated with the private sphere. Yet, observers noted that this contentment was unavailable to men, who had to live in the public sphere of contentious politics and the temptations it had to offer such as the saloon. In short, the "deck was stacked against the wife" (123), the provider and keeper of contentment. Women choose a new and different strategy because they had to.

After the civil war, women reformers began to emphasize a strategy of invasion--the entering of public spaces, such as saloons, to stage their politics and then to recede into the private domain. By the 1860s, as "reformers ... came increasingly to doubt the power of individual volition in the face of external forces, the invasion metaphor began to make more sense to them. Indeed, by the 1870s, the most radical of the temperance reformers looked to the language of invasion for a potential solution to the crisis of the drunkard" (128). Drink, in the language of temperance reformers, became "something fundamentally separate from the nation, communities, homes, and bodies it endangered" (141). The solution, then, was "to leave the home, invade the male domain, and reclaim drunkards by force" (152). And Cary A. Nation in Kansas and the 1874-74 Women's Crusades in Fredonia, New York, attempted just that in often theatrical performances, "combining moral suasion and coercion" (165). Temperance reformers "destabilized and then rebuilt basic cultural assumptions about gender, influence and power" (184).

The two books compare best on the issue of drink and temperance, where they are in remarkable agreement. Yet Dorsey's book raises some questions. At least in the 1820s, women drank as much and as often as men and were also brought in on charges of intoxication. Often, it was women who were tavern keepers. How did that affect the discourses of alcohol and temperance that Parsons discusses?

Both books also chart territory for future research. Parsons makes a convincing argument for a much closer connection between discourses of women's rights and temperance in the nineteenth century, yet women's suffrage and prohibition were achieved after World War I. How does the story Parsons tells us develop from the 1890s to the early 1920s? Dorsey points out that to get a fuller picture of antebellum debates over slavery, abolitionism and colonization, historians need to "begin the more difficult task of exploring how race and gender as a whole sustained antebellum antislavery debates" (194).

Both books, then, are useful and significant additions to a growing body of literature that seeks to integrate women's and men's history into a broader history of gender. Both direct students and scholars into new directions for research. And that is no small praise.

Thomas Winter

Bilkent University