Antebellum Women : Private Public Partisan

"Combining lucid analysis of women, black and white, Native and Euro-American, clite and laboring classes, with a dazzling variety of documents, Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson freshly synthesize decades of scholarship and introduce us to women's experiences in all their richness and vibrancy. We learn how women's civic identity and impassioned participation changed the face of antebellum America's society and politics. We find in the documents women playing multiple roles---Cherokees filing petitions to resist cessions of land, Lowell mill girls laboring in factories, elite blacks and whites organizing benevolent societies, activists calling for the end of slavery, suffragists claiming the vote. Bravo for a splendid presentation of women's keleidoscopic lives."---Mary Kelley, University of Michigan

"Lasser and Robertson have compliled a superb work that will challenge readers' conventional understanding of American women's involvement in politics in the decades before the Civil War. The wide range of primary sources allows women from a variety of social classes and races to express their political opinions in their own words. Lasser and Robertson's excellent introduction provides readers with a compelling framework for understanding the changes and continuities in women's political role throughout the first half of the nineteenth century."---Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University

How did diverse women in America understand, explain, and act upon their varied constraints, positions, responsibilities, and world-views as American society evolved between the end of the Revolution and the beginning of the Civil War? Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan Answers the question by going beyond previous works in the field. The authors identify three phases in the changing relationship of women to civic and political activities. They first situate women as "deferential domestics" in a world of conservative gender expectations; then map out the development of an ideology that allowed women to leverage their familial roles into participation as "companionate co-workers" in movements of religion, reform, and social welfare; and finally trace the path of those who followed their causes into the world of politics as "passionate partisans." The book includes a selection of primary documents that encompasses both well-known works and previously unpublished texts representing a variety of genres, making Antebellum Women a unique volume that will introduce readers to the documentary record as well as to the vibrant body of historical work on gender in the early nineteenth century.