Bruce Dorsey. Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. xi + 299 pp. Illustrations, notes,
index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8014-3897-7.
Reviewed by: Kathryn Tomasek, Department of History, Wheaton College,
Norton, Massachusetts.
Published by: <http://www.h-net.org/reviews//~shear>H-Shear (September, 2004)

Gendered History

Bruce Dorsey has written a significant book. Examining reform movements
that addressed issues surrounding poverty, drink, slavery, and immigration
in Philadelphia, he demonstrates the centrality of gender to cultural,
economic, and political changes in the early republic and antebellum United
States. Multiple meanings of masculinity and femininity, inflected by race,
ethnicity, and class, he demonstrates, illuminate ongoing cultural
struggles stretching from the 1770s to the 1850s.

A strong sense of the gendered meanings of citizenship underlies Dorsey's
analysis. In the first chapter, he outlines the significance of gender to
republican ideology, noting that independence and virtue were masculine
traits predicated on women's dependence under the provisions of coverture
in English common law. Republican concepts of masculinity competed with
notions of sentimental manhood, creating ambiguities around gender that
opened the way for women's movement into benevolent reform. Thus women and
men together constructed a public sphere of social and civic action out of
the private sphere of individual conscience, and white women relied not
only on ideas of republican womanhood but also on spiritual authority to
justify their benevolent work. Dorsey presents reform movements addressing
poverty, drink, slavery, and immigration in subsequent chapters, carefully
tracing the development of each. Concerns about citizenship, dependency,
and gender arise in each case.

Noting a trend toward moral and spiritual analysis of poverty, Dorsey
traces the shift from eighteenth-century humanitarianism to evangelicalism.
The feminization of poverty produced divergent responses from white
middle-class benevolent men and women. Men, more focused on poor men as a
problem, were more likely to recommend work relief, whereas women tended to
urge a more compassionate view of the poor. Notions that it was unmanly to
be soft on paupers suggested a fading of the sentimental ideal of the man
of feeling. Black benevolent societies recognized the effects of racial
discrimination and recommended self-regulation of poor members to combat
it. The rise of evangelicalism resulted in greater efforts on the part of
white middle-class reformers to mold the character of the poor through
Sunday schools, home missionary societies, and the temperance movement.
Both black and white reformers shifted away from using the language of
civic virtue to describe women's benevolence, promoting ideas of women's
influence as innate, and leaving the concept of power to men and their
political authority.

Ideas of manhood and womanhood also pervaded discussions of the problem of
drink, illuminating the social transformations that accompanied economic
development in the North. Dorsey traces shifts from the egalitarianism
expressed in the culture of drink that existed in the early republic
through the withdrawal of elites to more exclusive spaces and the
identification of drinking with white working-class men's culture. He notes
that reformers focused on the young man as the problematic figure, despite
the fact that some women also drank to excess. Drink was depicted as a
masculine problem, to be worked out in relation to other men. White
middle-class temperance reformers most often presented their messages about
the ravages of drink as stories of generational conflict, whereas
African-Americans saw young black men as continuing the struggles of their
fathers to have their own manhood recognized. For both white and black
temperance reformers, masculinity was grounded in self-discipline and
restraint. The rise of the Washingtonians marked a move toward mass appeal.
Women appeared chiefly as victims in temperance tales, where their
influence was women's most important characteristic. On the whole, the
relationship of independence to masculinity was central to the temperance
movement, with dependence on drink depicted as unmanly.

Similarly, masculinity and messages about gender and independence permeated
reform movements that addressed the problem of slavery. The American
Colonization Society promoted notions of men as natural colonizers,
presented sexualized images of Africa as female, and impugned the manhood
of African-Americans who resisted colonization. White men's fears about
black men's sexuality underlay much of this rhetoric, and pamphlets that
argued against amalgamation fueled race riots and the burning of
Pennsylvania Hall. Masculinity was also contested ground among black men;
Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass debated the merits of emigrating or
staying in the United States to claim their rights. Emigrationist editor
Mary Ann Shadd (Cary) subverted masculine notions of independence to her
own purposes. White women learned about racial discrimination from black
women, adopting the kind of anticlericalism exhibited by Shadd and
presenting a feminized, sentimentalized image of the slave. Such
feminization gave white abolitionist women opportunities to identify with
the dependence of enslaved African Americans, using the rhetoric of both
citizenship and women's influence to promote their cause. For white women,
black women, and black men, independence was linked to the rights of citizens.

Immigration brought together concerns about race, ethnicity, poverty, and
religion, again calling up questions about citizenship and gender. Irish
immigrants brought with them their own ideas about masculinity, introducing
another element into a contested arena already inflected with class and
racial distinctions. In Philadelphia, debates over the use of the King
James Bible in public schools raised fears of foreign influence among
native-born white Protestants and resulted in ethnic rioting. Nativist
women supported the anti-immigration movement through their own female
associations and through a newspaper, the American Woman. Immigrant men saw
African-American men as challengers to their own masculinity, adopting
minstrelsy and its ridicule of black manhood as their favorite form of
entertainment. Convent tales emphasized fears of priestly and papal
influence and presented the priest as confidence man. Catholicism,
nativists suggested, ran counter to the independence required for
citizenship. Irish immigrants, Catholic priests, black men, working-class
and poor white men, and white middle-class women, Dorsey suggests, all
challenged the ideal of entrepreneurial masculinity that was emerging
within the white middle class in the wake of the economic changes of the
early-nineteenth century. Gender, especially constructions of masculinity
inflected by class, race, and ethnicity, was as important to men's and
women's views of their world and its problems as religion, republicanism,
and market capitalism.

Dorsey characterizes his book as participating in an ongoing transformative
project that aims to make the invisible visible. It is, thus, a book at
once synthetic and grounded in significant original research, building
especially on African-American history, women's history, feminist theory,
and the growing literature on the history of masculinity.

This is, as other reviewers have noted, an ambitious book. Dorsey does not
shy away from pointing out where previous historians have failed to note
significant developments. The feminization of poverty is only one example.
The author offers a convincing argument for impulses beyond republican
womanhood that led women into the realm of benevolent reform. His choice to
include colonization, emigration, and nationalism in his discussion of
antislavery does indeed present a more comprehensive view of the many
movements that addressed the problem of slavery than do other studies that
have focused on white women's abolitionism or political developments after
1840. Dorsey's attention to black perspectives is notable throughout the
book. Including immigration sheds light on the broad effects of religion
and nationalism that would be lost had this topic been excluded. Broad
claims of comprehensiveness are sometimes undercut, nevertheless, by the
book's strong grounding in research on Philadelphia. The reader may share
the author's evident frustration when sources on black women's activism are
unavailable, for example. The achievements of this book outweigh any
shortcomings.

Dorsey has presented a compact yet solid account of a variety of reforms in
Philadelphia in the early-nineteenth century. He has also demonstrated the
centrality of gender to the social and cultural changes that accompanied
the economic and political developments of the period. His book is an
excellent example of the ways in which the work on gender, race, and class
of the past thirty years can lead to a more nuanced understanding of social
movements. It is a welcome and valuable addition to the ongoing development
of a history of the United States that recognizes the complex interactions
of multiple experiences of gender, race, and class in the social,
political, and economic changes of the early-nineteenth century.

Library of Congress Call Number: HQ1075.5.U6 D67 2002