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Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History Fall 2004 Review Of "The Origins Of Women's Activism: New York And Boston, 1797-1840" By A.M. Boylan Bruce Dorsey Swarthmore College, bdorsey1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history  Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Bruce Dorsey. (2004). "Review Of "The Origins Of Women's Activism: New York And Boston, 1797-1840" By A.M. Boylan". Journal Of Interdisciplinary History. Volume 35, Issue 2. 310-311. DOI: 10.1162/0022195041742256 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/60 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary HistoryThe Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 by Anne M. BoylanReview by: Bruce DorseyThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 310-311Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3656837 .Accessed: 05/09/2014 16:14Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal ofInterdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journalof Interdisciplinary History.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 16:14:24 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions310 BRUCE DORSEY The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840. By Anne M. Boylan (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2oo2) 343 PP. $49-95 cloth $19.95 paper The influential journal articles that Boylan published on the history of women's organizations between 1984 and 1990o, along with Lori Ginzberg's Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven, 1990), rep- resented the crest of a wave of scholarship that can be traced back to the birth of U.S. women's history. Boylan's latest book has built on that foundation and added significant new insights and a broader angle of vision to the history of women's benevolent activism. The Origins of Women's Activism examines the earliest years of women's organizations in the United States, exhaustively examining the memberships of over seventy-five associations in New York City and Boston prior to 1840. Not designed to be a comparative history of each city's women's organi- zations, the work utilizes a social-history analysis of the "life histories" of urban activist women to demonstrate what Boylan sees as the reciprocal relationship between women's organizations and the formation of a he- gemonic bourgeois gender system in nineteenth-century America. As Boylan maintains, the "founders of women's organizations helped create and reproduce a gender system to fit the times" (16). Much like her previous articles on women's activism, Boylan argues that life cycle is crucially important for understanding the experiences of benevolent women. Not only did married women dominate positions of leadership in their associations; women activists also engaged in a bal- ancing act of their domestic and organizational responsibilities. Yet, de- spite the social authority vested in their role as wives and mothers, these women rarely mentioned their domestic lives in their records and publi- cations. Thus could benevolent women elide any conflict between their public labors and their household duties, and position themselves as pro- tectors of individuals outside the boundaries of "true womanhood" and the middle class. This volume comes to life when Boylan paints the life portraits of five representative women activists who bridged the diversity of social experiences that characterized activist women in the early republic. This chapter reveals both the promises and a few of the shortcomings of this book. By examining the experiences of Catholic and African-American women activists in dialogue with more prevalent white Protestant women, Boylan moves closer to developing the kind of broad and in- clusive approach that the history of gender and activism requires. No existing work comes anywhere near what Boylan has done in exposing how gender informed the differences between the organizational actions of Protestant and Catholic women. Some readers might wish that Boylan had found a way to intersperse these lively personal histories throughout the whole book rather than isolating them in a separate chapter. Others might wonder why no activist woman from the "reform" era deserved a life portrait. This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 16:14:24 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsREVIEWS I 311 Boylan depicts the trajectory of women's activism in New York and Boston as the linear movement of three overlapping but distinct phases or "waves" of activism-the first being the founding generation of benevolent societies (1797-I806), the second involving the triumph of evangelical organizations (1812-1820), and the third coinciding with the tidal shift from charity or missionary actions to more radical calls for ending such social practices as slavery, prostitution, or selling alcohol (1820-1840). But Boylan has not given equal attention to the reform phase, which serves instead as a foil to demonstrate the contrasting life course and organizational apparatus of the early generations of benevo- lent women. Choosing to end this study in 1840 highlights this dilemma. Not only are the life stories of reforming women underexamined, but her wonderful contrast of the experiences of Catholic and Protestant women calls for an extension of this analysis into the era of large-scale Irish Catholic immigration and nativism in the i840s. Overall, however, readers will discover one of the most comprehensive social histories of women's organizational activities in Boylan's fine volume. Bruce Dorsey Swarthmore College A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Compara- tive Perspective. By Peter Kolchin (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State Univer- sity Press, 2003) 124 pp. $22.95 Kolchin offers "an extended analytical essay designed to explore old questions in new ways" (6). This work of both history and historiogra- phy pays particular attention to slavery and emancipation, the Civil War, and the meaning and source of southern identity. As elsewhere, Kolchin in this book makes a strong case for the use of comparative history. In- deed, he argues that "analysis that focuses on one case or locale but places it in a broader-comparative-framework" is particularly appro- priate for the study of the South (3-4). The book is divided into three main parts. In the first part, Kolchin compares the South to the North, or what he terms the "un-South." He examines both what the public and historians have said about this com- parison and how pronouncements about the South versus the North have changed over time. His key point is that efforts to distinguish the South make sense only within a broad national context. He also argues that what most distinguished South from North were slavery and the Civil War. The higher a region's percentage of slaves and the greater a region's support for secession, the more southern was that region. In the second part, Kolchin insists that despite southerners' clear conception of their difference from other Americans, there were also "many Souths." Change and variation existed between areas and times in the South. Using the density of blacks, either slave or free, and the This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 5 Sep 2014 16:14:24 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  The Origins Of Women\u27s Activism: New York And Boston, 1797-1840  By A.M. Boylan

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Review Of The Origins Of Women\u27s Activism: New York And Boston, 1797-1840 By A.M. Boylan

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