| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Barbara Cutter. Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2003. Pp. x, 285. $44.00.
In this book, Barbara Cutter tackles a familiar topic—gender roles in the American antebellum and Civil War years—and yields fresh and intriguing results. Ever since Barbara Welter's path-breaking critique of the "cult of true womanhood" appeared in 1966, American women's history has focused on how real women opposed, defied, modified, restrained, and subverted this gender paradigm. Indeed, although it has become commonplace to point out its many limits, true womanhood, and the related notions of separate spheres and domesticity, remain the standard characterization of antebellum gender roles. One reason may be a lack of compelling alternatives, and this is what Cutter's concept of "redemptive womanhood" provides.	1
Cutter argues that what was truest about an antebellum woman was neither her submission to patriarchy nor her focus on domesticity but "her ability to use her special moral, religious, and nurturing nature to redeem others" (p. 7). "Redemptive womanhood," she suggests, better describes what many women were actually doing in their lives as well as how those actions were understood and interpreted by the larger culture. "[W]omen were actively responsible for the moral and religious health of America" because "only women could sustain the nation's virtue or redeem its sins" (p. 8). Moreover, unlike true womanhood, redemptive womanhood reached across class and racial categories to include working-class, African-American, and immigrant women. Any woman could be a redemptive woman, Cutter finds, because motive, not behavior, was the key to unlocking the categories of "good woman" and "fallen woman" (p. 5).	. . .

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