| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865. By Barbara Cutter. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. x, 285 pp. $44.00, ISBN 0-87580-318-0.)

The doctrines of true womanhood and the separate spheres are twentieth-century constructs used to describe nineteenth-century gender relations. With Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels, Barbara Cutter bravely challenges these paradigms, which depict silent and passive women constrained within their private domestic spheres. Cutter creates a competing ideology, "redemptive womanhood" (p. 3 and passim), which existed alongside and gradually superseded notions that discouraged civic action and confined women to household pursuits. Redemptive womanhood "encouraged women to act in public, to ignore or defy male authority, and to engage in assertive, even militant behavior" (pp. 7–8). It "did not build fences around proper female activities; rather it tore the fences down" and in so doing "allowed women as women to justify their entrance into public debate" (pp. 39, 109).

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