| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nancy Isenberg. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 319. Cloth $45.00, paper $16.95.

This book is a fascinating examination of antebellum feminists' "rights discourse" on family, state, and church. Nancy Isenberg presents these women as skillful political theorists and commentators who systematically critiqued masculinized constructions of authority and consent, publicity, and equal protection. Isenberg takes a seemingly disparate collection of their concerns, ranging from dress reform to the political implications of "manifest destiny," and organizes them thematically to produce a broad-ranging yet focused analysis of the language of the women's rights movement. 1

Isenberg's exploration of the notion of publicity and the limitations it imposed on women's activism effectively challenges the lingering private sphere/public sphere dichotomy. She does offer an alternative model of gendered divisibility that brings free-born women's protests against their inherited political and social identities into sharper focus. As Isenberg reminds us, middle-class female reformers did not have trouble slipping out of the physical confines of their households; but once in public, women had to contend with a political culture that defined their non-domestic activities and the sentiments behind them as essentially and necessarily nonpolitical. 2

According to Isenberg, "rather than restrict women to the home or family, the democratic variation of the bourgeois public sphere rationalized gender inequality by making sure women were seen first as social rather than political beings" (p. 66). Although expected to contribute to civil society in some critical and very visible ways, women could not assume that these contributions elevated them to the level of political agents. Those who claimed such agency invited public disfavor for openly defying the rule that their sex must remain politically unobtrusive. . . .

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