| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael D. Pierson. Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 250. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.

During recent decades, historians have turned their attentions to women's contributions to American antislavery, and to the broader relationships between racial and gender reform during the turbulent antebellum era. Inevitably, perhaps, most of that historiographical attention has focused on the "radical" women—typically associated with the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement—who challenged many of the fundamental assumptions that underpinned gender and marital relations. Michael D. Pierson is well aware of the contributions of radical women, and he never loses sight of their impact on the sectional debates over race and gender. The focus of his book, however, is not on these women. Instead, Pierson is concerned with tracing women's contribution to the political parties that adopted antislavery positions, beginning in the 1840s with the Liberty Party and culminating with the Republican Party's 1860 campaign to elect Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. Pierson reveals that antislavery political parties expressed varying degrees of commitment to the principles of women's rights, and that they presented a range of views of what constituted the "ideal" woman. More significantly, however, Pierson demonstrates that at each stage of the political debate over slavery, the antislavery parties and their political adversaries expressed profoundly different views on questions of marriage, family, and true womanhood. Careful not to overstate his case, he provides further evidence that the sectional debate over slavery was just one aspect of a much broader political and cultural contest over the future shape of the nation.

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