| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1815–1860. By Carolyn J. Lawes. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. x, 265 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8131-2131-0.)

In her study of Worcester, Massachusetts, Carolyn J. Lawes argues the case for antebellum women's public influence and cross-class gender solidarity. She explores women's influence through church discipline, sewing circles, children's advocacy before city and state governments, and the Worcester women's rights conventions of 1850 and 1851. She correlates benevolent women's success with their maternalist ideology and finds cross-class solidarity in an empathy for impoverished women arising from the economic instabilities of their own lives. 1

As a paradigm, maternalism explains the political, social, and cultural behavior of women as the public expression of domestic values associated with motherhood. Lawes defines maternalism as an emphasis on the individuality of each child and a focus on the importance of the mother in meeting children's needs. She sees it as empowering women in Worcester and focuses on its relation to feminism. . . .

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