| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth R. Varon. We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: Univerity of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. x, 234. Cloth $45.00, paper $16.95.

In this stimulating study, Elizabeth R. Varon addresses several important historiographical and theoretical themes in southern women's history. Drawing on work in political theory and political history, including the concept of "the public sphere" and historical works on the second party system, she examines elite white women's involvement in Virginia's electoral politics during the antebellum years and finds that it was "active, distinct, and evolving." Using a variety of sources, including voluntary association reports, legislative petitions, newspaper accounts, novels, and magazine fiction, Varon disputes the "consensus" that, unlike their northern counterparts, "white Southern women were excluded from participation in the male arena of politics" (p. 1). Through forming voluntary associations, especially colonization societies, she concludes, elite women participated in public debates and shaped prevailing ideas about "female civic duty" (p. 2). Moreover, their activism created "significant continuities between the prewar and postwar eras"; to a great extent, Varon concludes, "Southern women's postbellum political roles and activities were extensions of their antebellum ones" (p. 171). . . .

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