Book Review

Canada and the United States

In the 1790s, when Martha Washington, clad in a simple white dress that symbolized this generation's idealized concept of republican virtue, met the public, she sat on a raised platform; a servant introduced the callers, who curtsied to her. Ten years later, in the newly relocated capital in Washington, D.C., when the British foreign minister Anthony Merry first met Thomas Jefferson, the latter was wearing slippers "down at the heels." Twenty years later, Louisa Catherine Adams entertained more than two hundred Washingtonians at her elegant Tuesday soirees, thereby providing a setting for political conversation at the same time that she advanced her husband's presidential chances. In 1828, Martha Jefferson Randolph turned to Margaret Bayard Smith in order to get a patronage position for her nephew. And at Andrew Jackson's inauguration in 1833, an unruly crowd insisted on shaking hands with their leader (something unimaginable in George Washington's time) and in the process nearly crushed the republic's seventh president.

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Such episodes form the evidential basis for Catherine Allgor's engrossing book. Allgor's is the world of etiquette and gossip, entertainment and politics, mixed together in behaviors previously demoted to female frivolity. But as Allgor convincingly argues, social events advance political intentions. Style is cultural substance, and historians neglect the link between society and politics at their peril, especially during a period when there were no precedents and when the idealized concepts of hierarchical authority, republicanism, and democracy awaited incorporation into the body politic. In such circumstances, in Allgor's words, "Here Washington women—both well-known and not—appear as political actors in their own right, using social events and 'the private sphere' to establish the national capital and to build the extraofficial structures so sorely needed in the infant federal government" (p. 1).

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