| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce Dorsey. Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 299. $39.95.
Bruce Dorsey demonstrates the advantages of applying gender analysis to a topic already well worked by historians of politics, religion, and women. His examination of reform movements in the antebellum North yields valuable new insights into the ways that men and women of various classes, religions, and ethnicities addressed the social problems of the new republic and simultaneously reconstructed gender ideals, identities, and roles. Dorsey diligently traces economic, political, social, and ideological change over time, lucidly explaining why an evolving democratic republic, a market economy, wage labor, and evangelical Christianity combined to make poverty more visible and problematic, change patterns of alcohol consumption, exacerbate awareness of the political and moral inconsistencies of slavery, and raise questions about citizenship in general and immigration in particular.	1
As evidence of the multiple meanings of gender for various groups, Dorsey cites the public rhetoric of leaders as well as the diaries, correspondence, minutes, and membership records of more ordinary participants in reform. He also employs graphic evidence, songs, novels, plays, and blackface minstrelsy to bolster his argument. By acknowledging diversity and the contradictions between values and actions that reformers struggled to reconcile, Dorsey avoids ascribing one set of motives or actions to a single group. Although he focuses on rich resources from Philadelphia, Dorsey offers ample context from a broader northern urban context.	. . .

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