| 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

Alison Piepmeier. Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina. 2004. Pp. 278. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
Alison Piepmeier examines various ways that women's bodies were "out" in nineteenth-century America. In so doing, she joins the effort to challenge and complicate the familiar dichotomies of women's history: public versus private, agent versus victim. Situating herself "within the field of poststructuralist feminist scholarship" (p. 4), Piepmeier draws upon multidisciplinary approaches to the body. Her study spans from the 1830s to the close of the nineteenth century as she rereads the texts and lives of five women—Anna Cora Mowatt, Mary Baker Eddy, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Sarah Josepha Hale—all the while placing the female body at the center of her interpretation. Piepmeier analyzes each woman's discursive strategies as she presented herself in public, repeatedly reminding readers of the material and cultural limitations at work upon these particular bodies.	1
Piepmeier opens her study with a consideration of Mowatt, a popular stage actress and the least familiar of the women studied. The chapter devoted to her focuses on her Autobiography of an Actress; or Eight Years on the Stage (1853). Piepmeier uses this text to lay out the themes and strategies of nineteenth-century female embodiment that unify her study. Mowatt's book offers a catalogue of female bodies: "traveling bodies, athletic bodies, and sick bodies" as well as "violated and freakish bodies" (p. 18). Piepmeier then shows how Mowatt juxtaposed these bodies to present herself as a respectable woman in public—no easy trick for an actress at this time.	. . .

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