| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Tina Stewart Brakebill. "Circumstances are Destiny": An Antebellum Woman's Struggle to Define Sphere. (Civil War in the North.) Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 255. $34.95.

This book is a biography of Celestia Rice Colby, a nineteenth-century Ohio school teacher, dairy farmer, reformer, and writer. Tina Stewart Brakebill attempts to put Colby's life into historical context, exploring it in relation to nineteenth-century farm life, reform movements, gender ideology, and the Civil War. The title is from an 1857 quote in Colby's diary in which she laments the disjuncture between the great aspirations she had for her life, and the little she felt she had accomplished with it. Her circumstances at the time—she was a married farm woman, the mother of young children, living in the home of her mother-in-law—had overwhelmed her, and left her no time to strive for other goals. Brakebill argues that Colby's frustrations and disappointments were rooted in the concept of "separate spheres," and that Colby spent much of her adult life—often unsuccessfully—struggling against this constraining notion of womanhood.

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