Book Review

Parlor Politics is the most recent in a series of books linking the history of gender to that of politics. Like several other feminist scholars, Catherine Allgor believes that women's history has tended to focus too exclusively on the so-called "private sphere" and that too much women's political history has concentrated solely on women's rights and allied movements. In this innovative and well-written book (a prizewinner in its dissertation form), she examines women's crucial role in the creation of the national government in the context of Washington City from the administration of Thomas Jefferson to that of Andrew Jackson. Allgor usefully extends and amplifies the arguments of articles and papers written on aspects of this same topic by such historians as Norma Basch, Fredrika Teute and David Shields, Jan Lewis, and Rosemarie Zagarri.

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