Book Review

Sex and Citizenship is a complex and challenging book. Isenberg's study of the political and legal theories of antebellum woman's rights activists covers topics as seemingly unrelated as prostitution, church polity, land reform, Sabbatarianism, and suffrage. Isenberg justifies this broad (even unwieldy) range of topics as the only valid means of rescuing the variety and texture of antebellum activism from the spin toward suffrage first imposed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her fellow editors in the History of Woman Suffrage. This unwarranted focus on suffrage, Isenberg argues, has been exacerbated by twentieth-century historians whose studies have so valorized Stanton and suffrage that an entire body of theories about government and governance have slumbered in the archives.	1
Isenberg has reclaimed this intellectual heritage, she says, and expanded the sweep of women's history beyond the hackneyed rhetoric of private and public spheres, domesticity, and voting. Isenberg's inclusion of the full range of topics that galvanized activists in the generation before the Civil War allows her to cover a remarkable amount of ground. The substantive chapters of the book contain consistent interest and insight and pockets of brilliant research and analysis. She focuses first on the importance of constitution making (and the central role of constitutional conventions in the development of political theory) as the key to understanding the motivation and political import of woman's rights conventions. Through such gatherings, and the theoretical arguments deployed there, activists constructed a coherent and powerful theory of rights, exposing the contradictions in regimes of "universal suffrage" that excluded women. Relying on their concept of "co-equality," a term pliable enough to include equality and difference, woman's rights theorists challenged the idea that the body politic in an egalitarian democracy might ever be restricted by notions of physical prowess (the superior strength of men) or protection (military service). Instead, they emphasized competence (capacity to reason) and self-protection (the right to call upon the state for equal protection and due process of law).	2
The commitment to co-equality at all levels led activists, and Isenberg in turn, into debates over the human voice, fashion, and literary and political criticism. They also engaged with legal technicalities, especially those connected with marriage and inheritance. The biblical notion of "one flesh," used in English and American law to support the civil disability of married women known as coverture, was particularly galling to some theorists. They also made much of the structural similarities between the law of slavery, especially the right of recapture, and the law of husband and wife.	3
Equally important was the deployment of political and social power by organizations that mediated and supported structures of private governance (marriage and family) and public governance (local, state, and federal governments)—viz., churches. Woman's rights theorists were deeply involved in debates over the relationship of church and state, including Sabbatarian legislation. They were also keenly aware of the mutual dependence of law and religion in the care and feeding of doctrines such as coverture. To counter the claims of divinely authorized representation of (and, of course, authority over) women by men, activists argued that women were designated "co-sovereigns" by God at the creation. As Isenberg points out, reinterpretation of the creation story "offered an ideological critique that was both political and ethical" (71). If the law of the Creator endorsed co-equality, then all structures—be they social, religious, legal or political—that assumed or enforced the subordination of women were (literally) void ab initio. The logic of such a critique is wide ranging, and as Isenberg's book shows, critics did indeed range wide.	4
There are weaknesses here, to be sure. The book promises more than it delivers and dismisses previous scholarship more than its own contribution warrants. Isenberg frequently hurtles through topics without treating them in depth, lending whole sections of the book a breathless and disjointed quality. For example, she treats fugitive slave laws, capital punishment, the Mexican war, immigration laws, jury duty, seduction, and prostitution all in one chapter. Further, the tone of the work is compromised by an excess of introductory matter deployed as justification for the smorgasbord that follows, much of it critical or outright dismissive of the work of other historians. Anyone who claims that previous scholars have ignored the "religious complexities" of rights talk (10), for example, should be sure of her bibliography, and pay close attention to the theological work of her subjects. But Isenberg apparently has not read Ann Braude's Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston, 1989), Robert Abzug's Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), or Elizabeth Clark's "The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995). All are widely read, closely related to Isenberg's project, and would have enriched and deepened her understanding of the relationship of religious innovation in the antebellum period to women's political struggles within and without churches.	5
These problems of tone and depth make the book difficult to read, but Isenberg's fundamental project remains worthwhile. Sex and Citizenship contributes to the recent scholarship on the multilayered quality of woman's rights rhetoric before the Civil War.	6
Sarah Barringer Gordon University of Pennsylvania

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