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Book Review
| Kathleen S. Sullivan, Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Pp. 181. $45.00 (ISBN 10-0-8018-8552-3).
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| The field of women's history has dramatically changed in the past decade. Seeing beyond a narrow, liberal view of women's progress, students of women's rights have graduated to more sophisticated methods of analysis. They now look at race, masculinity, class, religion, and the larger range of rights arguments that fueled debates on women's political, civil, and legal status in the United States. Kathleen Sullivan, a professor of political science, has ignored this scholarship. Indeed, she fails to engage with any serious work that challenges her preconceived and uninformed view of nineteenth-century feminism. |
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Sullivan's book is less a scholarly inquiry than a screed against Elizabeth Cady Stanton and liberal feminism. She reduces nineteenth-century feminism to the dangerous language of abstract individualism. In her mind, women's rights discourse has only one song to sing—abstract equality—and can be blamed for all the constitutional extremism that plagues judicial thinking today. Sullivan even claims that the concept of equality found in the Fourteenth Amendment is "absurd in its logic" (8). Thus the rights discourse of early feminists is deeply flawed. Where does she say feminists went wrong? Their love of the abstract rights bearer caused them to reject the common law, with its emphasis on equity, flexibility, gradual change, and most importantly, its acceptance of women's status and domestic obligations as a given condition and necessity of the social order. |
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What is wrong with this picture? Sullivan's caricature of the feminist straw woman is simply wrong. It is easy to reduce women's rights to this absurd paradigm if one ignores the thoughtful scholarship that contradicts this argument. Sullivan relies on only five historical sources: all of nineteenth-century feminism is reduced to Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments, her "Solitude of Self" speech, a few select quotes from the History of Woman Suffrage, Angelina Grimke's Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, and Sarah Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes. If Sullivan had bothered to read the proceedings of the women's rights conventions, the numerous essays in feminist newspapers such as the Lily, the Una, the Revolution, Stanton's personal papers, or the writing of other activists, such as Paulina Wright Davis, Lucretia Mott, Frances Gage, and legal reformers like Judge Elisha Hurlbut—she might have learned that women's rights activists were far more complex and far more subtle in their legal and constitutional thinking. |
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Contrary to what Sullivan claims, feminists did not reject the common law. If she had read the preamble of the Seneca Falls convention, she would have discovered Blackstone's definition of natural law, the working premise of which was not based on the abstract rights but the constitutional right of protection. Yet Sullivan is apparently not interested in doing meaningful research or even understanding feminism. One can reasonably ask why she ignores the work of Ellen Dubois, Rebecca Edwards, Lori Ginzberg, Kathi Kern, Judith Wellman, and my own study of early women's rights discourse, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America? It is not clear whether this is a case of a political scientist doing bad history, or an ideologue merely parroting Christina Hoff Sommers's position in defending "equity feminism," building on Sommers to prove that even first wave feminism took a wrong turn. |
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It is unfortunate that Sullivan so grossly distorts feminist rights discourse, because she explores another argument in her book that is worthy of consideration: the lingering influence of coverture. The author examines how judges and legal writers consciously worked to accommodate coverture to a modern vision of the family. Judges made rulings that preserved family unity, and Sullivan argues that the courts engaged in a balancing act: preserving women's status while acknowledging their newly legislated marital property rights. Similarly, Sullivan's examination of domestic relations, the way judges increasingly distinguished wives and children from servants, demonstrates that the law shaped the status of women indirectly—and through such comparisons. |
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One of the greatest weaknesses of this study is that the author conflates legal status with social experience. In her view, judges are not conservative but reasonable men, who protect the family; they find nothing wrong with their ruling assumption that the performance of domestic duties within the family justifies all sorts of civil and legal disabilities being imposed on all women. The interests of the family trump women's rights. Sullivan seems unaware that it is the husband's rights that are ultimately protected at the expense of women. Though she accuses feminists of promoting unrealistic abstractions, the foolish abstract thinking that judges used—the legal fictions that riddled the common law—is missing from her book. Indeed, too much is missing from this book, because careful research has been sacrificed to simplistic dichotomies and an ahistorical view of the past. |
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| Nancy Isenberg
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| University of Tulsa |
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