Reviewed by Susan Branson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2

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Reviewed by Susan Branson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Susan Branson, Syracuse University

Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850. By Rodney Hessinger. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 263 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
This clearly written, excellent book chronicles the early Republic's version of an age-old dilemma: how to check, channel, and ideally control unregulated youth run amok. But this study is not a book about the lived experience of young men and women. Rather it is an examination of reformers' reactions to the perceived social disorder of young adults and the youth culture of the day. Rodney Hessinger situates this exploration of reform and reformers within a larger framework of the formation of middle-class identity. To focus geographically what might otherwise have been a vast and unwieldy undertaking, Hessinger looks at six specific categories of reform in Philadelphia. He devotes a chapter each, with a particular example, to culture (novels), asylums (the Magdalen Society), education (the University of Pennsylvania), religion (the Sunday School movement), the marketplace (advice manuals for self-made men), and sexuality (antimasturbation literature).	1
Hessinger argues that seduction tales exemplify a societal shift underway in this era through a rejection of the eighteenth century's gender-neutral culture of sensibility in favor of a sentimentalism that emphasized female vulnerability without the complement of male responsibility. Novels, mirroring social changes, began to depict men as fundamentally immoral, creating a binary, gendered moral universe. The value of these novels as agents of personal reform is hard to determine, but Hessinger's treatment of them illuminates the assumptions about human behavior that provoked reform activities in the decades that followed.	2
The analysis of novels segues nicely into the second subject of reformers' attention: the fallen woman. The efforts of the Philadelphia Magdalen Society demonstrate the inability of reformers to look beyond the seduction narrative to explain the causes of prostitution in the early nineteenth century. The consequence of this failure was the development of an aggressive attitude toward the very women the society was designed to help. As case records from the society reveal, many of the inmates failed to live up to the expectations of their benefactors. Some of the life histories do read like the seduction novels, which bolsters Hessinger's earlier argument. These women told the society what it expected to hear. But over time the seduction trope seems to have worn thin. It was replaced by an inversion of the original discourse: now prostitutes were the victimizers of young men, with the much-studied Helen Jewett murder trial a prime example of this assumption. The Magdalen Society ultimately failed in its mission. Only a handful of individuals applied for entry in any given year. To the reformers this lack of interest was a serious indictment against fallen women because, evidently, they did not wish to be redeemed.	3
If young women failed to be demure, virtuous, and redeemable, young men were no better. Colleges in the early Republic suffered through an epidemic of riotous, undisciplined, and antiauthoritarian students. Hessinger takes the University of Pennsylvania as a case in point. The goals of a college education for the youth of America—citizenship training, responsibility, maturity—were disconnected from the reality of life at these institutions. Money was at the root of this bad behavior. Schools were financially dependent on and therefore often pandered to their clients. They rarely expelled even the worst offenders if parents paid the tuition. Immaturity added to the problem. Most students entered college in their middle teens. Colleges of the early Republic handled today's high-school-age student. As a solution to this rebellion of youth, colleges developed a system of meritocracy. Yes, grades began in the early Republic. This strategy was designed to divide and conquer, to dissolve horizontal bands of loyalty among students, and to emphasize individual achievement. Change did not occur overnight. As Hessinger points out, "until a college degree became a necessary credential for admittance into the practice of various occupations, students had little to lose in spurning the judgment and rules of college authorities" (94).	. . .

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