Reviewed by Nicole Eustace | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Nicole Eustace | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Nicole Eustace, New York University

The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780–1830. By Martha Tomhave Blauvelt. Jeffersonian America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 287 pages. $39.50 (cloth).
If wives and mothers of the early Republic enjoyed a decrease in the physical labor that marked the daily rounds of their colonial counterparts, historians have established that their familial and societal contributions did not diminish accordingly. From educating their children to serving as exemplars of virtue, middle-class white women supplied crucial symbolic and actual services as republican mothers and republican wives. In her new book, The Work of the Heart, Martha Tomhave Blauvelt argues that until now we have overlooked another highly significant element of these women's labors: the emotional work they performed. As the cultural influences of literary sensibility, evangelical Christianity, and republican theory combined to promote the sentimentalization of womanhood, the production of feeling became one of women's most important tasks. In an engagingly written study that draws extensively on the ideas of sociologists such as Arlie Russell Hochschild and Erving Goffman, Blauvelt argues that "labor need not be paid or public to comprise work." If we "regard emotions as labor," we can "move labor fully into the 'private' sphere" (5) and render women's contributions to the life of the early Republic more visible.	1
Seeking for evidence in the diaries of young, white, northern, Christian, middle-class women (qualifiers she is scrupulous about incorporating into her analysis), Blauvelt details how such women made meaningful contributions to the social status enjoyed by all members of their families. As much as knitting lace or learning to dance, the cultivation of feeling established young women and their families as respectable and refined. (Such work was especially suited to the young because, as they entered the marriage market, these women mixed more in society and had greater opportunities to establish reputations than at any other time in their lives.) Blauvelt finds that in socially ambitious middle-class households, such emotion work may have been valued more highly than prosaic tasks. All of her diarists recorded considerable housework in their years after marriage, indicating that all must have learnt to perform this mundane labor in girlhood. The higher a family's social status, however, the more likely a diarist in her courting years was to omit mentioning household chores in favor of cultivating a tone of refined sensibility. Blauvelt details how such women were taught to school their emotions informally by reading sentimental fiction and formally through the careful curricula of girls' schools. In analyzing a particularly wonderful set of diaries written on assignment at the Litchfield Female Academy, Blauvelt finds that girls were encouraged to feel less for themselves than for others; in so doing they could embody the standards of selfless virtue called for by republicanism while also maintaining the traditional selfeffacing stance of womanhood.	2
The implications of emotion for the development of the individual self represent another important strand in Blauvelt's analysis. Despite the culture of sensibility's stress on the importance of cultivating selfless concern for others, Blauvelt notes, in conjunction with literary scholars such as Janet M. Todd, that the inward turn encouraged by sensibility could tend to the promotion of individualism.¹ Her young diarists seem to have spent as much time admiring their own feelings as sharing them. In this sense, Blauvelt finds that emotion work, far from always being unpaid labor, might have allowed women to pay wages to themselves. Still, Blauvelt questions the authenticity of the voice girls created in imitation of sentimental fiction, arguing that sensibility "threatened to obscure ... individuality" (48).	. . .

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