Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (review)

Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism, by Margaret H. McFadden, pp. xiv + 270. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999, $29.95.

The concept of a "transatlantic world" has become increasingly popular with scholars of nineteenth-century North America, Britain, and Western Europe. Many of us now see the movement of goods, ideas, political and social movements, and, of course, people, across the ocean as definitive of this period and a historical phenomenon worthy of its own study. Margaret McFadden's Golden Cables of Sympathy is another addition to this body of literature, studying, specifically, the history of feminism as a transnational phenomenon. McFadden points to the ongoing and continuous movement of female activists in the United States, Britain, and Europe from the 1820s until the 1880s. The range of McFadden's women subjects is impressive; she examines the travels, writings, and activities of religious women (the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott and the Holiness Movement's evangelical leader Phoebe Palmer), writers (George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frances Trollope), European political radicals (Malwida von Meysenburg and Matilde Franziska Anneke), and utopian reformers (Flora Tristan, Frances Willard, Frances Wright). McFadden also probes the links between feminists in the United States and Britain, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Willard, and Elizabeth Blackwell, and feminists in Scandinavian countries, such as Finnish activist Alexandra Gripenburg. She argues that international feminism cannot be seen as an early-twentieth-century development; rather, the creation of feminist communities across national borders was an ongoing process throughout the nineteenth century. Using the metaphors of matrix, network, and web, as well as the sociological concepts of social network analysis, McFadden argues that interlinked ways and means of communication among women laid the groundwork for more formal, autonomous, and distinctly feminist consciousness in the transatlantic community of the late-nineteenth century.

Although McFadden provides biographical sketches of many well-known British and American feminists, to my mind the more interesting portraits are those of less famous American women, such as the African-American Holiness preacher and former slave, Amanda Berry Smith (1837-1915), as well as those of European women travellers, writers, and activists. McFadden is also to be commended for bringing together such a wide range of women's activism: European political radicalism of the 1840s, 1850s evangelicalism, the abolitionist movement, utopianism (the Owenites and Fourierists, for example), and, of course, the American nineteenth-century woman's rights movement. The women she studies did not all share identical concerns, nor did all of their lives intersect; nevertheless, McFadden's study points to the importance of seeing their work as being shaped by the intersections among transatlantic, local, regional, and national contexts.

McFadden's thorough research, particularly on women who might not be familiar to an Anglo-American audience, is remarkable. Her conception of these women as belonging to something larger than their individual nation-states adds to our understanding of the complexities of nineteenth-century women's activism. Yet I am not sure that her use of sociologically based social network analysis is useful or even particularly appropriate. Feminist (and other) historians have long noted, without having to rely on sociological theory, the presence and importance of social networks, whether in the women's movement or in elite political circles. Why not draw more explicitly upon the insights of the considerable body of work by feminist scholars who have studied women travellers during this period? Moreover, trying to shoehorn the complex patterns of historical trajectories and contingencies into mathematically based configurations such as matrix and web results in a flattening of the various historical contexts of this transatlantic world.

The biographical methods of the book, to my mind, are both its strength and its weakness: a strength because they allow Golden Cables of Sympathy to explore the lives of women such as Smith but a weakness because they are often used uncritically. This problem is clearest when McFadden discusses...