Citizenship and the Origins of Women's History in the United States

Chapter 6 Caroline Dall's Usable Past: Women and Equal Citizenship

Chapter 6 Caroline Dall’s Usable Past: Women and Equal Citizenship As 1852 drew to a close, Caroline Dall grumbled in the pages of her journal, ‘‘Finished Miss Kavenaugh’s ‘Women of Christianity,’ and meditate a review of that stupid book Mrs. Hale has put out ‘Woman’s Record.’ I wish I could write it over, and consider it no small misfortune that the task fell into her hands.’’1 Dall was living in Toronto at the time, where her husband was the minister to a local congregation, and she had not yet become actively involved in the movement for woman’s rights, though her antislavery connections were drawing her into those debates. A month after muttering about Hale in her journal, Dall produced a review criticizing Woman’s Record for The Una, Paulina Wright Davis’s fledgling journal devoted to the cause of woman’s rights. Over the next two decades, as Dall became more committed to the movement, she increasingly defined herself against Hale and the narrative of national progress that Hale championed. Dall took the bits and pieces of history that were scattered through the woman’s rights conventions of the 1850s (some of which she had contributed) and began to expand them into an alternative vision of women’s history that legitimated the demands for universal citizenship raised by woman’s rights activists. Beginning with short essays on historical figures for The Una, which Dall later included in her 1859 book, Historical Pictures Retouched, and continuing through lectures and writings in the late 1850s into the 1860s, Dall developed both a critique of history and new kinds of history writing that championed equal citizenship for women and men. It was a project that culminated in one of her most successful works, The College, the Market , and the Court, which she published in 1867. As she explored issues of Usable Past 165 economic, intellectual, and political citizenship, Dall took on many of the historical arguments that preceded her writing: the corruption women brought to politics, the nature of their intellectual abilities, and the effects of their public activities on their personal morals and family life, rewriting that history to tell a different story. In doing so, she developed an extensive critique of the role of history in shaping public opinion, injecting a new kind of self-consciousness into the writing of women’s history that had been absent in earlier efforts. Dall’s criticisms of history, as with all of her history writing, were tied overtly to her commitment to reform and woman ’s rights. This meant that she not only championed equal citizenship, but also justified the need for reform with a historical trajectory that often suggested decline rather than progress. Like Hale, she sought to rehabilitate the reputations of some women in the past who had been maligned, but she did so not by promoting empathy with motherhood (as Hale did) or sympathetic identification with female patriotism (as Ellet did) but through allegories meant to justify simultaneously the activities of women who transgressed traditional gender norms in both the past and present. Dall’s history writing faltered, however, as she struggled for recognition from various factions of the woman’s rights movement and failed to obtain it. Instead, she moved into the emerging world of social science. As a founding member of the American Social Science Association (ASSA) in 1865, she was one of the earliest proponents of using ‘‘scientific’’ data in her writing, but she never embraced the ‘‘objective’’ stance that professional historians would use to define their new profession. Committed to the use of data for purposes of reform, Dall moved instead in the direction of social engineering by the end of the 1860s, leaving the project of re-writing women’s history to others. What she left behind, however, was a new set of questions for linking women’s citizenship and women’s history. Women’s History and the Dangers of Public Opinion In one of her earliest essays on the women of Renaissance Bologna, Dall warned her readers about the insidious nature of public opinion, particularly with respect to women. ‘‘Whoever writes in the present day can hardly remain neutral with regard to the responsibleness of women towards women,’’ Dall claimed. ‘‘Let every conscious woman beware, lest an unlucky witticism, a smart saying, or a careless slur, injure for ever a reputation of which she knows nothing with certainty. Public opinion is a mingled USE (2024...