Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (review)

Antebellum American reform is a perennial historical topic, though views have shifted dramatically over the years. Progressive historians portrayed antebellum reformers as exemplars of democracy, whereas more cynical consensus historians interpreted reform as social control by a status-conscious evangelical middle class. Subsequently, social historians moved beyond the study of elite leaders to the rank and file, among whom women's historians found not only many women reformers but a distinctive women's culture. Given the richness of this existing literature, at first glance, there would seem to be little new to say about reform, but Dorsey shows otherwise. Dorsey makes a major contribution to reform literature by showing how gender ideologies "shaped the ways reformers marked the boundaries of race, nation and class" in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1850 (2). More deftly and more comprehensively than previous works in gender history, Dorsey shows precisely how gender participated in the relationships of power that created and maintained inequality. By showing so clearly how gender works, he moves gender studies off the discourse dime into action.

At the heart of the book are examinations of four topics: poverty, drink, slavery, and immigration. In each chapter, Dorsey begins by identifying the gendered ideologies of male and female reform groups, and then shows how their reform activities interacted with different racial and class positions. These examinations are not static snapshots but serious efforts to describe "a dynamic and contested process" (243). Not only did the goals of reformers change, but all of their actions occurred in a rapidly changing antebellum society that was simultaneously coping with the effects of the market revolution, the rise of the ideology of free labor, and the growth of American nationalism. All of this dynamism and contestation makes for a busy book, but Dorsey's clear and tightly argued exposition keeps what could have been a sprawling monster in hand.

Because of the novelty of fully developed "holistic" gender analysis (Dorsey's term) and his even-handed treatment of race and class as well as gender, the book is full of surprises. Familiar relationships between well-known episodes in reform shift, and new perspectives emerge. The chapter on slavery may be the most clearly revisionist. Dorsey pays a lot of attention to the American Colonization Society, usually dismissed as ineffectual. He argues that colonization schemes were tied to notions of patriotic and political white masculinity that deeply appealed to white men, rendering most of them hostile to later anti-slavery efforts. Dorsey submits that African-American men and women and white women formed the core of Philadelphia's abolitionist societies. Although other historians have recently acknowledged their participation, Dorsey is the first to insist on their centrality to abolitionist action. He also maintains that because colonization reformers tied their movement so closely to popular notions of political masculinity, the reform efforts of nonvoting African-American men and women were automatically stigmatized as radical, thereby pushing them in that direction. As a result, "black and white women abolitionists developed one of the most radical critiques of gender and racial inequality that Americans encountered in the nation's first century" (186). This assertion is not new, but the novel way in which Dorsey builds his narrative, uncovering new causal links, definitely is. Examples from other chapters similarly lend a fresh perspective on familiar material.