The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1794-1840 (review)

Few historians have attempted to incorporate Catholics into the story of women's emergence into public life in nineteenth-century America. As Maureen Fitzgerald has observed concerning the Progressive Era, Protestantism often functions as an unmarked category in women's history because religion is not analyzed as a source of difference, just as whiteness disappears when the impact of race is only considered for non-whites. Anne Boylan invites historians to redress this problem by including groups founded by Catholic laywomen in her long-awaited study of the country's first women's organizations, The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1794-1840. Boylan's goal is to help explain how the "republican mother" described by historians of the revolutionary period became the "true woman" of the 1830's and after. She points to "the new arenas of collective action" that women opened by forming associations as ideal venues in which to analyze this transition. Lavishly documented, with over 100 pages of appendices, tables, and notes, the book is based on the surviving records of seventy groups and the life histories of over 1000 founders and leaders in New York City and Boston.

Important revelations emerge from this comprehensive study. While the earliest women's groups probably understood their charitable activities as religiously inspired, their goals became much more explicitly religious during theSecond Great Awakening, when women, like men, were inspired by individual conversion experiences to initiate collective projects for the transformation of society along evangelical lines. Women's organizing itself turns outto be far lesscontroversial than it appeared to be to historians who took abolitionists as their example of early organization women. Earlier groups with less controversial goals, Boylan makes clear, aroused little suspicion from the clergy and few charges of departing from their "sphere." Women in groups could do things legally prohibited to their members, especially married members, as individuals.

Boylan moves us in the direction of a religiously plural women's history. Elizabeth Seton is the subject of one of the "Portraits of Organizers" that make some of the most compelling reading in the book. Still, much remains to be done. The study, for example, notes that members of religious orders performed the bulk of charitable labor among Catholics, and interprets this as indicating a lack among laywomen rather than the presence of a distinctive gender system including roles not available to Protestant women. Nuns, not laywomen, Boylan notes, "gained the kind of experience acquired from creating a permanent institution, raising endowment funds, attaining corporate status, and behaving as legal entities" (p. 119). Her book indicates the challenge historians of women will face in transcending Protestant frameworks embedded in the writing of U.S. history. Finally, the story she tells is one in which evangelical ascendance, aswell as the reproduction of class and race, are the primary explanatory themes. One hopes that others will walk through the door she has opened by the inclusion of Catholics to begin to write women's history in which discussions of gender include the impact of distinctive Catholic values, practices, and institutions.