Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, and: Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Organized as a series of case studies, Piepmeier's Out in Public focuses on the female body with specific explorations of five women: Anna Cora Mowatt, Mary Baker Eddy, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Sarah Josepha Hale. In addition to her material and discursive analysis of the body, Piepmeier offers a wide range of visual images of women in public, particularly of women's athleticism. Together, the analyses of these texts provide an "alternative iconography" to the familiar images both of men in public and of women in private, domestic settings (19).

One of the many strengths of this book is its rich interdisciplinarity. Piepmeier reads Mowatt's Autobiography of an Actress, for example, in the context of nineteenth-century representations of acting, travel narratives, freak shows, and sentimental portrayals of female invalidism. Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health is situated within discourses of science, including medicine and astronomy. Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech is likewise read within models of nineteenth-century oratory and the tradition of tall tales. This emphasis on cultural contexts and polyvocalism undergirds Piepmeier's boldest accomplishment—the dismantling of the still popular nineteenth-century binaries of public and private, agent and victim. Rather than completely abandoning these dichotomies, Piepmeier instead targets their instabilities, the "fluid interactions between public and private and the simultaneity of victimization and agency" (5). As Piepmeier makes clear, the body is an ideal site for such investigations:

The female body is the defining feature of the private sphere and of the victim paradigm, often coming synechdochally to stand for domesticity and victimization. However, the body is also a site which is mobile and malleable, able to change in response to changing circumstances and able to be configured in terms of various spaces, from the home to the podium. (9)

Testament to this malleability is the impressively diverse configurations of embodiment that Piepmeier uncovers. For example, while Ida B. Wells rejects any association of black female embodiment with victimization and instead uses the image of fully embodied black women to challenge discourses both of lynching and of racialized nationalism, Anna Mowatt uses her own experiences with illness as a "sentimental mask" that "conceals her sensational body" (45). Piepmeier's nuanced reading of Sarah Hale's identification of her corporeality with Godey's Lady's Book similarly shows how print culture "allowed her to exceed the boundaries of that binary and call it into question" (174). The collective result of these five case studies is an often surprising view of nineteenth-century womanhood, one that avoids the stereotypes of domesticated woman and defiant rebel. Most important, Piepmeier's work demonstrates the extent to which nineteenth-century women responded strategically to the varying and often competing discourses surrounding them.

Like Out in Public, Amanda Frisken's Victoria Woodhull's Sexual Revolution explores public womanhood in nineteenth-century America, in this case by focusing on one unconventional woman. The subject of three recent biographies—Lois Beachy Underhill's The Woman Who Ran for President (1995), Mary Gabriel's Notorious Victoria (1998), and Barbara Goldsmith's Other Powers (1998)—Victoria Woodhull is certainly a woman deserving of our attention. She was a vocal advocate for radical sexual politics, owned the first women's brokering firm on Wall Street, and in 1872 she served as the Equal Rights Party's nominee for President of the United States. Although much of Woodhull's life remains a mystery—the authorship of many of her speeches is uncertain, for example, and her own accounts of her life are often unreliable—Frisken's new book offers a compelling addition to these recent...