Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America, and: Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women (review)

The two books reviewed here have come from English departments and bear several of the trademarks of that discipline. T. Gregory Garvey's Creating the Culture of Reform is a "partly theoretical project" that foregrounds its contributions to political and cultural theory. While Garvey relies on the work of historians in piecing together the history on which his work is based, his primary interlocutors are readers of Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls, and their critics. The essays in Our Sisters' Keepers are not so rigorously theoretical in their aims or approach, but they too, by an understandable disciplinary bias, are less engaged with (or up to date on) historical narratives and more interested in the literary contributions of a cohort of nineteenth-century female benevolence writers.¹ As a result, some of the arguments made in both books will seem to historians already well established, while others stand in need of some interdisciplinary translation. Nevertheless, intellectual and cultural historians will find much in these pages from which to benefit. Garvey highlights an important genealogy for American democracy, and the volume on benevolence literature unpacks a distinctive articulation of American selfhood. Besides their disciplinary origins, the two books seem to have little in common—one being an exercise in historically grounded political theory, and the other taking a close and careful look at a literary genre that despite its contemporary pervasiveness no longer attracts much attention. That being said, the books do advance arguments that allow for fruitful comparison.

The title of Garvey's book is precise if somewhat opaque to nonspecialists. Garvey is principally interested in the early nineteenth-century emergence of a culture of reform, which, while incapable of arresting the accelerating political polarization in the young nation, nonetheless created "instruments of public dialogue" that addressed the nation's "most threatening and divisive questions" (1). Garvey's "culture of reform" is thus fundamentally a "mode of debate," rather than a group of reformers or their institutions. And he argues that this culture's significance lies in its bringing about a right of "access to critical public discourse," which played a decisive role in emerging definitions of American equality and citizenship (199).

According to Garvey, the culture of reform originated in the religious disestablishment struggles of the Revolutionary years. As Americans wrestled with social fragmentation and moral uncertainty, they turned first to democratic religion—evangelical revivals, in particular—to reassure themselves of cosmic order. In so doing, evangelicals pioneered certain "modes of publicity" that would later flourish outside specifically religious spheres (1). For Garvey, although religious contexts were important seedbeds for reform, religious institutions could not ultimately address the full range of social divisions in America, so the culture of reform quickly spilled over into civic arenas. Indeed, even specifically religious debates like the Unitarian controversy soon migrated to the pluralistic public sphere as both sides sought public legitimacy. Thus while the culture of reform emerged in a religious context, religious leaders and institutions simply could not contain it. Still, according to Garvey, reform's culture remained indebted to evangelical Christianity's "momentum" and "spiritual and salvific goals," even as it carried these things "outside the boundaries of religion." Emerson's case is paradigmatic for Garvey, because what began as his quest for spiritual sincerity ended with "an effort to imagine sincere civil dialogue" (166–67). Arguing along these lines in each of his chapters, Garvey suggests why reformers and reform movements in the United States have always retained close ties with religious cultures even while they have generally refused to be bound by them.

After unpacking this theory-driven argument in the introduction and first...