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256CIVIL WAR HISTORY communal living were no more unusual at the time than experiments with popular democracy, public education, or the factory system. With as many as 1 20 members in residence at one time, the Northampton Association was larger than most antebellum organizations, too. To label "come-outers" as failures, he insists, is to ignore the need of the larger society to respond to their radical challenge and reexamine its own premises. Indeed, radical beliefs did not destabilize the community. Dissenters were typically replaced with new recruits , and reformist zeal made the economic problems suffered by the silk industry easier to tolerate. Only when disunion became a goal for Garrisonians did enthusiasm flag, because such a political objective could not be achieved through social reorganization. After ending the association, members followed different paths in their continuing quest for social change, but their subsequent choices were invariably influenced by what they had concluded from their experiment in association. Clark's definitive study comments on numerous issues raised in other studies of communities. He sees women responding to community according to their own ideologies rather than gender alone. Social networks of families, neighbors , and ideological soulmates supplied the community recruits. Rather than being dominated by charismatic leaders, members were more radical than the community's founders. Although a total of only 240 people ever lived in the commune, Clark has managed to glean from their experiences with everything from silk making to hydropathy a compelling view of New England (and radicalism) in transition. Phyllis F. Field Ohio University The First Woman ofthe Republic: A Cultural Biography ofLydia Maria Child. By Carolyn L. Karcher. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. xxv, 756. $37-95ยท) William Lloyd Garrison once referred to Lydia Maria Child as "the first woman of the republic"; Carolyn Karcher, who teaches English at Temple University, uses this phrase as the title ofherbiography ofChild. The fact that Garrison held Child in such esteem and her importance to the abolition movement make it difficult to understand why she is not a better-known figure in the history of antebellum America. Her obscurity becomes even less comprehensible when one takes into consideration that she also was a pioneer of children's literature and an innovator ofgreat significance in the fields of fiction and journalism. All these accomplishments came at a time when women were supposed to stay exclusively within the domestic "sphere," yet Child managed to make quite an impact on the broader American public. Karcher is determined that Child get her due in the history of antebellum American culture. BOOK REVIEWS257 Unfortunately, Karcher does not succeed in her task. It is not because her subject lacks tremendous importance, but because Karcher consistently displays a lack of historical understanding. Her grasp of antebellum history is, at times, shaky, as when she conflates the "republican" ideology of eighteenth-century Americans with the ideology of the early Republican party (568). The party may have chosen its name because of the positive values Americans associated with the label, but party members departed significantly from earlier beliefs. Such mistakes, however, do far less damage to the book's credibility than does the author's penchant for projecting contemporary values onto Child instead ofrecognizing that her beliefs were firmly rooted in antebellum culture. Karcher subtitles her study a "cultural biography," yet her habit of assuming that Child believed and acted as if she lived in the present betrays a serious misperception of the culture Child did live in. Karcher delves into Child's fictional work in great detail, in the faith that the characters of Child's literary imagination unlock the secrets of Child's personality. Therefore, the reader confronts assertions such as the following on a regular basis: "Child would spend a lifetime coping with the psychic wounds left by her mother's illness and death (5)." Despite the fact that children raised in the early nineteenth century frequently suffered the loss of a parent, Karcher treats Child as if she had a uniquely traumatic childhood and reads her fiction as if it describes the feelings of a graduate of a twelve-step group rather than invention. Child also married a man who turned out to...

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