“Circumstances are Destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere by Tina Stewart Brakebill (review)

BOOK REVIEWS argument in favor of murder or suicide, nor does it enhance our understanding of life at the American periphery Paradoxically,the greatest value of this work lies in the reluctance of the authors to articulate a new argument. Instead, Ev His Oiut Ha) id? provides an introduction for the popular audience to the process of historical rese·arch. By ofTering wellreasoned arguments both for and against verdicts of murder · and suicide, the authors reveal the creativity born of controversy, disabusing readers of the common misconception that historians are merely passive chroniclers of events and that facts speak for themselves. Lawrence B. A. Hatter University of Virginia Tina Stewart Brakebill. " Cimimstances are Destiny": An Antebellum Woman' s Struggle to Define Sphere. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press,2006. 255 pp. ISBN 9780873388641 ( cloth), $ 34.95. By all accou its, including her own, Celestia Rice Colby led the outw· ardly ordinary life of a midni ieteenth century farm wife iii Ashtabula County, Ohio. I Ier family was among the earliest to settle in the area known as the Western Reserve, once part of Connecticut and considered a cultural extension of New England . Imbued with a strict Calvinist sensibility ,Colbyas Brakebill refers to her throughout came ofage during an era ofprofound religious, social, political, and economic change in the United States, a period that included the Second Great Awakening;the development of a market economy and its consequent imptict on gendered spheres of labor; the growing importance of Republican Motherhood, and the temperance, antislavery and woman' s rights movements. All of these movements and ideas had a direct impact on Colby,as shown iii the journals , diaries, and published works she left behind, now deposited in the Colby Collection at Illinois State University Brakebill has judiciously used these m·aterials to reconstruct the life of this intelligent but tortured woman who " struggled to obtilin a harmony between family and personal ambition " ( 31). Colby's life tracked great historical events, which provided impetus for her gradual radicalization. She married in 1848, the same vear as the Seneca Fills utiventioti, about two hundred · and fift, miles away trom her home in Cherry Valley, Ohio. As the wife of · a dairy fariner, Colby 's domestic dutiesin addition to giving birth to and bringing up four children in the span of five yearsincluded cheese making, an arduous and timeconsuming art practiced iii Ashtabula County,which contemporaries dubbed " cheesedom." Still, Colby fi, und time to write,publishing approximately forty pieces between 1853 and 1857 that covered such topics as raising virtuous sons for the new Republic to producing proper cheese. Beginning in 1858, Colby's writings became more political as she sided with the " ultras on the slave question and women' s rights and published in the AntiSla ' very Bugle. As an ultra, Colby believed that the government sanetioned slavery and thus " the Union [ was_] not worth saving" ( 82).On the woman question, Colby hoped to " stir up a deeper hatred for domestic and home oppression which is so common that both oppressor and oppressed are sometimes half conscious of it ( 154). Colby likened women' s situation to that of " the contented slave," a rhetorical, if not realistic, analogy often SPRING 2007 71 BOOK REVIEWS used by women' s rights advocates before the Civil War. Living in the land ofJohn Brown and in the middle of the antislavery,temperance , · and women' s rights speaking circuits, Colby still seemed unable to find a sympathetic soulnot even in her husband, who disappeared from family records after 1884. « Oh for the presence of a kindred I . heart, she wrote, who could understand me without words, and sympathize in silence " ( 58).Brakebill vividly depicts the disconnect between Colby's personal life and her public writings, a separation she w· as never able to reconcile. Sadly,Colby' s observation th· at circumstances are destiny "predated twentiethcentury notions that for women, anatomy is destiny." In Colby's words, " I am a strange, incomprehensible being,and live in a hidden world. My outward life and inner life are not the same,they have no points of resemblance. Like two vast continents,they are sep arated by an ocean of mystery" ( 110). Susan A...