Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (review)

Book Reviews 89 were persuasive. Walter Fisher's Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987) comes to mind throughout her chapters on narrative. Despite these limitations, The Dominion of Voice is an innovative, provocative study that deserves the attention of scholars of American political rhetoric, particularly of the antebellum period. Smith's willingness and ability to roam among such a wide variety of texts produces significant insights and pushes her readers to reassess the relationships among diverse forms of discourse. Smith ably demonstrates that questioning the efficacy of rationality can be a surprisingly reasonable enterprise. Jacqueline Bacon Independent Scholar Glen McClish San Diego State University Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism. By Margaret H. McFadden. Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1999; pp. xiv +288. $29.95. In Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism we are reminded that the Word Wide Web is far from the first technological advancement to revolutionize international communication and to profoundly affect culture. As Margaret H. McFadden explains, during the nineteenth century transformations in travel, publishing, international post, and, especially, completion in 1866 of the first reliable transatlantic telegraph cable link strengthened a well-established tradition of transatlantic female communication. Technological innovations enabled women (most of them white and middle-class or elite) to engage in a variety of pursuits to create international "virtual communities" in which a feminist consciousness began to emerge. By the turn of the century, these connections culminated in establishment of international women's organizations, particularly the 1888 International Council of Women, which McFadden identifies as a "signal event in women's history in the Atlantic community" (6). For scholars interested in communication technologies, the woman's rights movement, and gender studies, Golden Cables of Sympathy promises a great deal. Particularly noteworthy is the chapter on "The 'Miraculous Era' in Communication," which places women's growing international connections within the context of the communication revolution of the nineteenth century. McFadden uses Uncle Tom's Cabin and Harriet Beecher Stowe's tour of Europe to illustrate how transformations in travel, publishing, and literacy led to significant social and intellectual change. Stowe's international success resulted not only from the timeliness of her novel, McFadden argues, but also from advances in the means of communication. Marked improvement in presses, steamships, railroads, and other technologies, she explains, 90 Rhetoric & Public Affairs enabled Uncle Tom's Cabin to be distributed more widely than any novel before it. McFadden's discussion of nineteenth-century communication technologies and their effects on the dissemination of messages provides both examples and source materials for rhetorical scholars who would do well to provide this type of contextualization. Golden Cables is a welcome departure from studies focused narrowly on the activities of American advocates of woman's rights working within the borders of the United States. Although McFadden discusses prominent American figures such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she foregrounds their international activities rather than rehearsing their well-known contributions to the U.S. woman's rights movement. For example, most accounts of Mott's experiences at the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London emphasize that she returned to the United States to organize a woman's rights convention, but McFadden focuses on Mott's lecturing and networking throughout the British Isles. In addition to shedding new light on the activities of well-known activists, McFadden brings to our attention numerous other women from throughout the Western world. Among them is Aleksandra Gripenberg (1857-1913), who served two terms as president of the Finnish Women's Association, was elected to the first Finnish Diet in 1907, thereby becoming one of the first elected women parliamentarians in the world, who owned a library that included at least 400 volumes by renowned women writers, and who maintained a prodigious correspondence with Ernestine Rose and Susan B. Anthony, as well as woman's rights leaders throughout Europe. While McFadden stops short of closely analyzing the rhetoric produced by international women such as Gripenberg, she mentions dozens of speakers and texts heretofore ignored by rhetorical scholars. While Golden Cables...