Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America

Nancy Isenberg. Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Isenberg locates the roots of Antebellum feminism in discussions and activism predating the Seneca Falls convention. She also considers the broader goals of antebellum feminists, who saw suffrage as a means to an end rather than a particular goal in its own right. And that end was to achieve "co-equality", a concept which posited that in a republican society women needed to be allowed the ability to speak for themselves and defend their personal sovereignty--including control over their own bodies--while at the same time living in a separate, gendered sphere. Antebellum feminists were engaged in a complex struggle to redefine the role of women both in their private lives and in the public sphere.

This struggle was complicated because feminists understood that the implications of republican thought--particularly in a society which had sanctioned race-based chattel slavery--on those regarded as "dependents" was fraught with challenges. Women had to find ways in which to engage in a public sphere which was gendered as a (white) male theater of action.

The push for "personhood", then, had to contend both with societal norms restricting the legitimacy of feminine engagement with politics, and longstanding legal norms denying women the agency and legal autonomy to speak or act on their behalf. The push for rights--the right to divorce, the right to own property, guardianship of their own children, etc.--was the real goal of antebellum feminism. Suffrage and appeals to abstract notions of citizenship were a means to an end.

The Romance of Reunion

Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The story of Reconstruction, the Redemption of white rule, and the eventual "reunion" of the Northern and Southern whites a few decades after the end of the Civil War--at the expense of African-Americans, who were pointedly "written out" of the national narrative--is frequently told from the Southern point of view. It was the defeated former Confederacy which had to reckon with the specter of defeat, the unsettling of old racial caste norms, the newly enfranchised African-American vote, the attitude of victorious Northerners, and the prospect of having to redefine their place in the very country they fought four years to dismember.

Silber looks at the story from the perspective of the white North. She finds that in many ways, this is actually a gender history--Northerners, as she points out, had their own anxieties and fears to work out, and they did so partly by casting the South as a feminine contrast to their own presumed masculine mastery and strength.

At the same time, white Northern attitudes towards freedmen would shift along with anxieties about working class agitation and concerns about increased levels of immigration--the notion that Southern whites might understand "the Negro problem" best allowed Northerners both to cease worrying about the consequences of abandoning Reconstruction and it promises, and to allow Southern whites a subsidiary but respectable role in enforcing social and political harmony in "their" section of the country.