Jane Turner Censer

Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War.

A collection of essays on gender in 19th-century USA, which explores specifically all major aspects of womens roles in the American Civil War.

Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South (review)

for women’s sexual comfort.” But she also asserts that the emphasis on male sexual initiative “sustained male dominance in a new, more sexualized form” (p. 215). Then she concludes: “Yet this framework did not completely overwhelm the elements that spoke to women’s sexual needs, and it remains historically significant that such elements appeared in the texts” (p. 216). I admire Simmons’ rejection of one-sided, even conspiratorial, interpretations of these sexual advice manuals. And I agree that is it important to counter the idea that no progress occurred in the struggle for women’s individual fulfillment between the end of the suffrage movement and the beginning of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. But this thesis leaves the reader unclear about Simmons’ ultimate assessment of the impact of companionate marriage on the emergence of today’s more egalitarian values about sexuality and marriage. Was companionate marriage, despite all its limits, a critical step in establishing ideals that feminists, and later gays and lesbians, could use to challenge gender inequality and heterosexual privilege? Did it, as the inside cover flap of the book maintains, contain “the seeds of second-wave feminists’ demands” for transforming marriage? or was it a mass of contradictions that continually raised expectations of gender equality and personal fulfillment only to frustrate them, and created dissatisfactions that would eventually explode the precepts of companionate marriage rather than push them beyond their initial limits? And if the latter was the case, how many of those contradictions and tensions are still with us? The fact that these questions occur to the reader, however, is tribute to the breadth of Simmons’ research. Her book is a treasure trove of information and interpretation that contributes important new perspectives on the history of sexuality and marriage.

Welfare and Charity in the Antebellum South (review)

in Australia during the formative period of its labor politics; Australians were never dragged into the conflicts that divided Marxists from Lasalleans as deeply as Americans were, to the Americans’ detriment. Archer’s conclusion that Australia shared many of America’s most salient characteristics, and that what made the American experience different was not so much those characteristics as the way they interacted, makes for a powerful argument. Archer builds his case in carefully nuanced chapters, making this the most formidable contribution to the ongoing debate over the nature of American exceptionalism made by any scholar in decades. Still, this book is no more likely to provide a final word on this subject than Werner Sombart was able to do a century ago. Future scholars are bound to find flaws in Archer’s Australia-U.S. comparison. Even sympathetic readers are likely to believe that Archer downplays the importance of racial politics in the United States, to cite one example. Indeed, it is tricky to liken the position of African Americans in the late 19th century to that of “Kanakas,” the Melanesians who were imported from South Pacific Islands to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland, as Archer does. Surely, Australian race relations differed profoundly from those in the United States in scale, scope, and history. But the measure of Archer’s success is not that he has provided a final word on the question his book poses. Rather it is that he has helped sharpen that question, providing many fruitful avenues for further inquiry which future scholars will no doubt pursue. For this, and for a splendidly thought-provoking book, we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (review)

reform while the successes of the reformers opened up new opportunities for organizing. The interaction of the two with ‘the establishment’ was a good deal more complicated. On the one hand, MacLean tells the story of Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ruth Bader who moved from institutional reformer to part of the establishment. On the other hand, groups like the National Association of Manufacturers seemed to bend with the wind: giving in to pressure from the left in the late 1960s, rallying behind the challenges to affirmative action during the 1970s, then opposing the efforts of the Reagan administration to gut affirmative action in the 1980s because its members had learned to ‘cohabit’ with strategies of inclusion and diversity. MacLean’s focus on the centrality of economic inclusion to the civil rights movement is the book’s great conceptual strength, but the story is made compelling by the author’s investigations in to the work of grassroots organizers and activists who gave the movements impetus when their concerns were largely ignored by national politics. This interest in ‘infrapolitics’ extends to the struggles against affirmative action. MacLean tells an intriguing story of how affirmative action created a rupture between Jews and African American advocates during the 1970s. Even more interesting is her contention that Jewish women were critical to the policy reversal of many Jewish groups that defended affirmative action against the Reagan administration’s offensive. One significant gap in the book is its ignoring grassroots opponents of affirmative action. MacLean’s story of opponents focuses on the strategic machinations of legal advocates and the conservative establishment. The voice of ordinary people—one of the book’s great strengths in the case of civil rights advocates— is largely missing on the right. Working-class white women’s opposition to civil rights and its merging with the struggle over reproductive rights were critical to conservative successes after 1970s. Including this perspective would have provided a fuller and much more complex narrative. That said, Freedom Is Not Enough provides a compelling and illuminating interpretation of the victories and defeats of the economic inclusion movement. It allows us to make sense of the new African American inequality as an outcome that neither civil rights advocates nor their opponents sought, but one that provides both opportunities and challenges for those who believe that distributive justice must remain central to the nation’s political discourse.

The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Volume IV: Defending the Union: The Civil War and the U. S. Sanitary Commission, 1861-1863.

The Years of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, 1865-1874 documents one of the most productive periods of Olmsteds career. During these years he and Vaux created their classic design for Prospect Park in Brooklyn, drew up plans for Riverside and Morningside parks in Manhattan, and designed Chicagos South Park. Its rich assortment of documents will be of interest to historians, landscape architects, urban planners, and anyone concerned with the roots of modern America. The Olmsted Papers project is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and is sponsored by The American University.