2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities, Jun 3, 2017
This roundtable considers the significance of the sixty-year public career of Lucretia Mott (1793... more This roundtable considers the significance of the sixty-year public career of Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) to the history of nineteenth-century transatlantic activism. After a brief moment of scholarly attention marking the 100th anniversary of her death, historians have neglected Mott, arguably the most influential American female activist of her time. Beginning with the publication of the Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (2002), a biography titled Lucretia Mott’s Heresy (2011), and now Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons (forthcoming 2017), there has been renewed attention to Mott as a Quaker minister, abolitionist, woman’s rights advocate, pacifist, freethinker, correspondent, and speaker. The panelists will consider how Mott’s vocal, confrontational, and networked activism, as well as her newly accessible letters and speeches, offer opportunities for research on the complex relationship between religion and reform. The scholars on this roundtable assess Mott’s importance from the perspective of three fields: history, religion, and documentary editing. Two distinguished historians, Anne Boylan and Nancy Hewitt, will discuss her role in the intertwined histories of antislavery, women’s rights, and nineteenth-century movements for equality. As a foremost scholar of Quakerism and related Christian traditions, Ellen Ross will address the intersection of religion and activism in Mott’s life. Finally, Beverly Wilson Palmer, an accomplished documentary editor, will discuss the connection between Mott’s letters and her speeches and sermons. Carol Faulkner, author of the most recent biography, will moderate
The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. By Ann Fabian. (Berkele... more The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. By Ann Fabian. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 255. Illustrations. $39.95.) Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America. By James Perrin Warren. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Pp. x, 202. $40.00.) Here are two books about words, about written and spoken eloquence, about a writer's or a speaker's attempts to reach, convince, and change an audience. Both books analyze groups of nineteenth-century American writers; both seek to understand how writer and reader, speaker and hearer communicated, striving to avoid mutual incomprehension or mistrust. In Culture of Eloquence, a literary scholar climbs the era's Olympian heights to consider how some of its best-known and most revered essayists and orators-among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Frederick Douglass-employed the written and spoken word in the cause of social and political reform. In The Unvarnished Truth, a cultural historian descends into a Stygian world of historical ephemera and returns with armloads of long-buried pamphlets, each of which once attempted to represent the sad-but-true tale of its obscure author. Ann Fabian's subjects may be beggars and ex-convicts, James Perrin Warren's a heavenly crew of orators, yet both groups allow their analysts to consider important questions about how speakers and writers sought to reach their audiences. The books diverge significantly in their approach to words-their meanings and their uses. Warren's is primarily a work of exegesis, or internal analysis of ideas. In it, he carefully dissects his subjects' views on oratorical eloquence and the role of a "culture of eloquence" in promoting social reform. Taking as starting points Emerson's "ideal of reciprocity between word and deed, theory and reality, orator and auditors" (47) and his belief in the ability of eloquent speech to "awaken and intoxicate the audience" (45), Warren explores how seven "figures of eloquence" (27)Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Frederick Douglass, William Gilmore Simms, and Walt Whitman-- embodied, expanded, or altered "Emerson's vision of the reforming power of language" (28). Fabian's book is much more "a social history of a cultural form" (4), the "insistently personal" (3) narrative of the ordinary individual, a narrative that might have originated as a spoken story but ended up being printed (sometimes by subscription) and circulated in pamphlet form. As such, Fabian's book raises fascinating analytical questions about the relationship between words and the experiences they represent (or produce), the cultural work performed by so-called true story narratives, the role of the literary marketplace in turning people's stories into commodities, and the changing meaning of truth in American society. "Truth is a social convention," she asserts arrestingly; it is "the product of agreements among people" (98). Fabian's book analyzes the process by which some people's stories acquired "truth and authority" (7) while others, however similarly experienced, seemed inauthentic. From beginning to end, The Unvarnished Truth is a triumph of wellchosen sources, sensitive reading, shrewd analysis, interesting insight, and engaging writing. In analyzing successive types of narratives-whether of beggars, convicts, fugitive slaves, or Civil War prisoners-Fabian shows both how individuals turned their "misfortunes into assets" (4) and how the market for their stories "made speaking and writing into commodities" (52). Noting that "socially marginal" folk such as beggars employed the "culturally central" (12) act of writing in their quest for an audience, Fabian asks whether reading and writing uniformly "hastened the spread of gentility" (11). …
The double meaning of the title Reforming Men and Women is intentional. Bruce Dorsey has set out ... more The double meaning of the title Reforming Men and Women is intentional. Bruce Dorsey has set out to study both antebellum urban reform and the women and men who sought to reform themselves and others. Using Philadelphia as his canvas, Dorsey aims to paint "a holistic history of gender and reform," one that encompasses not only the experiences of reformers (and some of their clients) but also their use of "concepts and symbols of the masculine and feminine to fashion and advance their reform agendas" (pp. 4, 2). Reformers and their voluntary associations serve as one focal point; the other focus is on specific "sets of problems that northern reformers wished to redress," including poverty, alcohol use, slavery, and immigration (p. 9). Dorsey is less interested in depicting specific reform organizations than in demonstrating that reformers' approaches to major social problems always possessed a "gendered construction" and that "gender shaped the reforms [they] generated in response" to each problem (p. 9). In an opening chapter, he sketches the post-Revolutionary landscape of Philadelphia voluntary societies, a terrain that was changing rapidly as white women and African American women and men first undertook collective public benevolence. In successive chapters, he covers some of the social problems that they identified, moving through the period 1790-1850 in overlapping, layered fashion, as the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s witnessed special attention to specific issues. Throughout, he examines how women and men reformers, both African American and white, acted "as gendered beings," all the while deploying symbols of gender as they addressed pressing social problems (p. 4). Dorsey's interest in reformers and their ideas places him within an old and venerable historiographical tradition. Whether the topic is temperance, poverty, colonization, antislavery, immigration, or nativism, it comes with a long and rather daunting list of historians' names attached to it. And Dorsey's concern with understanding the similarities and differences between women's and men's reform impulses situates him among a significant group of historians interested in how individuals' experience and understanding of
Elaine Tyler May's new book is certainly timely. We live in an era when childlessness, whethe... more Elaine Tyler May's new book is certainly timely. We live in an era when childlessness, whether voluntary or involuntary, is a regular subject for public comment. In January 1996 alone, for example, the New York Times ran a fourday series describing "The Fertility Market," an op-ed piece defending voluntary childlessness, several letters responding to that piece (including one from a proud mother of fourteen children who counted among her achievements the possibility of spawning a thousand descendants), and a magazine column in which a man rendered sterile by treatments for leukemia described with wit and wistfulness a visit to his "future children": stored
... 19 JOHN M. MURRIN 2. Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution, 44 RUTH ... ... more ... 19 JOHN M. MURRIN 2. Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution, 44 RUTH ... and ruling elites and more recent com-munity organizations of common people inspired ... even opposite to, what they in-tended.14 Thus, a radical dissenting Protestantism was one ...
... maintained that it was men, not women, who were "responsible for defining the dimens... more ... maintained that it was men, not women, who were "responsible for defining the dimensions ... in this view, represented a "subtle subversion" of the cult of true womanhood whereby women ... it becomes clear that they emerged simultaneously with new ideals of woman-hood, not in ...
... I appreciate the interest and unflagging support of Leslie Goldstein, Phil Goldstein, Carole ... more ... I appreciate the interest and unflagging support of Leslie Goldstein, Phil Goldstein, Carole Marks, René Marks, Kathy Steen, Drew Faust, Charles Rosenberg, Joanne Meyerowitz,Howard Johnson, and the late, much-missed Howard Rabinowitz. ...
2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities, Jun 3, 2017
This roundtable considers the significance of the sixty-year public career of Lucretia Mott (1793... more This roundtable considers the significance of the sixty-year public career of Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) to the history of nineteenth-century transatlantic activism. After a brief moment of scholarly attention marking the 100th anniversary of her death, historians have neglected Mott, arguably the most influential American female activist of her time. Beginning with the publication of the Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (2002), a biography titled Lucretia Mott’s Heresy (2011), and now Lucretia Mott Speaks: The Essential Speeches and Sermons (forthcoming 2017), there has been renewed attention to Mott as a Quaker minister, abolitionist, woman’s rights advocate, pacifist, freethinker, correspondent, and speaker. The panelists will consider how Mott’s vocal, confrontational, and networked activism, as well as her newly accessible letters and speeches, offer opportunities for research on the complex relationship between religion and reform. The scholars on this roundtable assess Mott’s importance from the perspective of three fields: history, religion, and documentary editing. Two distinguished historians, Anne Boylan and Nancy Hewitt, will discuss her role in the intertwined histories of antislavery, women’s rights, and nineteenth-century movements for equality. As a foremost scholar of Quakerism and related Christian traditions, Ellen Ross will address the intersection of religion and activism in Mott’s life. Finally, Beverly Wilson Palmer, an accomplished documentary editor, will discuss the connection between Mott’s letters and her speeches and sermons. Carol Faulkner, author of the most recent biography, will moderate
The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. By Ann Fabian. (Berkele... more The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. By Ann Fabian. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 255. Illustrations. $39.95.) Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America. By James Perrin Warren. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Pp. x, 202. $40.00.) Here are two books about words, about written and spoken eloquence, about a writer's or a speaker's attempts to reach, convince, and change an audience. Both books analyze groups of nineteenth-century American writers; both seek to understand how writer and reader, speaker and hearer communicated, striving to avoid mutual incomprehension or mistrust. In Culture of Eloquence, a literary scholar climbs the era's Olympian heights to consider how some of its best-known and most revered essayists and orators-among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Frederick Douglass-employed the written and spoken word in the cause of social and political reform. In The Unvarnished Truth, a cultural historian descends into a Stygian world of historical ephemera and returns with armloads of long-buried pamphlets, each of which once attempted to represent the sad-but-true tale of its obscure author. Ann Fabian's subjects may be beggars and ex-convicts, James Perrin Warren's a heavenly crew of orators, yet both groups allow their analysts to consider important questions about how speakers and writers sought to reach their audiences. The books diverge significantly in their approach to words-their meanings and their uses. Warren's is primarily a work of exegesis, or internal analysis of ideas. In it, he carefully dissects his subjects' views on oratorical eloquence and the role of a "culture of eloquence" in promoting social reform. Taking as starting points Emerson's "ideal of reciprocity between word and deed, theory and reality, orator and auditors" (47) and his belief in the ability of eloquent speech to "awaken and intoxicate the audience" (45), Warren explores how seven "figures of eloquence" (27)Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Frederick Douglass, William Gilmore Simms, and Walt Whitman-- embodied, expanded, or altered "Emerson's vision of the reforming power of language" (28). Fabian's book is much more "a social history of a cultural form" (4), the "insistently personal" (3) narrative of the ordinary individual, a narrative that might have originated as a spoken story but ended up being printed (sometimes by subscription) and circulated in pamphlet form. As such, Fabian's book raises fascinating analytical questions about the relationship between words and the experiences they represent (or produce), the cultural work performed by so-called true story narratives, the role of the literary marketplace in turning people's stories into commodities, and the changing meaning of truth in American society. "Truth is a social convention," she asserts arrestingly; it is "the product of agreements among people" (98). Fabian's book analyzes the process by which some people's stories acquired "truth and authority" (7) while others, however similarly experienced, seemed inauthentic. From beginning to end, The Unvarnished Truth is a triumph of wellchosen sources, sensitive reading, shrewd analysis, interesting insight, and engaging writing. In analyzing successive types of narratives-whether of beggars, convicts, fugitive slaves, or Civil War prisoners-Fabian shows both how individuals turned their "misfortunes into assets" (4) and how the market for their stories "made speaking and writing into commodities" (52). Noting that "socially marginal" folk such as beggars employed the "culturally central" (12) act of writing in their quest for an audience, Fabian asks whether reading and writing uniformly "hastened the spread of gentility" (11). …
The double meaning of the title Reforming Men and Women is intentional. Bruce Dorsey has set out ... more The double meaning of the title Reforming Men and Women is intentional. Bruce Dorsey has set out to study both antebellum urban reform and the women and men who sought to reform themselves and others. Using Philadelphia as his canvas, Dorsey aims to paint "a holistic history of gender and reform," one that encompasses not only the experiences of reformers (and some of their clients) but also their use of "concepts and symbols of the masculine and feminine to fashion and advance their reform agendas" (pp. 4, 2). Reformers and their voluntary associations serve as one focal point; the other focus is on specific "sets of problems that northern reformers wished to redress," including poverty, alcohol use, slavery, and immigration (p. 9). Dorsey is less interested in depicting specific reform organizations than in demonstrating that reformers' approaches to major social problems always possessed a "gendered construction" and that "gender shaped the reforms [they] generated in response" to each problem (p. 9). In an opening chapter, he sketches the post-Revolutionary landscape of Philadelphia voluntary societies, a terrain that was changing rapidly as white women and African American women and men first undertook collective public benevolence. In successive chapters, he covers some of the social problems that they identified, moving through the period 1790-1850 in overlapping, layered fashion, as the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s witnessed special attention to specific issues. Throughout, he examines how women and men reformers, both African American and white, acted "as gendered beings," all the while deploying symbols of gender as they addressed pressing social problems (p. 4). Dorsey's interest in reformers and their ideas places him within an old and venerable historiographical tradition. Whether the topic is temperance, poverty, colonization, antislavery, immigration, or nativism, it comes with a long and rather daunting list of historians' names attached to it. And Dorsey's concern with understanding the similarities and differences between women's and men's reform impulses situates him among a significant group of historians interested in how individuals' experience and understanding of
Elaine Tyler May's new book is certainly timely. We live in an era when childlessness, whethe... more Elaine Tyler May's new book is certainly timely. We live in an era when childlessness, whether voluntary or involuntary, is a regular subject for public comment. In January 1996 alone, for example, the New York Times ran a fourday series describing "The Fertility Market," an op-ed piece defending voluntary childlessness, several letters responding to that piece (including one from a proud mother of fourteen children who counted among her achievements the possibility of spawning a thousand descendants), and a magazine column in which a man rendered sterile by treatments for leukemia described with wit and wistfulness a visit to his "future children": stored
... 19 JOHN M. MURRIN 2. Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution, 44 RUTH ... ... more ... 19 JOHN M. MURRIN 2. Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution, 44 RUTH ... and ruling elites and more recent com-munity organizations of common people inspired ... even opposite to, what they in-tended.14 Thus, a radical dissenting Protestantism was one ...
... maintained that it was men, not women, who were "responsible for defining the dimens... more ... maintained that it was men, not women, who were "responsible for defining the dimensions ... in this view, represented a "subtle subversion" of the cult of true womanhood whereby women ... it becomes clear that they emerged simultaneously with new ideals of woman-hood, not in ...
... I appreciate the interest and unflagging support of Leslie Goldstein, Phil Goldstein, Carole ... more ... I appreciate the interest and unflagging support of Leslie Goldstein, Phil Goldstein, Carole Marks, René Marks, Kathy Steen, Drew Faust, Charles Rosenberg, Joanne Meyerowitz,Howard Johnson, and the late, much-missed Howard Rabinowitz. ...
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