A Philadelphia Story

Abstract

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).