Domesticity All Dressed-Up: Gender in Antebellum Politics and Culture

Abstract

FOR SOME TIME NOW, feminist scholars have redefined the boundaries of politics by theorizing carefully about gender ideologies and household structures, cultural politics and official politics of parties, ballot boxes and talkative cravated men in legislatures. Read together, these two new books evaluate a body of printed artifacts including novels, newspapers, and legislative petitions. In this discursive realm of publicity, public criticism^ and publishing, mostly from outside the legislative halls, women could engage in certain kinds of antebellum political and cultural debates. By examining such discourse, two well-trodden topics in antebellum scholarship, slavery and domesticity, receive a stylish new look in the hands of Elizabeth Varon, an Historian at Wellesley College, and Lora Romero, an English professor at Stanford. Topical similarity and a modem feminist perspective link these books. Besides that, Varon and Romero occupy completely different theoretical fields. We Mean to be Countedplaces the public words and actions of a select group of elite Virginia women into a Habennasian public of newspapers, novels, reform work, and partisan politics, departing from earlier southern scholarship in women's history, from what she calls private sphere histories of family life, mistresses, slaves, and the rhythm of plantation activity. Varon's is an intellectual history of the participation of witty, well-educated, and seductively opinionated women who were complicit in antebellum southern conservatism. In contrast, Romero's Homefronts sifts the ideology of domesticity through the Foucauldian filter of post-structuralism.