Radicalism & Reform: The Vrooman Family and American Social Thought, 1837-1937 (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS59 dynamic of the pair, who reminds one of James's Verena Tarrant in her vivacity, stage presence, and independence of spirit, won thousands of converts to the abolitionist cause on her New England tour with Sarah in 1837. Although rigorous logic and personal, acute observation determined the sisters' courageous stand against slavery, they displayed an unconventional anger about the failures and the sterile apathy of their society; they were, as the subtitle suggests, rebels, though they always remained southern ladies in the best sense of that rather abused term. To explain how and why they pursued so lonely and unorthodox a course is hardly an easy task, for their personalities defy facile judgments. Angelina married the great abolitionist and organizer Theodore Weld, but she found it very difficult to adjust to the mindless domesticity of the ordinary housewife. Sarah, frustrated in her spinsterhood by the restrictions of career that nineteenth-century society imposed, tried in vain to find satisfaction in helping to raise "dear Theodore's children," but Angelina understandably resented her sister's persistent and devious efforts to dominate her household. Nor was the brilliant Weld a man of simple feelings and commonplace ideas, but rather, like his wife and sister-in-law, he spent his life searching for a spiritual fulfillment that constantly eluded him. After the trio's disillusionment with evangelicalism, they wandered almost aimlessly among various kinds of religious beliefs. Also, they gradually withdrew from antislavery labors after the dismal collapse of evangelical abolitionism in 1840, a retreat that no historian has yet adequately explained. While their contributions to the causes for which they fought—antislavery, educational reform, communitarianism, religious experimentation , and feminine equality—were great, something mysterious and opaque shrouds their motivations and their turmoil of soul. Mrs. Lemer, the first author to portray their careers in a full-length biography since Catherine Beecher published her account in 1885, has written a compelling, frequently eloquent book. The opening chapters are superbly written, especially the passages describing with dramatic power Sarah's ordeal in nursing her dying father at a remote seaside hotel. The biographer is particularly skillful in handling the often subtle interplay between the main characters, and she is sympathetic, while remaining objective, about the sisters' struggles between heart and mind over their roles as women seeking wider vocational and spiritual horizons in an age that discouraged both kinds of adventure. Nevertheless, this work fails to answer some of the basic questions facing antislavery scholars. Relying upon the outworn interpretations of Gilbert Barnes and other predecessors, Mrs. Lemer offers us nothing new about the antislavery cause nor about the Weld-Grimké role in it. (It should be added, however, that Weld's character is better delineated herein than in Benjamin Thomas' sketchy biography.) The author misses too many opportunities to probe the Grimkés' post-exile relations with their southern kinfoik, a failure that only further research in southern archives could resolve. Nor does she explore in sufficient depth their spiritual pilgrimage away from Christian orthodoxy, a course pursued by a rather sizable number of other reform leaders of that era. Moreover, there are signs of hasty production in the editing, selection of illustrations, and in the occasional lapses of style. Mrs. Lemer, however, writes with an artistry all to rare in academic circles, and this book fully merits wide circulation among general readers, though scholars will find it somewhat deficient in original thought about the larger questions which the Grimkés' somber lives encompassed. Bertram Wyatt-Brown Case Western Reserve University Radicalism