Reforming men and women: gender in the antebellum city

Abstract

Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. By Bruce Dorsey. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 299. Cloth, $39.95.) Reforming Men and Women is, first of all, a study of reform movements in Philadelphia from roughly 1790 to 1850. If Bruce Dorsey had limited himself to documenting the origins and development of Philadelphia reform his book would have been worth noting since it is, remarkably enough, the first full-length monograph to address this topic. But Reforming Men and Women is much more than an intellectual or social history of Philadelphia reform. This is a careful, complex, and extremely important book. What Dorsey has attempted here, and essentially accomplished, is nothing less than a history of gender in antebellum urban America through the lens of reform. It is also the most thorough and convincing account of the development of male gender ideology in the early republic yet published. The publication of Reforming Men and Women marks an important advance in the historiography of American gender history. There has been no shortage of well-executed and influential accounts of women's reform in the antebellum era, as well as solid studies on each of the individual reform movements Dorsey discusses here: temperance, abolitionism and colonization, nativism, and poverty reform. But studies of manhood in antebellum America have been in short supply, and have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of individual segments of the male population: men, middle-class men, firemen, bare-knuckle boxers, members of secret societies. Dorsey's contribution is to trace carefully the impact of changing ideals of manhood and womanhood African Americans as well as white Americans, to show how the experiences of one group influenced the others, and to reveal how gender shaped the responses to perceived problems in urban America. In some sense it seems obvious that changing ideas of manhood shaped ideas of womanhood, and vice versa; but Dorsey is the first person to detail the mechanics of that change-to show, example, that it was an uncertainty about manliness and the new goals of humanitarianism in late eighteenthcentury America, rather than an ideology of republican motherhood, that presented the opportunity for women's activism in a masculine arena of voluntary associations (21). Dorsey's holistic approach leads him to a number of conclusions as dramatic and exciting as this one. With the exception of the opening chapter, which addresses early ideologies of gender and reform in America, this book proceeds topically rather than chronologically. Each chapter focuses on a problem Americans rather than on reformers or reform movements themselves. In a chapter on slavery, example, Dorsey de-centers the work of white abolitionists and focuses instead on the ways in which colonization efforts were shaped by ideas of true manhood both by and black and white men. A chapter on immigration gives the gender ideologies of Irish men equal time with those of nativists without falling into the trap of classifying Irish ideals of manhood as working class and nativist ideals as middle class. The arguments here are complex, subtle, and ultimately convincing. A short summary cannot do them justice. …