Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (review)

Abstract

Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. By Rosemarie Zagarri. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 233. Cloth, $39.95; Paper, $22.50.)Reviewed by Simon P. NewmanFrom quite different vantage points, historians such as Susan Branson and Catherine Allgor have done a great deal to illuminate women's political activities in the early republic. Branson showed elite and some middling women participating in the cauldron of popular political activity in the excited revolutionary ferment of the 1790s, while Allgor demonstrated how leading women politicized the domestic sphere in early national Washington, creating a new and highly significant political arena.1 Their work has informed our understanding of women and politics by broadening our definitions and understanding of just what comprised political activity, from wearing pro-French Revolutionary bonnets and cockades to leading Washington women's salons. Perhaps because of this, what might be termed traditional political history continues to pay little attention to the work produced by Allgor, Branson, and others in the wake of the ground-breaking books published by Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton in 1980.2 Many historians chronicling the political history of revolutionary and early national America continue to regard women as wholly separate from the actual business of politics, and thus conclude that women can justly be excluded from their histories of political parties and the processes of local and national politics.Rosemarie Zagarri's Revolutionary Backlash furnishes a powerful and successful challenge to such conclusions, by reuniting the concerns of political and women's historians. Primarily concerned with exploring why the revolution changed so little for women, and why so many women were - by the late 1820s and the early 1830s - apparently willing to accept their exclusion from the public political sphere, Zagarri's answer provides the book's title and its compelling theme. It is her contention that men and their political parties orchestrated a severe, sustained, and successful counterrevolutionary backlash against women's political activities and identities, a backlash that succeeded in justifying women's exclusion from public political roles to such a degree that many women accepted without question private and domestic roles for themselves and their daughters. Perhaps what is most exciting in this book is Zagarri's strong sense of the revolutionary possibilities of the 1790s and early 1800s, and the ways that women were challenging the very assumptions and practices of politics. Progress ended only when political parties moved to restrict political activity to white men, slamming the door on women and effectively delegitimating a generation of female political activity.This argument places Zagarri at odds with Whiggish interpretations of American women's history that have assumed a revolutionary-inspired progression from women's public activities in support of resistance and independence through to Republican Motherhood, a feminized domestic sphere that supported the separate, male public political sphere, the advent of female moral reform, and women's eventual emergence into public politics embodied in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. …