Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780-1850 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780-1850 Anya Jabour (bio) Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780-1850. By Rodney Hessinger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp. 280. Illustrations. Cloth, $45.00.) In Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn, Rodney Hessinger examines the writings and actions of urban reformers concerned with the bodies and souls of northern youth. Focusing on Philadelphia and its environs, Hessinger links reformers' attempts to regulate the behavior of teenagers and young adults to the development of bourgeois values. Ultimately, he argues, "in reacting to the prospect of seduced and abandoned youth, aspiring Americans were reborn as a coherent middle class" (182). Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn enters into conversation with several sets of scholars: women's and gender historians, historians of childhood and youth, and historians of class and culture. Throughout, the author calls attention to "the unique qualities of the early national era" while also being attuned to the ways in which the developments of this period fit into broad transformations in American society (177). The rise of democratic values, the effects of the market revolution, the spread of evangelical religion, and the growth of cities all figure prominently in Hessinger's tale of Philadelphia's wayward youth and determined reformers. Hessinger's subtitle is reminiscent of that of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's classic collection of essays, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Indeed, like Smith-Rosenberg, Hessinger is concerned with the interplay of class and gender. He borrows from literary theorists (particularly Michel Foucault) and structures his book as a series of essays linked by common themes. Reflecting the increasing attention now paid to the cultural construction of masculinity, however, his treatment of gender neatly reverses the emphasis of the pioneering women's historian. Hessinger devotes three chapters primarily to men, two chapters to both men and women, and only one to women exclusively. Nonetheless, the traits that he identifies as bourgeois—chastity, domesticity, piety, and meritocracy—appear as deeply gendered, albeit not so clearly divided into "separate spheres" as some scholars of women's history have claimed for affluent Americans. Thus, while Hessinger's examination of seduction tales reveals an understanding of men as "inherently immoral" (23), his discussion of antimasturbation texts offers a contrasting "male chastity ideal" (148). Thus, in the early national [End Page 331] period, "bourgeois notions of self-control" became essential for both men and women in middle-class America (149). Readers interested in children and youth may be disappointed that Hessinger's goal is "to illuminate reformers' perceptions of, and reactions to, youth, more than it is to explore the lived social experiences of the young" (5). For instance, Hessinger's fascinating discussion of the Philadelphia Magdalen Society reveals more about how former, but not always reformed, prostitutes and their would-be reformers attempted to shape women's life stories to fit the accepted (and acceptable) seduction narrative than it reveals about prostitutes' daily lives. Nonetheless, Hessinger makes important contributions to the study of growing up in America. Calling attention to the ways in which cultural brokers were forced to cater to youthful demands in a variety of settings, from college campuses to religious revivals, he offers compelling evidence that "youth stood more outside adult guidance and control in the early national era than in the eras that preceded and followed it" (179). While Hessinger deals with a number of interesting and important themes, the overriding issue is class—or more appropriately, class consciousness. Examining reformers' responses to sexually active women, rebellious college students, assertive Sunday school teachers, "self-made men" in the making, and rakish male libertines, he argues that the development of a distinctive middle-class culture was the most important and lasting result of urban reformers' institutions and publications. While Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn calls attention to the "contradictory messages" issued by reformers, Hessinger concludes that the end result of their activity was a common set of middle-class values that both indicated and legitimated class distinctions (142). "The bourgeoisie," he writes, "came to know itself—one might say it almost called itself into being—in endless discussions about the young...