The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840. By Anne M. Boylan. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xvi, 343 pp. Cloth, $49.95, isbn 0-8078-2730-4. Paper, $19.95, isbn 0-8078-5404-2.)

Abstract

On a January day in 1839, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, the widow of Alexander Hamilton, walked into the law offices of George Templeton Strong to conduct business on behalf of the New York Orphan Asylum Society. Then eighty-two, Hamilton had served on the society's board for thirty-three years. She would preside for another decade. Exceptional only in the longevity of her participation, Hamilton's career modeled one woman's engagement with a female voluntary association. Numbering in the hundreds, religious, benevolent, charitable, mutual aid, and reform organizations launched America's women into public life. In her analysis of postrevolutionary and antebellum women's associations in New York and Boston, Anne M. Boylan builds upon the earlier scholarship of Dorothy Porter (1936), Mary Ryan (1981), Suzanne Lebsock (1984), Nancy Hewitt (1984), Dorothy Sterling (1984), Lori Ginzberg (1990), and Anne Firor Scott (1991). An exceptional contribution in its own right, The Origins of Women's Activism broadens the angle of vision to include the entire domain of women's collective labors in these cities. In contrast to previous historians, Boylan looks closely at the decades bridging the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Years in which a host of precedents were set, including the shift toward evangelical rhetoric and technique, those decades set the stage for the link forged between religious conversion and organizational participation. Changes also took place in self-representation. Instead of fashioning themselves on the model of the classical Roman matron as their predecessors had, evangelical women celebrated Hannah More. Continuities were equally important, as Boylan shows. For every large and multidimensional project begun in the antebellum years, there was a small-scale, single-focus association that resembled the societies founded in the decades before 1820. Organized benevolence also remained the most popular form of associational activity from 1797 to 1840.