The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion, 1780-1830. By Martha Tomhave Blauvelt. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. xii, 275 pp. $39.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-2597-4.)

Abstract

Emotion history, the field in which Martha Tomhave Blauvelt grounds her persuasive book The Work of the Heart, adds considerably to our understanding of the ways women and men experienced daily life. Blauvelt's aim is to create a work of emotion history that makes contributions to women's history, rather than the reverse. Regardless of the book's scholarly context, by its end Blauvelt makes a compelling case for using emotion work as an analytic tool in the study of the self. At the heart of Blauvelt's study are the diaries kept by women who reached the age of maturity in the early republic. Blauvelt examines emotion work, up front—in public—and “backstage,” in the journals that served as both a tool for and reflection of women's labor. She explores the tension between sensibility and sense, between feeling and reason, as constructed by middle-class culture and processed by women engaged in the search for self.