Male Suffrage Research Articles

Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know by Stathis N. Kalyvas

Reviewed by: Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know by Stathis N. Kalyvas Van Coufoudakis (bio) Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. Pp. xii + 242. Cloth $16.95. Stathis Kalyvas is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is also known to Greek audiences for his columns in Sunday papers. This book was published around the time of the electoral victory of SYRIZA (Συνασπισμός της Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς, Coalition of Radical Left) in January 2015 and consequently only marginally addresses the rise of SYRIZA or its politics. The author’s treatment of Golden Dawn is equally superficial. The author describes his book as an “essay of historical interpretation” rather than a “comprehensive and detailed history book” (xi). The book attempts to show how the present crisis fits in the context of Modern Greek history. In seven brief chapters, it discusses nearly 200 years of postindependence Greek history. Subheadings divide each chapter with titles like “How Was the New State Built,” “What Was the Anatolian Disaster,” and “What Caused the 1967 Coup.” Most footnotes refer to secondary sources. The book has no bibliography other than some references presented as “Suggestions for Further Reading.” Given the format of the book, Kalyvas’s work is replete with generalizations about Greek politics, society, and foreign policy that may be adequate for a reader unfamiliar with Greece, but not for the specialist. Some of these generalizations are likely to reinforce stereotypes about Greece rather than revise them. The author attempts to make sense of Modern Greek history along broad themes, such as nationalism, state building, modernization, populism, democracy, and autocracy. He applies contemporary terminology, such as “failed states” (38), to explain past events and current problems. According to the author, Greece is a largely successful late modernizer, whose history is characterized by almost epic disasters of which the 2009 crisis is the latest. Modern history shows Greece’s “capacity to achieve positive outcomes out of ambitious, often disastrous, projects … a case of an early, highly ambitious, creative, incomplete and imperfect—but overall quite successful—effort by an under endowed upstart to catch up with the most advanced nations” (13). The book identifies seven major boom, bust, and bailout cycles in Modern Greek history. These cycles started with highly ambitious projects intended to transcend the twin constraints of history and geography in the belief that Greece would become a normal Western country (196). The final chapter on Greece’s 2009 crisis has yet to be written. Greece’s problems led to various forms of foreign interventions, which, according to the author, proved favorable for the country. These interventions, however, [End Page 416] have not been perceived in this manner in Greece and have contributed to the love/hate relationship between Greece, Western Europe, and the United States. There were many “firsts” (23) in the Greek national project, according to Kalyvas. It was the first successful nationalist uprising in the Ottoman Empire that also gave rise to the first modern humanitarian intervention (Navarino). Greeks were able to play up the romantic connection of Ancient to Modern Greece (which the author rejects) and were able to align their interests with those of influential foreign powers throughout Modern Greek history. Even though Greece may have been born as a “failed state” (38), it addressed successfully—and ahead of other states in Western Europe—issues such as universal male suffrage, illiteracy, state control of religion, conscription, and land reform. Despite the immense economic, social, and political cost of the Anatolian disaster, Greece successfully integrated its displaced nationals, who turned out to be a boon to the country. The tragic and legally sanctioned ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of World War I also produced ethnically homogeneous states in the region, reducing the threat of interstate conflict. Post-junta Greece became a fully competitive democracy with peaceful political transitions between New Democracy and PASOK (Πανελλήνιο Σοσιαλιστικό Κίνημα, Panhellenic Socialist Movement), a clear indication of the maturity and consolidation of the political system. However, opportunities for political and economic reform were missed. PASOK is largely blamed for relying on populist politics, the misuse of bureaucracy, legal inefficiency, and the decline of the educational system at all levels...

Reading Age Beyond Childhood

Reading Age Beyond Childhood Sari Edelstein (bio) Why have scholars of American literature neglected age, broadly defined, as a critical lens and as an explicit subject of nineteenth-century culture? The blossoming field of childhood studies masks a larger reticence about age. Indeed, humanities scholars’ nearly exclusive attention to children has limited our focus to a single stage of life, the period fetishized by conservative investments in reproductive futurity and heteronormativity. This uneven focus on children and children’s cultures seemingly privileges young people’s lives as the most politically significant and worthy of historical and literary recovery. Even as critics may dismantle what Lauren Berlant called the “idealization of the child as citizen,” there is nonetheless an ideological problem when we fail to complement projects on American youth by considering age more broadly.1 In other words, childhood studies’ increasing prominence creates the illusion that we are discussing age, but in fact, the disproportionate attention to youth risks reifying childhood as the most appealing and meaningful site of inquiry. Moreover, this scholarship tends to demarcate development and vulnerability as particular to childhood when such conceptual terms may be usefully applied to any age. My goal here is not simply to urge scholars to add age to the standard list of identity categories that have attracted our attention. Rather, I argue that these other measures of social location (race, gender, sexuality, class, ability) are largely legible through the seemingly more natural and essential identity defined by age.2 That is, age ideology operates in tandem with discourses of power and naturalizes existing hierarchies. For example, the discourse of age conditions how we conventionally understand gender, enshrining old men as sources of wisdom while women are instructed in what critic [End Page 122] Kathleen Woodward calls the “pedagogy of mortification,” which teaches them invisibility after their reproductive years have passed.3 Similarly, quantitative, numerical age provides an ostensibly objective basis for the false binary between disabled and able bodies, as it is largely through age that mainstream science measures whether individuals are bodily appropriate and developmentally on schedule. During the nineteenth century, numerical age became a primary identity coordinate. The 1850 census was the first to ask respondents to include numerical age, and it was also the first census to render the pseudo-scientific taxonomy of race even more complex, suggesting how age and race simultaneously became crucial sites in a regime centered on bodily classification. Additionally, universal white male suffrage gradually became linked with the age of twenty-one rather than with property ownership. Alongside the state’s obvious biopolitical investment in numerical age as a relevant quantifier of political maturity and a key statistic for assessing the national population, numerous institutions, including schools and hospitals, were organizing around age. Age categories also became markets; publishers catered to specific age groups, and periodical culture increasingly interpolated readers within specific age demographics. Collectively, these developments signal how chronological age was integral to what Judith Treas calls a “stratification regime,” which standardized the course of American lives.4 Historians offer conflicting explanations for why age acquired heightened significance. Some link this shift to rising market capitalism, which devalued older people’s wisdom and instead favored the efficiency typically associated with youth. George Miller Beard’s American Nervousness (1881), for example, links aging not only to declining productivity but also to diminished creativity. He laments, “I find no record of any very important invention conceived and developed after the age of 60. Edison, with his three hundred patents, is not the only young inventor. All inventors are young.”5 Others [End Page 123] read the increased attention to age as a response to basic demographic changes; there were more people over sixty-five at the end of the nineteenth century than the nation had ever seen before. Whatever the explanation, we should recognize and study the nineteenth century’s second half as the moment that gave rise to our modern culture of age. In its insistence on age benchmarks and its disdain for aging itself, nineteenth-century culture laid the groundwork for contemporary concerns about the physiological, aesthetic, and economic costs of growing older. Moreover, anxieties about inappropriate aging permeated periodical culture and...

Das Frauenstimm- und Wahlrecht in der Schweiz 1848–1971

By focusing on the belated introduction of female suffrage in Switzerland, this article looks at how the political exclusion of half of the Swiss population was normalised. It argues that, notwithstanding its singularity, the Swiss case highlights some of the main mechanisms, practices and legitimisation strategies used to withhold political rights from women in modern society. The long time span between the introduction of male suffrage in 1848 and the introduction of female suffrage in 1971 raises the question of how such an exclusion could be maintained, particularly in the face of the tendency towards democratisation in the post–1945 world. Pursuing a loose chronological narrative, the author discusses the explanatory arguments of six types of socio-historical approaches to the question. Together, they provide evidence of what was at stake for the official gender scripts in the debates about a reconfiguration of the conception and practice of democracy.

Concepts of citizenship in France during the long eighteenth century

François Furet famously described the French Revolution as ’the first experiment with democracy’, and modern French citizenship is often seen as having emerged during this period. Universal male suffrage was practised for the first time in 1792 and the Revolution also witnessed debate over such issues as: the rights of citizens; the extension of the franchise to poorer inhabitants and black slaves; and even whether women should be given political rights. Yet, the modern idea of citizenship did not emerge from nowhere in 1789. Rather it was the product of more than a century of debate. This article examines the different understandings of citizenship that were competing for dominance in France during the long eighteenth century: the ancient conception; the Bodinian understanding and the rights-based approach. Not only does it demonstrate the contribution of these approaches (and in particular the last) to revolutionary understandings of citizenship, but it also highlights how the tensions of the eighteenth-century debates, and the ambiguities inherent in the rights-based conception, sparked some of the key controversies of the Revolution.

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898, by Lisa Tetrault

The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, by Lisa Tetrault. Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiv, 279 pp. $34.95 US (cloth). Beginning with its arresting title, The Myth of Seneca offers a refreshing and much-needed new perspective on the early decades of the US women's suffrage movement. The book tells two intertwined stories: how antebellum activists' broadly conceived women's rights agenda became a more narrowly focused women's suffrage crusade in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, and how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created an for their branch of the movement by writing its history, the foundational History of Woman Suffrage. In the process, as Lisa Tetrault convincingly argues, a small, local, and undoubtedly significant 1848 convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, assumed titanic stature for later generations, and Anthony, who had attended neither it nor a second convention held in Rochester shortly afterward acquired historic monumentality as the mother of the suffrage movement. Simultaneously, the grassroots activism of Stanton and Anthony's rivals, particularly that of individuals such as Lucy Stone, who led the American Woman Suffrage Association, largely disappeared from historical just as their archival remains were heavily excised from the History of Woman Suffrage. Remembering and forgetting--the two sides of the coin--receive significant analysis in Tetrault's retelling of the Seneca convention's history. As she demonstrates, the convention and its concerns did not receive much attention in the decades immediately following 1848. Indeed, during those years, few women's rights activists made any effort to identify a single point of origin for their movement. Instead, they acknowledged a number of important forerunners, including abolitionist and anti-slavery meetings and conventions, the lecture tours that speakers such as Angelina Grimke and Lucy Stone had undertaken in the 1830s and 1840s, and the national women's rights conventions that began in 1850. Claims for the importance of the Seneca Convention arose only in the Reconstruction years, as internal conflicts among abolitionists over black male suffrage moved women's lack of the franchise to the top of the list of necessary woman's Then, and only then, as Tetrault clearly delineates, did advocates begin to construct a suffragist memory (p. 113), designating not only the Seneca Convention but also suffrage itself as central elements in an emerging story of women's rights. Gradually forgotten or eclipsed along the way were African American and radical white women's understandings of woman's rights, as well as the concerns of working class women in labour organizations who doubted that the ballot could have the transformative power that suffragists claimed for it. We have known some aspects of this story, especially the bruising battles among abolitionists over whether to support ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and their outcome in producing two competing woman suffrage groups. Tetrault's signal achievement is to trace the process whereby Stanton and Anthony constructed a suffrage-focused historical that grew more convincing and powerful over the decades. Through carefully delineating the development of commemorative practices, Tetrault shows how the two women elevated the Seneca event to mythic status. The meeting at Seneca [began to] become the myth of Seneca Falls (p. …

Reform or revolution? Theory and evidence on the role of the middle class in the rise of universal male suffrage

This paper presents a theoretical account of suffrage extensions from a specific perspective: the strategic role of the middle class in the struggle for political power. Extensions are analyzed as a game among three players: the elite, the middle class, and the poor. To thwart the threat presented by the poor, the elite had to cede economic and political power to the middle class, who in turn might have an interest in extending suffrage further, either immediately or in some future. Whether suffrage was extended to the poor in one step or first only to the middle class depended on state’s capacity to repress and the strength of the middle class, along with some economic variables. Consistent with this theory, empirical results show that suffrage extensions did not reduce rebellious activity, but rather that economic growth and military power are strong predictors of decreases in the number of rebellions.

Universal Suffrage as Counter‐Revolution? Electoral Mobilisation under the Second Republic in France, 1848–1851

AbstractThe advent of mass, male suffrage in France in 1848 is usually regarded as a great success. There was a huge turnout in elections for a Constituent Assembly, but the outcome disappointed republicans, who failed to win a majority and blamed a backward peasantry. This paper suggests that the electoral system was at fault rather than the electorate. A hastily devised procedure, based on collective voting and the absence of declared candidatures, enabled notables to dominate the new regime. Radicals revised their tactics with some success in 1849, but soon succumbed to the plebiscitary democracy of Louis‐Napoleon. Universal suffrage might well mean counter‐revolution.

Universal, Unequal Suffrage: Authoritarian Vote-Seat Malapportionment in the 1907 Austrian Electoral Reform

Leaders of undemocratic regimes allow elections in order to co-opt powerful groups in society and secure their own grip on power. However, they do not allow fair elections. They manipulate the electoral system in order to over-represent the geographic areas, and the groups within them, to whom they wish to allocate political power. This is done via the mechanism of malapportionment, by which electoral districts in the privileged areas are assigned a greater share of legislative seats than their share of the population. Analyzing the introduction of universal male suffrage in Austria in 1907, I show that this reform did not lead to universal, equal suffrage and that malapportionment under authoritarian regimes does not run exclusively along an urban-rural cleavage. Instead, reform resulted in an electoral system which perpetuated the under-representation of ethnic minorities in the lower house of the Reichsrat and the over-representation of the rural German-speaking population and urban Polish elites. This solved the regime’s problem of controlling urban unrest by satisfying demands for electoral reform, while at the same time maintaining the predominant political position of German and Polish groups in Cislethania via more subtle manipulation of the electoral system.

Embedded in Social Cleavages: An Explanation of the Variation in Timing of Women's Suffrage

Under which conditions did introduction of women's suffrage occur before the First World War (early), and when only after the Second World War (late)? This article analyses necessary and sufficient conditions to explain both early and late introduction of women's suffrage in 14 Western European countries using Rokkan's cleavage theory, which distinguishes between four cleavages: religious, ethnic‐linguistic, class and sectoral. In addition to testing Rokkan's cleavage theory, this study adds a structural dimension to agency‐based studies on the role of the women's movement, which helps to explain why some such movements had much earlier success than others. Finally, this article advances the democratisation literature that takes the timing of the introduction of male suffrage as a proxy for the timing of the introduction of women's suffrage, as the timing of the introduction of male suffrage does not necessarily mean early introduction of women's suffrage. Based on fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the article shows that the absence of an ethnic‐linguistic cleavage is a necessary condition for early introduction of women's suffrage. Moreover, the fuzzy‐set analysis highlights that the absence of a religious cleavage combined with a class cleavage or a sectoral cleavage combined with the absence of a class cleavage is sufficient for early introduction of women's suffrage. Concerning late introduction of women's suffrage, it is the combination of a class cleavage with a religious cleavage or the presence of an ethnic‐linguistic cleavage in the absence of a sectoral cleavage that prove to be sufficient.

Don't Make War, Make Elections - Franchise Extension and Violence in XIXth-Century Colombia

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual problems in defining and measuring democracy, but also because political institutions and violence are jointly determined. We take advantage of an experiment of history to examine the impact of one simple, measurable dimension of democracy (the size of the franchise) on conflict, while at the same time attempting to overcome the identification problem. In 1853, Colombia established universal male suffrage. Using a simple difference-indifferences specification at the municipal level, we find that municipalities where more voters were enfranchised relative to their population experienced fewer violent political battles while the reform was in effect. The results are robust to including a number of additional controls. Moreover, we investigate the potential mechanisms driving the results. In particular, we look at which components of the proportion of new voters in 1853 explain the results, and we examine if results are stronger in places with more political competition and state capacity. We interpret our findings as suggesting that violence in nineteenth-century Colombia was a technology for political elites to compete for the rents from power, and that democracy constituted an alternative way to compete which substituted violence.

Yasuoka Masahiro's 'New Discourse on Bushido Philosophy': Cultivating Samurai Spirit and Men of Character for Imperial Japan

This essay considers the bushidō (Way of the Warrior) discourse of the nationalist ideologue and theorist of Tōyō shisō (Oriental thought) Yasuoka Masahiro (1898–1983). As part of his Confucian nationalist perspective on jinkakushugi (‘personalism’), Yasuoka propagated self-cultivation that would enable Japanese to resist the supposedly debilitating effects of materialist ideologies and effete urban living upon their personalities. Relying on Tokugawa-era reflections on the bushi (warriors), late Meiji musings on bushidō and budō (‘martial arts’) and modern idealist responses to materialism, he exhorted Japanese men to embrace a self-sacrificial ‘samurai spirit’ and to act as exemplary ‘men of character’ (jinkakusha) loyal to the emperor-centered state. Articulated during the advent of universal male suffrage, Yasuoka’s bushidō discourse not only revealed the obvious expectations of wartime service to the empire but also expressed elite anxiety over the prospect of mass political participation in an age of radical ideologies. Concern for political stability was also prominent in his insistence that these enfranchised public men be supported by disenfranchised housebound women living a feminine analog to bushidō. Examining what Yasuoka called his ‘new discourse on bushidō philosophy’ (bushidō tetsugaku shinron) thus sheds considerable light on the modern reproduction and political implications of bushidō as national ideology, as masculine ideal, and as part of the pervasive prewar discussion of self-cultivation.

Proslavery and Antislavery Politics in Rhode Island's 1842 Dorr Rebellion

Bringing race back into the history of the Dorr Rebellion, this article, grounded in deep archival research, demonstrates that Providence attorney Thomas Wilson Dorr's attempt at extralegal reform stirred the fears of slavery's proponents and opponents alike, thus unwittingly undermining the very reform his initiative was designed to advance: universal male suffrage.

The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (review)

Reviewed by: The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States Cam Grey (bio) Keywords Ancient Greece, Roman Empire, Classics, Classical studies The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States. By Carl J. Richard. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 272. Cloth, $45.00.) In this well-written and anecdotally rich book, Richard marshals a wide array of documentary, literary, and material evidence to demonstrate the enduring influence of Greek and Roman morals, mores, and models on [End Page 312] the intellectual, artistic, and political cultures of antebellum America. Even more importantly, he reveals the emergence of an increasing contradiction in the minds and manners of contemporaries between asserting the enduring relevance of the classical past and embracing the new and different challenges of living in their contemporary society. While Richard's title signals his explicit intention to argue that this period, not that of the Founders, was the "Golden Age" of the classics in America, it is this contradiction, and its awful outcome in the form of the American Civil War, that underpins and drives the narrative of the book. Richard tells a story of challenge and backlash as classical models and morals were alternately attacked and defended during the period. He begins in his "Preface" with a strong argument for the democratization of classics, supporting this argument in his first chapter ("Classical Conditioning: School, Home, and Society"), where he traces the multitude of ways in which the influence of the classics on American society can be discerned outside the ranks of its wealthiest members. He emphasizes a subtle shift in the focus of attention, too, from the figures of the late Roman Republic whose writings and ideas had dominated the attention of America's founding generation, to the writers and thinkers of (pre-dominantly) fifth-century Athens, who were increasingly taken as exemplars for contemporary American public and political figures. Richard picks up this theme in his second chapter ("Democracy"), exploring the ways in which classical models and rhetoric were implicated in the extension of male suffrage in the period. Most particularly, politicians needed to develop strategies for emphasizing their plain origins and shared experience with the less educated and aristocratic members of their audience, while simultaneously using their mastery of the classics as a marker of their wisdom and virtue among their peers. In this context, the attractiveness of Athens as a quarry for examples is clear: As "popular" opinion and the "popular" vote became increasingly important, the specter of populist demagogues of the late Roman Republic like Julius Caesar loomed large and threatening. The new American democracy was increasingly, and self-consciously, a plutocracy, conferring status according to wealth. As a consequence, economic utilitarianism became a fraught cultural debate in the period, and Richard turns to the ways in which classical models were implicated in this debate in his third chapter ("Pastoralism and Utilitarianism"). In particular, the period witnessed strong calls to embrace the sciences and contemporary languages at the expense of languages and philosophies [End Page 313] deemed to be outdated. Ultimately, however, these calls were unsuccessful, principally because the classics remained so deeply embedded in intellectual practices and cultural expectations. Indeed, as Richard demonstrates in his fourth chapter ("Nationalism"), it is possible to argue that the series of attacks upon the exemplars of antiquity, as against American figures deemed more worthy of reverence and imitation, is clear proof of the strong hold that the classics continued to have over writers, thinkers, and cultural commentators in the period. As Richard's fifth chapter ("Romanticism") reveals, the tension between Greece and Rome as the most suitable model for the new American state was particularly fraught in the field of literature, where American Romantic authors sought to refute the European dogma that it was impossible for a democracy to produce a national literature. As in debates over architectural forms and representations in pictorial and statuary form, particular attention focused upon the merits of imitation of classical forms, with both supporters and detractors of Romanticism propounding the value of the "classical spirit" while acknowledging the value of departing from the rigid canon of classical...

Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America Ellen M. Ross Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carol Faulkner. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. vii + 291 pp. Notes, illustrations, and indexes. $45. The radical activist Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) was "a follower of heresy," a prophetic voice, unshakeable in her resolve to bring to reality a society predicated on the equality of all persons. She challenged American "orthodoxies" in matters of religion, politics, and moral practice by championing a myriad of interrelated reforms including abolition, a commitment to the free produce movement, women's rights, Indian rights, prison reform, temperance, opposition to capital punishment, and peace advocacy. Carol Faulkner's biography of Mott is enthralling in its rendering of the power and scope of Mott's reforming vision. Mott, a renowned orator and self-proclaimed non-conformist and follower of Jesus, criticized the "close relationship between American religion and slavery" (109). Proffering moral suasion as the most potent source of personal and social transformation, she fought for the heart of religion, calling for Christianity to come out of "churches and seminaries into daily life in order to transform the morals of the country" (112). Faulkner argues that among white abolitionists, "Mott was perhaps the earliest and most consistent proponent of immediate abolition and racial equality" (217). Sparked by the British Quaker Elizabeth Heyrick's "Immediate, Not Gradual Emancipation" (published in Philadelphia in 1824), Mott's conversion to immediate abolition predated even William Lloyd Garrison's. Mott was, Faulkner argues, "in the interracial vanguard in the anti-slavery movement" (4); her "racial egalitarianism made her unusual even among fellow abolitionists" (218). Consideration of Mott, an original voice in the transatlantic women's rights movement, suggests that the history of early feminism is more complex and racially egalitarian than generally acknowledged (216). Histories of the women's movement too frequently document only the tensions between feminists and abolitionists, while overlooking the views of thinkers like Mott for whom advocacy for women's rights was inseparably linked to other social issues. For Mott, [End Page 37] "feminism must include racial equality" (4) and women's rights were "a logical extension of interconnected humanitarian concerns" (5). A multitude of fascinating subplots are skillfully woven throughout Lucretia Mott's Heresy including the narration of Mott's complicated relationship to the Society of Friends from her first public ministry in 1818 at 12th Street Monthly meeting through her last public appearance at the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1880. Among other themes, Faulkner chronicles the thirty-six year history of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society from its founding by Mott and others in 1833 as an organization focused on ending slavery and racial prejudice, to its post-Civil War identity as an organization advocating universal male suffrage and the integration of the Philadelphia railway lines. Faulkner delineates Lucretia Mott's significant role in local and national reform conventions from the late 1830s through the1870s. And she offers an intimate portrayal of the family connections and friendships that shaped and sustained Mott over the years. Faulkner's last chapter chronicles Mott's involvement with the Universal Peace Union and her role in founding the Pennsylvania Peace Society in 1866. Mott emerges as a visionary leader in American peace history. An eloquent orator and indefatigable activist, Mott worked with an astonishing number of organizations and individuals throughout her long life. Narrative encounter with a reformer as radical, influential, and multifaceted as Lucretia Mott may inspire some readers to reflect on their own activism. As this history of American radical social reform becomes part of public discourse, we expand our possibilities as individuals and as communities, to understand, and even to imagine and live out alternatives to our dominant cultural milieu. Carol Faulkner's meticulously researched and elegantly written book is a pleasure to read. It will be appreciated by subject area specialists, social activists, and by general readers, and is an excellent choice for undergraduate and graduate courses in history, peace and conflict studies, gender studies, and religion. [End Page 38] Ellen M. Ross Swarthmore College Copyright © 2012 Friends Historical Association

Education and the creation of capital in the early American republic

This book argues that schools were a driving force in the formation of social, political, and financial capital during the market revolution and capitalist transition of the early republican era. Grounded in an intensive study of schooling in the Genesee Valley region of upstate New York, it traces early sources of funding and support for education (including common schools and various forms of higher schooling) to their roots in different social and economic networks and trade and credit relations. It then interprets that story in the context of other major developments in early American social, political, and economic history, such as the shift from agricultural to non-agricultural production, the integration of rural economies into translocal capitalist markets, the organization of the Second Great Awakening, the transformation of patriarchy, the expansion of white male suffrage, the emergence of the Secondary American Party System, and the formation of the modern liberal state.

The MPs of the Basque Country: parliamentary practice (1891–1914)

This article arises from a line of research initiated over a decade ago by the Biography and Parliament Research Group at the University of the Basque Country with the aim of analysing the Parliamentary representation of the Basque Country in the Spanish Parliament throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This consists of a prosopographical analysis of the Members of Parliament (MPs) on the basis of extensive empirical information (a microbiographical analysis of the 610 parliamentarians who represented the Basque districts between 1810 and 1939). Here we analyse the parliamentarians during the Monarchic Restoration in Spain, a period which saw the industrial take-off in the coastal area of the Basque Country, and the establishment of universal male suffrage in 1890. In this work we are not only analysing a group of parliamentarians, but also elaborating a prosopographical working model for the study of Parliament through its actors.

Liberalism’s Incestuous Subject: Private and Public Sex in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and reaching its apex in the midnineteenth century, a discourse of the private family came to dominate normative visions of social and political life in the United States. Where previously the family had been conceived as the central institution of social and economic life, serving as a “little commonwealth” analogous to the state, by the mid-nineteenth century, at least in prescriptive literature and sentimental novels, the family was private, increasingly cut off from economic production and political life. It did, however, retain a political function: the production and dissemination of virtue, morality, and chastity that ensured the political health of the nation precisely by abstaining from politics. As countless historians have told us, this made for a relatively clear, gendered distinction between public (male and masculine) and private (female and feminine). The public-private distinction, with the virtuous, sentimental family at its heart, was taken as the guarantee of stability for liberal democracy in nineteenth-century America. The social and political function of this family was to instill order in an increasingly disordered nation. Vice and licentiousness, keywords of the American Revolution, only became more prevalent with urbanization. In the discourse of the frontier, civilization was always on the verge of disintegrating. Democracy itself, once something to be feared, was becoming an object of desire, manifest in the expansion of universal white male suffrage, and later, in claims by women and the enslaved for liberty and full citizenship. Sovereignty was becoming increasingly murky. The novelty of democracy was not that sovereignty disappeared, but that it was no longer localizable to any absolute authority. As the political theorist Claude Lefort has argued, “Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and

Carnival Balls and Penal Codes: Body Politics in July Monarchy France

Over the past several decades, historians have focused on the absence and occasional presence of women in public spaces and in the normative realm of reasoned discussion that is described as the public sphere. They have elaborated and critically interrogated theoretical formulations of modern liberal politics as based on an opposition between, on the one hand, a rational, abstractable, public, and male citizen, and on the other, a sensible, particularized, and private femininity. In the process, however, persistent theoretical slippages between spatialized notions of publicity and the public as a normative or political category have created considerable analytic confusion. As a result, this paradigm remains unable to address the question of why women were politically marginalized even when they were visibly present in many spheres of public life. Paradoxical as it may seem, I want to argue that what is regularly elided in this discussion—namely, the political and psychic history of male embodiment—can help us to answer this question. It is useful here to recall the two-sexed model of the body, or sexual dimorphism, that notoriously shadowed Enlightenment-era theories of universal rights. As Thomas Laqueur observed: “Ironically, the genderless rational subject engendered opposite, highly gendered sexes.” Laqueur and others have, in turn, shown how presumptions about men and women’s bodily differences were mobilized in arguments against and sometimes for women’s civil and political equality. As Christopher Forth has pointed out, however, this two-sex model depended on the fact that men, too, had bodies. If, in other words, the location of incommensurable gender difference in biology blocked women’s claims to political equality, then it also produced the male body as a cumbersome problem. In 1849, a year after the Second Republic definitively adopted universal male suffrage, feminist Jeanne Deroin aptly seized on this problem of male embodiment. When Jean-Joseph Proudhon dismissed her bid for election as no more logical than male wet nursing, she quipped: “In that case, it should be easy to tell us what organs are necessary

Abe Isoo and Kawakami Hajime in Interwar Japan — Economic Reform or Revolution?

This article explores the views of two eminent professors of economics, Abe Isoo (1865-1949) and Kawakami Hajime (1879-1946), regarding their socialist economic theories for easing poverty in Japan during the interwar years (1918-1939). Prior to this period, Abe believed the cure to capitalism’s ills lay in a combination of socialist economic reforms (sangyo demokurashii) and individual spiritual refinement. Kawakami, at that time a bourgeois economist, prioritised the spiritual revolution of the rich over any socialist-type economic reform. Thus, although convinced of the need for a different approach to eradicating poverty, they nevertheless agreed in the need for gradual change rather than radical reform (Gavin East Asia An International Quarterly 24:1, 30). The year 1928 marked a significant turning point both for Japanese social movements and in the lives of Abe and Kawakami. That year heralded Japan’s first national election under the new Universal Male Suffrage Law, and saw the police exercise their extended authority as they undertook a nationwide round-up of students and intellectuals suspected of left-wing tendencies (the March 15 Incident). Also in that year, Abe and Kawakami resigned from academic posts to dedicate themselves to alleviating the privations of the working class. Abe, by then well known as the father of Japanese socialism and as a Christian pacifist, became a symbolic figure for Japan’s working class parties, although he later came to support the government during WWII. Kawakami, who was forced to resign from his post during the round-up, “washed his hands of bourgeois economics”, became a prominent spokesman for Marxism in Japan ([28], xi, pp. 76, 169). This article will reveal that both Abe and Kawakami’s social and economic theories changed during the interwar period, so that Abe came to see imperial sovereignty as crucial to socialist economic reform, while Kawakami came to see it as a minion of the capitalists and advocated institutional and political revolution.

Du système des bureaux au système des groupes et des commissions. Le règlement parlementaire italien de 1920 et la doctrine constitutionnelle*

An attempt to explore the scope of Italian parliamentary reforms in 1920 in the context of the transition from a traditional constitutional culture to a new model of political representation is presented. The workings of Parliament were ‘temporarily’ established in 1848, when a system of ‘bureaux’ was adopted which was to last until 1920. They were distributed among members by lot. Preliminary discussions took place in these ‘bureaux’, which then nominated a commission with the responsibility to present its work to the Assembly. This system related to the concept of representation according to which each deputy freely represented the entire nation. By contrast, the 1920 reforms proposed to organise this by means of commissions whose membership mirrored the proportional weighting of political groupings to which all deputies had to belong. This regulation complemented earlier electoral reforms which, following the introduction of male mass suffrage, favoured the presence on the political scene of modern parties. As a result of this new parliamentary regulation and in spite of resistance based on constitutional tradition, the political parties, now part of political life, moved to the heart of the institutional life of the state.