H-SHEAR FORUM ON DANIEL WALKER HOWE'S _WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT_

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TODAY: Mary P. Ryan on Women and Gender

Daniel Walker Howe's brisk, encyclopedic excursion through the years
1815 to 1845 lingers for a generous number of pages over one of Andrew
Jackson's cabinet appointments, that of treasury secretary John Henry
Eaton. The political controversy provoked by the risqué reputation of
Eaton's wife Peggy garnered nearly as much attention as that landmark
event of the Jackson administration, the assault on the Bank of the
United States. This is not to suggest that matters of gender and
sexuality are beginning to rival questions of economics and
presidential politics as the staples of United States history. Yet it
does offer telling evidence about how women have been integrated into
the historical record and how gender can become a part of historical
synthesis as represented by this prize-winning book and distinguished
publishing series.

Howe is to be commended for welcoming women and gender into the Oxford
History of the United States. More than just including female
characters, of whom there are many in this volume, Howe acknowledges
the efficacy of women actors in making history. When wives of
Washington leaders snubbed Peggy Eaton, as Howe tells it, they
succeeded in thrusting their "separate gender identity" into national
politics: "The women saw themselves defending the interests and honor
of the female half of humanity" and learned that "women acting
collectively could advance the moral state of society" (p. 338) Taking
instruction from books like Catherine Allgor's _Parlor Politics_
(2000), Howe attributes power to women who "although legally
disfranchised were not necessarily politically apathetic or inert" (p.
338).

Howe puts women (even so unsavory a woman as Eaton, whom he calls
"brash, demanding, and voluptuous in appearance") squarely on the
stage of antebellum history. Although he treats this particular female
subject with some frivolity ("Peggy seldom seems to have been
lonely"), Howe demonstrates that gender operates on the most elevated
plane of history, in the federal circles of political power (pp.
335-336). Although he does not press the point, the drama of the
Washington drawing rooms also illustrates how women and their
sexuality can be exploited for partisan political purposes. Eaton was
largely a pawn in the political machinations of the familiar cast of
central historical characters; Martin Van Buren garnered favor from
President Jackson, outwitted Henry Clay, and advanced his own
presidential prospects, all by defending the wife of the Secretary of
the Treasury. Eaton is also something of a pawn in the historian's
interpretive game. Howe uses the Eaton scandal as an occasion to vent
his undisguised contempt for Andrew Jackson, who "expected to be able
to control his cabinet members, and thought they in turn should be
able to control their wives" (p. 337). The induction of Peggy Eaton
into mainstream history may seem a sobering and bittersweet, if not
entirely pyrrhic, victory for the field of women's history. After the
extraordinary scholarly efforts of a generation, women are issued
another reminder that they are the second sex, both in history and in
the U. S. historical synthesis.

To those of us who labored for close to forty years to write women
into history, this can be a painful recognition. It is enough to
provoke a feminist to take up a double-edged sword and critique both
the current state of women's and gender history and the whole project
of the grand synthesis of national history. Howe is fully cognizant of
the altered epistemological conditions under which we write history
now that powerful white males no longer hold exclusive title to
historical relevance. He concedes that the complexity and variety of
past experience cannot be reduced to a single argument and chooses
instead to tell multiple stories including those of people previously
excluded from the master narrative of U. S. History. While
particularly attentive to African Americans, and giving relatively
shorter shrift to lower classes, he makes women his favored Other.
Although the women actors are often minor players in a drama staged
around male political leaders, selective members of the second sex are
given a story of their own, and even a privileged position in the
closing chapters. The endpoint of the women's story is the Seneca
Falls convention, whose bold proclamation of women's rights Howe
anticipated even in the Eaton scandal of 1829. Jumping ahead to 1848
Howe predicted that "Although most or all of them would have been
shocked if had been pointed out," the wives who patrolled sexuality
during the Jackson administration "would lead in a few more years to
an organized movement on behalf of women's rights" (p. 342).

On close inspection the thread of this argument seems somewhat thin,
gnarled and frayed. Thin in supporting evidence and gnarled in its
convoluted chronology, it frays all along the ragged edges of the
social and cultural differences within the female population. Howe
himself acknowledges that the empirical foundation of this story is
weak; only a small minority of women or men endorsed women's rights by
1848. Careful recent studies also indicate that gender politics took a
detour away from women's rights during the period 1815-1848.[1] The
convolutions in Howe's line of argument are exposed when he strays
away from the history of the women's rights movement into his favored
domain of religious history. Speaking for antebellum advocates of
women's rights he contends that "Nineteenth-century feminists, when
they invoked the Enlightenment language of natural rights, typically
interpreted it in the light of the Second Great Awakening of
religion" (p. 845). Yet, as many women's historians have demonstrated
women's rights took intellectual root in ideas that were often outside
of, if not antagonistic to, evangelical Protestantism, chiefly those
of Quakers, Unitarians and freethinkers.[2] Conversely, Howe fails to
mention the potent evangelical opposition to women's rights, most
notably Catherine Beecher's rebuttal to Sarah Grimké's _Letters on the
Equality of the Sexes_ (1837) and pastoral admonitions that women
should practice their religion in unobtrusive ways.

The peculiar slant of this construction of the women's rights movement
is in fact a subplot of the dominant storyline that runs through _What
God Hath Wrought_. If not evangelicals, Howe's favored women, like his
favored men, are aggressively Protestant members of an emerging middle
class. While scores of women find entry into Howe's narrative, they
represent a relatively narrow segment of the population. Howe
inadvertently reveals his personal vantage point on antebellum America
at the very outset of the book when he chooses first a male and then a
female character to introduce his narrative. Samuel Morse, inventor of
the telegraph and fierce Nativist, serves as his male persona, while
the prologue to the female subplot is drawn from a Methodist woman's
magazine that praised the telegraph as a "means of extending
civilization, republicanism and Christianity over the earth" (p. 3).
Elsewhere he credits "Bible-centered Protestantism, synthesized with
the Enlightenment and a respect for classical learning," for helping
to "shape the culture, determine patterns of intellectual inquiry and
define the terms of debate in the antebellum American republic. It
supplied a young and rapidly changing society with a sense of
stability" (p. 482). Women's claim to influence in _What God Hath
Wrought_ is confined chiefly to these narrow social and cultural
channels, awarded on the condition that they be "moral" and act in the
service of "civilization."[3]

It is the insistent middle-class and Protestant slant of Howe's
synthesis that opens up a prominent role for women in American
history. Of the westward movement, for example, we are told that "the
shortage of women also contributed to the temporary drop in the level
of civilization among the new arrivals. ... The presence of
respectable Anglo womanhood in California became a dream, part of an
aspiration to the civilization the migrant had left behind" (p. 819).
Those who might oppose or reject this orthodoxy, like Fanny Wright,
whose forthright call for gender equality and sexual freedom is
slighted in a single reference to "Wollstonecraft feminism," are all
but ignored (p. 540). Similarly, Howe seems oblivious to Sarah Grimké
or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's rejection of the notion of female moral
superiority, which would contradict his account of the intellectual
origins and meanings of the antebellum woman's rights movement. At
least some humorous asides, like the references to Anne Royall, tried
for harassing Presbyterian ladies on their way to church, leave some
hint that not all women signed on to the middle-class Protestant
civilizing mission (p. 495).

In 1840 the subplot of Protestant womanhood converged with the Howe's
major storyline of partisan politics. In the presidential campaign of
that year, the Whig Party invited women to express their support for
their nominee, William Henry Harrison. While Howe concedes that women
were never Whig leaders and remained excluded from nominating
conventions, he pointedly takes note of the exceptionally rare
occasions when a woman gave a speech or marched in a partisan
procession. Not just women, but gender difference more broadly was
implicated in the Whig political culture that occupies so prominent a
position in _What God Hath Wrought_. "Recognizing that theirs was the
party of the middle class, the Harrisonians presented their candidate
as the custodian of the domestic values cherished by the middle class,
as the guardians of hearth and home" (p. 607).

The gender ideology of female domesticity as championed by the Whigs
is contrasted with the "insistent masculinity of Democratic ranks" (p.
607). Howe aligns the code of Democratic masculinity with a violent
urban "male tavern culture" where "youths proved their manhood by
drinking, fighting each other, attacking members of different ethnic
groups or political parties, and beating up or gang-raping women" (p.
528). Although a careful search through urban history would find some
brawling gangs affiliated with the Whig party, Howe codes his favored
party as a different style of masculinity characterized by "literacy ,
thrift, impulse control, respect for diligent work, honesty and
promise-keeping, moral involvement with the world outside one's local
community" (p. 580). This capacious volume does not exclude entirely
those magnetic American personalities who cannot be constrained within
the Whigs' gender discipline. He quotes Walt Whitman, for example,
proclaiming "O the joy of manly self-hood/ To be servile to none, to
defer to none" (p 528). Yet he does not take this as cue to celebrate
with Whitman that distinctively un-Whiggish love of the freedom,
tumult and delirium of the city, not to speak of his homosexuality,
though these too are a vigorous, if not a particularly godly, part of
antebellum American history.

Howe's way of mapping male and female onto the partisan landscape
identifies important aspects of the political culture of the
antebellum period. But by leaving that ideology largely unexamined and
undisputed he skirts the most critical and complicated issues in
gender history. Among other things he tends to obscure the inequity
and hierarchy that undergirded codes of masculinity and femininity.
While Howe is attentive to the ways in which the Whigs paid rhetorical
homage to femininity and domesticity, he tends to avert his gaze from
gender inequities: for examples, the denial of women's rights--to
property, child custody and individuality--or the sexual double
standard, for example. He opines that "despite the common law of
'coverture' which deprived married women of legal independence from
their husband, women almost always looked forward to the prospect of
marriage" (p. 36). The burdens of gender inequality for widows
sentenced to the almshouse house or the young females in sweatshops
are also greeted with relative complacency. They are acknowledged only
in muted references to Lowell girls who "put in long hours under
unhealthy conditions and contracted not to leave until they had worked
at least a year. But twelve to fourteen dollars a month was a good
wage and the new town had attractive shops" (p. 133). (This is at a
time when the typical women's wage was one third that earned by a
man.) While Howe never shrinks from indicting America for its crimes
of slavery and racism, his account of the gender relations of African
Americans is cursory. "In their aspirations for a modicum of personal
security, dignity, and tangible reward for hard work, enslaved
American families resembled other American families" (p. 59). Speaking
of such a resemblance seems glib given the fact, documented by
numerous studies, that the majority of enslaved men and women could
not expect to reside in households composed of two parents and their
young children.

No single volume, not even one as expansive as _What God Hath
Wrought_, can fully record all the fine gradations and variations in
the experience of gender, especially as they are refracted by class
and race. Still, to so homogenize them is to neglect one of the most
important historical transformations of the period from 1815 to 1848.
While Howe showcases a "communications revolution" that transformed
America in fundamental ways, he treats gender largely as a static
phenomenon, subject only to superficial variations within a priori
categories of manhood and womanhood. Modifications in gender roles and
practices appear as byproducts of economic or technological changes.
Of the Erie Canal, for example, he writes that the effect was
"particularly felt by women, causing some to turn from rural household
manufacturing to management of middle-class households based on cash
purchases" (p. 218). This hardly does justice to the magnitude and
complexity of gender change enacted by the men and women who inhabit
the pages of _What God Hath Wrought_. Over the course of Howe's
narrative, the productive unit of the farming couple of 1815 is seen
to disappear in a generation, replaced by two separate flanks of the
middle-class, the domesticated but reform-minded wives and the
independent hard- driving breadwinners of the Victorian age. Howe
offers general economic factors and scattered references to the
decline of "patriarchal authority" as explanations of this
transformation. Given all the energy women and gender historians have
paid to charting and then critiquing the notion of separate spheres
(an issue that is especially germane to the period covered here),
Howe's decision to forego the opportunity to make gender analysis a
more integral part his historical synthesis is specially regrettable.

Both gender and women, while admirably included in _What God Hath
Wrought_, are subordinated to another story, and inevitably suffer
some distortion in the process. This is the author's prerogative and
the result of difficult decisions about what to include in a work of
historical synthesis. More pertinent is the larger question: is it
possible to write a satisfying and comprehensive synthesis after
historical writing has been sufficiently democratized to give
representation to women and an array of other social differences and
cultural groupings? Some might consider giving up on the whole
enterprise, and try a different tack. Recent historiography has shown
us that in-depth, highly-focused, micro studies can better evoke and
explain the events of the past. For example, studies of one prostitute
by Patricia Cohen and one document by Lori Ginsberg speak to gender
with more complexity and completeness than any synthetic compendium
could possibly realize. Similarly a concentration on a single or
circumscribed space, a town in Tennessee (Lisa Tolbert) or a mining
camp in the West (Susan Johnson) can condense both intimate knowledge
and social breadth within one small compass.[4]

Yet books that attempt the national range and thematic generality of
_What God Hath Wrought_ meet a real need of both professional
historians and general readers. Daniel Walker Howe has served that
purpose with grace, erudition and the vitality of his distinctive
point of view. He has also been more attentive to women and gender
than most authors of big synthetic history books. This admirably
inclusive history has, however, the ironic effect of calling attention
to the remaining lacunae in big-picture history. This conundrum should
at least serve as reason to disavow the attitude of the omniscient
narrator and instead to admit to the inevitable selectivity or biases
of any single author. (In the case of this reviewer that means owning
up not just to a feminist perspective, but a preference for taking
historical excursions to city taverns rather than genteel parlors or
Sunday schools.)

Finally, a more pluralistic and less omniscient synthesis would convey
the volatility and ultimate incomprehensibility of history itself.
Daniel Walker Howe has deftly demonstrated and finely detailed the
massive transformation that occurred between 1815 and 1848. But this
volume, like most such synthetic works, leaves those who experienced
these changes somehow unruffled by change, still encased in the same
rigid boxes, be they labeled Whigs or Democrats, middle class or their
shadowy others, male or female. Yet these boxes were fabricated by
human beings and hence are always protean in themselves. In terms of
Howe's front story of politics, the period between 1815 and 1848 saw
not just a rivalry between two parties, but the invention of a whole
new political regime, characterized by expanded suffrage, wider
democratic participation, the assertion of the foreign-born and the
non Protestant, all worked out not just in party conventions, but at
the polling places, on the streets, and yes, in churches and private
households. That history requires more than placing Whigs on a par
with Democrats or women on the sidelines of presidential history.
Antebellum Americans did haltingly re-arrange themselves into two
separate, ill-fitting boxes, one labeled male and the other female. It
was certainly not clear at the time that women were on a teleological
path to equality that would take a century and more. Neither was it
ordained that men or women would docilely file into separate positions
within the public realm, nor that one sex or the other would construct
and then preside over a separate domestic realm. To invest the whole
unwieldy American story with this uncertainty, diversity and
possibility, is to see the history that human beings hath wrought.

Mary P. Ryan
Johns Hopkins University

Notes

[1]. See Rosemarie Zagarri, _Revolutionary Backlash: Women and
Politics in the Early American Republic_ (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania, 2007).

[2]. Debra Gold Hansen, _Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the
Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society_ (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1993); Nancy A. Hewitt, _Women's Activism and
Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872_ (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1984); Judith Wellman, _The Road to Seneca Falls:
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention_
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

[3]. See, for example, pages 349 and 628, as well as chapters 12 and 16.

[4]. Patricia Cline Cohen, _The Murder of Helen Jewett: the Life and
Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York_ (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998); Lori Ginzberg, _Untidy Origins: a Story of
Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York_ (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005); Lisa C. Tolbert, _Constructing
Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee_ (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Susan Lee Johnson, _Roaring
Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush_ (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2001).

*****

Catch up on previous parts of Howe Forum:

INTRODUCTION (Oct. 27)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=/eKgyeicCgpYSkmSDVdJng

JAMES HUSTON ON ECONOMIC HISTORY (Oct. 27)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0810&week=d&msg=xC7PayA4egD0XIRVNPkdcA

MICHAEL A. MORRISON ON POLITICAL HISTORY (Nov. 3)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=a&msg=7lyPqVnVCIx6iIXmEMx2ig

DAVID M. HENKIN ON THE "COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION" (Nov. 10)
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-SHEAR&month=0811&week=b&msg=1vGEslA6v7PF6F6yHB3tew

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