Leslie Butler

Consistent Democracy (eBook, ePUB)

The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

What did it mean that in the world's first mass democracy only a minority ruled? Women--free and enslaved, white and Black, single and married--constituted the bulk of those barred from full self-government in nineteenth-century America. The seeming anomaly of this exclusion fostered basic questions about the possibilities and limits of popular rule during the decades of democracy's worldwide ascendancy. Consistent Democracy examines how these wide-ranging discussions about self-government and the so-called woman question developed in published opinion from the 1830s through the 1890s. Ranging beyond the organized women's rights movement, it places in conversation travel writers and domestic advice gurus, activists and educators, novelists and journalists, as well as countless others who explored contested aspects of democratic womanhood. Across the expansive world of print, these writers explored women's individual autonomy, their familial roles, and their participation in the polity with the franchise and without it. An array of theorists, reformers, and critics--including foreign observers Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, educator Catharine Beecher, political theorist John Stuart Mill, African American author and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and historian Francis Parkman--compelled Americans to assess and reassess their popular political ideas and assumptions against the backdrop of a turbulent century that witnessed the violent end of slavery. Combining intellectual, political, and cultural history, Consistent Democracy illuminates how--in the nineteenth century and since--woman questions were democracy questions.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Oktober 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780197685846
• Artikelnr.: 69018201

Autorenporträt

Leslie Butler is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College and the author of Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prelude: Posing the Woman Question in 1838
Part I: American Democracy, American Women
Chapter 1: Observing American Democracy
Chapter 2: Domesticating Democracy
Chapter 3: To Make Democracy Consistent
Interlude: Self-Government on Trial in 1863
Part II: Woman Questions, Democracy Questions
Chapter 4: Amending Democracy
Chapter 5: Reconstructing the Woman Question
Chapter 6: Unresolved Questions
Epilogue: New Women, New Questions in 1893
Notes
Index