Book review
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We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and
Politics in Antebellum Virginia. By Elizabeth R. Varon. Gender and American
Culture. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. x, 234pp. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. |
The Southern Lady ain't what she used to
be. Elizabeth R. Varon's ground-breaking
study of women's roles in politics in ante-
bellum Virginia puts an end to any suppo-
sition that the mythic creature was based
on reality. Drawing on her extensive re-
search in manuscripts, newspapers, mem-
oirs, reminiscences, and novels, and setting
her work within a vast array of appropriate
secondary sources, Varon argues convinc-
ingly that women took an active role in
antebellum politics in the Commonwealth
of Virginia and suggests that the patterns
of their political activity probably held true
across the South.
As in the North, women's political participation in the antebellum period began
with their involvement in benevolent associations. Women's support of charitable
organizations to educate the young and
spread the Christian gospel involved them
in the public sphere of petitioning, publishing, and fund-raising. Their work for the
temperance movement drew on women's
image as moral superior and lasted until
the movement's link with northern abolitionism made the cause nearly impossible
to support. Women's actions on behalf of
the American Colonization Society provided them with experiences in a public
political world that they expanded upon in
order to preserve domestic order under the
threat of servile rebellion after Nat Turner's atrocities. These links between women's moral being and political duties were
seized upon by the Whigs. The Harrison-Tyler presidential campaign of 1840 capitalized on women's activities to attract
support for Whig ideals. Women joined in
enthusiastically to support the party as
partisans, argues Varon, but also as mediators. "Whig womanhood" combined
the recognition of the superiority of the
Whig party with the notion that those
doing the recognizing were above party -- disinterested mediators promoting civic
virtue and serving the common good.
This paradoxical role for women continued through the 1840s and 1850s as the
nation moved to a more sectional view of
party issues. Partisanship in the 1840s allowed women to maintain a distance from
the hurly-burly of politics by arguing that
they brought moral superiority to the discussion of political matters. Their job was
not to vote, but to inform men. If men
failed to follow women's advice regarding
political matters, as they did when defeating Henry Clay in 1844, women then
stepped in to restore the party's luster by
memorializing Clay. Women were to serve
as men's consciences, and Democrats and
Know Nothings were careful to adapt to
this view of women's role in partisan politics by the 1850s.
The political crises of the 1850s, however, demanded that women promote their
section over their party and serve as mediators to try to keep the sections from
breaking apart. Their mediation attempts, traced in literature, newspaper articles, letters, and editorials, were to no avail, and,
by the end of the decade, women had
become southern nationalists, promoting
the South over the North and siding with
the Confederacy. Varon cites this three-step process, from partisan to sectionalist
to nationalist, as clear evidence that
women had very specific political roles to
fulfill in this country, even in the South,
and even in the antebellum period, when
historians have long held women were virtually inactive in politics before Reconstruction.
Varon's compelling argument and evidence recast the political landscape in Virginia, certainly, and most likely in other
southern states where similar organizations and opportunities existed. Virginia's
women were not political neophytes after
Reconstruction, trained by the war to take
charge of their lives in the public sphere, as
earlier historians have argued. Rather,
their political actions after 1865 mirrored
their actions before the war when, as
former First Lady Julia Gardiner Tyier put
it, "Politics is almost universally the theme
of conversation among the men . . . and the
women would be stupid indeed, if they did
not gather much information from this
abundant source" (p. 113).
Virginia's political women were not stupid. Varon's work gives us a far clearer
sense of the degree to which women were
involved in partisan politics, even though
they lacked the franchise. They were active
participants, not symbols and not myths.
Varon has provided a solid and imaginative reading of massive amounts of evidence that expand our view of Virginia
women's political history.
Janet L. Coryell, Western Michigan University
Reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, v.106 no.3 (Summer 1988)
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