Overview

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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9780197685839

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Leslie Butler's Consistent Democracy provides a sweeping intellectual history of the American idea of democracy, with women's claim to inclusion at its center. The author ranges gracefully over nineteenth-century thinkers and writersâwhite and black, male and female, for and against women's equal citizenship. Well-known figures like John Stuart Mill sit alongside less familiar democratic 'querists' like Frances Watkins Harper. With this book, it will no longer be possible to consider the development of American democracy without thinking about women * Ellen Carol DuBois, University of California, Los Angeles * In Consistent Democracy, Leslie Butler powerfully recasts the history of American democracy. With deep research and penetrating analysis, she reveals how women were not peripheral but central to extensive thought and debate over the United States' political order in its most formative period. Elegantly written, this book should become required reading for all those with a stake in democracy's future. * Kyle G. Volk, author of Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy * Leslie Butler returns readers to a nineteenth century in which disputes over what it meant to make democracy consistent took nothing for granted, showing us how questions about women raised questions about self-government itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources and sparkling with insights, this timely book is a must-read for historians of democracy as idea and practice, as well as for anyone concerned about the fate of government that is of, for, and by all of the people. * W. Caleb McDaniel, author of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America *

01/05/2023 Main NY C Sales A 15/11/2023 22.99 HBJK JFCX JP HBWJ JPB DSB DSBF

Author Information

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

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