Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

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Univ of North Carolina Press, Nov 9, 2000 - History - 344 pages
With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas--before and after 1848--that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg shows, they developed a rich theoretical tradition that influenced not only subsequent strains of feminist thought but also ideas about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally.
By focusing on rights discourse and political theory, Isenberg moves beyond a narrow focus on suffrage. Democracy was in the process of being redefined in antebellum America by controversies over such volatile topics as fugitive slave laws,
temperance, Sabbath laws, capital punishment, prostitution, the Mexican War, married women's property rights, and labor reform--all of which raised significant legal and constitutional questions. These pressing concerns, debated in women's rights
conventions and the popular press, were inseparable from the gendered meaning of nineteenth-century citizenship.

From inside the book

Contents

1 Firstborn Feminism
1
2 Citizenship Understood and Misunderstood
15
3 Visual Politics
41
4 Conscience Custom and Church Politics
75
5 The Political Fall of Woman
103
6 The Bonds of Matrimony
155
7 The Sovereign Body of the Citizen
191
Notes
205
Bibliography
273
Index
309
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About the author (2000)

Nancy Isenberg is the Mary Frances Barnard Chair in History at the University of Tulsa.

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