Limit this search to....

We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia
Contributor(s): Varon, Elizabeth R. (Author)
ISBN: 0807846961     ISBN-13: 9780807846964
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
OUR PRICE:   $40.38  
Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats
Published: March 1998
Qty:
Annotation: Demonstrates the widespread reform efforts and partisan political activities of elite white women in antebellum Virginia. An eye-opening contribution to the history of womens activism in the U.S.
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Women's Studies
- Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social
- History | United States - 19th Century
Dewey: 306.208
LCCN: 97021587
Lexile Measure: 1490
Series: Gender and American Culture
Physical Information: 0.55" H x 5.43" W x 9.1" (0.81 lbs) 248 pages
Themes:
- Chronological Period - 19th Century
- Cultural Region - South Atlantic
- Cultural Region - Southeast U.S.
- Cultural Region - South
- Sex & Gender - Feminine
- Geographic Orientation - Virginia
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputed
the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still, a consensus has prevailed that, unlike their Northern counterparts, women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book, Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources, she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period, white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics.


Through their voluntary associations, legislative petitions,
presence at political meetings and rallies, and published
appeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to such
controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society, to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties, to the literary defense of
slavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, these
women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as
partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as
mediators who infused public life with the "feminine" virtues of
compassion and harmony.


Contributor Bio(s): Varon, Elizabeth R.: - Elizabeth R. Varon is professor of history at Temple University.