Combining lucid analysis of women, black and white, Native and Euro American, elite and laboring classes, with a dazzling variety of documents, Lasser and Robertson freshly synthesize decades of scholarship and introduce us to women's experiences in all their richness and vibrancy. We learn how women's civic identity and impassioned participation changed the face of antebellum America's society and politics. We find in the documents women playing multiple roles—Cherokees filing petitions to resist cessions of land, Lowell Mill girls laboring in factories, elite Blacks and Whites organizing benevolent societies, activists calling for the end of slavery, suffragists claiming the vote. Bravo for splendid presentation of women's kaleidoscopic lives.
Mary Kelley, University of Michigan Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson have compiled a superb work that will challenge readers' conventional understanding of American women's involvement in politics in the decades before the Civil War. The wide range of primary sources allows women from a variety of social classes and races to express their political opinions in their own words. Lasser's and Robertson's excellent introduction provides readers with a compelling framework for understanding the changes and continuities in women's political role throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.
Rosemarie Zagarri, George Mason University