Rewriting citizenship: women, race, and nineteenth-century print culture

Abstract

"Rewriting Citizenship is a cultural history that reveals how race and gender influenced nineteenth-century citizenship. By focusing on "domestic literature": cookbooks, novels, household manuals, newspapers, magazines, sermons, and even diaries, Susan J. Stanfield finds that women imbued the quotidian with "civic purpose." Indeed, it was more than the social reformers and political activists who argued that women should have a role in government. Because many of these women saw their civic status as "different," though not necessarily inferior to, that of men, they made forays into the public sphere through print culture. In Stanfield's estimation, this helped women fulfill culturally constructed ideas of femininity-maintaining the "authority of their womanhood" - while they also actively redefined citizenship by linking their domestic work to nation building. Unsurprisingly, middle-class white women sought to differentiate themselves from immigrants, the working poor, and women of color by distinguishing between household labor and household management. But middle-class African American women also used the "politics of respectability" to enhance their own status. Like their white counterparts, these women argued that their well-ordered homes proved that their husbands and father were patriarchs and were therefore worthy of citizenship and the vote"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Introduction: Gendering rights and racializing gender : the cultural practice of citizenship -- The expanding female sphere : creating the citizen woman -- Constructing home and nation : household advice and civic domesticity -- The infrastructure of race : citizenship, gender, and African American public culture -- Creating an empowered private sphere : female citizenship and print culture -- Rewriting race and respectability : African American women and citizenship -- Conclusion: Reconstructing womanhood : domesticity, citizenship, and Minor v. Happersett.