We mean to be counted : white women & politics in antebellum Virginia / Elizabeth R. Varon.

By:

Varon, Elizabeth R, 1963-

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Gender & American culturePublication details: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, �1998.Description: 1 online resource (x, 234 pages)Content type:

text

Media type:

computer

Carrier type:

online resource

ISBN:

0807866083
9780807866085

Subject(s):

Genre/Form:

Additional physical formats: Print version:: We mean to be counted.DDC classification:

306.2/082 21

LOC classification:

HQ1236.5.U6 V37 1998eb

Other classification:

15.85
HD 475

Online resources:

Click here to access online

Contents:

The representatives of virtue: female benevolence and moral reform -- This most important charity: the American Colonization Society -- The ladies are Whigs: gender and the second party system -- To still the angry passions: women as sectional mediators and partisans -- 'Tis now liberty or death: the secession crisis -- Epilogue: the war and beyond.

Action note:

digitized 2010 committed to preserve

Summary: 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.Summary: 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.

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-220) and index.

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.

Print version record.

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Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL

Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. MiAaHDL

http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212

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English.

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