Volume 9, Number 1 · July 13, 1967
Emancipated Women
By Christopher Lasch
Vessel of Wrath: The Life and Times of Carry Nation
by Robert Lewis Taylor
New American Library, 363 pp., $6.95
Vicky: A Biography of Victoria C. Woodhull
by M.M. Marberry
Funk & Wagnalls, 329 pp., $5.95
Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull
by Johanna Johnston
Putnam, 307 pp., $5.95
Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery
by Robert Peel
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 359 pp., $7.50
The Puritan Ethic and Woman Suffrage
by Alan P. Grimes
Oxford, 154 pp., $4.75
The nineteenth century produced a new and distinctive social type: the woman as reformer. Defying convention, she was nevertheless the product of one of the most popular conventions of the period, the sexual division of labor, which assigned commerce and politics to men and 'culture' to ladies. In the orthodox version of the Victorian social myth, this same division of labor justified women's confinement to the home. But in the 1830s, the reformers began to draw a different conclusion: If women were more 'spiritual' than men, as the prevailing sexual stereotypes so clearly implied, to restrict their influence to the home was a criminal waste of resources.
Review, 4375 words
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