We Mean to Be Counted
White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia
Elizabeth R. Varon
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/2000
Pages: 248
Subject: History, Social Science
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807866085
DESCRIPTION
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.
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