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Informationen zum Autor ELIZABETH R. VARON is professor of history at Temple University. She is author of We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (from the University of North Carolina Press). Klappentext Over the past two decades, historians have successfully disputedthe 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 publishedappeals, Virginia's elite white women lent their support to suchcontroversial 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 ofslavery, and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension, Varon argues, thesewomen struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both aspartisans who boldly expressed their political views and asmediators who infused public life with the "feminine" virtues ofcompassion and harmony. Zusammenfassung The author challenges the historical assumption that women of Virginia were largely excluded from public life. Varon demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period! white Southern women of the slaveholding class were involved in politics through their presence at political meetings and rallies. In the GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE series.
Info autore
ELIZABETH R. VARON is professor of history at Temple University. She is author of We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (from the University of North Carolina Press).
