This is a history of women’s history in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, the period that was the crucible of the suffrage movement. It covers the same period as Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (1995), but Teresa Anne Murphy disagrees with Baym, who condemned later nineteenth-century women writers for offering a debased form of identity politics, and argues that the discussion of domesticity and gender difference in histories of women during the period was part of a larger political debate over the way that citizenship for women should be conceived (p. 6). In this, Murphy is undoubtedly correct. National and cultural identity is inextricably tied up with the construction of national and cultural history. The inclusion of women in that history inevitably raises, and is typically motivated by, questions of gendered citizenship.

Murphy does not define “women’s history,” but it is clear she does not mean history written by women. Mercy Otis Warren’s history of the American Revolution is not discussed. Women’s history is, implicitly, the history of women’s place in society, and merges into the new discipline of sociology. Indeed, the subject of the last chapter, Caroline Dall, was instrumental in the establishment of sociology about the United States (p. 185). According to Murphy:

Glancing beyond the United States, Murphy might have distinguished theories of women’s contribution to the progress of society, which emerged as part of the history of civilizations, from earlier “histories of women” that go back at least to Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies (1405) and recount stories of notable women, in pursuit of the aim of improving women’s social position.

Some of the U.S. works mentioned, such as Hannah Mather Crocker’s Observations on the Real Rights of Women from 1818 (pp. 66–68) and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century from 1843 (pp. 70, 92–98), show many features of the earlier genre, while Sarah Josepha Hale’s rehabilitation of Eve (pp. 141–43) has multiple antecedents in earlier works. A wider and more critical definition of women’s history would have provided the opportunity for comparison with this earlier tradition, and avoided its annoying excision.

Murphy identifies the origins of women’s history in the United States with William Russell’s 1774 translation of Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s essay on the character of women, Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women, in Different Ages; William Alexander’s The History of Women: From Earliest Antiquity to the Present (1779); and Lord Kames’s “Progress of the Female Sex” from 1778 (pp. 13–14). She follows Karen O’Brien in emphasizing the influence on women of Scottish Enlightenment figures, such as Kames and John Millar, claiming that it was in the context of their accounts of the development of civilization that “the first women’s histories came to be written” (p. 28). Mid-eighteenth-century British works, such as George Ballard’s Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, are ignored, and although Murphy acknowledges that Thomas and Alexander drew on material from the earlier “tradition of celebrating female worthies and female accomplishments” (p. 29), she appears unaware of earlier accounts of women’s influence on the development of civilization for good or ill. Rousseau is not mentioned, but it is difficult to appreciate the political issues involved in the contrast between histories celebrating exceptional women and those promoting domesticity and republican motherhood, without acknowledging his influence.

Beginning with this group of male-authored works, Murphy represents early women’s history as dominated by “stage theory,” according to which there has been a historical progress toward “Anglo-Saxon” societies in which women participate as domestic citizens, but refrain from public politics or forms of work outside the home (p. 38). In addition to Dall, Crocker, Hale, and Fuller, we are introduced to Abigail Adams, Judith Sergeant Murray, Maria Stewart, Lydia Maria Child, Emma Willard, Paulina Wright Davis, and Elizabeth Ellet. They are treated more or less chronologically. Murphy attempts to explain the ways in which they each theorized women’s social role through their use of history.

One of the most successful chapters includes the 1838 debate beteen John Qunicy Adams and Benjamin Howard over women’s right to political participation (pp. 107–12). It demonstrates how circular appeals to history can become, with the disputants offering contrasting accounts of the past, to bolster conflicting recomendations for the present. This chapter is lively, but insufficient concrete detail often makes for a less than entertaining read. Maybe these women and their works are sufficiently well known to U.S. audiences that Murphy thought that she could dispense with biographical, exigetical, and other background details, but for an Australian reader there was too little exegesis and scene setting.

The second chapter begins with Abigail Adams, without explaining who she was, and claims that she “directly engaged and rewrote a key part of the argument in Russell’s translation” of Thomas’s work. This is confusing. It is unclear whether Murphy is refering to Adams’s letters or some other text. It transpires that it is the letters, and Adams is represented as going against Russell in reading Thomas as demonstrating “instances of patriotick virtue in the female sex” (p. 45). While Adams “rewrites,” Ellet is characterized as following a Thomas-inspired tradition of “domestic history,” and as making use of history to “undercut any demands women might make for their own legal or political rights” (pp. 132–33). Yet Ellet clearly thought domesticity and patriotism compatible, as did Adams. In The Women of the American Revolution, she suggested that before the revolution, the “talk of matrons in American homes was of the people’s wrongs and the tyranny that oppressed them” (p. 14), and she argued that the general political climate of a nation depends on women’s attitudes. Because there is no systematic setting out of the various strands of argument developed in the works discussed, such assessments, while they may be correct, appear ungrounded.

Although dismissive of Ellet, Murphy claims that Lydia Maria Child’s History of the Condition of Women “led the way in challenging the orthodoxies of women’s history that had been central in constructing arguments for women’s citizenship,” while Fuller “pushed even further” (p. 70). This is despite the fact that Child is also represented as warning readers “that some passages of [Fuller’s] book would offend” (p. 98). Child’s work is of a very different kind than either Fuller’s or Ellet’s. It borders on anthropology, rather than history, and opposes notions of white cultural superiority in ways that align with Child’s opposition to slavery. Ellet, by contrast, writes to celebrate the contribution of women to the revolution, while Fuller offers something closer to a traditional celebration of female worthies. Murphy lumps Hale with Ellet as an advocate of domestic citizenship (p. 135), but the former also writes history to demonstrate the contribution of Christianity to the progress of civilization. Diverse strands of argument are not sharply distinguished, and it was not very illuminating to treat these works as though they were largely reponses to stage theory.

While I learned a great deal from Murphy's book, it would have benefitted from a more clearly defined political framework, grounded in a discussion of earlier women's histories, contemporary political debates, and the attitudes to women's citizenship, sexuality, and political participation that had developed in Europe during the eighteenth century.