Reviews for Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800-1860

The average rating for Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800-1860 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-30 00:00:00 William Cromer Between 1865-1920, Americans' concept of liberty - understood as self-ownership - changed in important ways. This revision involved changes to notions of injury and gender. A substantial portion of these revisions occurred through the agency of ordinary men and women, through the vehicle of courts, in response to changes in railroads and injuries which befell railway passengers. Recasting American Liberty opens on an America with a masculine laissez-faire conception of liberty: men could dispose of the selves they owned as the wished.To be vulnerable and to need protection was to be both feminine and unfree. To receive protection was to impinge on masculine freedom to dispose of one's own self. As technology improved, trains got faster, more frequent, and traveled longer stretches of rail. Along the way, accidents grew more numerous and more destructive, spurring increased documentation. Tracking accidents established patterns, demonstrating that accidents did not 'happen to befall' but occurred systematically. Considering accidents as systemic rather than individual events treated the free man as one among many, with his independence limited by large forces. Awareness of accidents as widespread, even commonplace, engendered calls for systemic remedies, a further transformation of men's freedom and individuality. Protective laws and injury claims in response to railroad accidents embodied changes in liberty and gender. Men who brought personal injury claims to court made public declarations of vulnerability and injury out of step with their masculine freedom. Women's personal injury suits were another revision of gendered liberty. By bringing personal injury suits, women took on active roles in the public arena beyond the proscribed bounds of protected feminine unfreedom. In addition, these suits were declarations of masculine failure, since the women involved had not been protected by men. In the face of this failure, women had no choice but to become agents seeking remedy for themselves in law suits. Changes resulting from lawsuits extended protections over all railway passengers. This effectively extended feminized unfreedom - having one's body and person managed by others - to male passengers. Free men were no longer to be left to handle problems on their own. Possibilities for accidents were to be managed by laws and procedures which former another power above individual men, in addition to the technological power of railroads which produced injuries and vulnerability. The self owned by each became something which required protection resulting from a supra-individual power. The era also saw a growth in what could be considered an injury. Not only could the body suffer (recompensable) injury, but the psyche could as well, as with the nonphysical trauma of disaster survivors, passengers during near misses, and so on. One type of nonphysical injury which Welke focuses on were injury claims about racial status arising from the mixing and segregating of whites and blacks during train journeys. Changes in what could count as injury, increased awareness and likelihood of injury, and changes in how the possibility for injury should be managed, amounted to a transformation of the concept of liberty. At the close of the era, self-ownership was no longer a laissez-faire matter. The existence of systemic forces threatened the individual self. Protection from these forces required that powers above the level of individuals manage the vulnerability of the self and self-ownership, thereby producing another systemic force, the protective state, which applied to both men and women. The book consists of three sections each of which treats the entire period from 1865-1920. Each section consists of three subsections. The first subsection of each section treats an aspect of and a change in rail travel, the second subsection treats gender and vulnerability, and the third treats law as both response to and vehicle for acting back upon the above. The first section of the book deals with railways and passengers physically: technological changes in railway travel, gendered dimensions of physical injuries, and the law of accidental injury. The second section deals with railways and passengers subjectively: the experience of rail travel and rail accident, gendered responses to trauma, and the law of nonphysical injury. The third section deals with railways and passengers socially and spatially: how passengers were distributed according to - primarily racialized - social position, gendered components of racial norms, and the law of racial segregation. Several factors enter into each of the transformations which the book narrates across these sections, and each transformation created both a new extension of management and new grounds for pursuing claims to injury. Instead of strongly emphasizing a single causal factor or type of causal factor over others, the book paints a picture of multiple processes and agents acting and reacting upon one another. Welke draws extensively on a wide range of sources including writers like Tocqueville and Mill, court records and legal decisions, railroad company and railroad board records, railroad trade magazines, and other history monographs. Welke demonstrates the role of railroads as an engine for changes far beyond the areas of commerce and communication, as well as demonstrating that a number of factors entered into the extension of and practices on railroads in addition to economic factors. The book ties together an impressive number of issues which could be thought of as discrete and shows how they operated as an ensemble. Recasting American Liberty moves across discussions of railway technology, law, conflict and norms about gender and race, and terrible stories of personally injury and death all without transitions which seem awkward or forced. I can imagine differently ordered excerpts from this book fitting well into different sorts of courses. The book also shows each of its threads as relevant to the others. Avoiding a simple chronological narrative allows Welke to attend to developments liberty without being teleological, as well as to address moments from different perspectives. The book focuses on ordinary people, not great individuals, in changing the narrative of the U.S. and the lived experience of freedom within that story. Since many of the injuries and the resutling personal injury cases Welke deals with took place in railways and courtrooms in the South, the book makes the South an important arena in the U.S. passage to modernity. It's difficult to assess a book's weaknesses in a way which is a not a wish list of what the book could have also included were it only longer. The book could have included more detail on legal matters of corporate ownership prior to the railroad revolution and to what degree law was a tool in that process. Doing so would extend the case made on the role of law in social processes. The book could have included more attention to railway workers, their injuries, their organizations, their publications, their letters and journals, and on employment law in railways and in general. Doing so would add another dimension to the story of vulnerable bodies and protective measures. The book could have included more material on responses to railway disasters and related legal battles among the public which witnessed disasters vicariously through news reports. Doing so would strengthen the argument made about railways as central to an important shift in American concepts of freedom and gender.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-11-29 00:00:00 Marvin Tahmahkera Welke makes a good case for the ways in which modern bodily vulnerability profoundly altered Americans' sense of self in relation to corporations and government. As she does so, she highlights the irony that the government's role in the preservation of "bodily integrity" - the right of an individual to keep his or her body free from harm - ironically limited certain American bodily freedoms (including the right to endanger one's body). That said, Welke's project does depend upon the reader's acceptance of the book's critical premises, most particularly the centrality of travel to Americans' conception of liberty. While the assertion that travel was critical to individual autonomy is logical enough, the place of movement within cultural understandings of freedom would have been an interesting, and formative, line of inquiry.