“BELONGING TO THE WORLD”: WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND CONSTITUTIONAL CULTURE by Sandra F. VanBurkleo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 409 pp. Cloth $69.95. ISBN: 0-19-506971-4. Paper $24.95. ISBN: 0-19-506972-2.

Reviewed by Sharon G. Whitney. Department of Political Science. Tennessee Technological University.

“BELONGING TO THE WORLD” is a volume in a series of Bicentennial Essays on the Bill of Rights, sponsored by Oxford University Press and the Organization of American Historians. Kermit Hall, the General Editor, writes that the series is designed to foster better teaching about the history of liberty, including the legal and political struggles to attain equal rights by African Americans, Native Americans, and women. Mary K. B. Tachau was originally to prepare the volume on women, but she met an untimely death. VanBurkleo, an Associate Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Law at Wayne State University, stepped in to do the work. Hall introduces VanBurkleo’s volume as synthesizing “the best and most recent literature” in history, political science, law, and women’s history and studies (p. viii).

“BELONGING TO THE WORLD” is a phrase that comes from Reverend Antoinette Brown, in an 1853 speech that explained her motivation in going to the World Temperance Conference in New York City as an official delegate of two state leagues. At the conference she tried to speak but was excluded, prompting a break-away formation of the WHOLE World Temperance Conference.

“I went there as an item of the world, to contend that the sons and daughters of the race, without distinction to sex, sect, class or color, should be recognized as belonging to the world, and I planted my feet upon the simple rights of the delegate. I asked no favor as woman, or in behalf of woman; no favor as a woman advocating temperance; no recognition of the cause of women above the cause of humanity; the endorsement of no ‘ism’ and of no measure; but I claimed,
in the name of the world, the rights of a delegate in a world’s convention” (p. 86).

VanBurkleo’s first stated premise is that many Americans, including educators and college students, believe that feminism is, or should be, dead. Her book “could be read as a meditation on the merits” of such claims (p. ix). Her clear thesis is that they are untrue. Beyond the Nineteenth Amendment and various beneficial, or controversial, U. S. Supreme Court rulings since the 1960s, there are signs that American women are still vulnerable to suffer under inequitable conditions, for
example, in matters of rape, wife-beating, or poverty, which seem to resist the positive effects of institutional changes and developments in education rights. Ironically, there is resistance too in the contemporary culture of an educated middle-class. Computer science degrees that go to women DECLINED between the

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1980s and 1990s (p. x, citing a SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN report).

VanBurkleo’s historical narrative for feminism relies on two cultural concepts. The first is SETTLEMENT. It originally was used by John Murrin to “describe the periodic reordering of Anglo-American governments and the terms of citizenship during constitutional crises” (p. xi), and she adopts it to describe both the dynamic process of renegotiation in the basic terms of legal and political discourse and the concrete results in constitutions, judicial declarations, popular identification with a new political system, and the like.

The second cultural concept she uses is SPEECH COMMUNITY, and its variant, SUFFRAGE COMMUNITY. Such communities extend beyond the formal
state into organizations in the civic culture. They bond participants in a shared belief that expressed voices have influence in changing relationships, perhaps even more than do governmental institutions. She uses these concepts to good advantage in the organization of her book.

VanBurkleo’s book is divided into three parts, corresponding with three historical eras in the settlements and communities associated with women’s struggle for reforms in America’s constitutional culture. Part One is called “’The Way of Obedience’: Foundations.” In Chapter One women’s subjugation during British American colonialism is dealt with. During this period females were classified as FEME SOLE (single) or FEME COVERT (married), and individuals of a family unit governed by a man as the household’s undivided sovereign. The household was seen as a microcosm of the king’s virtual representation of national unity. The marital system was known as COVERTURE. Women, like Ann Hutchinson or Ann Hibbens, who publicly expressed independence from this system, could be punished as a subversive force against the natural order of society.

Chapter Two is titled “Toward the Revolutionary Settlement.” In the New World, despite coverture, women as well as men began to experience a new freedom in religious conscience, speech, travel, and in economic and political changes. Within the household favoring revolution against colonialism, women did auxiliary patriotic republican acts, like sewing American flags. A useful section in this chapter is entitled “Locke, Filmer, and the Sexual Contract.” It shows how
Locke’s revolutionary ideas on both government and marriage being a voluntary civil contract had a privatizing effect on female’s relationships with both males and the government. This helps to explain why the revolutionary settlement on citizenship rights in terms of sex adhered to the norm of coverture.

Part Two is called “’Talk is the Fountain-Head of All Things’: Republican Speech Communities and Coequality.” It covers the post-revolution and the immediate post-Civil War era. During this time, armed with revolutionary texts, the first wave of women’s critical speech against patriarchy and paternalism emerged. The
American Revolution expressed the common belief that moral limits on governments’ actions exist, and that human beings’ natural rights constitute a legitimate basis to struggle to be free from tyrannical ruling authorities. The first wave of speaking out originated in women’s activism for slavery’s abolition, but it was accompanied by the Second Great Awakening in religious sentiments and growth toward capitalism, both of which also had equalizing effects. A separate

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speech community for women’s equal civil rights eventually evolved.

By the 1840s a loosely-organized women’s rights movement existed, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which became a distinct discourse by the mid-1850s, but by 1869 this community was showing fissures. Law-minded activists developed a “New Departure,” which demanded its voice be heard in federal presidential elections, and there was much more agitation for sex-neutral reforms in citizens’ rights. Universal suffrage as an electoral reform was contrasted with sex-specific protections for female laborers and in marriage and family law, but the Civil War settlement perpetuated women’s political subservience. Moreover, the SLAUGHTERHOUSE CASES (1873) and BRADWELL v. ILLINOIS (1873) both put to rest the idea that the Fourteenth Amendment was meant to be universal and individualistic in its economic applications, and MINOR v. HAPPERSETT (1874) denied there was a federal right for women to vote.

Part Three is called “’Governments Try Themselves: Democratic Suffrage Communities and Equality.” It deals with developments after the Civil War settlement. During this period, universal suffrage and the need for equal protection by the law to engage in the professional careers of law and politics emerged as the key focus of agitation. Yet, some public policy analysts touted the merits of scientific and technological methods of objectivity as applied to private and public organizational systems, and some analysis of women’s physical and social differences helped to spawn values for governmental subsidies to individuals’ social welfare. Progressive analysts feared that the health of the American family unit was jeopardized by the mass free market imperative of corporate capitalism. One response was
legislation to protect working women and children. Florence Kelly, a pro-labor social worker, and Louis Brandeis, were instrumental of this development, for example in MULLER v. OREGON (1908). Women’s right to vote was also debated in such terms. Justices Sutherland and Holmes squared off in ADKINS v. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL (1923) on if women’s suffrage ended the need for governmental protection of female laborers in a free market economy.

Once the battleground shifted from formal rights of equal participation in the political culture and the New Deal economic regulations became acceptable to a majority of the United States Supreme Court’s justices, it was possible for speech communities of liberal activists to try to secure this foundation of more equality in
liberty by highlighting the positive material benefits from a productive economic life. In this context, advocacy for more individual freedom in contraception, comparable work and pay analysis, and a new movement to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment emerged. More conservative public policy analysts feared that these steps could do more damage to the traditional values of a family-centered culture, while more radical critical theorists have doubted that liberalism can
effectively free women from persistent sexist oppression in the mass culture. At any rate, by the end of the 1990s a new civil rights settlement on behalf of women had been hammered out in politics and jurisprudence.

VanBurkleo’s method of historical narrative highlights the leading voices of women in their experiences with America’s constitutional culture. She explained in her preface that her reason for taking this approach was that typically scholars of

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American constitutional culture address only the significance of judicial opinions and congressional debates in the contemporary era of civil rights speech and settlement. Although she does not ignore this vein, for many of us, her coverage of legal, political, and social developments before our own era may help to close a knowledge gap. I happen to have a peripheral research interest, for example, in the U. S. Supreme Court’s decisions about Congress’s Morrill Act (1862) and
Mormon polygamy in the Utah and Idaho territories, cases which she discusses in Chapter Seven, titled “The Civil War Settlement,” under a section on marriage and women’s bodies. Moreover, VanBurkleo’s historical narrative is supplemented with copious notes for each chapter, an extensive bibliographic essay, and a reliable Index. Because I was so impressed overall by her work, I hate to mention that I also noticed a couple of factual errors, and that a colleague who is a specialist in the 19th century political developments expressed in women’s literature, pointed out a third minor factual error.

After digesting “BELONGING TO THE WORLD” I affirm that I can better converse with interested others on assorted empirical points relevant to the continuity and change in America’s constitutional culture pertaining to women. I think such conversation among seasoned scholars of feminist politics and jurisprudence is served quite well by this book. I do wonder if knowledge of our culture’s evolution is a valid springboard for analyzing the human rights progress for other women, as in Afghanistan, since the end of rule by the Taliban and with its current leadership toward a more stable constitutional culture.

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Copyright 2002 by the author, Sharon G. Whitney.