Rosemarie Zagarri’s Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic examines women’s role in politics during the first fifty years of the American Republic. Zagarri draws upon the fields of women’s history and gender history as well as legal history in her analysis.
Zagarri seeks to understand women’s political involvement following the American Revolution and what led to their removal to separate spheres. Additionally, Zagarri wants to know what methods were used to define inclusion and exclusion in American politics.
Zagarri argues that women were politically active following the American Revolution and that men’s fears of their political activism led to the end of their overt role in traditional partisan politics. Following the American Revolution, “many American women and men did understand the notion of women’s rights in political terms.” Women actively engaged in partisan politics and, “through their very presence, women eased men’s guilt about the ruptures caused by partisanship and provided a visible symbol of unity, linking the mythical patriotic consensus of the revolutionary era with a factionless era that lay in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future.” Despite this hope, women played an active role in party conflict. Changing social mores, however, led to calls for women to act as mediators, calming partisan clashes. Zagarri claims that this eventually resulted in women’s forced exit from party politics and the expectation that they would “exercise their political role indirectly,” a part of the discourse of separate spheres. According to Zagarri, the concept of separate spheres was not used to prevent women’s political activity, rather, “separate spheres ideology…may actually have been a reaction against women’s more extensive involvement in politics, a convenient way to explain and justify excluding women from party politics and electoral activities.” In the end, Zagarri argues that the triumph of the Republican party after the Federalist’s downfall left little room for women’s political activism. The creation of a racial and gender-based hierarchy finally justified women’s exclusion from American politics.
Zagarri works within a framework developed by Joan Scott and Mary Kelley to broaden the definition of political actions. She argues against Mary Beth Norton and Linda K. Kerber to suggest that women voting in New Jersey were not outliers, but part of a larger pattern of women’s political involvement in American society. In her epilogue, Zagarri builds upon the foundation of political historian Louis Hartz to suggest that white masculinity stood as a bulwark against “the excesses of unfettered individualism” and reinforced a hierarchical structure to American life.
Zagarri uses “traditional sources of male political history, including newspapers, legislative records, political pamphlets, and correspondence among political elites.” She also expands her source base to include “popular periodicals and ladies’ magazines; Fourth of July orations; fiction; satire; and the writings of women contained in letters to their husbands, friends, and relatives.” This balance of sources enables Zagarri to contrast the role of women in politics as men understood it and as women themselves understood it. ( )