United States
small-farmer yeoman class was mostly illiterate," given
the contrary evidence in a later chart (pp. 150, 326).
The discussion of Reconstruction-era railroad fraud is
garbled; 240 times $16,000 per mile equals $3,840,000,
not $768,000 as indicated in the text (p. 253). Interpretive points are similarly muddled on occasion: the
distinction between share wages as a form of labor
payment and decentralized "sharecropping" is confusing if not factually wrong (p. 270).
Another problem relates to the topic of race relations. African Americans are hardly absent from the
book, and the general discussion of racial issues is
reasonable, but the black perspective on events is not
much in evidence. For example, the Populists' approach toward black voters is examined, but the whole
issue of how blacks responded receives far less attention. It seems possible that the authors' vigorous
sympathy for Populism as a "true and native people's
crusade" leads them astray here (p. 319). Similarly, the
chapter on women after the Civil War slights the
dramatic changes emancipation hrought to black
women and their families. The Freedmen's Bureau
receives more careful scrutiny than what the freedpeople themselves were doing.
One striking example of this occurs in the generally
excellent portion of the book dealing with civil rights.
The movement's rejection of Martin Luther King and
turn toward Black Power in the late 1960s had national
ramifications. It also had much to do with Alabama,
given the presence of Stokely Carmichael and the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the group
that first popularized the Black Panther symbol. From
this book, one might not know that the phenomenon of
black nationalism existed, then or earlier. Marcus
Garvey is not mentioned in the section dealing with the
1920s, despite the recent literature suggesting his
strong following in the South. In general, the book
does not much explore internal conflicts within the
African-American community. It might have profited
from presenting events less consistently from a mainstream viewpoint.
The book does have strengths beyond its generally
reasonable interpretive line. It integrates social and
cultural history into the political narrative, often in the
form of individual vignettes. The final section of the
book pulls together an argument skillfully, despite the
difficulties of writing instant history. The study generally maintains its critical distance, with perhaps one
exception: it takes a pardonable pride in the athletic
accomplishments of Alabamians, including, it seems,
the world water-skiing championship of one of the
authors (p. 587). The volume provides a judicious
interpretation of the state's history that should remain
the standard treatment for some time.
MICHAEL W. FITZGERALD
Sf. Olaf College
RICHARD H. CHUSED. Private Acts in Public Places: A
Social History of Divorce in the Formative Era of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
237
American Family Law. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 1994. Pp. viii, 234. $32.95.
This concisely written, richly researched study of divorce in Maryland during the first half of the nineteenth century offers the most thorough historical
examination of the politics of divorce I have ever seen.
By linking shifts in the treatment of divorce, custody,
alimony, and property settlements to changes in the
structure of state government and the nature of electoral politics, Chused successfully challenges many
historical generalizations about why divorce laws were
reformed and which groups favored judicial, as opposed to legislative, divorce. His examination of 1,300
divorce petitions also sheds new light on the changing
nature of marriage in Maryland during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, providing an
index to shifting attitudes toward gender and domestic
violence.
Before 1841, authority to grant divorces or annulments rested exclusively with the Maryland legislature.
Over time, however, legislative divorces went through
several abrupt shifts, underscoring the importance of
the legislature's composition and the fact that reform
was not a unilinear process. Between 1790 and 1815,
the legislature only granted complete divorces with a
right to remarry. But for a decade after the Federalists,
led by Roger Brooke Taney, a Catholic, regained
control of the Maryland senate in 1816, the legislature
granted only partial divorces. This era, however, combined "traditionalist" and "reformist" elements. For
example, rural southern legislators proved much more
willing to vote for bed and board divorces than they
had been for complete divorce; the legislature also
granted child custody to an increasing proportion of
mothers and extended feme sole protections permitting
women to participate in economic transactions otherwise precluded by marital property laws. After 1826,
the number of divorce petitions increased, the proportion of full divorces rose, the divorce process grew less
adversarial, and the legislature became increasingly
willing to grant divorce for male adultery, gross intoxication, and physical and even mental cruelty (although even then the level of cruelty and ill-usage that
needed to be proven was exceedingly high).
As Chused persuasively shows, the increasing number of divorce petitions did not, in and of itself, lead
frustrated legislators to approve judicial divorce. Even
after adoption of judicial divorce in 1841, pressure to
continue granting legislative divorces persisted, and it
was not until 1850 that a new state constitution finally
banned legislative divorce altogether.
This book rebuts several widespread historical presumptions. For example, Chused suggests that the
sharp contrast drawn between divorce in colonial or
early national New England and its absence in early
Maryland may have been overdrawn, since at least
some women, victimized by their husband's adultery or
physical cruelty, were able to receive alimony and
separation agreement through Maryland's chancery
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238
Reviews of Books
courts. He also shuws that the shift tu judicial divorce
did not lead to a sharp increase in the rate at which
couples sought to divorce.
Perhaps his most striking finding is that the drive for
judicial divorce was spearheaded not by liberal reformers, critical of the inaccessibility of legislative divorce,
but by traditiunalists, like the planter John Lewis
Millard, who inveighed against procedural irregularities and the public airing of scandalous adultery accusations. Far from reflecting a radical change in marital
norms, judicial divorce was favored by many traditionalist rural legislators as a way to slow the de-facto
liberalization of the grounds for divorce within the
state legislature.
Social historians will find a great deal of valuable
information in this bouk abuut changes in dumestic
behavior and values. Before 1806, most petitioners
were rural and male, and petitions were granted only
for interracial adultery or prostitution (by the wife).
After 1806 (when the Republicans had swept the
Federalists from power in Maryland), women (especially urban women) petitioned for divorce more often
than men, and with greater success. Like Norma
Basch, however, Chused finds that the rise in the
number of women's petitions was less an expression of
women's increasing independence in a world of disappointed romantic expectations than an effort to formally end marriages that had been terminated earlier
by desertion. Chused also reveals the strikingly high
number of divorce petitions from Baltimore and from
relatively poor petitioners. One minor point needs to
be corrected: it was Rachel Jackson, not Andrew,
whose divorce had not been finalized at the time of
their marriage (pp. 90, 134).
Anyone who has ever tried to reconstruct the legislative history of family law reform in the antebellum
period will attest to the difficulty of uncovering the
politics of reform on the state level. Chused has done
this brilliantly, and his book will be a valuable source
of information not only for family and women's historians but for students of legal history and antebellum
politics as well.
STEVEN MINTZ
University of Houston
THOMAS DUBLIN. Transforming Women's Work: New
England Lives in the Industrial Revolution. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. 1994. Pp. xix, 324. $35.00.
Thomas Dublin had a hard act to follow. It is difficult
to imagine a book that has a greater influence un
women's labor historians and on the field of women's
labor history in its formative years than Dublin's
Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and
Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860
(1979). Its recovery of the importance of women in the
Industrial Revolution, its sensitivity to culture and
gender, and its creative methodology made the work
an enduring classic. In this volume, Dublin returns
again to women's work and the Industrial Revolution
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
in New England. Broadening his work to include a
variety of female occupations throughout the nineteenth century, Dublin answers larger questions about
the relationship among women's work opportunities,
family, and working women's independence during this
period of industrial transition. He greatly expands on
his use uf manuscript census linkages, compiling a data
base of demographic information for over 2,000 working women. The painstaking labor involved is breathtaking and the detailed, extensive explanations in the
appendixes are both impressive and useful. Dublin's
findings add to our knowledge of the effects of the
Industrial Revolution on women, yet I found myself
frustrated by some of the limitations of this study.
Dublin begins with a clear but selective survey of the
literature; labur historians have traditionally left women's stories out of their portrayals of the Industrial
Revolution, not only doing a disservice to these female
workers but also distorting the story by the omission of
these important historical actors. The issue of whether
or not work provided by industry accorded women
greater or less independence and the relationship
between wage-earning women and family have preoccupied many women's historians interested in correcting this omission. Through a number of case studies
defined by chronology, work, and geography, Dublin
pledges to "explore women's experience of the industrial revolution by placing women at the center of the
analysis" (p. 13).
Dublin's findings are presented in roughly chronological chapters. He starts with rural New Hampshire
outworkers who made palm hats in the early nineteenth century. These daughters and wives in farm
families received payments in credit from local merchants. This type of work could either be a strategy to
combine domestic responsibilities with work for payor
a way for young, single women to have access to some
discretionary income of their own. Dublin believes
rural outwork "must be viewed as transitional" (p. 74).
The transition was to factory labor, the subject of the
next two chapters on textile operatives at Lowell and
female shoemakers in Lynn. Because Lowell mill girls
did not work in the factory out of dire economic
necessity, their work, too, was transitional to the extent
that, "by working short, repeated stints in the mills and
returning periodically to their rural homes, early mill
women could live in both worlds. They remained
farmers' daughters, integrated within the family farm
economy and yet earning the higher wages that urban
mill employment offered. They could take advantage
uf what industrial capitalism had to offer without
permanently renouncing their status as 'daughters of
freeman'" (p. 149).
Lynn shoemakers, however, were usually daughters
of shoemakers. They stayed in Lynn and had an
intermittent but lifelong connection with shoemaking.
It is in this case study that we see the first evidence of
women as permanent members of a growing urban
working class and of the family wage economy, with
the contributions of daughters and wives key to the
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1996