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740 the NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY with Keen Attention To 740 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY With keen attention to detail, Bergland’s biography shows that Mitchell’s personal circumstances in the Quaker community on Nan- tucket and sustained guidance from her father—himself a well- respected astronomer and teacher—positioned her for public achieve- ment. Her success, in turn, provided a signal to others that women could have a public role in science, and indeed, with the opening of single-sex colleges during the late nineteenth century, many women continued to demonstrate their sex’s capacity to pursue the discipline. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Professor of the History of Science and Tech- nology at the University of Minnesota and coeditor of The Estab- lishment of Science in America (1999), has written numerous works on scientific culture and women in science. From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century. By John T. Cumbler. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 238.$49.95.) Studies of New England abolitionism often conclude at the Civil War, with the end of slavery just around the corner, leaving it for biographers to fill in the details of what Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and other activists did with the remaining years of the long nineteenth century. In From Abolition to Rights for All: The Making of a Reform Community in the Nineteenth Century, John T. Cumbler positions New England abolitionists as individuals who continued fighting for social justice on several fronts after the war: from women’s, civil, and immigrants’ rights, to public health, prison, and tenement house reform. Cumbler argues that too often historians have inaccurately portrayed abolitionists as having more or less retired after slaves were emancipated; his project is not only to resuscitate postwar reputations but also to document abolitionists’ success in building a community of reform by capitalizing on the skills they had honed in the antislavery trenches. Motivated, he maintains, by their conviction of Lockean natural rights, this extended “community ofactivists...reinforcedeach other in their continuing battle for human rights” (p. 142). Cumbler frames his study around two principal figures: Boston physician and abolitionist Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, and sometime abolitionist and feminist Julia Ward Howe. Usually relegated to the sidelines, Bowditch especially benefits from this attention. A native of Salem and a successful doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital, Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.740 by guest on 28 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 741 he, like Wendell Phillips, was a “gentleman of property and standing” converted to Garrison’s immediatist cause. By 1854, Bowditch had joined the Boston Vigilance Committee’s extremist contingent, orga- nizing the clandestine Anti-Man Hunting League (which Cumbler deems “an underground paramilitary abolitionist organization” [p. 4]) in response to the rendition of fugitive slave Anthony Burns. League members, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel May, and Bronson Alcott, pledged to kidnap any slaveowner who showed up in Boston to reclaim a runaway slave. Julia Ward Howe is, of course, better known than Bowditch, al- though more as the author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” than for her abolitionism, a cause to which she eventually gravitated through the influence of friends such as Parker and Maria Weston Chapman. In the 1850s, Julia’s husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, be- came one of John Brown’s “Secret Six” financiers, thus bringing the couple into the radicals’ inner sanctum. But Julia’s reputation as a reformer, as Cumbler documents, rests most securely on her postwar efforts for women. By the 1860s, she had become an avowed leader of women’s suffrage—much to her husband’s consternation. Apparently Samuel spoke a good line on women’s rights until left to fend for himself on the domestic front while Julia was away. Complaining that Julia “neglected” him and their children (p. 106), he attempted to per- suade friends to boycott her lectures. Cumbler drives home the irony of the situation, particularly during the 1870s, as Samuel’s increasing disaffection seems to energize Julia, who takes on ever more re- sponsibilities, including organizing a Woman’s Industrial Convention, pushing for women’s admission to Harvard University, and coediting a new periodical, the Woman’s Journal. Bowditch joined Howe in many of these battles, including suffrage and women at Harvard (a fight they lost); he also drew on his leadership in the state medical establishment to push for women to be considered for membership in both the Massachusetts Medical Society and the American Medical Association. Expanding on the “community” in the book’s title, other reformers and their exploits extend Bowditch and Howe’s network. Appearing frequently are Higginson and fellow Boston Vigilance Committee stal- wart Lewis Hayden; Chapman and her sisters, abolitionists all; and Lucy Stone and Abby Kelly Foster, whose pioneering labor yoked the early women’s rights movement to the antislavery cause. The topical structure of the book’s nine chapters, however, leads to occasional du- plication of key details and incidents; readers must, sometimes within Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.740 by guest on 28 September 2021 742 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY a span of two pages, shift backward and forward through decades, with few dates to signal the transitions. Additionally, a few minor in- accuracies mar the archival effort. To give one example, it was Henry Thoreau’s father, and not his brother (both were named John), who must have attended an abolitionist gathering in 1855, since John Jr. had died in 1842. Most readers will find the latter half of From Abolition to Rights for All the most compelling. The first chapters cover ground already familiar to scholars of abolitionism and reform: the rise of Garrisoni- anism and its adherents, their subsequent splintering into diverse fac- tions including the Liberty and eventual Free Soil Party, the fugitive slave sensations of Boston in the 1850s, the internecine squabbles of the abolitionists, and the relation of women’s rights to antislavery. Yet the postwar material Cumbler presents, in chapters five through nine, provides a fresh appraisal of the scope of postbellum New England reform, particularly regarding the pivotal contributions of Bowditch and Howe. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Professor of English and American Stud- ies at Penn State Altoona, is the author of To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord (2006). Henry James and the Visual. By Kendall Johnson. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 246.$95.00.) Kendall Johnson’s Henry James and the Visual takes up a familiar topic in James studies: that of visual perception. Johnson’s contribu- tion to this body of work is his analysis of “the role of visual language in representing types of national culture and more broadly in con- ceptualizing ‘culture’ as the kernel of national cohesiveness” (p. 4). Although the broad scope implied by the book’s title is somewhat mis- leading (here is one case in which the dreaded subtitle, now strongly discouraged by academic publishers, would have proved useful), John- son’s discussion of the visual is neither simple nor narrow. Informed by theories of the picturesque—a concept whose history he traces in detail and whose longstanding connection to cultural and political ideas he describes and himself deploys—Johnson, as he investigates how James uses and revises cultural stereotypes, also attempts to re- create the visual habits of American readers. Paying close attention to the publication conditions of James’s work and focusing particularly Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2008.81.4.740 by guest on 28 September 2021.
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