1280 Reviews of Books

on the traumatic childhood death of his brother. terns, the author simply reports, year by year, the Although he was the first minister to publish a tract doings first of the antislavery meetings that Mary urging female suffrage, his idealization of women Grew attended and wrote about and then those of the and feminization of Christianity simultaneously con- Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association of which firmed sexual stereotypes. she was president and the American Woman Suffrage Yacovone's use of the term "Liberal Persuasion" (a Association in which she was active. It seems likely phrase derived from the liberal Christianity of ante- that no remaining annual report or convention pro- bellum Unitarianism) is at times too encompassing to ceedings have escaped encapsulation here, as it seems explain the reform imperative. "It attacked slavery equally unlikely that any extant Grew letter has not and racial prejudice" (p. 3), the author states, yet most been noted. And, because most of these were written "liberal" and "conservative" clerics held abolitionists to her cousin Ann Terry Greene Phillips, we know in contempt. Nevertheless, Yacovone has written an more about their inconsequential mutual cousin engaging biography with important insights about a Charles Greene than about those who played critical Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/97/4/1280/189656 by guest on 01 October 2021 fascinating figure. roles in her life. LAWRENCE B. GOODHEART There probably is in these sources, which are the University of Connecticut, bulk of Brown's data, sufficient material for a signif- Hartford icant article, but their use scarcely sustains a book that, despite a fair sprinkling of recent secondary works on abolition and the suffrage movement noted IRA V. BROWN. : Abolitionist and Feminist in the bibliography, asks few questions of much (1813-1896). Selinsgrove, N.J.: Susquehanna Univer- concern to contemporary historians. There is as little sity Press. 1991. Pp. 214. $35.00. analysis of Grew's reform ideology and activism as there is about her personal growth and private life. This old-fashioned biography chronicles the life of Thus, we learn little about her either as abolitionist or Mary Grew from her arrival in in 1834 feminist. until her death there sixty-two years later. Born in JANE H. PEASE 1813, the fifth child of Baptist minister Henry Grew College of Charleston but the first of his third wife, she grew up in Hart- ford. Two year before her birth, her father had been relieved of his pastorate at the city's First Baptist DAVID R. ROEDIGER. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and Church but was able to support his family on an the Making of the American Working Class. (The Hay- independent income he received from his native market Series in North American Politics and Cul- and to pay for Mary's education at Catharine ture.) New York: Verso. 1991. Pp. viii, 191. Cloth Beecher's Female Seminary. After a short stay in $54.95, paper $16.95. , where the father became active as an aboli- tionist, the family moved to Philadelphia, where Mary In this book, David R. Roediger deftly combines the joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society almost at approaches of Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, and once. She shared her father's reform enthusiasms the new labor history to produce a brilliant account of and, despite his ardent opposition to public roles for how white workers in antebellum America con- women, she apparently continued to live in his home structed a social identity fundamentally premised on until he died in 1862. Made financially independent their "whiteness." Unlike earlier Marxist analysts of by the inheritance she shared with two sisters, the the same subject, Roediger is unwilling to reduce children of one of them, and her stepmother, Mary racism to a divide-and-rule stratagem of dominant asserted her personal freedom by betoming a Unitar- elites. While he examines the more frequently noted ian preacher only five years after Henry Grew's utilitarian/economic motives for cultivating a sense of death. racial exclusiveness, he delves deeper into the murk- Ira V. Brown, alas, hews to "a conventional bio- ier waters of cultural and psychological anxiety, graphical method for the most part narrative rather where such intangibles as republican pride and mas- than analytical" (p. 9) and ignores the Jamesian culine assertiveness could seem even more precious implications of Mary Grew's life. Similarly "avoiding and even more threatened than jobs and wages. speculation on such intriguing questions as why Mary The American Revolution made "independence" a Grew never married," he waits until near the end of potent political and masculine ideal. During the next the book to quote her own reference to her "closer eighty years of capitalist economic development, the union than that of most marriages" with Margaret emergence of hired labor generated an enormous Jones Burleigh, and he passes rapidly over Grew's fear of dependency that many workers defended concluding observation: "We know there have been against by drawing the starkest differentiation be- other such between two men, & also between two tween wage and slave labor. But whereas the category women. And why should there not be? Love is spiri- of "free labor" seemed infinitely preferable to that of tual; only passion is sexual" (p. 165). bondage, it could not conceal from an imperiled Instead of searching the data for meaningful pat- artisan class, jealous of its "manly independence," its

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992