I thank Wendy Sarvasy for her generous review of Consistent Democracy, which not only wonderfully summarizes the book but captures what I consider its key interventions. I am also grateful to the editors for making this critical dialogue between a historian and a political theorist possible.

Sarvasy raises three compelling questions in her review, which I will address in turn here. First, she wonders about the consequences for the women’s movement of its deep entanglement with abolition, particularly given how dependent the former was on the latter for its organizational infrastructure, its intellectual force, and its cultural visibility. How did slavery’s demise in 1865 affect public discussions of the woman question? This is a fascinating question. In the decade after 1865, discussion of the “woman question” completely saturated print culture, thanks both to the profound debates over citizenship and suffrage that emancipation triggered and to the attention the subject garnered abroad (e.g., the publication of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women in 1869). So, ongoing—even increased—visibility was not a problem. However, the movement faced new resistance in the wake of revolutionary upheaval. In a pattern we have seen repeat throughout American history, many Americans grew wary (and weary) of continued reform. These men and women looked for a way to halt the momentum. They found precisely that in women’s suffrage, which became for them something of a resting ledge on the slippery slope of democratic expansion.

I appreciate Sarvasy’s second question because it most directly puts our books in conversation with one another. She asks to what extent those who called for a “consistent democracy” actually recognized that they were engaged in a “refounding” of American principles and not simply an extension or reinterpretation of them. The answer to that is an unsatisfying “it depends.” Certainly, a radical thinker like Elizabeth Cady Stanton understood what she was up to—and in this way, she resembles Sarvasy’s core group of feminist “refounders.” However, as I understand it, the strategic appeal of a slogan like “consistent democracy” was its ability to minimize the radicalism and instead emphasize the continuity of the call for women’s political equality. Indeed, the 1858 document from which I borrowed this title is a moderate, almost bland affair, with little of the rhetorical flair of the far better-known “Declaration of Sentiments” produced at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Read together, these documents capture the sometimes complementary, sometimes competing imperatives of reform movements in a democratic society: the need to stake out bold positions but also win support of enough nonreformers and moderates to create a majority.

Finally, Sarvasy’s third reflection offers an “alternative interpretation” of post-war women’s suffrage activists. I don’t disagree with her at all here. I, too, think the (largely white) temperance activists and critical theorists like Gilman “read the room,” so to speak, and forged new approaches to women’s equality in a conservative era. My concern in the book, however, was not with how feminist reformers adjusted their message and strategy but with what happened to democratic thought and “democracy talk” in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And on that front, I see attenuation more than innovation. Our different outlooks might seem to be attitudinal—Sarvasy’s optimism contrasting with my pessimism—but I think it’s more a question of emphasis. Sarvasy’s Refounding Democracy highlights an impressive group of feminist reformers from whom we might draw inspiration today, while Consistent Democracy foregrounds the obstacles such reformers face in inhospitable contexts.