In Consistent Democracy, Leslie Butler argues that the “woman question” was central to American debates over the meaning of democracy in the nineteenth century. The standard history of women’s struggle for equal citizenship in the United States stresses how it emerged out of the abolitionist movement and was stymied during the Reconstruction era. For Butler, this story reduces democracy to the question of a citizen’s inclusion in or exclusion from voting rights. To regain a sense of how democracy as an evolving experiment defined the spirit of the times, Butler recasts this history by decentering movement activists. She excavates instead a transnational intellectual/cultural ecosystem of published opinion that “preceded, paralleled, or swirled around” them (p. 3). As she shows, the participants engaged in messy popular political theorizing. In the process, they modeled a democratic conversation. By recovering this version of nineteenth-century intellectual history, Butler provokes us to approach our disagreements over women’s identity politics and abortion rights as constituting the continuation of this democratic conversation on how the quest for women’s equal citizenship shapes our understanding of democracy.
As an intellectual historian, Butler reminds political theorists of the benefits of a historicist method of interpreting texts. Freed from the constraints of the political theory tradition’s tendency to put democratic practices and ideas into different conceptual containers like liberal democracy or deliberative democracy, she recovers the newness of a people thinking together about democracy. To achieve this aim, Butler utilizes three concepts. First, she introduces the “woman question” as an organizing framework for the discussion of gendered inequalities in private and public life. This concept gave legitimacy to democratic conversations that grappled with a range of issues, including married women’s property rights, women’s education, and women’s political rights. Second, Butler introduces the notion of published opinion to characterize a diversity of written materials by canonical theorists, activists, querists, and conservatives. In doing so, she makes visible how the people reflected on who they were and what kind of body politic they sought to establish. Third, Butler adopts a concept of democracy not as a form of government, but as an ethos with an emphasis on the value of self-government. Specifically, she explores how the debates in published opinion over women’s access to self-government, both in the family and in the public sphere, generated a conversation about the value of further democratizing the US republic.
In a prelude, Butler begins her argument by tracing the first usages in print of the “woman question” back to 1838. She suggests that the term crystallized two eighteenth-century frameworks for thinking about the position of women. One measured the level of civilization based on the position of women; the other granted natural rights to women based on a notion of shared humanity. Part I of the book illustrates Butler’s method by making visible the transnational intellectual context that paralleled the emergence of the woman question and preceded the birth of a women’s rights movement. To establish how the woman question became central to thinking about democracy, Butler turns to the critical role of foreign observers, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and John Stuart Mill. As these thinkers studied American self-government for its international significance, they explored the inconsistencies of a democracy in principle that supported in practice the institution of slavery and a patriarchal marriage contract. Collectively, they established the central role of women in sustaining a healthy democracy. According to Butler, their writings provoked self-examination on the part of Americans who took up the challenge of thinking about women’s citizenship and democracy.
One theme that emerged in published opinion before the women’s rights movement involves what Butler calls “domesticating democracy.” She locates the origin of the connection between women and self-government in the domestic advice writings of educator Catharine Beecher, older sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Beecher envisioned white, middle-class women strengthening self-government within the family as the basis for strengthening political democracy. By combining domestic concerns with Tocqueville’s notion of a democratic ethos, Beecher popularized his ideas. The conversation on domesticating democracy further expanded when radical critics of the patriarchal family, including socialists, argued for transforming the domestic–public division entirely.
These contributions to published opinion provide Butler with the intellectual context for the women’s rights movement that took off in 1848. She shows how women’s rights advocates participated in published opinion to expand the American conversation about women and democracy. Before the Civil War, the movement politicized and radicalized the domesticity formulation of self-government, and it drew strength from the foreign observers’ critiques of the inconsistencies of the American democracy. In 1858, movement activists introduced the phrase “consistent democracy” to crystallize their argument that women’s exclusion from the right to vote established that the US political system was indeed hypocritical.
In Part II, Butler depicts how the democratic conversation in published opinion on the woman question gained increased urgency during Reconstruction. She foregrounds the contributions of African American women, including Sojourner Truth and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper. Ultimately, the white men in power were not persuaded by the consistent democracy argument. Congress did not establish universal suffrage in the 15th Amendment, passed to grant African American men the vote in 1869. Six years later, the Supreme Court ruled that women did not have the right to vote automatically as part of their national citizenship. Butler follows this political history with an analysis of the transnational intellectual debates on the woman question and self-government that took place during the same period.
As Butler shows, a public commitment to discussing what a robust notion of self-government might entail weakened after the Reconstruction era. In doing so, she brings into conversation many different participants—some of whom opposed self-government for women, and others who no longer included self-government as an explicit aim, even in radical plans for societal transformation. However, in her epilogue, Butler finds a return to the theme of self-government and the woman question, understood to include the diversity of women, at the famous 1893 Congress of Representative Women.
I offer critical reflections on Butler’s energetic retelling of nineteenth-century intellectual history. First, while Butler intentionally sidelines the ideas of activists, she also reveals how they created many of her framing concepts by bridging different social movements. For example, she starts with an obscure querist’s use of the phrase, the “woman question,” noting that he most likely saw it in William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist publication. The concept captured the struggle over women’s equal citizenship within abolitionist organizations. Similarly, “consistent democracy” came out of the interconnections between suffragism and abolitionism. It was the title of a leaflet defending women’s suffrage that gathered testimonies by white male abolitionists. These examples raise two questions: Did the force of the woman question to generate a widespread debate over women’s citizenship and democracy depend on the context of the abolitionist movement? Once slavery was abolished and this connection was severed, was it inevitable that published opinion would marginalize the woman question?
Second, while Butler asserts that consistent democracy made a new demand on American democracy, she does not clarify the extent to which this demand actually transformed the founding principles of American democracy. In this way, Butler’s presentation of the concept of consistent democracy reflects the messiness of the debate in published opinion. Some defenders of the concept argued for extending to women the inalienable right to self-government. Opponents of women’s equal political citizenship countered that this inalienable right was not explicitly articulated in the founding documents. Other supporters of consistent democracy avoided the language of natural rights and simply asserted that American democracy should include all people in its founding principle of popular consent. Since men wrote the founding documents and they never explicitly included women as part of the people, I ask: Did the advocates of consistent democracy understand that they were, in effect, rewriting the founding documents, because this was required to include women fully in political citizenship?
Third, based on Butler’s method of interpretation that stresses the importance of situating ideas in historical contexts, I offer an alternative interpretation of the post-Reconstruction era. Once the argument for consistent democracy failed to persuade men to include women in democratic citizenship, organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and theorist–activists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman creatively responded to a changed historical context. On the one level, they addressed a theme from Mill that Butler includes in the concept of consistent democracy: the rewriting of the marriage contract to dismantle male despotism. The WCTU defended the vote as a way for women to protect themselves against the domestic violence caused by men’s alcohol consumption. Gilman, in turn, analyzed women’s economic dependency in marriage. On another level, they innovated new ways of thinking about women and democracy, supported by new types of interconnected movements: (i) temperance and women’s rights; and (ii) socialism and feminism.
Consistent Democracy, beautifully written and deeply researched, could guide students both to discover a past national debate over the meaning of democracy that centered on women’s citizenship and to excavate today’s version of this debate.
