Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America - Hardcover

Dixon, Christopher F.

9781558490680: Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155849068X ISBN 13: 9781558490680

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

For three turbulent decades before the outbreak of the Civil War, radical abolitionists labored to reform American society. Some carried the struggle beyond the public crusade against slavery, extending it into the private realm of family relations. Appalled by the horrors inflicted on black families in the Southern slave states, and concerned about the precise meaning of freedom in the North, they sought to make their own marriages into models of affection and equality.

Chris Dixon creates a vivid portrait of these antislavery families, focusing on eight prominent couples. He examines the details of their domestic lives and reveals the relationship between their abolitionist and domestic ideologies, showing how they both confronted and conformed to the emergent bourgeois culture of ninteenth-century America.

While radical abolitionists held men accountable for many of the corruptions that they felt were poisoning American life, they did not believe men were beyond redemption. As Dixon shows, the abolitionists set out to redefine masculinity by renouncing power and oppression in favor of intimacy and cooperation. Perfecting the Family examines the ways in which these reformers tried - with mixed success - to make those affectionate qualities the basis for a new, companionate type of marriage, in which women and men would go forward as equal partners.

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About the Author:

Chris Dixon teaches history at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

From Library Journal:

Historian Dixon, in a work originally presented as her doctoral thesis, conducted a study of the familial experiences and gender relations of radical abolitionists, particularly the Garrisonians. By analyzing eight marriages of radical white abolitionists, Dixon uses "abolitionist attitudes and lifestyles as examples of the ways in which cultural abstractions were played out in individual lives" in 19th-century America. Their domestic lives, she found, sharply contrasted with the subjugated domestic environment of antebellum America. Abolitionists perceived their marriages as an epitome of their reformism. Dixon's work supplements well Lydia M. Child's An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Univ. of Massachusetts, 1996). The book is well documented, with detailed notes and reference to extensive primary and secondary sources. An excellent study for scholars in feminist historiography, social history, and American history in general.?Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast, Long Beach
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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