The Refuge of Affections

Historians explain Progressive reforms in terms of bifurcated gender ideology and politics: female reformers campaigned successfully for mothers' pensions, child labor laws, and other protections for women as homemakers, while male Progressives were stifled by prevailing notions about manly self-sufficiency in pushing for unemployment, health, and other benefits for male workers. Eric Rauchway argues in his original and elegantly written if tentative book that this historical paradigm ignores the “rebellious nature of Progressive thought” by mistaking outcomes for motives and by assuming that traditional gender differences continued to determine men's and women's politics in the early twentieth century. In sympathetic intellectual biographies of three married reformer couples—the New Republic founder Dorothy Whitney and the banker Willard Straight, the educator Lucy Sprague and the economist Wesley Clair Mitchell, and the historians Mary Ritter and Charles Beard—he suggests that gender relations among Progressives were more complementary than current analyses imply. The couples pursued a joint politics of reform based on a liberal familial ethos: enlightened parents together devote themselves to educating their children in self-governance and cooperation, finding consummation of their parental mission in the dissolution of the family as children leave for independent, fulfilling lives of their own. The six extended this liberal ideal of family outward as a model of social relations appropriate for a democratic society. Slaveholders and industrialists in the nineteenth century had used the metaphor of family to justify social hierarchy. What was progressive about Progressivism, according to Rauchway, was the use of this metaphor by an educated elite to teach selfgovernance and social responsibility to dependent groups of industrial workers, immigrants, and women

Democracy · Ethos · Ideology · Metaphor · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Separate spheres · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• A Life in Progress

  Daniel Scroop•American Nineteenth Century History•2012

  Add to list

• Sex and the City

  Open Access•Christopher Diffee•American Quarterly•2005

  Add to list

• Political Hermaphrodites’

  Adam Rome•Environmental History•2006

  Add to list