"Rewriting Citizenship is a cultural history that reveals how race and gender influenced nineteenth-century citizenship. By focusing on "domestic literature"-cookbooks, novels, household manuals, newspapers, magazines, sermons, and even diaries-Susan J. Stanfield finds that women imbued the quotidian with "civic purpose." Indeed, it was more than the social reformers and political activists who argued that women should have a role in government. Because many of these women saw their civic status as "different"-though not necessarily inferior to-that of men, they made forays into the public sphere through print culture. In Stanfield's estimation, this helped women fulfill culturally constructed ideas of femininity-maintaining the "authority of their womanhood"-while they also actively redefined citizenship by linking their domestic work to nation building. Unsurprisingly, middle-class white women sought to differentiate themselves from immigrants, the working poor, and women of color by distinguishing between household labor and household management. But middle-class African American women also used the "politics of respectability" to enhance their own status. Like their white counterparts, these women argued that their well-ordered homes proved that their husbands and father were patriarchs and were therefore worthy of citizenship and the vote"-- Provided by publisher.
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