934 The Journal of American History

Although a political ethos is more readily described then measured, the

author applies a variety of statistical techniques, including multiple regression
analysis, to county-level electoral and demographic data to demonstrate that
the Liberty party was an embodiment of the revivalist ethos. He offers
correlation coefficients and beta weights to suggest that neither previous
voting patterns, denominational affiliations, nor population shifts sufficiently
explain the concentration of third party support in areas most affected by
revivalism. Hammond concedes that revivalism did not shape the political

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realignment of the 1850s, but does contend that its influence continued after
the Civil War. He finds that the revivalist political ethos became an in-
stitutionalized cultural pattern that later shaped the reactions of voters to
temperance, populism, and even Barry Goldwater in some of the communities
touched by antebellum evangelism.
Despite his carefully framed definitions and statistical tests, Hammond's
thesis crumbles under the weight of unproven assumptions and inferences.
The reader is asked to make a leap of faith that an amorphous political ethos
cohld pervade a large number of communities, but alter the political behavior
of only a minority of voters, and even then only sporadically. But why these
voters and not others? Where is the evidence that rank-and-file abolitionists
were as self-conscious of the connection between revivalism and abolitionism
as were their leaders? Hammond's attempts at quantitative precision prove
futile. He fails to provide persuasive statistical measures of the revivalist ethos
itself, the key independent variable of his explanatory scheme. And his ac-
count of the continuing influence of revivalism fails to indicate how this
political ethos managed to survive both the revivals and their converts. The
result is a frustrating work that promises more than it delivers. Antebellum
reform was a complex, protean movement that cannot properly be understood
through the naive reductionism of the author's monocausal explanation.
Specialists in abolitionism may share a feeling of d~j,~ vu after reading this
book. Hammond's conclusion that abolitionism was born of revivalism
resurrects, in part, Gilbert H. Barnes's thesis in The Antislavery Impulse
(1933). Hammond's statistical scaffolding and sociological jargon aside, the
thesis remains unconvincing. To resurrect is not necessarily to redeem.
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ALAN M. KRAUT

The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America. By Blanche Glassman

Hersh. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. xi + 280 pp. Notes,
bibliography, and index. $14.50.)
Blanche Glassman Hersh, basing her study on the biographies and writings of
fifty-one women, identifies a "feminist-abolitionist movement . . . in-
dependent of the antislavery crusade," traces the development of feminist
ideology, and does a recruitment and leadership study of her group. Her book is
tantalizing and frustrating: useful and informative in focusing attention on a
long-neglected group of women active in reform movements, frustrating in its
lack of an adequate conceptual framework and methodology. The criteria of
selection are never explained nor is the concept "feminist-abolitionist"
defined. Does she mean abolitionists with feminist leanings? Or members of
the organized antislavery and woman's rights movements? If so, her exclusion
Book Reviews 935

of well-known feminists like Frances Wright and Margaret Fuller makes sense,
but her inclusion of Elizabeth Blackwell and Jane Swisshelm, both opponents
of the organized woman's rights movement, does not. Her exclusion of black
women--feminists like Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth and abolitionists
like Charlotte Forten, Sarah Remond, Harriet Tubman--makes of her group a
skewed sample. Her explanation that "black women . . . played only a
peripheral role in organized feminism" is dubious, even if one speaks only of
antebellum feminism. Since her group includes a number of white women

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whose major activities fall into the post-Civil War era, among them several
physicians whose main claim to fame was their struggle for the advancement
of professional women, the exclusion of black women pioneering in the
professions, such as Sarah Douglass, invalidates her claim of "represen-
tativeness" for her sample group. Since the inclusion of black women in her
group would have affected at least some of her generalizations, this omission is
a serious flaw. Her thesis of the existence of something separately identifiable
as a "feminist-abolitionist m o v e m e n t " is never proven.
Still, there is m u c h to be learned from the lives and writings of these fifty-
one abolitionist feminists. Hersh is at her best in tracing the gradual
development of a feminist ideology among them. Her recruitment study offers
important evidence of the ideological shortcomings of the antebellum
feminists, manifested in their strong elitist class biases and their tendency
toward nativism. The group tended to move from orthodox Protestant sects
toward more liberal denominations and beliefs. In this, as in the other
characteristics that the study details--a relatively high level of education,
upper or middle class status, a high incidence of reformers among the families
of origin, marriages to reformers who were generally supportive of their
wives--Hersh's analysis corroborates what was already known about an-
tislavery women. The absence of control groups for comparison--abolitionist
women who did not become feminists, feminists who had no antislavery
leanings, or women of the same region who were neither feminists nor
abolitionists--weakens the validity of her generalizations.
Hersh's study of the interlocking reform activities and the ideological
development of a sample group of women who were both antislavery activists
and advocates of woman's rights is interesting and offers a useful synthesis,
but it falls short of its claims and of the potential inherent in the rich sources.
SARAH LAWRENCECOLLEGE GERDA LERNER

The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement. By Otto J. Scott.
(New York: Times, 1979.375 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $15.00.)
Manufacturer George Luther Stearns, teacher Franklin Benjamin Sanborn,
landowner Gerrit Smith, theologians Theodore Parker and Thomas Went-
worth Higginson, and physician Samuel Gridley Howe were all antislavery
reformers and, according to Otto J. Scott, conspiratorial revolutionaries and
terrorists. The Secret Six tells the familiar story of how they planned, funded,
aided, and abetted John Brown and his murderous career from Kansas to
Harper's Ferry. They knew his plans, more or less; they raised money for him;
they cheered his crusade against slavery and the South, for freedom and the
blacks. In his death they found martyrdom writ large.