As I read Michael Schudson's book and Stuart Blumin's essay, I kept asking myself --What can women's history contribute to this discussion? That's the question I want to address today as we consider how we might rethink the history of American political culture.

I have read (and listened to) Professors Schudson and Blumin with great interest and I have learned a lot. I share their fascination with the contours of nineteenth century American political culture, and their search for meaningful lessons we can draw from the past about American political culture today. I find their categories of analysis quite compelling. So compelling, in fact, that, when reading or listening to them, I frequently lost track of my question about women's history and became absorbed in their accounts of civic life.

But for me another issue also remains compelling: why are there no (or almost no) women present in their accounts of American civic life? --especially during the long nineteenth century between 1820 and 1920, when (we all agree) the fundamentals of American civic life were established.

How might the inclusion of women contribute to the discussion we have heard so far? I want to provide a rather large answer to those questions, --an answer that tempers my criticism of my colleagues for omitting women, because it addresses an aspect of women's participation in American political that historians of women also neglect --the way that women often draw upon religious or moral or ethical values when they participate in American political culture.

Today I want to explore the possibility that women are absent from most accounts of American political culture, not only because the world of scholarship is a narrow one in which we all pursue our own specialties to the exclusion of neighboring specialties, but also because the frequency with which women have historically framed their political participation in moral, ethical, and religious discourse places them outside the frame of reference that most scholars (including historians of women) use to analyze political culture.

It seems easier for us to discern the presence of women at torchlight parades and in smoke-filled rooms --difficult as that is --than it is for us to understand how women helped shape the mainstream of American political culture by their use of moral, ethical and religious discourses. Recent books, such as We Have Come to Stay: Women in American Partisan Politics, 1880-1960 have described women's participation in torchlight parades and smoke-filled rooms. But no one (that I know of) has taken on the challenge of analyzing why so many of the major moments of women's political impact --the major junctures of change --in what might be called American women's political history drew heavily on religious, or moral or ethical language and ideas.

Because most historians of American political culture -like most historians of American women --are not entirely comfortable with ethical, moral, or religious discourse, this aspect of women's political activism is usually overlooked, marginalized, or trivialized. We know it is out there, but we think that if we don't pay any attention to it, it will go away.

My comment today is an effort on my own part to get over this attitude and begin to look at the process by which women did much to shape American political culture by carrying moral, ethical and religious values into it.

Elsewhere I have written about the importance of other factors in women's political activism, including the phenomenal access that women had to higher education in 19th century America --(by 1880 one out of every three students enrolled in institutions of higher learning was a woman. One out of three in 1880 --a statistic that was not duplicated in some European countries until after 1960.) It would be hard to overestimate the importance of women's access to higher education as an explanation for their leadership at the local and national levels between 1830 and 1920.

I've also written about the importance of women's separate institutions and the way that these became a base for women's entry into male-dominated political culture. Building on American traditions of voluntarism, and reflecting 19th century beliefs in the differences between men and women (including women's belief in the moral superiority of women), women's separate institutions created a parallel universe of political activism in almost every American community. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of these institutions as a source of civic vitality before 1950. Indeed the effects of their absence after 1970 has been widely noted.

But I and other scholars have had relatively little or nothing to say about the religious, moral, and ethical emphasis that we find in women's political activism. We are embarrassed by it, and tend to ignore it. I have gone further than most of my colleagues in emphasizing the importance of the separation of church and state as a source of vitality for the religious laity in the United States, and hence as a source of vitality for women's organizations, many of which between 1830 and 1880, were religiously-based. But I haven't really ventured beyond this brief reference. Yet Michael Schudson's book, The Good Citizen, and Stuart Blumin's response to the book have prompted me to go further down that path and ask if there was more religious punch in the history of women's political activism than the initial punch delivered to the religious laity during the Second Great Awakening, and if there WAS, then how might that shape our understanding of American political culture as a whole, as well as women's participation in it?

To address these questions, I want to look (very briefly!) at two examples of what I mean by the importance of religious, moral, and ethical discourses within women's activism. Then I will offer some thoughts about how we might reconfigure the history of American political culture to include those discourses. My first example comes early in the process of women's 19th-century political activism, my second example comes from the Progressive era, when that process might be said to culminate in a great wave of women's political involvement.

I've just finished writing a small book entitled, Women's Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery Movement: A Brief History with Documents, 1830-1870, (which will be available from Bedford Books in March this year). When I began the book, I thought that it would be fun and easy to collect documents and write up an introduction on this topic. But while the work was always fun, it wasn't easy.

Early in the project I realized that historians of women had missed a very big part of the story of how women's rights emerged as a social movement within the anti-slavery movement. They had missed the importance of religion as the fuel that made the women's rights teakettle sing. Some of the standard story remained valid for me --Many of you may know its outlines: "after the Grimke sisters of South Carolina moved north to Philadelphia, they joined the anti-slavery movement. Everyone wanted to hear them, so they broke the prohibitions against women speaking in public and, when clergymen opposed such public speaking by women, they launched the women's rights movement."

The main problem developed for me with this story-after I became familiar with the documents in the process of editing them -was that it left out religion as a motivating force in Angelina Grimke’s ferocious defense of her right to speak in public to mixed audiences of women and men, which she quickly extended to the right of all women to speak to such audiences.

In the process of editing the documents I was amazed to find that other historians had either missed, or overlooked or ignored the fact that the Grimke sisters did not leave South Carolina because they hated slavery. They left because they were swept up in the religious current that we call "the Second Great Awakening" and felt that Philadelphia Quakers offered a surer form of saving their souls than the Protestant ministers of Charleston.

Sarah Grimke had discovered Philadelphia Quakers when she accompanied her dying father to that city to seek medical care, and Quakers helped her after her father died. The irony was that these helpful Quakers were Orthodox Quakers, who, while they opposed slavery, feared the disruptive effects of this and other social issues on their community, and (having just survived an extremely disruptive schism with Hicksite Quakers), forbade the discussion of slavery within their community. So when Sarah and Angelina moved to Philadelphia in 1829, they lived with people who prohibited debate about slavery even more than had been the case in Charleston. When Angelina finally decided to break out of this community in 1836, she protested to her sister, "my spirit is . . . shut up in a prison!"

This is quite a different story from the classic one in which the Grimke sisters leave South Carolina because they hate slavery and live with Philadelphia Quakers who turn them onto the anti-slavery movement. The difference came to matter to me because the same religious motivation that (mistakenly it turned out) carried them into the Orthodox Quaker community also fueled Angelina's commitment to Garrisonian abolitionism and her defense of women's rights.

For her the world of transcendent God-given values was closely connected to the worlds of public debate and political discourse. As she put it:

"I am persuaded that woman is not to be as she has been, a mere second-hand agent in the regeneration of a fallen world, but the acknowledged equal and co-worker with man in this glorious work."

She went on to say:

"My idea is that whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights. I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female."

Historians have conveniently selected the secular phrases in that passage and ignored the religious dimensions of Grimke’s view of her "glorious work."

For me Angelina Grimkeís work makes more sense if we take her religious motivations seriously. The change she and her sister introduced into American political culture was very, very large. In a cascade of publications in the late 1830s they created a new language to describe women's participation in public life. That language changed the minds of many people about what was respectable and appropriate behavior for women. It laid the foundation for a women's rights convention movement that began with Seneca Falls, New York, and swept through New England, New York, and the Midwest in the 1850s. It seems to me quite reasonable to conclude that this shift -this major move on their part- could not have been achieved by conventional secular means. It needed to ally with a power that was more powerful than the clergy who constituted their chief opponents. That power could only be the power of personal religious conviction.

Angelina Grimkeís example in the 1830s was not an aberrant case within the history of American women who reconfigured American political culture as they moved through it. Rather, she was an early example of what became an important tradition whereby women relied on religious, ethical, or moral discourse to introduce new ideas and values into American political culture.

But what about the post-Civil War era when science replaced religion as the chief source of understanding about the human condition? Did women continue to draw on religious, moral, and ethical ideas to justify their interventions into American public life? If so, how and why?

When I first began writing about Progressive women reformers I concluded that they were not religiously motivated, and I still understand them as primarily political in their actions and values. The great majority of them were raised in politically-oriented rather than religiously-oriented families, and they left college with their heads filled with modern social science. Recently, however, I have tried to understand why ethical, moral, and indeed, religious language remained so important in their political work.

I have concluded that such language worked differently (in many ways) in the Progressive era than it did in the 1830s, but similarities between the two eras raise important questions about the enduring influence of religion in American political culture.

One brief example must suffice --Florence Kelley's use of the word "ethical" in her 1905 book, Some Ethical Gains through Legislation. As executive director of one of the most powerful women's organizations in the country the National Consumers' League (or NCL), she shaped the legislative agenda for the national League and its sixty-four local branches. Combining a constituency of elite, middle-class, and trade-union women, under her direction the NCL became the single most powerful lobbying force for the passage of state labor laws governing working conditions for women and children. A member of the Socialist Party of America, she was a woman with a profoundly material mission. Nevertheless, she constantly spoke in moral and ethical terms. And not only for public consumption. Letters to her closest associates ring with terms like righteousness and conscience. She spoke constantly before church groups. And her first major book, Some Ethical Gains through Legislation articulated ethical arguments in favor of state interventions in the labor place. Why ethical? And what did she mean by ethical?

The book argued that when the strong exploited the weak, the community experienced an ethical loss, and when the strong protected the weak, the community experienced an ethical gain. This argument directly countered Darwinian notions about the survival of the fittest, although it never mentioned that competing ethic. This example of her argument comes from a chapter titled, "The State, the Child, and the Nation":

"When young children are made ineligible as breadwinners, the responsibility is placed where it belongs, upon their parents or upon the community. There is nothing more moralizing going on at the present in the United States than this shifting of responsibility from the weaker to the stronger."

The chief enemy of such moral or ethical gains was economic competition, which forced ethical employers to adopt unethical practices in order to stay in business.

"Leisure never comes to young girls and children employed in manufacturing and commerce . . . upon the initiative of their employers, because under the demand for dividends and the pressure of competition, the better employer is constrained by the meaner or the industrially weaker."

For this reason, legislation served as the community's chief means of achieving ethical gains. "Under the pressure of competition," she wrote, "the highest ethical level possible to our social life can be reached only through legislation."

Kelley depicted women readers as solidly with her on this score. So much so, that in her analysis woman suffrage was by definition an ethical gain.

"[A]n ethical gain has been made whenever the new intelligence of women has become available in the body politic; . . . other important gains may reasonably be expected in proportion as [the intelligence of women] is extended by conferring the franchise upon women." (before 173)

What purpose did Kelley's ethical argument serve in her reform work, and how does its use compare with that of Angelina Grimke’s religious argument in the 1830s?

The chief difference between the two reflects the difference in Protestant religious discourse in the two eras. Grimke was in direct touch with a personal God. Kelley spoke in much more general terms about Judeo-Christian ethical traditions. While these differences are important, I am more impressed with the similarities between the two, since both invoked a higher moral authority to justify the changes they were generating within American political culture: Grimke to launch a women's rights movement, Kelley to achieve social justice for working people.

Kelley’s encouragement of her constituency of middle class women to endorse labor legislation to regulate the work place very much needed the ethical and moral boost that her argument provided. Many middle-class women might have hesitated to support such legislation, because it required them to oppose "free market" and "freedom of contract" ideologies, as well as traditions of limited government within their communities.

Kelley eventually won this battle for the hearts and souls of middle-class women. For example, their lobbying efforts among state legislatures between 1912 and 1920 produced the first minimum wage legislation in the United States --exclusively for women --in fifteen states. But her campaign would probably not have been won without her skill at drawing on values that transcended or were perceived as higher than those that presumably otherwise governed American political culture.

What does this brief excursion into the parallel universe of women's political activism tell us about the relationship between that activism and the political culture that Professors Schudson and Blumin have described? I think we can draw two conclusions: one about women's participation in American political culture before 1920; one about what we can learn from their experience about American political culture more generally.

1) First, between 1820 and 1920, women did not enter American political culture on its own terms; they imported their own set of "higher" values. These "higher" values were crucial to their success in introducing innovations into American political culture.

2) Second, if we can generalize on the basis of this paradigm, it seems to me that we can conclude that the separation of church and state in the United States had the unexpected consequence of transferring religious, moral, and ethical authority into civil society and permitting average people to drape themselves in that authority (on the one hand), while leaving the state relatively bereft of such authority (on the other). This might help us understand why our governments are particularly susceptible to popular moral mandates.

If a right-regarding citizenship offers hope for the future of our democracy --and I think this is a very promising concept -then we need to include women in the story of how the fairly abstract notion of rights became so vital --and so popular --a part of American public life.

Gender as a category of analysis rewards the effort involved in applying it to the study of American political culture because it not only illuminates the categories of male and female, but also sheds new light on American political culture and civic life generally .

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