She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America, and reported the following:
Page 99 places the reader in the 1850s—and the book’s third chapter—when discussions of the “woman question” have intensified thanks to the emergence of a women’s movement. The page discusses: Lucy Stone, who became a “celebrity” of sorts on the lecture circuit (and for keeping her own name upon marriage); fictional treatments (generally hostile) of the women’s movement; and the way disagreement over women’s rights, roles, and responsibilities entered into partisan politics in this decade.Learn more about Consistent Democracy at the Oxford University Press website.
In some ways, page 99 is misleading. The book does not follow a “movement” narrative. Nor is it primarily concerned with partisan politics (a topic that is handled quite well by other scholars—most recently by Lauren Haumausser in The Democratic Collapse (2022). As a work of intellectual and cultural history, Consistent Democracy instead tracks discussions of women’s role in society and the polity wherever they occurred. That means that many voices outside the women’s movement drive the narrative, from foreign observers to domestic advice gurus to antislavery activists, moralists, commentators, educators, journalists, and countless others. I call this extensive print discussion “published opinion” (to mark its distinctiveness from the more familiar concept of public opinion). In the pages before and after page 99, canonical thinkers (e.g. John Stuart Mill) share space with lesser-known figures including Harriet Martineau, Catharine Beecher, William Alcott, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and many others.
But in another way, page 99 does a nice job highlighting two of the book’s central claims: that discussions of the “woman question” permeated every aspect of nineteenth-century culture and that those discussion were vital to the theory and practice of American democracy. The political exclusion of women (white and Black, free and enslaved, single and married) provoked scrutiny over the meaning of “the consent of the governed” and (by the 1830s) “universal suffrage.” As Americans (and others) debated women’s rights, roles, and responsibilities, they grappled with key aspects of their political experiment. “Woman questions,” the book contends, were thus at heart “democracy questions.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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