Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era

Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era. By Rebecca Edwards. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii, 232 pp. Cloth, $39.95, IsBN 0-19-511695-X. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-19-511696-8.)

Rebecca Edwards's Angels in the Machinery is a stunning entry in the historical scholarship currently revisioning the politics of the Gilded Age from a gendered perspective. The fundamental interpretive move Edwards makes in her ambitious study is to recast the intense partisan politics of this period in terms of interrelated representations of "family" and "state." Greatly oversimplified, her argument is that Republicans linked their activist government goals with a vision of a domesticated family, centered around women's maternal role; Democrats held to an older vision of a male-dominated family and on this basis cultivated suspicions of government action for infringing on liberty. Particularly fascinating in her discussion of Gilded Age Republicanism...