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Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and Gender in a Civil War Marriage. By Peg A. Lamphier. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. 315. Cloth, $55.00.)
Although Kate Chase has not been entirely neglected by biographers, she has received somewhat less than full justice. Biographies have represented her as overwrought with ambition, aggressive, and self-absorbed. Peg Lamphier reinterprets this conventional view in three ways. First, she argues that Kate must be regarded as a political actor as the daughter and wife of politicians. Like other feminist scholars, Lamphier believes that too much women's political history has concentrated solely on women's rights and allied movements. She argues that historians must broaden their understanding of mid-nineteenth century politics to include both formal and informal kinds of influence and authority as the basis for political power. When the parameters of "political" are changed, it becomes apparent that Kate was a committed and passionate partisan woman who "placed her imprint directly upon the manly form of traditional politics" (5).
Lamphier's second, and more problematic claim, is that it was Kate's search for love and acceptance that consumed her life and motivated her political involvement. Curiously leaning on the findings of modern psychiatry, Lamphier writes, "Politics functioned as a way to gain approval from her father, and when she...