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Swindler, Spy, Rebel: The Confidence Woman in Nineteenth-Century America
In her new book, Kathleen De Grave recovers another lost female figure from behind the cloak of invisibility that patriarchal history has imposed on women. De Grave positions the confidence woman as a transitional figure, inhabiting the interstices between the "true woman" of the nineteenth century and the "new woman" of the twentieth. Because the confidence woman becomes especially visible during and after the Civil War, De Grave focuses her revisionist historical and literary analyses on this cultural moment.
In describing the nineteenth-century con woman, De Grave paints pictures of strong and powerful women who delight in outsmarting society. The wonderful irony of the confidence woman is that her cons work by taking advantage of misconceptions about women and their capabilities. Everything "known" about a woman's psychological makeup indicated that she could not think rationally or plan logically and so was not capable of creating and carrying out a con. The con woman acted in ways that women allegedly could not act, and this was the secret of her success.
De Grave sees the confidence woman as providing a role model for other women, visual proof that one can reject the rigid boxes into which society jams women. Confidence women create their own subjectivity, flying in the face of a world that refuses to allow...