Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States

Unlike studies of nineteenth-century culture that perpetuate a dichotomy of a public, male world set against a private, female world, Lora Romero's Home Front shows the many, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory cultural planes on which struggles for authority unfolded in antebellum America. Romero remaps the literary landscape of the last century by looking at the operations of domesticity on the frontier as well as within the middleclass home, and by reconsidering such crucial (if sometimes unexpected) sites for the workings of domesticity as social reform movements, African American activism, and homosocial high culture. In the process, she indicts theories of the nineteenth century based on binarisms and rigidity while challenging models of power and resistance founded on the idea that "culture" has the capacity to either free or enslave. Through readings of James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maria W. Stewart, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romero shows how the politics of culture reside in local formulations rather than in essential and ineluctable political structures.