Consistent Democracy: The "Woman Question" and Self-Government in Nineteenth-Century America

What did it mean that in the world's first mass democracy only a minority ruled? Women—free and enslaved, white and Black, single and married—constituted the bulk of those barred from full self-government in nineteenth-century America. The seeming anomaly of this exclusion fostered basic questions about the possibilities and limits of popular rule during the decades of democracy's worldwide ascendancy.

Consistent Democracy examines how these wide-ranging discussions about self-government a...