Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women by Joan HoffReview by: Hendrik HartogThe American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Jun., 1992), p. 920Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2164913 .

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920 Reviews of Books

succeed in formulating plans to resolve the conflicts that stand in the way of achieving democracy or the conflicts that persist even when participation becomes the order of the day. The same "unshakable faith" (p. 192) that sustained Dewey in his long crusade for democracy prevented him from appreciating fully the reasons for, and the depth and breadth of, the opposition to his ideal. If Dewey expressed the pow- erful and persistent American aspiration toward de- mocracy, his critics have reflected an equally pro- found ambivalence about extending the principle of participation to all forms of social life. Everyone interested in probing this crucial tension in American culture will find Westbrook's splendid book challeng- ing and rewarding.

JAMES T. KLOPPENBERG

Brandeis University

JOAN HOFF. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. (Feminist Crosscurrents.) New York: New York University Press. 1991. Pp. xi, 525. $39.50.

Joan Hoff frames her legal history of women using three presumptions. First, legal change-and in par- ticular so-called egalitarian reform-has never been an accurate measure of progress for women. She calls this her "broken barometer" theory of history, and it bears strong resemblance to Derrick Bell's conver- gence theory of African-American legal history: those with power-whites in Bell's case, men in Hoff's- only give that which they want to give. Second, all women-regardless of race or class (or, a subject almost undiscussed in the book, sexual orientation)- should be understood as having continuously shared a common identity throughout American history. Third, struggles for equal rights have been a trap for women set by a male legal culture. Such struggles have usually blinded women to their own best inter- ests.

Hoff's book argues strenuously with the more optimistic focus on women's legal agency and rights consciousness that has characterized much recent historical writing. The story she tells is thus intention- ally pessimistic, although moments of possibility and transformation appear occasionally, as befits a work that honestly incorporates most all the recent writing on women's legal history and the legal and constitu- tional history of family relations.

There are brilliant moments in the book. I think, for example, of her perceptive reading of the Decla- ration of Sentiments (1848), as fundamentally con- cerned with marriage. Or, to take another example, her fine discussion of the changing place of dower rules in the law during the first half of the nineteenth century (followed, unfortunately, by an unconvincing quantitative analysis of dower and female wealth hold- ing). She is, moreover, correct to place marriage and marriage law at the heart of women's legal history.

Yet because she insists on a separatist legal history,

because she refuses to view marital rights relationally, as incorporating duties and obligations on the part of both husbands and wives, her discussion of family law is overall truncated and sometimes misleading. I suspect that she may have been captured by the very liberalism she criticizes throughout the work-at least that part of liberalism that imagines rights as posses- sions (or absences) rather than as relationships.

At the heart of the book stands a paradox. Women have been deeply alienated from the law; yet, in Hoff's rendition, women's status and identity has been derived from their legal rights. In spite of her generous appraisal of the work of Mary Beard, she misses Beard's central insight that the meaning of marriage for women cannot be captured by a list of the legal rights they possessed or lacked. To Hoff, the fact that women began to win child custody cases during the first half of the nineteenth century is no sign of positive change because women did not ac- quire legal rights to their children equivalent to those that men had held earlier. The facts that husbands lost what had once been presumptively theirs and that wives gained continuity in relationships that were crucial to them are apparently beside the point.

In its current incarnation, this is a deeply flawed work. But let me not be misunderstood. For the most part, the flaws are founded not in its perspective but in careless writing and extraordinarily bad editing. It gives every appearance of having been put together in too great haste. At times arguments in the text are incomprehensible without first reading the endnote. (See, for example, the passage on page 37, where one historian's "anachronistic" reading of Tocqueville is challenged.) The tables of laws affecting the legal status of married women are incomplete, unex- plained in their categories, and unaccompanied with any identification of sources.

This book means to challenge the conventional whiggishness and optimism of our legal and constitu- tional history. Perhaps in a revised and reworked edition it will succeed in doing so.

HENDRIK HARTOG

University of Wisconsin, Madison

VIRGINIA LIESON BRERETON. From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1991. Pp. xvi, 152. Cloth $29.95, paper $10.95.

Virginia Lieson Brereton's survey of conversion nar- ratives begins where one might expect in middle-class Protestant evangelicalism. She does not close her book, however, until she takes her readers into the discourse of twelve-step programs and. feminist con- sciousness-raising groups. She read conversion nar- ratives closely in order to describe a distinct genre; she ranges widely across two centuries in order to detect shifts in form and content. This ambitious and

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 1992

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