What did it mean that in the world’s first mass democracy only a minority ruled, with women – free and enslaved, white and Black, single and married – forming the largest group of people barred from full self-government in nineteenth-century America? This talk will explore how a range of observers and activists, thinkers and reformers at that time responded to – and questioned – these seeming anomalies. Drawing on her new book of the same title, published by Oxford University Press, 2023, Butler shows how women were central as Americans debated democracy’s exclusions and confronted their aspirations and anxieties about popular government.

Guest Speaker:
Leslie Butler is an American intellectual and cultural historian, with an emphasis on the nineteenth century. She is the author of two books: Consistent Democracy: The “Woman Question” and Self-Government in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). She joined the faculty at Dartmouth in 2003 and since then she has also taught at University College, London and Occidental College, where she was the 2020-21 Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor. Her other scholarship includes articles and contributions to the Cambridge History of America and the World and the Oxford Illustrated History of the United States. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and Massachusetts Historical Society.