Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860

Rating:
Summary: Nominated by its publisher (Oxford) for the Pulitzer Prize.
Review: The late Susan Phinney Conrad was my college roommate at the University of Texas and one of the first Ph.D.s in the country in the new field of American Studies. She developed the earliest Women's Studies program at the University of Texas and was the first coordinator of the new American Studies program at Dickinson College. Illness later forced her to give up university teaching. Perish the Thought, the only book Susan ever completed, is based on her dissertation. But don't let that put you off. The writing is as witty as the title, and the book is chock full of good stories, social asides, and much incidental information that cumulatively make a gift to the reader of a rapidly widening view of Jacksonian democracy. Perish the Thought was not published until 1974, but long sections of it were already in draft as early as 1968. A younger feminist coming to the book from the perspective of the 1990s may wonder at the omission of some Second Wave insights/orientations we now take for granted.