{"id":878,"date":"2008-09-22T08:09:53","date_gmt":"2008-09-22T08:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/?p=878"},"modified":"2014-01-06T12:51:06","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T12:51:06","slug":"circumstances-are-destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/2008\/09\/22\/circumstances-are-destiny\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: “Circumstances are Destiny”"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Circumstances are Destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere<\/em>. By Tina Stewart Brakebill. (Civil War in the North.) Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 255. $34.95.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy destiny,\u201d lamented Ohio native Celestia Rice Colby, \u201cis to act, to do life\u2019s humblest duties, in a narrow, unknown sphere, to crush back the upspringing aspirations that rise in my soul, and to strive for the mastery over my own spirit.\u201d (xii)\u00a0 With this, the reader of Tina Stewart Brakebill\u2019s \u201cCircumstances are destiny\u201d: An Antebellum Woman\u2019s Struggle to Define Sphere<\/em>, a volume in Kent State University Press\u2019s Civil War in the North Series, is led into one antebellum woman\u2019s thoughts concerning her decades-long struggle against gender-based limitations in American society.\u00a0 Increasingly, Colby came to believe (with obvious deep-seated despondency) that she and her circumstances in life had been severely curtailed simply because she had been born a woman; increasingly, also, she felt defeated by being unable to alter the path of her socially-proscribed destiny.<\/p>\n

Brakebill\u2019s penetrating, contextual analysis of Celestia Rice Colby\u2019s writings\u2014private and published\u2014and mid-nineteenth-century American society are nicely woven together in this fine study about how some women perceived and contributed to the growing movement for women\u2019s rights and an equality of circumstances.\u00a0 The book is divided into three parts relative to Colby\u2019s life: \u201cAn Expected Life\u201d which encompasses her formative years through her first decade of marriage; \u201cThe Battle to Change Expectations\u201d which focuses on her efforts to alter the path of her life from what was expected of women; and, \u201cExpectations Stagnate\u201d in which Colby assess the battle\u2019s outcome.\u00a0 Colby had much to say even if she doubted the power to influence even her own life, writing some 680 pages of diary entries and 275 published newspaper and other periodical items upon which this is based.<\/p>\n

Colby was born Celestia Rice in 1827 in the town of Andover (Ashtabula County) in northeast Ohio, a time and place where rural and agricultural life dominated much of American society.\u00a0 Also becoming prevalent was the trend of families migrating westward as her parents had done, relocating to Ohio from Massachusetts, and as she would do in moving with her family to Illinois after the Civil War.\u00a0 Colby, however, lived the majority of her life in Ashtabula County, particularly Cherry Valley, which was known for its dairying and butter and cheese production.\u00a0 As a daughter then as a mother, her roles and responsibilities would lie within this rural socio-economic context and include often arduous and monotonous farm and household routines.<\/p>\n

While growing up, the relative prosperity of Colby\u2019s family enabled her to attend Grand River Institute, a private seminary school, in the early 1840s.\u00a0 Here the rigorous curriculum and reformist influences including abolitionism found a fertile mind in Colby and awakened a life-long passionate interest in gender and racial disparities. \u00a0These ideas would dominate her writings, especially her growing disaffection with the separate spheres ideology.\u00a0 In 1848 she married Lewis Colby, a Cherry Valley dairy-farming neighbor, and in so doing Colby returned to assume the life expected of rural Midwestern women, ultimately raising five children.<\/p>\n

Initially, Colby\u2019s personal writings reveal a basic, even happy acceptance of her new role as farm wife.\u00a0 \u201cIt is my\u00a0first desire<\/em>,\u201d she maintained, \u201cto be a blessing to my husband.\u201d (19)\u00a0 During the 1850s, some of her published essays began appearing in the\u00a0Ohio Cultivator<\/em>and, at least early on, echoed traditional values.\u00a0 Sounding very much like Catherine Beecher, Colby contended that \u201cIf the great mass of our sex fully understood their duty, and were prepared to fulfill it, how soon, how very soon would the moral aspects of the world be changed for the better.\u201d (47)\u00a0 Interestingly, she, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, found that the issue of the preservation of the family could be used as a non-threatening vehicle for women writing in support of the antislavery movement, to name just one cause.<\/p>\n

By the late 1850s, ten years into marriage, motherhood, and dairying woman, Colby was not only articulating more radical reformism, but also an obvious bout with depression.\u00a0 Whether the two were related or not, the reader begins to question this long before Brakebill concedes the likelihood of a \u201cclinical depression\u201d on page 185.\u00a0 For example, Colby frequently despaired of a life she perceived as full of meaninglessness, especially her \u201cnatural\u201d dairying and housekeeping labors.\u00a0 She also disparaged women \u201ccontent to live a life of idle dependence\u201d who would \u201csink into mere drudges, and plod through the rest of their hopeless existence with no thought or hope beyond the bounds of their kitchen or parlors.\u201d (119)\u00a0 At this point, Colby appeared to believe that she could not alter her gender-driven destiny after all.\u00a0 Perhaps this brought on her depression, or vice versa; nevertheless, one becomes hard pressed at being able to analyze her reformism separate from her depression.<\/p>\n

During the Civil War era, Colby\u2019s public writings focused on children\u2019s stories while her private writings were increasingly despondent with allusions to marital unhappiness.\u00a0 After the war, the family re-located to Freeport, Illinois, where they abandoned farming as a way of life.\u00a0 Eventually Colby rejoiced that her children, including her daughters, pursued a college education, right at the time that women were first being accepted at places like the University of Michigan.\u00a0 At some point in the 1880s, Colby\u2019s husband was no longer in the picture, and Colby herself died in 1900 at the age of seventy-two.<\/p>\n

Tina Stewart Brakebill has produced a remarkably nuanced analysis of Celestia Rice Colby and her mid-nineteenth-century world.\u00a0 Certainly gender suggested destiny, but a miserable life was not guaranteed.\u00a0 To understand how other women coped with these circumstances, Brakebill might have consulted msore primary source accounts for connections to other women and perhaps fewer of the numerous secondary sources she referenced.\u00a0 A regional grounding with other rural, agrarian women would also have kept Brakebill from misconstruing Ohio as being \u201ca microcosm of New England culture\u201d at this late stage (the 1850s).\u00a0 If anything, this is a Midwestern story, and the main connection to New England at this point is genealogical.\u00a0\u201cCircumstances are destiny\u201d\u00a0<\/em>is a must read for those interested in Women\u2019s, Ohio, and Midwestern histories.<\/p>\n

Ginette Aley<\/em>
\nAssistant Professor, University of Southern Indiana<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Circumstances are Destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere. By Tina Stewart Brakebill. (Civil War in the North.) Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 255. $34.95. \u201cMy destiny,\u201d lamented Ohio native Celestia Rice Colby, \u201cis to act, to do life\u2019s humblest duties, in a narrow, unknown sphere, to crush back the … Continue reading Book Review: “Circumstances are Destiny”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1622,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39906],"tags":[42006,41954,11850,41950,18770],"class_list":["post-878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-volume-5-issue-1-spring-2008","tag-5-1","tag-celestia-rice-colby","tag-gender","tag-ginette-aley","tag-review"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1622"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=878"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":886,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/878\/revisions\/886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/nojh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}