Southern Historical Association

Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern America by William H.ChafeReview by: Van GosseThe Journal of Southern History, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 215-216Published by: Southern Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649375 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 215

Rymph charts the role of these partisan women by comparing the leaders,

members, and policies of the Republican National Convention's Women's

Division and the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW). Seek

ing access to party elite and the opportunity for a political career, the Women's

Division wanted women integrated within the party structure. They also were

less conservative than the NFRW. The NFRW sought to maintain women

specific organizations, often to the dismay of their leaders, articulating their

politics in crusading terms that celebrated women's disinterestedness and

moral superiority. Federation women upheld women's place in the home and

claimed that women's politics were a natural outgrowth of their maternal and

domestic concerns. As Federation women remained more conservative than

the party, these tensions between gender ideologies and the party continued

into the 1960s. Even in the 1970s, however, Republican feminists still felt that

Republican individualism was a natural fit with feminist politics. The unpre dictable rise of Phyllis Schlafly gave voice to Republican women who had

long believed they were doing the "the housework of government" for the

party but that their conservative views on women's equality and foreign and

domestic policy were ignored by the party's liberal elite.

Rymph contends that women throughout this period were the party's cen

tral grassroots activists. They built partisan networks among women and

youth, disseminated literature, and went door-to-door, and during the cold

war, the importance of their political housework grew. As the Republican

Party silenced its feminists in the 1980s, it also adopted a more feminized

style of politics in line with the crusading style of Federation women. Thus, women's political housework and the Federation's devotion to a particular vision of gender politics gave rise to modern American conservatism.

Rymph convincingly builds the relationship between Republican women's entrance into politics, their ideas of womanhood, and the party's antifemi

nism. This historical development, however, also paralleled the dismissal of

black Republican women?loyal party members?from the party's ranks.

Rymph acknowledges that the party got whiter but does not substantially examine the relationship between race and Republican gender ideologies.

When some southern white women joined the Democrats for Eisenhower

campaign in 1952, they found a political home for their ideas about woman

hood, motherhood, whiteness, and politics. While this example might be

beyond the scope of the book, it suggests that it is necessary to understand the

gendered language of antifeminist, conservative women in conjunction with

the racialized language of motherhood and womanhood to fully understand

women's contributions to the rise of the right.

Western Carolina University Elizabeth Gillespie McRae

Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern

America. By William H. Chafe. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard

University Press, 2005. Pp. [x], 420. $29.95, ISBN 0-674-01877-X.)

In Private Lives/Public Consequences: Personality and Politics in Modern

America, William H. Chafe steps aside from his foundational scholarship on

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216 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

social change in modern America to engage with the entirely subjective side of history?the emotional formation of powerful if not always "great" men

and women.

In the main, this is a history of presidents and presidential families: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill and Hillary Clinton, with Martin Luther King Jr. as an odd-man-out. In each case Chafe presents an already familiar narrative (FDR's polio; Bill Clinton's abusive stepfather; JFK's wartime heroism) to argue that early experiences conditioned what

particular leaders could or could not do, whether as individuals or within a

couple. (In this context, one is surprised by the decision to present the

Kennedy brothers separately rather than as another consequential dyad; per

haps Chafe wished to avoid the ground covered in Garry Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power [Boston, 1982], the indispensable un

packing of that particular family.) Private Lives/Public Consequences is most useful in capturing a particular

conjuncture of "personality and politics," as in its examination of the powerful

alignment of Franklin and Eleanor in the 1930s despite irreconcilable personal differences. Also intriguing is its quizzical portrait of Ronald Reagan as the

public tribune of a highly motivated team in his first term, prior to the second term implosion due to what Chafe describes as sheer mental laziness, if not

incompetence. Less successful is his treatment of the Clintons as a presidential

couple who undercut each other badly, which led to the sequence of disasters

in 1994?first the failed health-care reform effort and then the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. Here chronological muddles and an

exaggeration of superficial factors in the rise, fall, and rise again of Clintonism

work against the author's intent. One cannot blame Republican intransigence over health care on Newt Gingrich, as Chafe does, since in 1994 the fault lay with the solid Democratic majorities in both houses. Nor is it accurate that in

1992 Bill Clinton promoted a "co-presidency" and "told the nation repeatedly, in electing him they would have 'two for one,'" a quasi-feminist presidential

partnership (pp. 357, 367). Clearly, Chafe is fascinated by how private experiences?the kind that we

all have?fixed a personality. But while we may accept his arguments, which

are based on the authoritative biographical scholarship of others, they presume a unique, self-contained, permanent self. That is the "self" posited in presi dential memoirs and the recollections of those close to these men and women.

But it is problematic to suggest we should reinstate a positivist claim about

human agency, versus either the "social self" proposed by William James or

a more traditional emphasis on collective overdetermination rather than indi

vidual choice. Ultimately, this skillful set of pocket biographies leaves one with a sense of mystery and a rather different conclusion than Chafe: that in

many of these cases, there was less there than meets the eye?that most of

these figures were rather ordinary people elevated by combinations of con

tingency, utility to others, and that least understood but ubiquitous human

emotion, ambition.

Franklin and Marshall College Van Gosse

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