Daniel Carpenter: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. We now get to your new book. Again, I’ll repeat the title, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870. It helped me think about a whole host of issues anew. First question: how and why were petitions key to the women’s rights movement in the 19th century? Really a great question. If you think about the international women’s rights movement — not just the United States, but also New Zealand and Australia, Canada, even France, Britain — in part, women saw themselves signing these petitions not just individually but collectively. They saw the weight of numbers, and they saw that, especially white women, as they learned, actually, some level . . . Native American women in the United States were petitioning in ways that were more innovative, even compared to white women. But as they saw this — what I call the accountability of voice, the idea that their voices could matter, not only in the arguments they put forth, but also in the weight of the numbers — I think that became a much more powerful motivator for women’s rights movements to make bolder and bolder claims for the vote. Why was early 19th-century French Canada so important for the history of petitions? This is the hardcore podcast, in case you hadn’t known.…

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