The Wild Woman of Cincinnati: Gender and Politics on the Eve of the Civil War by Michael D. Pierson (review)

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• The Wild Woman of Cincinnati: Gender and Politics on the Eve of the Civil War by Michael D. Pierson
• Andrew Kettler

The Wild Woman of Cincinnati: Gender and Politics on the Eve of the Civil War. By Michael D. Pierson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 178. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7872-0.)

The Wild Woman of Cincinnati: Gender and Politics on the Eve of the Civil War is a fascinating little book that will find its way into numerous classrooms due to its highly accessible use of microhistory to understand many significant cultural and political trends in the nineteenth-century United States. The work specifically focuses on a history of gender through the telling of a stage performance in Cincinnati in 1856. Thinking about con men and spectacles in the Queen City through the lens of reception, racism, and entertainment, Michael D. Pierson provides an engaging history with numerous tentacular connections to major narratives concerning the North and the South in the late antebellum era.

Through focusing on a single event and connecting outward to other major historical narratives related to gender, partisanship, and ethnicity, The Wild Woman of Cincinnati explores history and historiography in enlightening manners. The central microhistory revolves around a public spectacle concerning the promoter J. W. C. Northcott and his production of a stage show concerning a supposedly “feral” woman from the Texas borderlands (p. 3). Linking narratives of race, gender, supposed Indigenous profligacy, and the American West that were prominent in the political cultures of the East, Pierson expresses how white male populations fantasized about their control over female bodies of many different races through a connective desire to hold capitalist markets in the North, land in the West, and enslaved people throughout the South.

Chapter 1 looks explicitly at the press concerning the Wild Woman show and the principal components and promoters of the show, including Northcott, the attendant Ann Walters, and the Wild Woman herself. Debating the truthfulness of the story, which itself is internally contradictory and most likely false in most of its aspects, the chapter exposes how con men came to be able to tell such fantastical false stories to their audiences in the antebellum era. Through comparisons to P. T. Barnum’s Joice Heth, daredevil Sam Patch, and wild women stories from earlier decades, Pierson shows how audiences acknowledged possible false narratives as part of entertainment due to traditions of hoaxes that included many tropes, which became commonly understood by audiences in both uncanny and clearly accepted ways.

The second chapter looks at the decline of the Wild Woman show due to a rising reform movement in Cincinnati that focused on modernizing female voices in the changing public sphere and due to the prominence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Taken to court with her attendants, the Wild Woman was placed in an asylum before the three principal figures of the spectacle were lost to the historical record. Chapter 3 looks at partisan allegiances related to [End Page 432] how audiences responded to reading about the Wild Woman. Examining newspapers with party allegiances, Pierson shows a specific split in reception related to Republican, Democratic, and Know-Nothing readerships. Even with ideals of common whiteness driving most party politics, different interpretations of gender portrayed considerable regional breakdowns of American consensus on sexual morality and women’s rights.

The fourth chapter looks at women in antebellum society, focusing on class relationships concerning those who needed assistance from upper-class women, the specific empowered women who fought against a determined patriarchy, and the perceptions of empowered women by those who needed assistance. Through imagining what the Wild Woman would have understood about her place in society, Pierson ends chapter 4 by focusing on whether the Wild Woman was in on the con, a truly “feral” human, or part of a connected manipulation by Northcott and Walters, exploring these possible interpretations from the viewpoint of the stage and through gendered ideals in the ante-bellum United States.

The Wild Woman of Cincinnati reiterates a history of how American women experienced different versions of powerlessness in the face of antebellum society at the edge of Civil War...