What did it mean that in the world's first mass democracy only a minority ruled? Women—free and enslaved, white and Black, single and married—constituted the bulk of those barred from full self-government in nineteenth-century America. The seeming anomaly of this exclusion fostered basic questions about the possibilities and limits of popular rule during the decades of democracy's worldwide ascendancy. Consistent Democracy examines how these wide-ranging discussions about self-government and the so-called woman question developed in published opinion from the 1830s through the 1890s. Ranging beyond the organized women's rights movement, it places in conversation travel writers and domestic advice gurus, activists and educators, novelists and journalists, as well as countless others who explored contested aspects of democratic womanhood. Across the expansive world of print, these writers explored women's individual autonomy, their familial roles, and their participation in the polity with the franchise and without it. An array of theorists, reformers, and critics—including foreign observers Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, educator Catharine Beecher, political theorist John Stuart Mill, African American author and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and historian Francis Parkman—compelled Americans to assess and reassess their popular political ideas and assumptions against the backdrop of a turbulent century that witnessed the violent end of slavery. Combining intellectual, political, and cultural history, Consistent Democracy illuminates how—in the nineteenth century and since—woman questions were democracy questions.

In this intellectual history of American liberalism during the second half of the nineteenth century, Leslie Butler examines a group of nationally prominent and internationally oriented writers who sustained an American tradition of self-consciously progressive and cosmopolitan reform. She addresses how these men established a critical perspective on American racism, materialism, and jingoism while she recaptures their insistence on the ability of ordinary citizens to work toward their limitless potential as intelligent and moral human beings. At the core of Butler's study are the writers George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton, a quartet of friends who would together define the humane liberalism of America's late Victorian middle class. In creative engagement with such British intellectuals as John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Goldwin Smith, these ""critical Americans"" articulated political ideals and cultural standards to suit the burgeoning mass democracy the Civil War had created. This transatlantic framework informed their notions of educative citizenship, print-based democratic politics, critically informed cultural dissemination, and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy. Butler argues that a careful reexamination of these strands of late nineteenth-century liberalism can help enrich a revitalized liberal tradition at the outset of the twenty-first century.