Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest , and: Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (review)

Abstract

Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in Old Northwest. By Stacey M. Robertson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 320. Cloth, $39.00.)Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan. By Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Pp. 227. Cloth, $36.95 ).Reviewed by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino ZborayFor over two decades, scholarly monographs delineating antebellum women's civic, mainstream political, and partisan activity have been slowly changing face of women's history by questioning overriding impact of separate-spheres ideology on actual lived experience. Two recent books, Stacey Robertson's Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in Old Northwest, and Carol Lasser's and Stacey Robertson's coauthored Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan, continue to chip away at separate-spheres monolith in exciting and creative ways, while deepening our understanding of variegated pathways - including partisan road - by which disfranchised women attained a sense of political agency between post- Revolutionary War and Civil War eras.Robertson's Hearts Beating for Liberty accomplishes this with a spotlight on women abolitionists of Old Northwest (Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), a region that embraced third-party politics in 1 840s a means for ending slavery. According to Robertson, abolitionist women utilized and tolerated diverse plans of action not only to accommodate partisanship, but also to navigate region's particular environment of racism and discriminatory legislation that included infamous Black Laws. Cooperative, flexible, and pragmatic, are words Robertson uses to define these Westerners - quite a contrast to lexicon employed by Robertson for eastern abolitionists riven by internecine conflict over women's leadership or voting's efficacy. Because they self-consciously acted in concert with men and with abolitionists of all stripes, women of Old Northwest created a distinct approach (2) to their political activism.This well-written, lively, diligently researched book, based on manuscript personal papers, institutional records, and periodicals, is arranged in seven chapters that cover range of venues for Western women's multivalent strategizing: antislavery society, Liberty Party, free-produce movement, antislavery fairs, lecture circuit, aid to fugitive slaves, and women's rights. To reach far and wide, women organized on county and state levels, a matter of practicality given rural population's spread. As expert networkers (17), they held membership together through correspondence and by rotating annual meetings. Many of these societies endorsed Liberty Party. The party, in turn, invited female attendance at its conventions and treated women supporters as much more than symbols (55). Through free-produce movement, which facilitated slave-labor goods boycotts, women necessarily tackled hardcore economic issues such labor conflict and international finance, while travailing alongside men in equitably balanced leadership (69). Men's previously overlooked participation in sewing societies and antislavery fairs - indicative for Robertson of western women's teamwork - is highlighted in chapter 4. The ability to bend characterized female Garrisonian lecturers who, albeit reluctantly, adjusted to politically divergent audiences. Synergism operated among mixedsex and interracial assemblages of Garrisonians and mainstream and third-party affiliates who united to aid fugitive slaves.Each chapter offers fresh and often surprising insights on vital roles western women played in a movement that has been largely represented through northeastern lenses. Readers learn that Portage County (Ohio) Female Antislavery Society's 1836 membership was numerically unrivaled, east and west, and that 1850 Salem, Ohio, convention was the first and last antebellum woman's rights meeting to exclude men from holding office or speaking (185). …