Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity

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Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity. By Susan Zaeske. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 253. Illustrations. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.)Susan Zaeske's long-overdue study of women's antislavery petitions to the United States Congress in the period between 1831 to 1865 makes two interlocking arguments. The first is that women's petitions constitute a signal contribution to abolitionism, as they sparked national debate, a proslavery backlash, and a reorientation of the antislavery crusade. The second is that such petitions advanced the nascent cause of feminism, as they staked women's claim to citizenship and full political participation. Neither argument, in the broad sense, is new; scholars such as Gerda Lerner, Richard H. Sewell, and Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven have made the case for the significance of antislavery petitions. But Zaeske has strengthened that case immeasurably by doing work no other scholar has done before: she has painstakingly recovered and analyzed hundreds and hundreds of petitions (she estimates that some 3 million women's signatures were affixed to antislavery petitions); she has provided a chronological framework for organizing this vast collection of documents; and she has provided lucid analysis of exemplary passages from petitions and thus furnished new insights into some old debates.Zaeske's opening chapter sets the stage by showing that women's petitioning was on the rise in the early nineteenth century and was integral to women's crusades on behalf of evangelical benevolence, temperance, and opposition to Cherokee removal. She then turns her attention to the initial phase of women's antislavery petitioning, from 1831 to 1836. During this phase, before the passage of the gag rule, petitions were vehicles for Garrisonian moral suasion, and women, by adopting the mantle of citizens, described their actions as motivated by Christian duty and as an extension of the religious speech act of prayer (48). Despite their deferential cast, however, such petitions sparked controversy and resulted in the congressional gag rule that tabled all antislavery petitions. The gag rule had the unanticipated consequence of ratcheting up the antislavery petition campaign, as abolitionists sought to capitalize on the perception that proslavery forces were infringing on the of free speech. Moreover, the passage of the gag rule compelled antislavery and their male allies, during the second phase in Zaeske's narrative (1836-1840), to radicalize their rhetoric and elaborate justifications for female petitioning that cast it not simply as a moral duty but as a constitutional right. Zaeske shows that well-known antislavery events and documents, such as the 1837 women's antislavery convention and Angelina Grimke' s An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, had as a core concern women's to petition.Perhaps the most eye-opening section of Zaeske's book is her excellent account of John Quincy Adams's june 1838 speech in the House of Representatives. In response to southern politicians who charged that it was inappropriate and even scandalous for to enter the domain of politics through their petitions, Adams offered a stirring defense of antislavery women, reminding his audience of female heroism in the Old Testament, of women's patriotic activism during the American Revolution, and of their profound stake in contemporary political issues such as Texas annexation. To the charge that had no to petition because they had no to vote, Adams countered that women did, in fact, possess the to vote and that it was an injustice that they were denied the practice of that right (140). Zaeske clearly relishes the fact that John Quincy Adams, whose mother Abigail's remember the ladies letter of 1776 inaugurated the woman's rights debate in America, presented the most extensive defense of women's political participation ever before heard in the halls of Congress. …