The woman-slave analogy: rhetorical foundations in American culture, 1830-1900

Abstract

During the 1830s, Sarah Grimke, the abolitionist and women’s rights reformer from South Carolina, stated: “It was when my soul was deeply moved at the wrongs of the slave that I first perceived distinctly the subject condition of women.” This rhetorical comparison between women and slaves – the woman-slave analogy – emerged in Europe during the seventeenth century, but gained peculiar significance in the United States during the nineteenth century. This rhetoric was inspired by the Revolutionary Era language of liberty versus tyranny, and discourses of slavery gained prominence in the reform culture that was dominated by the American antislavery movement and shared among the sisterhood of reforms. The woman-slave analogy functioned on the idea that the position of women was no better – nor any freer – than slaves. It was used to critique the exclusion of women from a national body politic based on the concept that “all men are created equal.” From the 1830s onwards, this analogy came to permeate the rhetorical practices of social reformers, especially those involved in the antislavery, women’s rights, dress reform, suffrage and labour movements. Sarah’s sister, Angelina, asked: “Can you not see that women could do, and would do a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?” My thesis explores manifestations of the woman-slave analogy through the themes of marriage, fashion, politics, labour, and sex. The white reformers who employed this prominent rhetorical device often privileged the position of white women over their enslaved African American counterparts. As a result, the woman-slave analogy has been derided by twentieth-century scholars, leading to a lack of historical examination regarding its nineteenth-century cultural significance. My thesis fills this critical omission through a historical and cultural examination of this rhetoric: examining the broader cultural context reveals the woman-slave analogy was much more than racist rhetoric. Yet this oversight is based on the assumption that the use of such rhetoric was limited to white women. My thesis proves that this was not the case by demonstrating that a variety of nineteenth-century Americans relied on discourses of slavery to describe women’s oppression, from proslavery ideologues to African American reformers, for both reform and conservative purposes. However, unlike white reformers, African American reformers emphasised the plight of the slave and the experiences of black women over those of white women. This thesis therefore suggests that it is more useful to consider the woman-slave analogy as a nineteenth-century attempt toward understanding interdependent forms of oppression – intersectionality. During the antebellum era in particular, when comparisons were predominantly based on a direct analogy between women and chattel slavery, many reformers and cultural commentators demonstrated a profound awareness of how different forms of oppression could intersect. However, following the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments that privileged the passage of manhood suffrage, white women reformers became increasingly focused on white women’s rights. This was expressed through a transformation to comparisons based on sex and race, rather than women and slaves. Overall, the woman-slave analogy could and was mobilised in racist, nativist, and even sexist ways, but its mobilisation generally demonstrated a growing desire to understand of the intersections between different forms of oppression. By the turn of the twentieth century, the prominent women reformers of the nineteenth century were remembered, alongside the “Great Emancipator” President Abraham Lincoln, as “Lady Emancipators,” thus demonstrating the cultural centrality this rhetoric gained throughout the century. It is important, therefore, to consider the ways in which discourses of slavery worked alongside that of women’s rights throughout the nineteenth century. The woman-slave analogy was a rhetorical device that enabled a discussion of the multiple sites of oppression that existed during the nineteenth century, and was often used in a concerted attempt to describe how this affected women – all women.