Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (review)

Abstract

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in Indian and Slave Debates. By Alisse Portnoy. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 290. Cloth, $49.95.)Alisse Portnoy's Their Right to Speak examines debates about women's right to petition that arose during Indian removal and slavery controversies of 1830s. Some of Portnoy's ideas will be familiar to readers of this journal, since she published elements of this book here in 2003. Nevertheless, an overview of her findings is in order.Portnoy's story starts in January 1830, when sixty-one women in Hallowell, Maine, signed and sent to Congress a petition protesting government's removal of Cherokee nation from Georgia. Portnoy has found that some 1,500 other women sent similar petitions to Congress over next two years, in a campaign that, surprisingly, Catharine Beecher secretly helped to orchestrate. Beecher's role is especially noteworthy given her later public opposition to similar efforts by abolitionist women, especially her war of words with Angelina Grimke in 1837.Much of Portnoy's book attempts to explain contradiction between Beecher's early leadership of a women's petition drive and her condemnation only a few years later of abolitionist attempts to use same tactic. Looking for consistency in Beecher's arguments during 1830s, Portnoy dismisses usual argument that conservative Beecher condemned radical Grimke as a result of differences in their beliefs respecting gender roles. This seems like a solid start, especially as Beecher's intellect commands respect (if not agreement), and because antiremoval petitions unearthed by Portnoy prove that Beecher was open to some women's public involvement as early as 1830.Portnoy explains Beecher's change by examining differences between antiremoval and abolition, with particular attention to how much support each of causes enjoyed in Whig reform circles. Native Americans, she finds, enjoyed more favorable press than African Americans throughout this period, and this influenced degree to which Beecher and other middle-class reformers felt they could properly embark on petitioning activities. As Portnoy writes, the ways European Americans imagined African and Native Americans more significantly influenced women's early national, collective political activism than conventional gender constraints of period (9). After two chapters detailing how white society depicted Native and African Americans in novels and newspapers (particularly National Intelligencer), Portnoy concludes that reformers like Beecher regarded Cherokees as a sovereign nation with legitimate treaty rights. In addition, individual Native Americans could be bright, brave, honorable, and Christian. In contrast, African American characters in novels such as James Fennimore Cooper's were less than fully human, and nation's newspapers ran frequent advertisements that depicted African Americans as fugitive slaves and as merchandise to be bought and sold. Portnoy argues that in print culture of 1830s, term Negro was synonymous with enslavement, and that this made immediate abolition an undesirable goal for Beecher and other like-minded reformers. These racial assumptions underpinned American Colonization Society (ACS) and its work. …