Antislavery Organizations Research Articles

Iklan Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

<i>Iklan</i> Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

Perpetrator-Centric Strategies for Addressing Modern Slavery

Abstract When viewed through the lens of social movement theory, recent initiatives aimed at eradicating modern slavery have given insufficient attention to the role of the social movement’s primary target, namely the perpetrators of modern slavery. The existence of this disparity between social movement theory and anti-slavery practice is supported by global survey results from 147 anti-slavery organizations. After arguing for the importance of anti-slavery strategies that attempt to change perpetrator behaviour, this article introduces the concept of perpetrator vulnerability. The article proposes a matrix of perpetrator-centric interventions as the basis for future research and anti-slavery practice, in order to fill the identified disparity.

Paul J. Polgar, Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

En decembre 1834, dans les pages du Liberator, le leader abolitionniste americain William Lloyd Garrison revient en ces termes sur la fondation de son journal antiesclavagiste, a Boston, trois ans plus tot : At that time, there was scarcely a man in all the land who dared to peep or mutter on the subject of slavery; the pulpit and the press were dumb; no anti-slavery organizations were made; no public addresses were delivered; no reproofs, no warnings, no entreaties were uttered in the ears o...

Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt

Reviewed by: Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds by Nancy A. Hewitt Julie Husband Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds. By Nancy A. Hewitt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xvi + 413 pp. $39.95 cloth/$26.49 eBook. Amy Kirby Post housed self-emancipated people fleeing slavery for Canada, helped Harriet Jacobs find an editor and publisher for her slave narrative, organized fairs and subscriptions to sustain Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, and followed Susan B. Anthony by attempting to register to vote in 1872. She forged many of the interracial, cross-gender, and cross-organizational bonds that drove social changes in the nineteenth-century United States; and yet, until recently, historians have paid little attention to her. In the course of recounting her extraordinary work, Nancy A. Hewitt builds a case for Post’s universal reform philosophy as well as her generous practice of opening her home and life to others. This philosophy and practice made Post, according to Hewitt, into a “conductor” across radical movements (5). For contemporary readers, Post emerges as a model for what it meant in the nineteenth century to be an anti-racist ally, one who need not be in the front, defining an injustice and its solution, but might more effectively work as a part of a team, amplifying the voices of those who speak for themselves. The first three chapters perform considerable world-building, as readers see how the Quaker communities of Jericho (Long Island), Ledyard (central New York), and the boom city of Rochester, New York, fostered a spirit of independent judgment and, for women, an unusual freedom to speak publicly. These communities, too, supported interracial education, which contributed to Post’s later sensitivity to the often fraught interracial dynamics within antislavery communities. White-dominated antislavery organizations welcomed the testimony of fugitive slaves but often rejected African American leadership. The issue could be magnified in the ladies’ antislavery societies where much of the fund-raising took place. Post’s own leadership in the Western New York Antislavery Society provides a model for interracial alliances. She hosted in her home Black abolitionists, including Douglass, his friend and fellow journalist William C. Nell, self-emancipated writer Harriet Jacobs, and Sojourner Truth, and became lifelong friends with them all. She facilitated Truth’s speaking career and Jacobs’s writing and speaking career by connecting them to her extensive reform network. She resourcefully established a reading room above Douglass’s offices at The North Star that marketed antislavery products. At one time, it was managed by Harriet Jacobs, thereby giving Jacobs both an income and a place to write. Meetings for the Western New York Antislavery Society also took place at the meeting room, making it easy for Jacobs to participate. [End Page 175] Nonetheless, Post recognized the need for autonomous Black organizations. As Hewitt explains, “Given black women’s relationships with white women—for whom they often worked as servants, laundresses, or seamstresses—and their well-earned distrust of white men, it is not surprising that they chose to labor in a separate society” (121). Hewitt claims that Post’s unique ability to bridge racial and gender divides owed much to her Quaker upbringing. Quakers hold each individual’s reflections on truth and justice—their “inner light”—sacred (3). Post resisted the kind of infighting that poisoned relations between political abolitionists and Garrisonian abolitionists, who rejected voting, public office, and political action. One limit to this strategy was her difficulty surmounting prejudices that made her a less successful fund-raiser than Julia Griffiths, Frederick Douglass’s English friend who became his greatest asset in making his newspaper a success in Rochester. Confident, extroverted, and status-conscious, Griffiths emerges in Hewitt’s telling as an antihero to Post. Griffiths offended many, most especially Frederick Douglass’s wife, Anna, but she likely saved Douglass’s paper from bankruptcy by forging connections with the wealthy and influential in Rochester. One area that remains somewhat under-explored in the biography is Amy and Isaac Post’s leadership within Spiritualism. They were central to popularizing this belief in communication with the dead, promoting the famed “rappers” Kate and Margaretta Fox and...

No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936) ed. by Pura Fernández

Reviewed by: No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936) ed. by Pura Fernández Ronald Briggs TK Pura Fernández, editor. No hay nación para este sexo: la Re(d)pública transatlántica de las Letras: escritoras españolas y latino-americanas (1824–1936). Iberoamericana, 2015, 396 pp. Pura Fernández's new anthology focuses on the women who participated in what Habermas might call the public sphere in the Spanish-speaking world between the end of the Spanish American Wars of Independence and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. Attuned in equal measure to the degree of agency afforded by the world of letters and the limits placed on that world by economic and political forces beyond its control, the group of 16 essayists assembled here provides an eloquent and well-researched series of investigations into the web of international and transatlantic literary networks that sustained women writers in Spain and Spanish America. Fernández's forcefully written and historically grounded introduction makes clear what is at stake in the project: not just the recovery of unjustly marginalized figures, but the advancement of a networkcentered approach to researching them that takes into account the influence of personal and official relationships on individual texts and careers. It is no accident that the time period covered by this collection roughly corresponds to the development of national literary histories and canons in the Spanish American republics. These histories have tended to serve as vehicles of oblivion and recovery—select clubs from which writers can be exiled and into which they can be rescued. Fernández's collection takes seriously the attempts of women in the Spanish-speaking world to create international networks that would serve as a counter-structure to the national ones that so often excluded them. This network-based approach is not without precedents, and Fernández's introduction acknowledges, among many other precursors, Francesca Denegri's work on Peruvian women intellectuals in the late nineteenth century and Leona S. Martin's 2004 article, "Nation Building, International Travel, and the Construction of the Nineteenth-Century Pan-Hispanic Women's Network." Going beyond the question of oblivion and recovery, Fernández also cites Lynn Hunt's articulation of New Cultural History as a guiding principle, underlining the need to focus on the structures that shape the production of texts. Aesthetics matters, too, in Fernández's analysis, and her introduction takes care to point out the intersections between the practical forces governing publication and distribution and the defining qualities of the literary: what artistic genius means and what sort of reaction a writer should seek to produce in her readers. She argues that the practical and the aesthetic did not exist in parallel isolation and that the notions of literary genius and objectivity developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tended to put women writers at a disadvantage. [End Page 246] The breadth of the collection—16 essays and a substantial introduction covering three continents and two hemispheres—makes it difficult to summarize. Since it would be impossible to discuss every essay in detail, I will offer some reflections on a sampling that reflect the overall high quality of scholarship on display throughout. The collection's geographical and temporal breadth extends to genres of cultural production, too, as the works under consideration range from William Acree's appraisal of the hand-woven divisas carried by nineteenth-century soldiers in Río de la Plata to the role of women writers in the 1910 celebration of the centennial of the Revolución de Mayo analyzed by Javier Lluch-Prats. Networking and its practical and aesthetic implications take center stage in essays by Noël Valis, Akiko Tsuchiya, and María Nelly Goswitz that deal, respectively, with mentorship among romantic writers in Spain and the US, the influence of gender and anti-slavery organizations in the writings of Faustino Sáez de Melgar, and the legacy of real and virtual literary salons. These studies use archival and published materials to reconstruct the literary communities in question and the concrete role they played...

Radical Hospitality and Political Intimacy in Grahamite Boardinghouses, 1830–1850

Radical Hospitality and Political Intimacy in Grahamite Boardinghouses, 1830–1850 April Haynes (bio) After enduring three days of crowded steamboats, segregated cars, and rutted roads, three hundred travel-weary abolitionists filed slowly toward their appointed meeting place in May of 1840 only to meet a menacing crowd. Residents of New York City's fourth ward lined Franklin Street to jeer the unwelcome arrivals. Familiar with such episodes, the antislavery delegation from New England moved with practiced calm toward St. John's Hotel. Urban boardinghouses overflowed with reformers during each anniversary week in the 1830s and 1840s, inundating the scarce lodging spaces otherwise accessible to abolitionists. Added to these usual pressures, the Garrisonian contingent also anticipated an exceptionally ugly battle among fellow abolitionists at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The cresting debate over women's full membership in antislavery organizations had attracted, according to one observer, "far greater numbers" of activists than had attended prior conventions.1 The Franklin Street crowd had been summoned by a white man who [End Page 397] claimed to have witnessed an instance of interracial flirting in the street near the hotel. But a domestic threat soon overshadowed the sexual one. The crowd roared at the sight of "white, black and mulatto, men and women, married and single" carrying "trunks, cloaks, umbrellas, band-boxes, carpet bags, smelling bottles, bedding and other necessary articles" for what appeared to be the start of housekeeping together. Reporters on the scene noted the "cart loads of beds, kitchen utensils, provisions cooked and raw" that the abolitionists carried with them. They watched as the first arrivals "took possession" of the hotel's kitchen to cook a communal meal. A group of teenage girls from the Plymouth Juvenile Antislavery Society realized that the hotel would not have beds for everyone and began hanging up their shawls to portion its ballroom into makeshift sleeping quarters. In the street, "light-colored fathers" ushered their "precious family" indoors. As abolitionists "tumbled in the Hall, with luggage, bed and bedding," men in the crowd bellowed that it would just be a matter of time until they "all lay, like pigs, amalgamated together." A few of them accosted the hotel's proprietor and threatened to burn his building to the ground. He admitted that Arthur Tappan had reserved the hotel for a large group of "religious" travelers but denied admitting this "mixed multitude of commingling colors, tongues and notions of propriety" into his large, elegant hotel. Escorted by street toughs, the hotelier "downed the rough-board table of his early customers, tumbled it and their mass of trumpery into the street, and then compelled the amalgamators to follow their luggage."2 Where could this enormous group of abolitionists find lodging on a moment's notice? And even if the delegation broke into smaller parties, where would African Americans be welcome? Urban entrepreneurs and municipal authorities had built the exclusion of black lodgers into the first national network of hotels. Those who allowed black guests to stay among their predominantly white clientele risked legal suppression as well as extralegal violence. Their businesses could be closed by court order, a policy that survived until the mid-twentieth century. The problem of navigating hostile spaces was nothing new to African Americans in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly when it came to lodging, which was a necessity during journeys that took days or weeks. As Elizabeth Pryor [End Page 398] has recently shown, black mobility was heavily constrained by exclusion, segregation, and harassment. These actions profoundly limited black freedom and citizenship. Unrestricted mobility theoretically separated free people from slaves and bound servants. As freedom of movement increasingly defined citizenship in an expanding nation, "colored travelers" undermined the association in many white minds between blackness and servility. In this context, white Americans fortified their monopoly on travel accommodations and black activists fought campaign after campaign for the right to move freely. In practical terms, the black abolitionists ousted from St. John's Hotel would ordinarily have turned to hospitable friends or black-owned boardinghouses. African American boardinghouse-keepers such as Amelia Seaman advertised directly to black abolitionists, but these resources stretched thin during mass political gatherings. One attendee...

Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest by Stacey M. Robertson

Reviewed by: Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest by Stacey M. Robertson Lowell J. Soike Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 320 pp. $39.95. During the 1830s and 1840s antislavery feeling, though years in the making, was beginning to take hold in the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Slavery’s antagonists, once operating in a relatively quiet and unorganized state, were now coalescing. And as northern and southern attitudes diverged, so too did their moral compass. This all accompanied the rising southern economy where, taking advantage of the cotton gin’s development and cheap available tracts of land, ambitious southerners found no faster way to fortune than using slave labor to set up a cotton plantation. Soon, however, despite enjoying high demand for their competitive cotton in the textile mills of New England and Great Britain, slaveholders saw that adding thousands more slaves to their expanding operations was fostering sharp negative reactions and posing danger to their national political and economic power. By 1833 the newly founded American Anti-Slavery Society was busy decrying the spreading slave-based economy and calling for immediate emancipation. Before long, American slaveholders saw antislavery influences spreading through numerous antislavery organizations being formed in Ohio and other states. And, because slavery’s wrongs had a strong moral dimension that touched female as well as male social roles, women began taking an active part in the organized opposition. It was here among abolitionists that [End Page 165] women found opportunities beyond the limits of their traditional home and family duties to enter the public arena. In Hearts Beating for Liberty Stacey M. Robertson recounts the lives and pathways taken by women joining the antislavery struggle in the Old Northwest. Focused to a large extent on carefully documenting Ohio developments, the author brings to light the numerous contributions of these dedicated western women and their leaders to the cause. Her intent: to show that shifting the focus from East to the West “forces a reconsideration of antislavery history” to correct the bias of eastern scholarship. Here in the Old Northwest, “a region with a complicated history of slavery and racism, abolitionists working at the grassroots level created a distinct approach characterized by cooperation and flexibility” in building their movement (2). Her excellent introduction challenges the view that western abolition was an eastern import and points out that “Racism and the Black Laws” of the Old Northwest along with its diverse population “created an environment that demanded a pragmatic abolitionism.” This sets the stage for what follows in seven chapters, organized by topic and in a generally chronological fashion. The opening chapter describes overall features of antislavery organization in Ohio, indicating how, unlike in the East, county and statewide groups predominated— and how the female antislavery societies would take on regional issues with national influence, cooperate with men and sister societies in petition campaigns to the mutual benefit of abolitionism, and involve themselves in African American education efforts. Chapter 2 turns to abolitionist women and the Liberty Party, where western women found that through quiet involvement, “the ‘feminine’ area of morality overlapped with the ‘masculine’ political domain in ways that made them more knowledgeable, politically skilled, and accepted.” Chapter 3 takes up their involvement in the Free Produce movement in hopes that slavery might be made unprofitable by citizens “refusing to purchase or use any products made by slaves.” Chapter 4 details how western women pressed their radical agenda through organizing sewing societies, participating at antislavery fairs and conferences to awaken public sentiment. Chapter 5 focuses in on women public speakers such as Betsey Mix Cowles, Lizzie Hitchcock, and Josephine Griffing, who discussed local issues by aiming to attract supporters less by using hardline methods than more effective cooperative approaches. Chapter 6 [End Page 166] on abolitionists and fugitive slaves shows that western women, despite the scoldings of eastern Garrisonians to stop “wasting time and energy” on the futile task of aiding escapees, nonetheless pressed on, finding “their work with fugitives as deeply fulfilling and sometimes life changing.” A final chapter looks to...

Women, vigilance committees, and the rise of militant abolitionism, 1835–1859

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the activism and resistance of the women abolitionists and runaways associated with vigilance committees. Vigilance committees were urban antislavery organizations dedicated to helping slaves along the Underground Railroad. Women intervened decisively in all the activities of the committees. Hundreds of female fugitives revealed to committee members the specific ways slavery oppressed women. Women activists, fugitive, and free, did most of the work for the committees both aboveground and underground. In the process, these activists taught other abolitionists that the resistance and experiences of enslaved women were central to the abolitionist movement and to the early women’s movement.

Humanitarian imperialism: the politics of anti-slavery activism, 1880-1940. By Amalia Ribi Forclaz

It is very good to have a solid monographic overview of anti-slavery advocacy and politics in their later and least well-known period. Focusing on the time between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War, Amalia Ribi Forclaz's research has the truly international scope of covering several European contexts. She deftly delineates the complex landscape of interactions between several types of actors around the issue of slavery: the oldest and strongest anti-slavery ‘establishment’ in London; newer national anti-slavery organizations in Italy, Switzerland and France; national governments of European states and Ethiopia, and international bodies like the League of Nations or the Vatican. The book is organized chronologically around two main narrative arches. The focus of the first two chapters is the revival of anti-slavery activism around the turn of the century and the inclusion of slavery as a topic in the work of the newly founded League of Nations. Here, the main strength is a hitherto missing synthetic discussion of the new wave of late nineteenth-century Catholic anti-slavery in its international context. Three chapters weave together another narrative, that of the complex international politics around the issue of Ethiopian slavery. The question is first adopted and advocated by British abolitionists and then co-opted—with the willing cooperation of the Italian anti-slavery movement—by Mussolini's regime for its imperialist designs in Africa. Although Italy's allegedly humanitarian invasion provoked international opposition, a complex constellation of factors, including Italian intrigues to sway international public opinion and British anti-slavery's complicity with Mussolini, led—indirectly—to the disintegration of the anti-slavery project. Between these two narratives, somewhat uneasily sits a chapter on the limited revival of British anti-slavery around the centenary of the abolition of colonial slavery in 1933. The final pages, on the other hand, open up a larger vista, as they shed light on the eclipse of the long-term anti-slavery project with its eighteenth-century origins as, in the post-Second World War context, the ‘master frame’ of slavery is superseded by the new hegemony of the ‘human rights’ concept.

Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-first Century at a Post-Emancipation Site

How can a historic house museum speak to communities experiencing complex urban change and social ills in the twenty-first century? Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC), a post-emancipation site based in residential Brooklyn, interprets a free black, intentional, land-owning community, which established its own schools, churches, and anti-slavery organizations, and operated as a safe space for African Americans in the greater New York area throughout the nineteenth century. The museum is a direct result of more than a generation of community activism begun in the late 1960s to reclaim a forgotten history. WHC radically attempts to redefine ideas of freedom and emancipation in contemporary and self-determined ways. Drawing on Weeksville’s histories, WHC explores interpretations that highlight agency, independence, and activism and that resonate with contemporary concerns.

Book Review: James Heartfield, British Workers &amp; the US Civil War: How Karl Marx and the Lancashire Weavers Joined Abraham Lincoln’s Fight against Slavery 150 Years Ago

Book Review: James Heartfield, British Workers & the US Civil War: How Karl Marx and the Lancashire Weavers Joined Abraham Lincoln's Fight against Slavery 150 Years Ago. London: Reverspective, Ltd., 2012. ISBN: 978-0956806123 (Paperback). 40 Pages. £5[Article copies available for fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2013 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]You may have caught late night classics-in-the-making such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter or Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies. Well, I have one for you that happens to be true according to historian James Heartfield. What do Abraham Lincoln, weavers in Lancashire, Britain, Karl Marx, and the US Republican Party have in common? They all collaborated in the fight against the Confederacy and the regime of slavery that it represented.In his fascinating albeit abbreviated work, Heartfield, British journalist and former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, weaves story of cross-Atlantic solidarity and social movement building while laying bare uncomfortable truths. He shows us that Britain was in position to determine the balance of the US Civil War for number of years until 1963. However, the British government and elites displayed contradiction that uncovered the dark nature of power in the classical manner that Chomsky lays bare as the nature of American Imperialism. Britain publically disdained slavery, going so far as to search its merchant ships on the high seas under suspicion of slave activity. Logically, then, one would expect that had Britain intervened in the Civil War, it would be on the side of the Union lead by Lincoln. According to the established myth, British workers would side with the Confederacy knowing they would be hurt by the famine through lost jobs and reduced work hours. This is because significant portion of Britain's industrial activity depended on stable supply of raw cotton from the South. When the North blockaded Southern ports it resulted in drop of cotton exports, thus the cotton famine.History proved otherwise, as Heartfield demonstrates in his work. British politicians and elites actively agitated their workers to enter the war on the side of the South for couple of reasons. One, Lincoln represented then radical Republican ideals opposed by British elites. Rather, it was the elite's natural instinct to oppose notions of freedom should those expand into greater demands by white workers. Second, British industrialists needed the South' s raw cotton for their mills and economic activity. The Northern blockade of Southern ports interfered with the free cotton trade. Third, Britain was resentful if not fearful of former colony becoming stronger competitor under consolidated Union.Marx, who was living in Britain at the time, and many other intellectuals, activists, journalists, etc., recognizing the specter of sanctioned slavery across the globe, agitated against support for the Confederacy. Marx himself corresponded with Lincoln, the first Republican President, in genuine show of support and solidarity. More importantly, as Heartfield underscores here, British workers demonstrated instinctive solidarity with the plight of the US slaves even though it was against their own immediate economic self-interest. As important, the North sent shipments of supplies to striking British workers in show of solidarity.Southern elites, in collaboration with most British elites, newspapers, and pseudo-pro-labor, and anti-slavery organizations, engaged in fierce propaganda to persuade British workers to support the Confederacy and accept British military intervention on their behalf. For example, the leader of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), with official government ties, stated Lincoln's Proclamation was a measure of hostility to the whites, and designed to produce slave insurrection (p. …

“The Strength that Union Gives”: Western Women and Pragmatic Antislavery Politics

Western female antislavery organizations, including the Ohio State Female Anti‐Slavery Society, were characterized by pragmatism and cooperation. Unlike many eastern female antislavery societies, those in the old northwest organized at the local, county, and state levels to form a unified and inclusive antislavery voice. Movement leaders such as Betsey Mix Cowles, Lucy Wright, and Maria Sturges developed shrewd antislavery tactics that appeared to be well within the range of female activity but nonetheless challenged the social and legal status quo in ways that had political manifestations. The Ohio women engaged in a variety of local activities, including concerts, publications, education, and petitions that both nourished their own sense of accomplishment and raised the visibility of abolitionism. By combining their cooperative approach with a subtle political agenda, the women of Ohio initiated a campaign that would have a long‐term influence on antislavery and politics across the North.

Antislavery in America: The Press, the Pulpit, and the Rise of Antislavery Societies

We analyze how communications networks and social institutions influenced the growth of the antislavery movement in the U.S. from 1790 to 1840. Communications networks fueled by print media transmitted news about the movement to the public and so helped mobilize a broad base of support. Among social institutions, churches were especially supportive because their emphasis on morality and community was conducive to antislavery activism. Our analysis focuses on the founding of antislavery societies, the formal organizations that underpinned this movement, and makes three contributions to our understanding of social movement organizations in general and antislavery societies in particular. First, we show that the impact of mass media was strong as far back as the early nineteenth century and that the growth of magazines spurred antislavery society formation. Second, we demonstrate that theology, specifically an orientation toward this world or heaven, determined whether religious resources were available to antislavery organizations. This-worldly religions supported abolition organizing, while other-worldly religions undermined it. Third, we resolve an important causal ambiguity in debates about antislavery by showing that the development of the media was the cause, not merely a consequence of or companion to growth of antislavery organizations.

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America by Beth A. Salerno

<i>Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America</i> by Beth A. Salerno

Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America, by Beth A. Salerno

<i>Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America</i>, by Beth A. Salerno

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. By Beth A. Salerno. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. x + 237 pp. $38.00 cloth.

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. By Beth A. Salerno. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. x + 237 pp. $38.00 cloth.

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America, and: Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society (review)

Reviewed by: Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America, and: Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society Bryan Rommel-Ruiz (bio) Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. By Beth A. Salerno. (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 233. Cloth, $38.00.) Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. By Eric Burin. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xiv, 223. Cloth, $59.95.) During his visit to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at the American propensity for volunteerism [End Page 184] and establishing associations. Indeed, for Tocqueville, in order to understand American democracy, one needs to examine the political and civic associations in the United States closely. By participating in their associations, Americans truly lived democracy. At their associations, Americans wrote constitutions, voted members for offices, raised funds, debated with one another, created communication networks that circulated ideas, and importantly, actively engaged the public. American associations did not simply mimic national political institutions; they reinforced and legitimated those institutions by enabling Americans to practice democracy in their everyday lives. It seemed that wherever De Tocqueville turned, he saw Americans immersed in associational life. Whether in temperance organizations, antislavery societies, or similar institutions, Americans were engaged in activities that made politics their lifeblood. It is important to keep Tocqueville's perspective in mind when considering women's antislavery organizations or the American Colonization Society, the subjects of Beth Salerno's Sister Societies: Women's Anti-Slavery Organizations in Antebellum America and Eric Burin's Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society. Through the activities of black and white women in the North (Salerno), or colonization advocates from the North and South, as well as black and white (Burin), these authors examine the ways the "peculiar" dilemma of American slavery galvanized people who used civil associations to address the politically, economically, and morally provocative issue of emancipation. Even as political leaders sought to marginalize slavery from national affairs, in the private sector Americans as diverse as black women in Massachusetts and proslavery plantation owners in Maryland were working to solve the "peculiar" problem that plagued the nation. In their important books, Salerno and Burin remind us that Americans at the grassroots level were seriously engaged in the debate over slavery's future in America, and by extension the role of African Americans in the American republic. In Sister Societies, Salerno documents the emergence of female antislavery societies in the northern United States and the ways women negotiated the contested terrain between the private and public sphere. As protectors and teachers of moral virtue, women were expected to refrain from the corrupt world of politics. But as abolitionists argued, it was from their position as matrons of morality that women needed to work to end the immoral practice of slavery. As Salerno points out, in their meetings, women would stress slavery's destabilizing impact upon women, children, and the family, and, more provocatively, they petitioned [End Page 185] legislators to abolish slavery. Rather than prompting a new political presence in the public sphere, advocating for emancipation was part of a long tradition of women using public and political means to support and protect the domestic sphere. Nevertheless, Salerno demonstrates that female antislavery societies met strong resistance, not just from antiabolitionists but also from those who believed that women should not engage in political affairs. Fearing that women were participating in "promiscuous" associations (ones where women encountered and worked with men), laboring with African Americans, or, most provocatively, lecturing and speaking out against slavery, critics contended that these women were turning social and gender conventions upside down. In her careful analysis, Salerno cautions readers that the majority of members of female antislavery societies did not see their public activity as subverting gender norms. Yes, they were politicized, but in ways to challenge slavery. And while some women were provoked to question contemporary views of gender and racial categories, most were not. Women's historians have called attention to the ways that female participation in antislavery associations fed into a women's movement that...

Book ReviewSister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. By Beth A. Salerno. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature. By Michael Bennett. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. By LeeAnn Whites. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. By Beth A. Salerno. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Literature. By Michael Bennett. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. By LeeAnn Whites. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. By Stephanie M. H. Camp. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.Lyde Cullen SizerLyde Cullen SizerSarah Lawrence College Search for more articles by this author Sarah Lawrence CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 32, Number 2Winter 2007 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/508238 Views: 46Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author(s).PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America

Many nineteenth-century women got their first taste of political activism in small-town societies advocating temperance and other moral causes. Alongside national organizations with charismatic male leaders, these grassroots efforts by ordinary women brought about social reform, changed the meaning of political action, and, in the process, redefined gender roles. Significantly, women moved from behind-the-scenes moral suasion into the political arena at a time when the question of slavery in the United States was developing from a humanitarian concern into a hotly contested partisan issue. The public met women's entrance into political antislavery with mobs, riots, and sharp debate. In Sister Societies, Beth Salerno documents ties of kinship and friendship that drew women into the more than 200 exclusively female antislavery societies scattered across the free states. These societies were home to a surprising degree of diversity. Whether black or white, churchgoing or come-outer, radical or conservative, members found temporary unity in a common cause and the bonds of womanhood. Though some of the antislavery societies were short-lived, others persisted from the 1830s through the Civil War. As women's activism evolved during these decades, members practiced quiet forms of resistance such as sewing clothing for fugitive slaves, embroidering antislavery slogans on linen goods, and boycotting the products of slave labor. At the same time, they increasingly engaged in public protest by signing petitions, sponsoring conventions, circulating antislavery propaganda, and raising funds for the cause. Salerno looks closely at the ways in which members defined their work as political or moral, as well as how the surrounding society viewed it, to fine-tune our understanding of a critical moment in the history of women's activism.

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America

Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America