Antislavery Women Research Articles

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent

Reviewed by: Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent Sara L. Crosby Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction. By Holly M. Kent. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2017. Pp. 204.) Professor Holly M. Kent has written a much-needed account of the fiction published by female abolitionists in the antebellum era. When historians have examined antislavery women, they have usually directed their attention to their subjects’ activities, but, as Professor Kent points out, “it is important to examine not only what antislavery women actually did but also what antislavery women imagined” (8). This focus allows Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right to illuminate constitutive philosophical tensions in women’s, particularly white women’s, antislavery thought: both its “radical promise”—its challenges to repressive gender and racial hierarchies and validation of women’s moral and thus potential political authority—and its “troubling limitations”—its failure to envision African American women as equals or fully imagine a “female power . . . disconnected from female domesticity” (8). Professor Kent delves into these contradictions by retrieving a wide swath of ignored writers and their forgotten antislavery stories. She examines texts published in “six antislavery newspapers, six gift books, and three periodicals intended for child readers,” as well as “twenty-seven antislavery novels written by twenty-two authors” and the papers of a variety of editors and publishers (11). The authors include relatively well-known women like Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Wilson, and E. D. E. N. Southworth but overlooked significant writers such as Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Hannah F. Gould, Eliza Lee Follen, Maria Weston Chapman, Caroline W. Healey Dall, Eliza Leslie, and Harriet Newell Green Butts. Most interestingly, Professor Kent also investigates a host of anonymous authors, including a number of women of color. This rich antislavery literature, as Professor Kent discovers, was fretted through with lines of tension that heavily impacted social movements like abolition but also later feminism and civil rights. Of particular note in Professor Kent’s analysis is the tension over the proper political roles of white and African American women. She points out that antebellum gender ideology expected women to be more emotional and sympathetic and thus, after overcoming their initial squeamishness, a more receptive audience for antislavery [End Page 97] appeals. At the same time, women had no actual public power to act upon that sympathy. They could teach (male) children, they could plead with sons, husbands, brothers, but the old tactics of “republican motherhood” and “moral suasion” fell flatter and flatter as the glorious possibility of abolition receded amid the slave-owning south’s intensified intransigence and aggression. As the antebellum era waned, women’s antislavery fiction thus exhibited increasing frustration with the limitations of its own gender ideology. Questions of an antislavery violence to match proslavery violence, particularly the potential violence of African American women, began to haunt these fictions, while they anxiously urged white men to political action yet represented “efforts to use feminine moral suasion on behalf of abolitionism as abject, dramatic failures” (135). Professor Kent tracks the progress into this ideological quandary as she follows the fictions decade by decade, with the final chapter on the 1850s being the finest and most detailed one. My lone criticism of the book is that Professor Kent could have done more in the earlier chapters to tip us into the world of these texts. I would have appreciated further plot summary, quotation, and analysis combined with more leisurely portraits of the authors and their specific, even idiosyncratic ideological aims and rhetorical moves. The study threatens at times to paint these fictions with too broad a brush. (But I am also ready to concede that my frustration on this one point stems from the disciplinary difference between English and history departments, so I am perhaps being a bit unfair.) Professor Kent is performing crucial recovery work and analysis. Critical understandings of antislavery literature have rested too heavily upon the shoulders of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and, while, as Lincoln may or may not...

A Political Tightrope: Mary Elizabeth Massey and Bonnet Brigades

A Political Tightrope:Mary Elizabeth Massey and Bonnet Brigades Lyde Cullen Sizer (bio) When invited to make this study I first decided what I would not do. I would not romanticize, idealize, or debunk the women of either North or South or attempt to prove or disprove the theses of any school of history. —Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades: American Women in the Civil War, x Elizabeth Massey’s Bonnet Brigades is breathtaking in its scope. Beginning with the work and opportunities of women before the war (excluding, for the most part, enslaved women), North and South, as the war began, she surveys [End Page 415] a remarkably varied terrain including (among others) female nurses, seamstresses, camp followers, writers, lecturers, government clerks, and refugees. She locates women at the battlefront, both in uniform and in camp, escaping their former masters and accompanying their officer husbands. And she locates them on the home front, in dark cold rooms, making do with less. So many of the remarkable books that have emerged from the now-burgeoning field of Civil War women’s history are anticipated here in some form, offering revisions and considerable depth, but following the path that Massey blazed. Coming back to the book after twenty-five years away, I am now struck by the political tightrope Massey walks. Her invitation may not have been explicit on this point, but the occasion would suggest it: this was a moment to emphasize unity between the white North and South, to emphasize what the war cost as well as what it allowed. To walk that tightrope without romanticizing or idealizing represented a kind of political bravery, even as we wince at some of Massey’s choices. Reading her work reveals the imperatives and the nuance of her historical moment and her own complicated sensibility. As much as Massey tried hard to eschew the wrangling, to offer balance and objectivity, she revealed her own ambivalence, her own understanding of the avenues for change, her own sensibility. For Massey, the Civil War was both a tremendous opportunity and a profound tragedy, and she swung back and forth between the two. For women to be “awakened” to a sense of their own possibilities, they needed “a movement . . . which would arouse their emotions, permit them to work with and not against their men, remove them mentally and physically from their narrow domestic world, and challenge them to perform great new tasks and assume new responsibilities.” If all those conditions emerged, such a “movement might do wonders.” Here was the Civil War as possibility, the catalyst for “latent talents.” Still, the end of the war left “many women in all parts of the country destitute, despairing, and embittered.” If the Civil War was a “springboard” to leap beyond the constraints of womanhood, Massey warns, “it is safe to say that in many instances unhappiness, physical breakdown, psychological disturbances, or insecurity were a direct or indirect result of the war.”37 While Massey spends the majority of her attention on the lives of middle-and ruling-class white women, North and South, it is telling that she frames [End Page 416] their lives around their work and argues explicitly and implicitly that freedom from social and cultural constraints must come through remunerated labor or respect given to household labor and attention paid to rural and working-class women. “Of all women’s new activities,” she notes, “none contributed more significantly to her emancipation than increased economic opportunities.”38 Massey’s perspective on radicals or what she called “feminists” was often dismissive. They were few, “dedicated but belligerent visionaries . . . frustrated in their attempt to remake the social order ‘overnight.’” Most women rejected their tactics if not their ideas, viewing them “with indifference, curiosity, derision, disgust, or apathy.” Few, after all, wanted to “listen to harangues on the social injustices, or fight for vague principles.” Antislavery women get short shrift, despite the significance of their work in the lead-up to war. Massey seemed amused by those fighting for dress reform. “Yet one thing could be said for the style,” she wrote: “it brought more humor to the nation than any other feminist cause.”39 When briefly noting the National...

Antislavery Women and the Origins of American Jurisprudence

“Antislavery Women and the Origins of American Jurisprudence is an essay review of Sarah Roth's Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2014). It assesses Roth's account of the dialog between antislavery and proslavery writers. Roth finds that the antislavery and proslavery writers were joined in their depiction of enslaved people in the 1820s and early 1830s -- as savage people who threatened rebellion. But as antislavery writers shifted to portray enslaved people as humble citizens-in-waiting, the proslavery writers responded with an image of the plantation as a family. This critique turns to southern judges and treatise writers to provide a slightly different picture, which shows that while the public face of the proslavery movement may have been of happy enslaved people, the hard-nosed economic and legal side continued with the initial image of enslaved people. This became particularly salient as the south moved towards Civil War. Roth perceptively portrays the shift in the North that led to increasing calls for African American freedom and citizenship and the rise of empirical critiques of law, which became central to post-war jurisprudence. That is, the antislavery white women in Roth's study injected empirical as well as humanitarian considerations into jurisprudence. Meanwhile, in the southern courts the reaction to calls for citizenship resulted in increasingly dramatic efforts to deny citizenship -- and ultimately in a secession movement along the lines sketched by southern legal thinkers.

Women and Abolitionism in the United States: Recent Historiography

AbstractThe past 20 years have seen substantial developments in the historiography on women and abolitionism in the United States. These include a focus on the experience of African American women both as activists and as objects of the abolitionist movement. Recent studies explore the ways in which religion inspired and shaped American women's commitment to ending slavery. Important work has been done on the ways in which antislavery women functioned as political actors and the ways in which their efforts influenced antebellum American politics. Abolition historiography has benefitted from the Atlantic perspective as studies have explored the transnational networks created by British and American women and comparisons highlight new aspects of American women's experience in abolitionism. Lastly, studies of women and abolition from each of these perspectives have complicated and problematized the grand narrative of 19th‐century American women's history which enshrined a “path from antislavery to feminism” as a critical consciousness‐raising experience which inspired American women to take up the quest for their own rights.

Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

Reviewed by: Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America Julie Roy Jeffrey (bio) Keywords Lucretia Mott, Women's rights, Abolition, Antislavery, Quakers Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. By Carol Faulkner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 291. Cloth, $45.00.) Lucretia Mott has presented formidable challenges to historians and biographers, Carol Faulkner suggests. The characterization of Mott as a domestic saint has discouraged scholarly examination of her life and career, while Mott's devotion to the family circle can appear to minimize her radicalism. Furthermore, although Mott gave hundreds of sermons and speeches, few were recorded. The paucity of published primary sources, and letters that confine themselves to family news, make it difficult to understand Mott's inner thoughts and motivations. It is hard to bring the domestic saint to life. Undaunted, Faulkner sets out to rescue the woman she considers the most important female abolitionist in the United States. Arguing that recent scholarship has once again excluded abolitionist women by "privileging the radicalism and egalitarianism of political abolitionists and revolutionaries" (4), Faulkner focuses on Mott's public activism. Mott, she argues, played a central role on both the local and national levels as an advocate for immediate emancipation and racial equality. Adopting [End Page 287] immediate emancipation and the free produce movement years before William Lloyd Garrison, Faulkner rightly considers Mott as part of "the interracial vanguard" (4) of abolitionism. Although Mott's involvement in the women's rights movement was always subsidiary to her commitment to abolitionism, Faulkner also examines her involvement in feminism as well as other causes like nonresistance. Faulkner shows that underneath the saintly image lay a woman of surprising strength and iron will who held fast to what she believed was right. Both an ideologue and purist, she was unable or unwilling to compromise any of the founding principles of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This stance narrowed her vision and led her to reject actions that she felt did not directly contribute to emancipation or equal rights. Her argument that aiding fugitives and the Underground Railroad did not constitute proper antislavery work resulted in an exodus of members from the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Her dislike of compromise also explained her disinterest in politics and her failure to understand the ways in which politics might contribute to realizing the causes she espoused. Faulkner organizes her book chronologically. In the first chapters on Mott's girlhood and early married life, Faulkner explores some of the origins for her mature views. Her mother's business skills, Mott's own superior education, and the realization of the pay inequities between male and female teachers reinforced the young girl's rejection of female inferiority. From Quakerism, she learned that the leadings of the inner light outweighed the voices of earthly authorities, a view that guided her throughout her life and supported many of her radical stances. Faulkner makes clear how Mott, like other Quaker women, was affected by and contributed to the divisions within the Society even as she rose to prominence as an outspoken female minister. Although she was often critical of her coreligionists and of religious authority in general, she never abandoned her religious community as so many other abolitionists chose to do. The chapters on abolitionism cover some familiar ground with descriptions of the formation of the American Anti-slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and the organization of the conventions of antislavery women in the 1830s. Faulkner sees Mott as one of the major players in these events; she, like other female abolitionists, faced hostility and criticism for her activism. Her attendance at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 contributed to her [End Page 288] growing notoriety, not only because she was one of the American female delegates excluded from participation in the proceedings but also because English Quakers rejected the validity of her Hicksite connection. Less well known are Mott's continuing attacks on the ties between religion and slavery and her growing prominence in the national antislavery movement. In 1841 she addressed the state legislatures in the Middle Atlantic...

To No One More Indebted

This research examines the role of Julia Griffiths, a white Englishwoman who worked closely with former slave-turned-newspaper-editor Frederick Douglass in the 1840s and the 1850s. Although historians have generally identified her as a secondary figure in the abolitionist movement, closer examination, particularly by media historians, is justified by the complexity of the relationship between the two of them and the nature of her influence on both the American and the British abolition movements. In 1849–50, Griffiths rescued Douglass’ faltering North Star, and her fund-raising for him and his paper throughout the decade before the Civil War energized and empowered antislavery women on both sides of the Atlantic. Overall, she made significant contributions to the thought and actions of women envisioning a new place for themselves on two continents.

Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric

In the 1830s, antislavery advocates used highly sexualized language to recruit Northerners into the growing immediatist movement. The "voyeuristic abolitionism" they developed in speeches, pamphlets and periodicals served to shock and mobilize men and especially women, who were urged to identify with the enslaved of their own sex, and then to act to save these victims. Engaging women in such explicit discussions and encouraging female efforts to strike against slavery challenged established gender norms. Yet as the antislavery movement evolved beyond moral suasion into a political strategy, most abolitionists curtailed their use of sexualized imagery, and women's participation in the antislavery movement took its own form. The rise and fall of the rhetoric of "voyeuristic abolitionism" can be charted by studying the vocabulary used in magazines and other popular publications of the era, now searchable electronically through the American Periodical Series. The explosive potential of this language can also be seen in the ways in which it was employed -and avoided-in the U.S. Congress. By the 1850s, some Americans-among them African American authors and antislavery women, including most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe--found ways to reference the moral evils of slavery without invoking explicitly sexual language. In the end, attacks on slavery framed in political terms prevailed over the voyeuristic abolitionism that had first drawn women into the antislavery coalition.

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 328. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. Laurie urges us, however, to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most important, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, such as the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). Moving beyond Garrison and his allies, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" citizens who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. Elizur Wright, Rev. Joshua Leavitt, and William S. Robinson are just a few of the many politicians, journalists, and activists who Laurie unearths from the ashes of Garrisonian abolitionism; he follows their path toward partisan antislavery vehicles like the Liberty party. He also underscores the importance of free blacks like Lewis Hayden and John Swett Rock in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation. Laurie claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than whites [End Page 205] in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos alike (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded only in middle-class, educated urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley, however. Laurie features Bagley's courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, but Bagley is only one of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, as Laurie says she did, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. But Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven had recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," it is not the case that antislavery women were wholly divorced from political action. Although Laurie may have underestimated the significance of female politicos, he did provide...

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

Reviewed by: Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity Lorien Foote Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity. By Susan Zaeske. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. 253. Cloth, $19.95.) In Signatures of Citizenship Susan Zaeske combines new primary source evidence with rhetorical analysis to provide a compelling portrait of the antislavery petition campaigns of the nineteenth century and their impact on women's political identities. Zaeske convincingly demonstrates that women's participation in the petition drives both contributed to the success of abolition and transformed women's political identity from one rooted in localities and religious duty to one of national citizenship and natural rights. Petitions historically have provided a voice for those who were denied full political participation, and women in the antebellum era were able to use this tradition to insert their voice into the petition campaign of 1831-36. Women did not view their petitions as political in this phase, Zaeske argues, because they used supplicatory language and justified their petitioning on the basis of women's moral authority. If women signed a standard petition form, they would often scratch out the word "citizen" and replace it with "women" or "ladies." The passage of a series of gag rules intended to stop the influx of antislavery petitions marked a turning point for women, however. Outraged by this violation of free speech, women took the unprecedented step of meeting in convention. Here antislavery women planned a systematic petition campaign designed to flood Congress with antislavery petitions. Zaeske notes that historians have overlooked the fact that women organized their petitioning in this phase before the men of the American Antislavery Society. In their efforts to garner as many signatures as possible in a coordinated effort across the North, women used short petitions that dropped expressions of humility and supplication. Many of these petitions now asserted that women were citizens who possessed a constitutional right to petition. [End Page 332] Hundreds of thousands of Northern women signed these petitions, and Zaeske argues that this was the key moment in the development of women's political identities. It indicated that women were beginning to think of themselves as public actors who thought apart from their male guardians. This fact was not lost on defenders of traditional gender roles, whose attacks on women's petitioning led abolitionist women to a more forceful argument regarding women's rights as citizens. Indeed, the influx of petitions created discussion in Congress over the political rights of women, the first such debate in the federal legislature. Zaeske points out that in these debates John Quincy Adams defended women as citizens with political rights and articulated a position far in advance of many women's rights advocates of the time. Congress's continued refusal to consider antislavery petitions contributed to the collapse of moral suasion as the sustaining ideology of the abolition movement, however. Men within the movement increasingly turned to political action in the 1840s and lost interest in petitioning. Female petitioning decreased during this period, but Zaeske shows that women who continued to petition Congress took a clearly political stance, identified themselves as national citizens, and justified their actions on the basis of natural rights. Their petitions now addressed specific federal legislation, such as the annexation of Texas, and used bold republican language. The final phase in the transformation of women's political identities was the 1860s petition campaigns in support of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. This campaign was dominated by women, produced even more petitions than the 1830s campaigns (more than 400,000 names), and was one of the first successful mass campaigns that used public opinion to pressure Congress into action. The rhetoric in these petitions indicated that women conceived of themselves as national citizens. Signatures of Citizenship builds on the work of historians Gerda Lerner, Lori Ginzberg, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Readers of their work will not be surprised by Zaeske's findings. The picture she presents of women's contributions to the abolition movement and the interaction between events in the antislavery campaign and the emergence of women's political identities is familiar. However, Zaeske uses myriad new sources...

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

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. …

Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres

In early days of organized antislavery, letter London Female Antislavery Society recently established Female Antislavery Society in Reading, Massachusetts, appeared in Liberator. In letter, London society encouraged Reading association persevere in its work for immediate emancipation, no matter what obstacles it encountered. Warning their American counterparts ignore the plausible reasonings of any who try turn you aside, English women explained that commitment antislavery cause did not demand any departures from that propriety which allots sex its peculiar sphere of usefulness. This reassurance implied restricted role for antislavery women focused on stirring up the more active efforts of male connection and reading, conversing, and praying within family circle.1 Initially, Garrison and other male leaders shared similar notions of what women might do aid against slavery. As recent scholarship has amply demonstrated, however, most middle-class white and black women abolitionists gradually moved beyond antislavery efforts that were private and domestic in nature (like prayer or support for free produce movement).2 Because they believed that abolitionism was not only moral question but also public issue, women routinely engaged in activities that took them into public arena. As organizers of Boston Fair, which attracted large crowds every year, pointed out, their main objective was to keep subject [of immediate emancipation] before public eye, and by every innocent expedient promote perpetual discussion.3 Sharing this perception of necessity of involving themselves in public non-Garrisonian Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle of Dover, New Hampshire, decided in 1857 promote public discussion of national questions by organizing a meeting of citizens of Dover in behalf of Kansas.4 Although records of Sewing Circle do not reveal whether any Dover residents questioned legitimacy of women calling town meeting, many antislavery activities attracted furious responses critics who claimed that women were out of their sphere. Whether responding criticism or reflecting on meaning of their commitment, abolitionist women proved adept at exploiting, subverting, and contesting conservative definitions of appropriate female behavior. Even when they did not agree among themselves, antislavery women blurred distinctions between private and public, expanded parameters of woman's sphere, and suggested alternative meanings for gender norms.5 The activities and written records of abolitionist women are useful reminder of nature of social, cultural, and economic changes in antebellum period. Just as class divisions were imprecise, and membership and meaning of middle class were not yet set, notions of gender were in process of construction. In fluid society, meaning of key concepts like propriety and female decorum were contested. Whether they eventually subscribed women's rights or not, many abolitionist women (and men) found themselves engaged in definitional that notion of distinct spheres obscures.6 The was one that took place on nonverbal as well as verbal level. James Vernon and others have demonstrated importance of analyzing politics cultural perspective. This approach broadens understanding of political activity and illuminates political culture as an arena of struggle between groups, each with its own definition of politics and participation. In this arena, material objects as well as use of time and space offer fruitful evidence for understanding political action. Three events staged by antislavery women in 1840s are good examples of political culture of female antislavery. By examining them closely, we can see ways in which women's antislavery activities asserted their right participate in public world and shape popular political culture. …

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers. By Anna M. Speicher. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 242 pp. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers. By Anna M. Speicher. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. 242 pp. $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paper

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

Nineteenth-century women reformers such as the radical abolitionists have frequently been seen as having abandoned the constraints of religion in order to pursue their personal and political goals. The subjects of this book - Angelina Grimke, Sarah Grimke, Sallie Holley, Abby Kelley, and Lucretia Mott - did indeed reject what they found to be the repressive features of the Christianity of their day. Their religiosity, however, remained fundamental to their world view. In this book, Anna M. Speicher explores the dimentions of this evolving faith, which was critical in shaping their decisions and actions throughout their lives.

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

A Poet, a Planter, and a Nation of Farmers

For the past few days in Harpers Ferry we have been inventing and reinventing American nationalism in a marvelous variegation of scholarly papers. We have heard about nationalism and travel, nationalism and antislavery women, nationalism and male identity-and southern artisans, and black nationalists, and even luxury hotels. Although we try to put ironic distance between ourselves and the more egregious forms of nationalism, the papers seem to share the popular fascination with American identity. We cannot resist staring into history and asking who we are as a nation, how did we come to be so wonderful, and why have we failed so miserably. As my own contribution to the convention festivities, I want to offer a few comments on national society in the United States. By national society I mean the construction of social types suitable for life under a republican political regime, the foundation of our national identity. The republican state was created in a stroke at the Revolution, but that was only the beginning of nation formation. Thereafter, American cultural workers had to conceive of a republican society to go with republican government. Writers and intellectuals accomplished this feat of the imagination partly by making sweeping statements about the nation, but more specifically by dressing individual social types in a republican guise. Everyday lives had to be reconceived as exemplifications of republican values. Hence, the famous republican mothers, and the less famous republican children, republican wives, republican merchants, republican artisans and laborers, all were represented in public discourse in their relation to national values. Often the discourse on national social types began in controversy. People fought over these new social identities, because they implied norms of personal behavior, standards for government policy, and degrees of

African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965

Written by leading scholars of African American and women's history, the essays in this volume seek to reconceptualize the political history of black women in the United States by placing them "at the center of our thinking." The book explores how slavery, racial discrimination, and gender shaped the goals that African American women set for themselves, their families, and their race and looks at the political tools at their disposal. By identifying key turning points for black women, the essays create a new chronology and a new paradigm for historical analysis. The chronology begins in 1837 with the interracial meeting of antislavery women in New York City and concludes with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The contributors focus on specific examples of women pursuing a dual ambition: to gain full civil and political rights and to improve the social conditions of African Americans. Together, the essays challenge us to rethink common generalizations that govern much of our historical thinking about the experience of African American women.

Friends in York: The Dynamics of Quaker Revival, 1780-1860 (review)

66Quaker History Societies" includes a historiographical essay by Nancy Hewitt and discussions of the New York, Boston and Philadelphia Female Antislavery societies by Amy Swerdlow, Debra Hansen and Jean Soderlund, respectively . Those looking for the inclusion of further information about the Buffum sisters will be disappointed, because only Rebecca is mentioned, and that only briefly, in the essay on the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The essays highlight the social and political tensions these women faced as they attempted to organize in a culture of "separate spheres" and respond with moral integrity to the unpopular cause of abolition. The second part investigates "Black Women in the Political Culture of Reform." Sources focus on the same three cities: Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Emma Lapsansky and Julie Winch concentrate on Philadelphia , which had the most active black population, while Anne Boylan examines antislavery activity in New York and Boston. The essays reflect on the halting, but daring, attempts at biracial organizing and the emergence ofAfrican-American self-help organizations. The final essay in this part, written by Nell Irvin Painter, rethinks the indomitable Sojourner Truth, in light of the highly charged intersection ofrace and gender. Thè final part explores "Strategies and Tactics." Strategies immediately raise questions ofanalysis ofpower, resource allocation, and participation. Fund raising fairs, writing pamphlets and newspaper articles, circulating petitions, even speaking before "promiscuous" (mixed-gender) audiences are some ofthe many tactics examined in these essays. Ofparticular interest to some will be the essay by Margaret Bacon "By Moral Force Alone: The Antislavery Women and Nonresistance." The section concludes with Kathryn Kish Sklar's essay comparing American and British women at the World Anti-slavery Convention held in London, 1840. Together these books offer some fascinating insights into the nineteenth century world offemale activists. Racial slavery tears at the fabric oftheir society, and in challenging slavery, they learn a great deal about the political and economic operations of their country, and begin pushing the borders of their own commitment to gender and racial equality. Their struggle to live "virtuous lives" in the midst of socially sanctioned injustices may challenge some readers to reflect on contemporary parallels. Earlham CollegeCarol Hunter Friends in York: The Dynamics of Quaker Revival, 1780-1860. By Sheila Wright. Keele: Keele University Press, 1995. 253 pp. Maps, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. £35. Membership ofYork Monthly Meeting grew in these eighty years even Book Reviews67 though the membership ofLondon Yearly Meeting as a whole decreased during thisperiod, andWrightprovides us with a careful analysis ofvarious statistics, plus helpful and reasonable explanations of what the figures represent as well as an interesting overall picture of York Quakers in this era. The author indicates that the contributions of strong, independent women such as Esther Tuke, Priscilla Tuke, Katherine Jepson, and Sarah Rowntree was as important in explaining the strength ofthe Meeting as the contributions of male members such as Henry Tuke, Lindley Murray, James Backhouse, and Joseph Rowntree. She provides many statistical tables such as figures on the size ofestates of deceased Friends, varying from £60,000 for the nurseryman Thomas Backhouse to £1,000 for the bookseller Nathaniel Bell, and a similar amount for John Tuke, land-surveyor. One third of the wills listed were worth £1,000 or more. She compiles figures on the age ofboth men and women at the time ofmarriage, the number ofyears between marrying and the first birth, statistics about disownment, of which marrying out of Meeting was the most common. She also lists allmembers who attendedthe business meetings ofYork Monthly Meeting, and provides the occupation of each member. As Friends turned from Quietism to Evangelicalism they became involved in many philanthropic activities in York, oftenjoining Evangelicals in other denominations, instead of maintaining a distinct existence as before. Wright lists 33 of these bodies, not counting the Retreat, the Quaker-controlled mental hospital. She also listed seven schools which Friends supported, including three started by their own members. They provided leadership in some of these concerns, especially in the antislavery movement, which they supported even before the evangelical movement embraced it. John Woolman, an active leader in this movement, was also a leading exemplar ofQuietism. He came to minister in York in...

His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (review)

84CIVIL WAR HISTORY Despite his active political role, Grant took much time with his private interests. Never a rich man, he spent much time in supervising activities at his farm in St. Louis through the mails, advising on the sale of horses and improving the blood line of his cattle (he was an expert horseman and judge of livestock), obtaining adequate "insurence" on his investment, and advising on planting (19:28, 30-31, 60-61, 237-38; 20:127-28, 224-25, 259-60, 323-27). He sold his home in New York City to General Sherman (14:122-23; 20:121, 219) but retained a home in Philadelphia, which he leased out (19:35-36), and a vacation home on Long Island (19:219-24). Grant speculated regularly in land, not always successfully, through agents like longtime friend Charles Ford and his father-in-law, Frederick Dent (19:228; 20:76-77, 138-40, 144-47, 177-78). He even took a little time to go trout fishing (20:166-67). As The Papers ofUlysses S. Grant reveal, by taking the oath of office 1869, the new president moved into what would become two of the most controversial terms of office it was ever a chief magistrate's misfortune to bear in American history. It is an onus that Grant continues to bear, although, led by William Hesseltine, some historians have been more forgiving ofhim in the last part of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, many of his personal desires on poUcy were blunted by men of ill will in and out of the administration and by Grant's misguided notion that Congress alone represented the will of the American people. This belief led Grant to be molded by events, a quality emphasized by Brooks D. Simpson. Regardless of one's view of the results of the Grant administration, the president himselfstill comes off as a quiet, honest, firm, and decent man with a strong public and private equanimity. But, as noted by Bruce Catton, Grant usually epitomized the American character rather than rising above it as great executives must. William L. Richter Tucson, Arizona His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Edited by Paul Finkelman. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Pp. xii, 354. $65.00 cloth; $19-95 paper.) The late ProfessorWilliam B. Hesseltine liked tojoke aboutwhether the Lincoln theme had been exhausted. The publication of another book about John Brown might well raise the same question, but this one is different and makes a unique contribution. Among its contributors are Daniel C. Littlefield on blacks and John Brown, Wendy Hamand Venet on the response of antislavery women, Peter Knupfer on how theraid affected Northern union, PeterWallenstein on theraid's impact on Southern politics, and Seymour Drescher on European reaction to the raid. Several of the essays discuss details of the Harpers Ferry raid. Bertram Wyatt-Brown summarizes the findings of the other essayists and also discusses BOOK REVIEWS85 the vital role of religion in Brown's thinking as well as his mental state. Robert McGlone's essay deals with the question of Brown's possible insanity and of how Virginia's Governor Wise and others reacted to it. Each essay adds to our understanding of the subject. EspeciaUy valuable is Paul Finkelman's discussion of the aboUtionists, who attempted to reconcile their nonresistance with support for Brown by placing blame for the violence on the slave power rather than on the Uberator. Brown himself aided that process after his capture by assuming the role of a gentle Christian martyr. In his essay on the return home from Philadelphia of Southern medical students, James Breeden documents the depth of anger and horror that many Southerners felt after the Harpers Ferry raid. In the final essay, Charles Joyner appUes the sociological theories of Victor Turner to the Brown theme, concluding that Brown's martyrdom made the i860 election "a referendum on the future of slavery" and the Civil War "a war against slavery." The John Brown legend endures in popular thought, an excellent example of terrorism-become-acceptable that helps iUuminate contemporary events as well. Each individual and group found special meaning...

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown

Angel of Light: Interpreting John Brown William E. Cain (bio) Paul Finkelman, ed. His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xii 354 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). As the biographer Stephen B. Oates has noted, John Brown is “one of the most controversial figures in American history.” 1 Many have condemned Brown as a madman for committing gruesome murders in the Kansas territory in 1856 and for plotting insurrection at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, while others have honored him as a warrior-saint who sacrificed his life in an inspired but doomed attempt to free America’s slaves. In His Soul Goes Marching On, Paul Finkelman and nine other historians chart “responses” to Brown during the period of his imprisonment and trial and its immediate aftermath, showing vividly the ways in which he clarified, complicated, and heightened the slavery crisis and arguments for and against secession. This is an excellent collection — diverse, wide-ranging, richly detailed — and an important contribution to scholarship on the Civil War period. Part 1 of the book performs the tasks of summary and overview. Finkelman launches it with a cogent preface that surveys Brown’s life and abolitionist activities and comments on the significant work that biographers (e.g., Oswald Garrison Villard, W. E. B. Du Bois, Oates) and scholars (e.g., Benjamin Quarles, Jeffrey Rossbach) have done. Bertram Wyatt-Brown comes next, with a suggestive piece that outlines the themes of the collection and meditates on the “heartening and horrifying” meanings of Brown’s action (p. 11). He scrutinizes Brown’s strange, brooding, obsessive personality and the hold that Brown exercised over northern writers, intellectuals, and reformers. Part 2 focuses on “Northern supporters of Brown.” First, Finkelman describes the “antislavery response” and the process by which Brown was “canonized” as a Transcendentalist and Christian hero (p. 43) — a process to which, Finkelman keenly points out, Brown himself contributed through the nobility he cultivated in his writings, speeches, and conduct in prison and the courtroom. Daniel C. Littlefield follows with a superb study of African Americans’ responses to Brown, whose raid intensified debates about alliances between black and white abolitionists, the meaning of black manhood [End Page 606] and masculinity, and the place that violence should or should not occupy in the campaign against slavery. As Littlefield shows, African Americans were caught in a dilemma; if they resorted to violence, they were portrayed by whites as “aggressive and unprincipled savages,” but if they submitted meekly and relied on moral persuasion alone, they then were seen as weak, acquiescent, incapable of the kind of righteous resistance that white colonists had undertaken during the Revolution when they battled the British (p. 88). Wendy Haman Venet concludes Part 2 by sketching responses to Brown by northern antislavery women, including Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Abby Kelley Foster, Susan B. Anthony, and, in particular, Lydia Maria Child, whose correspondence with Virginia governor Henry Wise and Margaretta Mason (wife of Virginia senator James Mason) sold 300,000 copies in pamphlet form and was reprinted in many newspapers. Part 3 consists of three illuminating essays on “Northern and Southern opponents of Brown.” Peter Knupfer studies political alignments in the North and Brown’s jolting effect on them. He treats the problems that Brown’s raid caused for the Republican party as it sought to present itself as a moderate force — opposed to slavery extension but not intent on abolition in the slave states themselves — and as its leaders prepared for the election of 1860. But even more, Knupfer delineates the attempt by northern conservatives, Democrats, and constitutional unionists somehow to meet the threat of national disorder and disintegration that antislavery agitation fostered and that, to them, Brown starkly epitomized. In the next essay, Peter Wallenstein concentrates on southern politics and the quest for sectional unity, as proslavery forces addressed the triple danger they perceived in their four million slaves, nonslaveholding whites, and the Republican party. Brown’s raid, Wallenstein explains, dramatized the evil of “Black Republicanism” and the peril of slave revolts that, it was said, northern whites would kindle but that might...