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Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of
Emancipation
Since its founding in 1998, The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which is part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, has sponsored an annual international conference on major aspects of the chattel slave system, its ultimate destruction, and its legacies in America and around the world. The Center’s mission is, one, to increase knowledge of this story across time and all boundaries, and, two, to reach out to broader publics which demonstrate a growing desire to understand race, slavery, abolition, and the extended meanings of this history over time. Because the research, discoveries, and narratives presented at our conferences do so much to enrich our knowledge of one of humanity’s most dehumanizing institutions and its place in the founding of the modern world, as well as of the first historical movements for human rights, we are immensely grateful to Yale University Press for engaging in this joint publication venture. The Gilder Lehrman Center is supported by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, generous Yale alumni and devoted patrons of American history. The Center aspires, with Yale University Press, to offer to the broadest possible audience the best modern scholarship on a story of global and lasting significance.
David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of History at Yale University, and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
EDITED BY KATHRYN KISH SKLAR AND JAMES BREWER STEWART
Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
Copyright ∫ 2007 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Frontispiece: Antislavery token, Ohio, 1838 (Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society)
Set in Sabon type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women’s rights and transatlantic antislavery in the era of emancipation / edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. p. cm.
Based on lectures from a conference in Oct. 2002 at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn: 978-0-300-11593-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women abolitionists—United States—History—19th century—Congresses. 2. African American women abolitionists—History—19th century—Congresses. 3. Antislavery movements—United States—History—19th century—Congresses. 4. Women’s rights—United States—History—19th century—Congresses. 5. Women abolitionists—Great Britain—History—19th century— Congresses. 6. Women abolitionists—Europe—History—19th century—Congresses. 7. Antislavery movements—History—19th century—Congresses. 8. Women’s rights—History—19th century—Congresses. 9. United States— Relations—Europe—Congresses. 10. Europe—Relations—United States— Congresses. I. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. II. Stewart, James Brewer. III. Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
e449.w895 2007 973.7%114082—dc22 2006029065
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To David Brion Davis, who showed us that the history of slavery in the Atlantic world includes the history of antislavery
Contents
List of Illustrationsx
Introductionxi
Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart
Part I: Context—Then and Today
1.Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery3
David Brion Davis
2.Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Antislavery Work and Women’s Rights Movements in the United States During the Twentieth Century19
Judith Resnik
Part II: The Impact of Antislavery on French, German, and
British Feminism
3.How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640–184857
Karen Offen
4. Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists82
Bonnie S. Anderson
5.Women’s Mobilization in the Era of Slave Emancipation: Some Anglo-French Comparisons98
Seymour Drescher
6.British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective121
Clare Midgley
Part III: The Transatlantic Activism of African-American Women Abolitionists
7.Sarah Forten’s Anti-Slavery Networks143
Julie Winch
8.Incidents Abroad: Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement158
Jean Fagan Yellin
9.‘‘Like Hot Lead to Pour on the Americans . . .’’: Sarah Parker Remond—From Salem, Mass., to the British Isles173
Willi Coleman
10.Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins
Harper’s ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ 1859–60189
Carla L. Peterson
Part IV: Transatlantic Influences on the Emergence of Women’s Rights in the United States
11.‘‘The Throne of My Heart’’: Religion, Oratory, and Transatlantic Community in Angelina Grimké’s Launching of Women’s Rights, 1828–1838211
Kathryn Kish Sklar
12.The Redemption of a Heretic: Harriet Martineau and Anglo-American Abolitionism242
Deborah A. Logan
13.‘‘Seeking a Larger Liberty’’: Remapping First Wave Feminism266
Nancy A. Hewitt
14.Ernestine Rose’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848279
Ellen Carol DuBois
Part V: Transcultural Activism Against Slavery by African-American Women
15.Writing for True Womanhood: African-American Women’s Writings and the Antislavery Struggle299
Erica Armstrong Dunbar
16.Enacting Emancipation: African American Women Abolitionists at Oberlin College and the Quest for Empowerment, Equality, and Respectability319
Carol Lasser
17.At the Boundaries of Abolitionism, Feminism, and Black Nationalism: The Activism of Mary Ann Shadd Cary346
Jane Rhodes
List of Contributors367 Index369
Illustrations
‘‘Am I Not a Woman & a Sister,’’ antislavery medalliontitle page
Nicolas Louis François Gosse, Liberté; Egalité; Fraternité; ou L’Esclavage affranchi 58
Portrait of Harriet Jacobs160
Map of North Carolina in 1770 by John Collett161
‘‘Slavery as It Exists in America; Slavery as It Exists in England’’162
Portrait of Angelina Grimké212
Text from Angelina Grimké’s diary223
Portrait of Harriet Martineau244
Introduction
kathryn kish sklar and james brewer stewart
At an international conference sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, held at Yale University in October 2002, a group of historians gathered to consider the relationship between transatlantic antislavery and transatlantic women’s rights. Titled ‘‘Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women’s Rights,’’ that conference proved enormously productive, generating many of the chapters included in this book and prompting the recruitment of others that also appear here. Building on that event, and drawing together recent scholarship that views women’s antislavery and women’s rights–seeking activity in a transatlantic context, this book came to focus on the transatlantic emergence of women’s rights within antislavery activism. The chapters fit together in ways that show us how women’s rights ideas and movements emerged as integral features of transatlantic political cultures during the debates over slavery and emancipation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All the book’s chapters are published here for the first time.
Although the cascade of current scholarship about women’s public activism during the era of slave emancipation between 1770 and 1870 overflows the boundaries that can be contained in one volume, the diversity and vibrancy of these new writings nevertheless challenge us to consider how they relate to one another. Did women’s antislavery activism emerge in similar forms
throughout the Atlantic world? Did women abolitionists embrace women’s rights in similar ways? To what extent did women’s activism reach across national boundaries? To what extent did women abolitionists mirror national political cultures and national political trajectories? How did racial identities define the boundaries of women’s activism? How did African-American women participate in the transatlantic world of antislavery activism? Offering preliminary rather than definitive answers to these questions, this book seeks to advance our understanding of the complex issues these questions raise. By bringing together an array of recent writings, we invite readers to formulate their own answers and raise new questions about the historical intersection of women’s rights and transatlantic antislavery campaigns.
During much of the nineteenth century in England, Europe, and the United States, the enslavement of African people and people of African descent generated explosive political struggles that ultimately led to slavery’s abolition.∞ As this process unfolded, women in all these localities—from enormously varied walks of life—created and encountered unprecedented opportunities for selfdiscovery, intellectual exploration, and political engagement on behalf of the enslaved, and on their own behalf as well. This volume views a wide range of their public activism, including, for example, the construction of solidarity networks among African-American women as well as explicit rights-seeking activity by white women abolitionists. Our goal is to explore the larger contours of women’s opportunities in the era of transatlantic slave emancipation and to chart the paths by which diverse groups and individuals created and exploited those opportunities.
The growth of civil society throughout the Atlantic world provided fertile sites for women’s activism, especially in Anglo-American political culture.≤ Dissenting churches, voluntary organizations, and friendship networks brought women into interaction with one another in new ways, pooling their talents and raising the power of their voices. Occupying the broad swath of social life that unfolded between the formal authority of the state and the economic domain of the marketplace, civil society steadily expanded in the Atlantic world between 1750 and 1850. Within civil society antislavery ideas and social movements steadily acquired the power to challenge the alliance between state and marketplace that legitimized slavery. Women were central actors in that process, especially in Great Britain and the United States, where the state did not regulate civil society or women’s activism as much as it did in Germany or France. Women’s activism went furthest in the new American republic, where religion, no longer supported by the state, became a competitive form of voluntarism that encouraged women’s collective activism.≥ Nevertheless, on mainland Europe as well as in Britain and the United States,
women came to view their own emancipation in terms that drew on their understanding of slavery as a gendered institution.
The time is ripe for historians who study the emergence of women’s rights within women’s antislavery activism to locate their work within the Atlantic world and ask new transnational and comparative questions. In the past decade a new transatlantic perspective has fundamentally transformed our understanding of the history of African slavery in every part of the Atlantic world.∂ Historians of antislavery campaigns have long emphasized the transnational currents that carried ideas and activists across geographical and political boundaries; now that emphasis has acquired new significance.∑ Historians of American women have long stressed the importance of abolition as the origins of nineteenth-century women’s rights movements.∏ And historians of European and American women recently have mapped the transatlantic connections among women abolitionists and women’s rights advocates.π This book builds on these historiographic precedents and takes the next step of systematically analyzing the emergence of women’s public empowerment within the context of transatlantic abolition.
Comparative and transnational history presents new challenges to historians who are usually trained and accustomed to writing within traditional national boundaries. Yet the results are worth the extra effort they take, clarifying the effects of those traditional boundaries as well as the forces that transcend them.
Many chapters in this volume highlight the significance of national political cultures within the context of international antislavery movements. In France, Germany, and Britain antislavery movements drew women into new forms of public activism, some well before the rise of women’s activism in the United States. Women’s activism differed, depending on the time and place. By focusing on women we gain new insight into the historical forces shaping national political cultures as well as new understandings of the transnational flow of emancipatory ideas and actions. Every political culture analyzed here incorporated gender as a fundamental principle of its organization, defining public space, granting individual rights, and constructing citizenship in terms of gender differences. These chapters show us how women’s actions sought to redefine those rights, spaces, and citizenship ideals. They also show us how women’s success varied greatly, depending on the historical circumstances of the political cultures that they sought to change.
Differences among women—both national and racial—emerge strongly in these chapters. Racial slavery’s strong presence in the United States shaped the nation socially, politically, and economically, dividing women into two legal groups, slave and free, and two racial groups, black and white. Differences
between free and enslaved women fueled antislavery activism among free women, both African-American and white. The gendered oppression of enslaved women as mothers, daughters, girls, and sisters had an enormous impact on women’s antislavery activism and led many free women to view slavery as an affront to womanhood as well as to humanity. ‘‘Where woman’s heart is bleeding,’’ one activist insisted, ‘‘shall woman’s heart be hushed?’’∫ Even though slavery’s high toll in human misery throughout the Atlantic world remains offstage in much of this book—only one slave woman is the focus of a chapter—free women’s responses to slavery arose from horrors and degradations associated with the traffic in human lives, especially the lives of enslaved women. When free women mobilized to end those horrors and in the process created new opportunities for their own self-expression, they did so in a world deeply compromised by slavery’s inhumanity.Ω
Most chapters in this volume focus on the decades between 1830 and 1860 in the United States, when the movement for immediate slave emancipation gained momentum in northern states. During those decades the robust growth of the plantation agricultural economy in the South belied earlier hopes expressed by Thomas Jefferson and others that slavery would die of its own accord. Although slavery atrophied in the North’s diversified economy (the first federal census in 1790 listed no slaves in Massachusetts), formal emancipation there was gradual and slow. In New England a series of court decisions and state statutes began to abolish slavery in 1780, but the process did not end until 1857.∞≠
Popular attitudes in the North began to turn against the Southern system of slave labor only in the 1830s—a century and a half after the enactment of slave codes by Southern states, four decades after the U.S. Constitution acknowledged slavery as part of the American Republic, and two decades after slave importation into the United States became illegal. This change in attitudes was not inevitable. Supporters of immediate emancipation often met secretly in the 1830s and—even in the North—their lives were threatened by pro-slavery mobs. Between 1790 and 1860 American political culture was profoundly shaped by the close integration of the agricultural South with the mercantile and industrial North; thirteen of the first eighteen American presidents were themselves slave owners.∞∞ But the accelerated expansion of North and South into the new western lands after 1800, fueled in part by the robust extension of slavery after the invention of the cotton gin, challenged the status quo and forced many to reconsider their tolerance of slave labor. Free women, both black and white, were at the forefront of the popular movements that hastened that reconsideration. Their involvement created complex and
multiple links between the immediate emancipation of enslaved people and the continuing emancipation of free women.
This book focuses on two groups of free women—African-American and white. Because the racial character of slavery in the Atlantic world made race an important marker of status in American society, privileging white women and creating obstacles to black women’s participation in public life, American political culture constrained African-American women’s participation in public life differently from the limitations it imposed on white women. Several chapters explore the strategies African-American women used to expand their access to public space, civil rights, and new forms of citizenship, including utilizing their access to the larger Atlantic world. Their efforts constituted an important part of that world.
The book is divided into five parts, each of which explores different historical aspects of women’s rights-seeking activity associated with efforts to end human bondage.
Part I: Historical Overviews of the Past and Present
Two chapters review the historical forces that brought women’s rights and women’s antislavery activism together in the past and continue to shape women’s activism in the present.
In ‘‘Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery,’’ David Brion Davis links American women’s antislavery activism to classical and biblical traditions, to practices of human debasement common to all systems of slavery, and to specific post-1800 events in the United States and the greater Atlantic world. His broad international focus pays close attention to the United States, but also introduces the balance between transnational and national perspectives that is sustained throughout the book.
Judith Resnik’s ‘‘Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Antislavery Work and Women’s Rights Movements in the Twentieth Century’’ links contemporary antislavery and human rights efforts to those of earlier centuries. As she notes, in 2001 the International Criminal Court for the Former Territories of Yugoslavia issued the first international judgment against sexual slavery. That ruling was the product of transnational work to redefine international war crimes and women’s rights. Related efforts have produced the 1979 U.N. Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which obliges signatory states to take ‘‘in the political, social, economic, and cultural fields, all appropriate measures, including legislation, to ensure the full development and advancement of
women.’’ Resnik reviews the many instances in which the United States has stood apart from innovative transnational efforts to lessen the subordination of women and men of all colors and the role that jurisdictional prerogatives— of the nation-state and of states within this federation—have played. Resnik compares the reluctance to join CEDAW, positioned as undermining America’s traditions, with the willingness of the United States to join in international anti-trafficking efforts. She argues that by coupling concerns about women’s vulnerability with an image of harms flowing from abroad, proponents of anti-trafficking legislation have found an array of supporters. In contrast, when transnational rights movements seek to disrupt extant status hierarchies (from the abolition of slavery to CEDAW), American lawmakers often respond with a claim of sovereign authority to make internal decisions free of outside influences. As she puts it, the ‘‘idea of jurisdiction—of delineated and bounded authority—is doing a good deal of work,’’ sometimes as a source of oppression and other times as a method of intervention. ‘‘Civil rights workers of centuries past and present have themselves been sources of new jurisdictions’’—creating societies and organizations that have transformed the meaning of rights domestically and throughout the world.
Part II: The Impact of Slavery and Antislavery on French, German, and British Feminism
Four chapters analyze the multiple forces that shaped women’s activism in antislavery movements in the British Isles, France, and Germany during the Enlightenment age of revolutions and emancipatory social movements.
Karen Offen explores ‘‘slavery’s’’ protean meanings in ‘‘How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640–1848.’’ By tracing the ideological comparison of marriage and slavery from the seventeenth century to the midnineteenth, Offen identifies its numerous sources, evaluating its meanings and exploring its connections (or lack of them) to France’s racially driven systems of colonial slavery. As she clearly demonstrates, the slavery/marriage analogy had deep historical roots in novels, plays, poetry, and tracts produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and these in turn supplied the ideological basis for the explosion of demands for ‘‘female emancipation’’ that accompanied the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Bonnie S. Anderson’s ‘‘Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists’’ demonstrates how powerfully the terms ‘‘slavery’’ and ‘‘emancipation’’ resonated in the minds of women’s rights advocates in a society that had direct association with
Introductionxvii
African enslavement—France—and a society that had none—Germany. Despite this difference, Anderson shows that the meaning of these terms grew complicated and ever more deeply contested in both nations when they became associated with overtones of ‘‘free love,’’ utopian socialism, and revolutionary class conflict.
Seymour Drescher’s ‘‘Women’s Mobilization in the Era of Slave Emancipation: Some Anglo-French Comparisons’’ moves the discussion from slavery’s influences on the launching of struggles for women’s rights to comparisons of women’s involvement in antislavery movements themselves. In France, Drescher posits, revolutionary upheaval at home and in its Haitian colony generated (over ensuing decades) far less female involvement in antislavery movements than was the case in non-revolutionary England. Differences between French and English political culture, class structure, colonial policy, and governance inform Drescher’s analysis of these differences, as well as his explanation of why, despite such heavy female involvement in British abolitionism, English reformers for so long rejected American abolitionists’ demands for gender equality.
Clare Midgley extends and enriches Drescher’s comparative focus in her ‘‘British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective’’ by juxtaposing the British example in abolitionist feminism against the abolitionist/feminist movement within United States, and also by linking the British abolitionist movement’s formulations of race and gender to influences of the British empire. In the process she, like Drescher, demonstrates that the reluctance of British abolitionists to embrace American feminism resulted from important differences in the two nations’ political cultures. But unlike Drescher, Midgley also stresses the importance of the British reformers’ concerns for women ‘‘enslaved’’ in ‘‘savage’’ Africa and in the ‘‘despotic’’ Orient, as well as in the slave plantations of the Caribbean. Female antislavery, Midgley suggests in conclusion, should be understood as an expression of feminism in its own right, but one that must take full account of the actions of women of color and elements of white racism, and be clearly connected to British imperial projects.
Part III: Transatlantic Aspects of African-American Women’s Antislavery Activism
Four chapters focus on the lives and ideas of specific individuals, each an American, an abolitionist, and a woman of color—individuals whose highly varied lives were shaped significantly by international influences and experiences.
As Julie Winch points out in her chapter, ‘‘Sarah Forten’s Anti-Slavery Networks,’’ Forten never traveled more than fifty miles from her native Philadelphia. Nevertheless, she found herself strongly influenced by transatlantic abolitionism, which connected her to the British Isles, the European continent, and even Africa. Members of Sarah’s family visited England frequently and they and Sarah welcomed abolitionist emissaries from abroad. The Female Anti-Slavery Society in which she was so active, the abolitionist periodicals that she read and for which she wrote, and the abolitionist gatherings in which she participated all carried strong and specific references to the antislavery activism in Britain. Though she never ventured far, and though a domineering husband prematurely ended her public engagement, Sarah Forten exemplified the cosmopolitanism that richly informed African-American women’s abolitionism.
As presented by Jean Fagan Yellin in ‘‘Incidents Abroad: Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement,’’ Jacobs’s was a life shaped by journeys. Her life was first transformed by seven years as a fugitive in hiding before she fled to the North and secured her emancipation. She then expanded her world by traveling several times abroad, becoming famous as the author of her enormously influential narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). She concluded her life by participating in post-emancipation struggles on behalf of freed people in the South. Throughout, as Yellin emphasizes, Jacobs’s orientation was invariably international. Her deepest concerns were expansively feminist, encompassing the struggles of African-descended women throughout the Atlantic world.
In contrast to Forten and Jacobs, Sarah Parker Remond became an expatriate. Though she did not turn her back on the struggle against slavery in the United States, her life illustrates how a black woman’s quests for respite from white oppression conflicted with her abolitionist commitments. As Willi Coleman explains in ‘‘‘Like Hot Lead to Pour on the Americans’: Sarah Parker Remond—From Salem, Mass., to the British Isles,’’ Remond abandoned a life of privilege as a member of an elite abolitionist family in 1859 to seek personal freedom in England, a society presumably untainted by white racism. But when she began to sense its blighting presence in England as well, she moved again, in 1866, to Italy. Though this odyssey ultimately left her disconnected from post–Civil War struggles for racial equality, Remond accomplished much as an editorialist and outdoors agitator in England, becoming an extraordinary spokesperson for African-American equality. Her black American woman’s voice from the British Isles amplified the transatlantic crusade against slavery.
In ‘‘Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘Fancy Sketches,’ 1859–60’’ Carla Peterson analyzes the literary imagination of this prominent black abolitionist. Peterson focuses on a series of sketches that Watkins Harper wrote in 1859–60 under the pseudonym Jane Rustic. She argues that Watkins Harper and other antebellum American writers crossed the Atlantic to borrow the form of the sketch from earlier British authors. As Peterson notes, these ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ consist of parlor conversations among friends concerning the status of black Americans. In them, Watkins Harper emphasized the wisdom of practical-minded women conversationalists who are not afraid to critique African-American men and women— men for their misogynistic behavior, women for spurning their appointed roles as moral instructors to become cosseted drones, and both for their mimicking of white behavior. Her critique reaches its high point when the conversation turns to slave resistance in the seventeenth-century Brazilian maroon community of Palmares, an exchange in which she underscores the rebels’ courage and moral vision while situating them within the context of slave insurrections in the United States and Haiti. Watkins Harper’s revealing meditation highlights the centrality of the African diaspora in antebellum black American thought, and the determination of African-descended men and women throughout the Atlantic world to overthrow oppression and create a justly governed state.
Part IV: Transatlantic Influences on the Emergence of Women’s Rights in American Abolitionism
Four chapters examine the international influences on the development and evolution of women’s rights activism in pre–Civil War America. In ‘‘‘The Throne of My Heart’: Religion, Oratory, and Transatlantic Community in Angelina Grimké’s Launching of Women’s Rights, 1828–1838,’’ Kathryn Kish Sklar explores the transatlantic context of Angelina Grimké’s commitment to abolition. Using Grimké’s private writings, she maps the spiritual odyssey that guided this young, white woman from South Carolina origins into abolitionist feminism. As this process unfolded, powerful international influences repressed and radicalized Grimké’s quest. International Quakerism seemed to promise Grimké spiritual rebirth; instead it led her to deep alienation. Yet elements of Grimké’s salvation turned out to be English as well; British abolitionist George Thompson’s visit to the United States drew her into abolitionist commitment and the tradition of antinomian women preachers, rooted in the English Reformation, modeled women’s oratory for her. Nevertheless, by
embracing feminist abolitionism Grimké carried Garrisonian abolitionism in a distinctly American direction, highlighting the national boundaries that persisted within transnational abolitionism.
Deborah A. Logan’s ‘‘The Redemption of a Heretic: Harriet Martineau and Anglo-American Abolitionism’’ shows how influential emissaries from England helped create abolitionist feminism in the United States in the 1830s. Englishwoman Harriet Martineau enjoyed a literary reputation before her visit to the United States. However, as her tour took her through the South and then to New England, she became a subject of transatlantic controversy by expressing her opposition to slavery, usually casting her criticisms in what might best be described as proto-feminist terms as she decried the brutal sexual exploitation of enslaved women and its devastating impact on families. In Boston, Maria Weston Chapman and William Lloyd Garrison, soon to become two leading proponents of women’s rights within abolitionism, became her closest friends and public defenders. Thus the ‘‘foreigner’’ Martineau, no less than Grimké, Garrison, and Chapman, became a primary impetus for the emergence of feminist abolitionism in the United States.
In ‘‘‘Seeking a Larger Liberty’: Remapping First Wave Feminism,’’ Nancy Hewitt focuses on a single region, the city of Rochester, New York, and its immediate environs in the 1840s. The extraordinary community of reformers living there fervently embraced abolitionist feminism while cultivating a broadly internationalist outlook. Free black activists and Quaker radicals residing in and around Rochester drew others to the area, creating larger networks of friendship and communication. The community’s cosmopolitanism was magnified further by the presence of foreign visitors and by fugitive slaves, as well as by tours abroad by some of its own members. In 1846 the start of the U.S.-Mexican war propelled these reformers to internationalize their understanding of the problem of slavery. Finally, news from abroad in 1848 of revolution across the face of Europe inspired them to initiate unprecedented campaigns in support of oppressed groups and movements of liberation the world over.
‘‘Ernestine Rose’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848’’ presents Ellen DuBois’s analysis of Rose’s distinctive approach to sisterhood and emancipation. Born into a Jewish family in Poland, Ernestine Rose abandoned her father’s land, religion, and name but was never fully absorbed into Anglo-American Protestant culture. She remained connected to transatlantic influences after she moved from England to the United States. Her Jewish background and non-Christian perspective led her to critique the religious underpinnings of antebellum reform, including the women’s rights movement to which she became devoted. She rejected all religion
Introductionxxi but when pressed defended the Jewish people from anti-Semitic attacks, including those from reform allies. Influenced by Robert Owen’s brand of utopian socialism and Thomas Paine’s radical republicanism, she looked to environment and social relations, not ‘‘sin,’’ to explain slaveholding and other human oppressions. When her women’s rights sisters turned to the Bible to elaborate their claims, Rose spoke distinctively for a secular ‘‘sisterhood’’ and for a hermeneutic and historical approach to scripture. In the 1860s, Rose allied herself with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in debates over divorce law liberalization and the linking of woman and black suffrage in reconstructing the U.S. Constitution. Nevertheless, Rose felt increasingly marginalized as the women’s rights movement became more openly Christian, and left the United States for the final decades of her life.
Part V: Transcultural Antislavery Activism by African-American Women
Three chapters address strategies and tactics chosen by black women to advance their claims for equality and citizenship in the face of mounting racial bigotry in the North.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s ‘‘Writing for True Womanhood: African-American Women’s Writings and the Antislavery Struggle’’ surveys the vehicles that black abolitionist women invented for developing their skills as writers and speakers and for projecting their voices into public discussions of slavery and protests against the discrimination that free African-American communities faced. Armstrong Dunbar also surveys the lives and careers of African-American women writers who availed themselves most fully of these venues. Female literary societies modeled on male examples evolved quickly into training grounds for a generation of African-American women essayists, orators, and newspaper publishers. ‘‘Friendship books’’ that circulated hand-to-hand through surprisingly extensive networks of inscribers became exercises in black, female cultural ‘‘uplift’’ by stressing advanced penmanship, poetic forms, and expressions of the ‘‘finer’’ sentiments. While such expressions of ‘‘sisterhood’’ reflected deep middle-class values and aspirations, they also empowered a pioneer generation of African-American female activists to develop public critiques of slavery and racial bigotry that ratified their claims to equality.
Carol Lasser’s ‘‘Enacting Abolition: African-American Women Abolitionists at Oberlin College and the Quest for Empowerment, Equality, and Respectability’’ explores the frustrations and accomplishments of young AfricanAmerican women who studied at Oberlin College during the decades before the Civil War. Immersed in an otherwise all-white student body and taught by
an all-white faculty, African-American women students responded to misunderstandings and incidents of outright discrimination with resentment and resistance. Nevertheless, strong affinities also operated between young women of different races at Oberlin, shaped by the values of ‘‘respectability’’ and the doctrines of ‘‘practical abolitionism.’’ Respectability prompted black women undergraduates to join with their white counterparts in the cause of ‘‘female moral reform’’ thereby allowing them to exhibit the ‘‘virtue’’ that slavery and skin color had presumably otherwise denied them and upon which their white colleagues also depended to forward their claims of personal worthiness. ‘‘Practical abolitionism’’ stressed the day-to-day advancement of the ‘‘cause,’’ which supported black females in day-to-day quests for intellectual advancement, motivated a surprising number to enter public controversies related to slavery, and led many to impressive careers as educators in the postemancipation South.
In ‘‘At the Boundaries of Abolitionism, Feminism, and Black Nationalism: The Activism of Mary Ann Shadd Cary’’ Jane Rhodes presents the multifaceted career of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, black female educator, editorialist, anticlerical, feminist, and expatriate. Influenced by her activist father, Mary Shadd moved aggressively into public controversy in her early twenties by criticizing what she deemed the ignorance and self-indulgence of many free black church leaders. From this moment forward, there was no more fervent exponent of self-help and ‘‘uplift’’ than she, and no more stringent a critic of behavior within the black community that she judged as detrimental to these goals. Drawn to the vocation of educator, Shadd Cary opened schools in Delaware and New York City in the late 1840s and then again as an expatriate in Canada after moving there in 1851. From just beyond the U.S.-Canadian border she entered decisively into the cause of black emigration, never hesitating to argue vociferously with colleagues with whom she disagreed. With no compunctions about acting as a ‘‘public’’ woman, Shadd Cary also took up journalism, returned to the United States with the outbreak of Civil War, again turned to teaching in Washington, D.C., and eventually earned a law degree from Howard University.
Although historians who analyze the related problems of abolitionism and women’s activism in comparative and transnational settings face many challenges, so too, as these chapters persuasively illustrate, do they reap great benefits. Because gender was a leading principle of social organization in Europe, England, and the United States, women’s activism highlights important commonalities that transcended national boundaries. Such commonalities form the basis for fruitful cross-national comparisons of women’s use of emancipatory discourse, illuminating differences as well as similarities.
Although racial differences in the United States often channeled AfricanAmerican and white women’s activism into different paths, the wide range of women’s antislavery activism created dynamic new forms of public expression that challenged racial as well as gendered boundaries. These chapters help us understand the multiplicity of women’s voices in campaigns against slavery as well as the way those voices combined to make the era of slave emancipation an era of women’s emancipation as well.
Notes
1. For the era of slave emancipation, see David Brion Davis’s magisterial trilogy, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, Revised Edition, 1988); The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, Revised Edition, 1999); and Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
2. For a discussion of the relationship between women’s activism and the expansion of civil society in this era, see Karen Offen, ‘‘Civil Society, Gender Justice, and the History of European Feminisms,’’ in Civil Society, Public Space, and Gender Justice, ed. Gunilla Budde, Karen Hagemann, and Sonya Michel (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, forthcoming).
3. See, for example, Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).
4. See, for example, David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
5. See, for example, Richard M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); and Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
6. This historiographic stream began with Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), and continued with Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1967). An important recent addition to that stream is Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). See also Nancy Hewitt et al., ‘‘From Wollstonecraft to Mill: What British and European Ideas and Social Movements Influenced the Emergence of Feminism in the Atlantic World, 1792–1869?’’ in Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds., Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000, Vol. 7 (2003), online at http://www.alexanderstreet6.com/wasm.
7. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century
Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999) mention but do not systematically analyze the transatlantic activism of antislavery women.
8. This passage was familiar to readers when it appeared in Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (New York: [American Anti-Slavery Society], 1836), reprinted in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2000), 87. Emphasis in original.
9. The less public means by which enslaved women resisted slavery are analyzed in Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
10. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘‘Race’’ in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 76.
11. For the influence of slavery on the federal government, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Garry Wills, ‘‘Negro President:’’ Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).
