Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation 9780300137866

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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

E D I T E D B Y K AT H RY N K I S H S K L A R A N D J A M E S B R E W E R S T E WA R T

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 Illustrations x Introduction xi Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart Part I: Context—Then and Today 1.

Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery 3 David Brion Davis

2.

Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Antislavery Work and Women’s Rights Movements in the United States During the Twentieth Century 19 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, 1640–1848 57 Karen Offen

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4.

Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists 82 Bonnie S. Anderson

5.

Women’s Mobilization in the Era of Slave Emancipation: Some Anglo-French Comparisons 98 Seymour Drescher

6.

British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective 121 Clare Midgley Part III: The Transatlantic Activism of African-American Women Abolitionists

7.

Sarah Forten’s Anti-Slavery Networks 143 Julie Winch

8.

Incidents Abroad: Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement 158 Jean Fagan Yellin

9.

‘‘Like Hot Lead to Pour on the Americans . . .’’: Sarah Parker Remond—From Salem, Mass., to the British Isles 173 Willi Coleman

10.

Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ 1859–60 189 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, 1828–1838 211 Kathryn Kish Sklar

12.

The Redemption of a Heretic: Harriet Martineau and Anglo-American Abolitionism 242 Deborah A. Logan

13.

‘‘Seeking a Larger Liberty’’: Remapping First Wave Feminism 266 Nancy A. Hewitt

Contents

14.

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Ernestine Rose’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848 279 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 Struggle 299 Erica Armstrong Dunbar

16.

Enacting Emancipation: African American Women Abolitionists at Oberlin College and the Quest for Empowerment, Equality, and Respectability 319 Carol Lasser

17.

At the Boundaries of Abolitionism, Feminism, and Black Nationalism: The Activism of Mary Ann Shadd Cary 346 Jane Rhodes List of Contributors 367 Index 369

Illustrations

‘‘Am I Not a Woman & a Sister,’’ antislavery medallion title page Nicolas Louis François Gosse, Liberté; Egalité; Fraternité; ou L’Esclavage affranchi 58 Portrait of Harriet Jacobs 160 Map of North Carolina in 1770 by John Collett 161 ‘‘Slavery as It Exists in America; Slavery as It Exists in England’’ 162 Portrait of Angelina Grimké 212 Text from Angelina Grimké’s diary 223 Portrait of Harriet Martineau 244

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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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).

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Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery david brion davis

Looking back over the last century-and-a-half, many of today’s defenders of genuine female equality would agree with the 1849 declaration of the radical German feminist∞ Louise Dittmar: ‘‘The freedom of women is the greatest revolution, not just of our own day, but of all time, since it breaks fetters which are as old as the world.’’ Inspired by the soon to be crushed Revolutions of 1848, Dittmar called on German reformers to include women in their emancipations, ‘‘otherwise women must pass on their slave-chains from generation to generation.’’ Still drawing on Professor Bonnie S. Anderson’s chapter in this volume, we find similar views expressed fifty-seven years earlier, at the height of the French Revolution, when the German Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel also likened the status of women to slavery and, in striking contrast to most male rebels, even argued that ‘‘the oppression of women is the cause of all the rest of the oppression in the world.’’ There may well be some ancient historical basis for this linkage between the oppression of women and human slavery, a connection that then became a vivid and existential ‘‘rediscovery’’ in the European revolutions of the 1790s and 1840s and a familiar theme, as Karen Offen’s chapter shows, even in midseventeenth-century French literature, especially in novels written by women. The modern historian Gerda Lerner has advanced the hypothesis that the virtual enslavement of women in the earliest patriarchal societies, where their

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reproductive potential ‘‘became a commodity to be exchanged,’’ provided a model for the first enslavement of prisoners-of-war, most of whom would have been women. When reading Homer and other classical writers, we find that male prisoners-of-war were traditionally killed, since they were too dangerous to control, while women were enslaved, often dishonored by rape, and brought into tribal societies. Women were thus the archetypal slaves, and as slavery became associated with supposedly inferior foreign women, this had a further degrading influence on all women: ‘‘slave girls staffed the brothels and filled the harems of the ancient world. . . . Women, always available for subordination, were now seen as inferior by being like slaves.’’≤ In my own writings, I have suggested that prehistorical slavery was also probably modeled on the domestication of animals, a process that ideally would convert captive human beings into so-called natural slaves. Thus in ancient Mesopotamia slaves were not only named and branded as if they were domestic animals but were actually priced according to the equivalent in cows, horses, pigs, and chickens. Aristotle, who proclaimed that ‘‘from the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule,’’ connected the theme of domestication with the theme of gender: ‘‘Tame animals are naturally better than wild animals,’’ he wrote, ‘‘for all tame animals there is an advantage in being under human control, as this secures their survival. And as regards the relationship between male and female, the former is naturally superior, the latter inferior, the former rules and the latter is subject. By analogy, the same must necessarily apply to mankind as a whole. Therefore all men who differ from one another by as much as the soul differs from the body or man from a wild beast . . . these people are slaves by nature.’’≥ These traditional dualisms had for millennia not only justified slavery and patriarchy but, even worse, had been aimed at transforming the selfconsciousness and behavior of slaves and women, much as the biological process of neoteny had tamed and disciplined domestic animals. Remembering that beloved household pets are seldom treated or thought of as animals in the degrading sense (pigs, rats, lice), this comparison gives added meaning to the nineteenth-century ‘‘cult of domesticity,’’ which romanticized women who had been trained to maintain the household as a refuge or ‘‘haven from a heartless world.’’ The feminist Louise Dittmar struck a tender nerve and evidenced her own psychological liberation when she claimed that women of her time were enslaved by the ‘‘fetters of idealization’’ and the ‘‘shackles of beauty.’’∂ Aristotle’s merging of gender, domestication, and natural slavery enriches the significance of the preface to the famous 1848 ‘‘Declaration of Sentiments,’’ adopted at Seneca Falls, New York, by sixty-four women and thirty-

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two men, many of them veterans of the American abolitionist movement who had been inspired in part by the news that revolutionary France had abolished French colonial slavery: ‘‘The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.’’ This crucial indictment and its historical context symbolize the temporary convergence of the movements for slave emancipation and women’s rights. The feminists’ choice of the slavery analogy, apparently begun in France in the mid-seventeenth century and forcefully used by the Englishwoman Mary Astell in 1700, was part of a long linguistic tradition that goes back to antiquity. As Orlando Patterson has imaginatively argued, the Western concept of freedom grew out of the experiences with slavery and manumission in ancient Greece and Rome. For the nonslave, as Patterson puts it, ‘‘[t]o contemplate the social death of the slave was to conceive of one’s existence in a wholly new light, as the cherished condition of not being socially dead, not being kinless, not being bereft of one’s household and tribal gods. Who in his, or her, right mind would ever have thought of anything so crazy until the perverse reality of slavery came into the world?’’∑ Of course Patterson recognizes that it took a complex series of historical events to create the Western and Christian philosophical tradition of freedom, which also drew on the Jewish narrative of a long enslavement in Egypt and the exodus toward freedom and the Promised Land. My point here is that from the ancient Athenians and Roman republicans on to Machiavelli and seventeenthcentury British philosophers of liberty, a multitude of Western writers and speakers used the metaphor of slavery to describe the status of Persians, Russians, Asians, Africans, and the rest of the ‘‘unfree peoples’’ of the world, to say nothing of the tyrannical kings, emperors, popes, and dictators who threatened the ‘‘liberals’ ’’ own freedom. But with few exceptions, these theories and affirmations of liberty were wholly limited to males and preceded any meaningful antislavery activities by one or more centuries. When seventeenth-century French and English writers thought of true slavery, they almost always had in mind the hundreds of thousands of European Christians who had been captured and enslaved by Muslim raiders and taken in chains to the Barbary Coast.∏ Thus a work like Samuel Sewall’s 1700 The Selling of Joseph, which did attack the enslavement of black Africans, was as unusual and as isolated a phenomenon as Mary Astell’s feminist work Some Reflections on Marriage, published in the same year. While historians search and discover early examples of feminist or antislavery opinion, nothing is more striking than the lack of continuity and thus the lack of anything like organized movements for abolition or for women’s rights until the 1790s, 1830s, or 1840s. Of course some of

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the activists in various movements were interested in and helped to unearth long-forgotten precedents. If the very concept of freedom was a consequence of slavery—and it seems that it was the relatively sudden and unexpected economic dominance of African-American slavery in the colonial Chesapeake that provided the foundation for an emerging sense of white liberty and equality, culminating in Virginia’s Revolutionary generationπ —there would be nothing novel or contradictory about a slaveholder exclaiming, ‘‘Give me liberty or give me death!’’ But as it happened, the Patrick Henrys and other white American colonists of the 1760s and 1770s did find themselves in a unique and awkward situation. They sincerely believed that in the aftermath of the triumphant French and Indian War, Britain threatened them with a kind of enslavement. But they were also entering an era when the legitimacy and justice of genuine chattel slavery had begun to be sharply questioned. They could thus be accused of flagrant hypocrisy, as in Samuel Johnson’s famous quip: ‘‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’’∫ Johnson had long expressed bitter opposition to colonial slavery and represented a growing antislavery literary tradition in England and Scotland. One answer to such mockery, as we will soon see in a passage written by Jefferson, was to blame Britain and King George III for the originating sins of African slavery. But many American patriots must have been further shocked when they found their own natural rights rhetoric embedded in petitions for freedom from Northern slaves. And by the 1820s the increasing number of free blacks in the North looked to the nation’s Declaration of Independence as their foundational document, defining their undeniable goal of equality at a time of worsening racism.Ω Women, as we shall see, would later be inspired by the same verbal architecture. On July 4, 1827, towns across New York State celebrated the final and complete emancipation of all slaves in the state, twenty-eight years after New York had passed its first gradual emancipation act.∞≠ In some town squares audiences listened to the words of the Declaration of Independence precisely one year after the amazingly coincidental deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had been on the committee appointed to draft the Declaration. By 1827, thanks in part to Jefferson’s long life and the political triumph of his party, the document had become sacred scripture. But few New York residents would have been aware of the long passage in the original Declaration, deleted by Congress, in which Jefferson had morally condemned the very foundations of African enslavement in the New World. This is a subject to which I’ll soon return. I should first note that only two years after the New York State emancipa-

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tion celebration, the most eloquent early black abolitionist, David Walker, would publish a truly revolutionary work that quoted the natural rights doctrines of the Declaration of Independence before exclaiming: See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world . . . ‘‘We hold these truths to be self evident—that all men are created equal!! That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!’’ Compare your own language above . . . with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us—men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!! . . . Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain one hundredth part as cruel and tyrannical as you have rendered ours under you?

David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which turned up in various parts of the South after being written in Boston, goes on to assert: ‘‘Some of you, no doubt, believe that we will never throw off your murderous government. . . . If Satan has made you believe it, will he not deceive you? Do the whites say, I being a black man, ought to be humble, which I readily admit? I ask them, ought they not to be as humble as I? Or do they think they can measure arms with Jehovah? Will not the Lord yet humble them? or will not these very coloured people whom they now treat worse than brutes, yet under God, humble them low down enough?’’ Walker also critiqued and satirized Jefferson’s notoriously racist passages in his Notes on the State of Virginia.∞∞ Walker’s vivid ideal of equality, also expressed in the first African-American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, was no doubt related to rapid social changes that enabled a visiting French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured America in 1831, to conclude that the nation’s most distinctive characteristic was its success in moving toward ‘‘almost complete equality of conditions’’ (and Tocqueville was keenly aware of both slavery and the racial divide). As various scholars have shown, the Declaration of Independence was a product and summation of a collective series of colonial protests and affirmations. The original text had been hastily written by Jefferson and then substantially revised by the Continental Congress. In the summer of 1776 and for some years to come the Declaration was not viewed as a pivotal or even extraordinary document. Yet in time, especially after the French Revolution’s similar Declaration of the Rights of Man, to say nothing of the actress Olympe de Gouges’s lesser known Vindication of the Rights of Women and Citizenesses, it became the American Enlightenment’s equivalent to sacred scripture—

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the founding document, even more holy and enduring than England’s Magna Charta and 1689 Declaration of Rights. If many in the nineteenth century, especially slaveholding Southerners, attacked the doctrine that all men are created equal as self-evidently absurd, reformers and radicals of various kinds, including workers, abolitionists, feminists, and even anti-Masons, used the Declaration as a model for expressing their own public grievances and aspirations.∞≤ Pauline Maier points out that Jefferson was no Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from the hand of God and stresses the marvel of such successful group editing. There is an interesting contrast between the sources of the Declaration’s principles and the source of the Ten Commandments and other laws revealed to Moses and the Israelites at Horeb or Mt. Sinai. As the Torah or core of the Old Testament suggests, true freedom in accordance with higher law presupposed centuries of Hebrew enslavement followed by a complex escape from slavery and an arduous struggle to learn what freedom means when regulated by divine law—that is, a new higher bondage to God, not to human masters. Because biblical law came directly from God and was then reiterated by Moses to the younger generation before they crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land, it was endowed with transcendent sanctity; obedience to such laws became the condition stipulated by God in return for the Promised Land. An independent America was also seen as a promised land, but given the premises of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Jefferson could affirm that the principles of a more abstract Creator were self-evident to rational humans —in Jefferson’s initial draft, not ‘‘self-evident’’ but ‘‘sacred and undeniable.’’ Thus the ‘‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’’ entitled the American people to a ‘‘separate and equal station,’’ in part because it was a self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with such ‘‘unalienable’’ rights as ‘‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’’∞≥ As Garry Wills has convincingly argued, Jefferson had adopted the philosopher Francis Hutcheson’s view of a universal moral sense, shared by all races of humanity. Thus despite Jefferson’s well-known racist writings on the intellectual capacities of Africans, he thought it more important that blacks were equal to whites in what Wills terms ‘‘the cardinal virtues of moral-sense theory, the central manifestations of man’s highest faculty.’’ According to Wills, Jefferson could thus affirm ‘‘a literal equality of men.’’∞∂ In Jefferson’s first draft of the Virginia Constitution, written before June 13, 1776, he assembled a list of indictments against King George III, very similar to those he would soon expand upon in the Declaration, in order to document the king’s ‘‘insupportable tyranny.’’ Infuriated by the Royal Governor Lord

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Dunmore’s tactical decision in November 1775 to offer freedom to any of Virginia’s slaves and servants who deserted their masters and joined ‘‘his Majesty’s troops,’’ Jefferson accused the king of ‘‘prompting our Negroes to rise in arms among us; those very Negroes whom by an inhuman use of his negative [i.e., veto] he hath (from time to time) refused us permission to exclude by law.’’ The last phrase referred to England’s veto of a succession of colonial laws intended to limit or stop the further importation of slaves from Africa. Unlike the West Indies, the Chesapeake colonies, in particular, profited from a rapid natural growth of the slave population. For many reasons, including moral misgivings over slavery, whites had feared a growing racial imbalance if the unlimited importation of African slaves continued. Garry Wills has argued that Jefferson’s words submitted to the Virginia Convention about ‘‘our Negroes’’ rising in revolt, which I’ve just quoted, show that his only purpose was to highlight among the king’s war atrocities the military mobilization of black slaves along with Indians and Loyalists. ‘‘The irony of charging the King with manumission as a crime,’’ according to Wills, then ‘‘led Jefferson to write his tortuous preamble to this charge [in his draft of the Declaration of Independence].’’∞∑ Wills affirms that it is wrong to think that Jefferson was attacking slavery itself, or to assume that he was offended when Congress deleted his twisted and vulnerable rhetoric on slavery but retained his main indictment of the king for exciting ‘‘domestic insurrection amongst us.’’∞∏ But carefully consider Jefferson’s actual words as presented to the Continental Congress in early July 1776: ‘‘[The king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.’’ No abolitionist tract of that time had been stronger in condemning the very basis of New World slavery. Jefferson then goes on to attack the king for ‘‘exciting those very people to rise in arms among us . . . to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.’’ While highly emotional, these statements do not strike me as being either twisted or hypocritical. John Adams, who first saw the passage as a member of

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the drafting committee, said he was ‘‘delighted’’ with Jefferson’s ‘‘high tone and flights of oratory . . . especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose.’’∞π Garry Wills seems to forget that in his 1774 Summary View, the youthful Jefferson had proclaimed that ‘‘the abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state,’’ and that in his 1783 draft of a new constitution for Virginia, Jefferson provided for the freedom of all children born of slaves after the year 1800—a provision similar to the gradual emancipation acts adopted in five Northern states. As I wrote long ago, if Jefferson had died in 1784, the year when he also asked Congress to exclude slaves from all the western territories, ‘‘it could be said without qualification that he was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery.’’∞∫ While it is true that the purpose of the Declaration of Independence was to abolish the bond with both the king and Great Britain, Jefferson’s assertion of natural rights principles followed by a list of indictments also opened a new era in time. In 1776 Congress and most American whites were not prepared to accept Jefferson’s claim that the slave system was ‘‘a cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty.’’ But by December 1833, in the wake of Britain’s legal emancipation of nearly eight hundred thousand colonial slaves, there were enough Northern whites and blacks who had adopted precisely that belief to call a so-called Convention in Philadelphia, modeled on the Constitutional Convention of 1787, in order to found an American Anti-Slavery Society. Significantly, the Convention’s ‘‘Declaration’’ proclaimed: More than fifty-seven years have elapsed since a band of patriots convened in this place to devise measures for the deliverance of this country from a foreign yoke. The cornerstone upon which they founded the temple of freedom was broadly this—‘‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’ At the sound of their trumpet-call, three millions of people rose up as from the sleep of death, and rushed to the strife of blood; deeming it more glorious to die instantly as freemen, than desirable to live one hour as slaves. . . . We have met together for the achievement of an enterprise, without which, that of our fathers is incomplete, and which, for its magnitude, solemnity, and probable results upon the destiny of the world, as far transcends theirs, as moral truth does physical force. . . . Their principles led them to wage war against their oppressors, and to spill

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human blood like water, in order to be free. Ours forbid the doing of evil that good may come, and lead us to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to reject, the use of all carnal weapons for deliverance from bondage. . . . [Our measures] shall be such only as the opposition of moral purity to moral corruption—the destruction of error by the potency of truth—the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love—and the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance. Their grievances, great as they were, were trifling in comparison with the wrongs and sufferings of those for whom we plead. Our fathers were never slaves—never bought and sold like cattle—never subjected to the lash of brutal taskmasters. But those, for whose emancipation we are striving,—constituting at the present time at least one-sixth part of our countrymen—are recognized by the laws, and treated by their fellow beings, as marketable commodities—as good[s] and chattels—as brute beasts;—are plundered daily of the fruits of their toil without redress;—really enjoy no constitutional nor legal protection from licentious and murderous outrages upon their persons;—are ruthlessly torn asunder—the tender babe from the arms of its frantic mother—the heart-broken wife from her weeping husband—at the caprice or pleasure of irresponsible tyrants;—and, for the crime of having a dark complexion, suffer the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, and the ignominy of brutal servitude.∞Ω

In both Britain and America women played an absolutely central role in the antislavery movement, beginning in Britain in 1791 with a boycott of slavegrown sugar and later constituting in America what Julie Roy Jeffrey has termed ‘‘The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism.’’≤≠ Before long, such leading American women abolitionists as the Grimké sisters and Abby Kelley discovered that ‘‘in striving to strike [the slaves’] irons off, we found most surely that we were manacled ourselves.’’≤∞ Increasingly, female abolitionists underscored the fact that married women could not own property, make contracts, bring suits, or sit on juries. They could be legally beaten by their husbands and were required at any moment to submit to their husbands’ sexual demands. As we have seen, reformers had drawn this parallel between chattel slavery and the subordinate position of women during the French Revolution and the analogy was as old as the first demands for women’s rights. When one looks carefully at many of Jefferson’s indictments of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, they pale and become even petty when compared with the indictments of male rule in the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, drafted at the first convention in history devoted to women’s rights. We can only sample some of these charges, which, unlike Jefferson’s list, challenge some of the most ancient, deeply embedded, and gendered conceptions of ‘‘nature’’:

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Context: Then and Today He [man] has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. . . . He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns. . . . In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement. . . . He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her. . . . He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man. . . . He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.≤≤

Defenders of traditional institutions conveyed Dantean images of the worldly infernos that would allegedly result from the emancipation of all slaves or from the equalization of the sexes. The second disaster would destroy monogamous marriage and thus the traditional family as women moved out of the protective home and initiated the sexual revolution that was already being advocated in Europe by such champions of ‘‘free love’’ as Louise Aston and George Sand. The fact that feminism in France was merged with SaintSimonian socialism and calls for ‘‘emancipation of the flesh,’’ beginning in the 1820s, provided conservatives with quotations that seemed to sanction a totally licentious society—and a society in which virtuous women would be stripped of all protection from predatory males. As for black slaves, the Haitian Revolution, beginning in 1791, created a stream of nightmarish images of whites being murdered, raped, tortured, and dismembered, supposedly as the result of French antislavery provocations and emancipation decrees. And while many Southern diplomats and editors were

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surprised when the emancipation of slaves in the British colonies failed to ignite another Haitian bloodbath, they soon took heart after receiving reports from both British planters and American diplomats of plummeting plantation production, exports, and land values; rising Negro crime; and white emigration, especially the flight of white women. The close links between American feminism and abolitionism were especially striking to highly educated and wealthy Southern slaveholding women like Louisa Susanna McCord, the daughter of the South Carolina planter, statesman, and president of the Bank of the United States, Langdon Cheves. Fluent in French and Italian, precocious in mathematics, and fascinated in science, Louisa McCord became an accomplished writer, poet, and defender of Southern slavery and theories of racial inferiority. Rejecting what she called ‘‘Mr. Jefferson’s great humbug flourish’’ of universal equality and liberty, McCord charged, in striking anticipation of the McCarthy era, that the women’s rights movement, antislavery, and economic protectionism all revealed the creeping influence of European socialism in the United States. Abolitionism, she declared, was a ‘‘hideous deformity of vice . . . gibbering out of its horrible obscenities of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism,’ drags upon its track a shouting mob, who, in their ravings for ‘negro abolition’ and ‘universal equality’ trample under foot at once God’s law and man’s law.’’ In response to the news of another women’s rights convention, McCord mocked the attempt of feminists to ride on the backs of emancipated slaves: ‘‘Follow close, ladies. The door of privilege is open pretty wide for the admission of Cuffee. Should he get in, surely you might follow. . . . Mounted on Cuffee’s shoulders, in rides the lady!’’≤≥ McCord argued that women’s intellect was different rather than below that of men; that instead of being ‘‘would-be-men’’ or ‘‘unsexed things,’’ women were designed to be men’s helpmates and not their rivals. On the other hand, she recognized that in the brutal world of reality, ‘‘[in] every government, and under every rule, woman has been placed in a position of slavery—actual, legal slavery: not perfect slavery, we grant . . . as are our Negroes—but still in a very decided state of bondage, inasmuch as she is deprived of many rights which men enjoy, and legally subjected to the supremacy of man. There is, as the result of such a system, much hardship, much individual suffering.’’ ‘‘Many a woman of dominant intellect,’’ McCord concluded, ‘‘is obliged to submit to the rule of an animal in pantaloons, every way her inferior.’’ Although these surprising words seem to betray at least a repressed sympathy with feminism, Louisa McCord made it clear that inequality, domination, and subordination were inevitable facts of life, and only by adapting to the natural order could woman perfect herself and find a kind of self-fulfillment.

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Ironically, McCord did achieve a kind of feminist self-assertion by attacking feminists and such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, and by contrasting her own physical security with the hostility and mob violence that women reformers faced in the North. The fact that McCord could agree with abolitionist/feminists that women suffered from a kind of slavery points to a crucial and seldom recognized anomaly at the very heart of the feminist/abolitionist coalition. The anomaly pertains to the specificity and generality of the concept ‘‘slavery,’’ a word that signifies the ultimate in the loss of freedom and independence. On the one hand, the Anglo-American abolition movements tried to single out the racial slavery of the New World, especially in the Caribbean and North America, as a unique and incomparable evil, an evil that made the American colonists’ talk of being enslaved by the Stamp Act and a tax on tea seem preposterous, as David Walker had already implied. On the other hand, people had long talked, often quite seriously, of being enslaved to love, sexual passion, dreams, alcohol, coffee, the Devil, and the wage labor system—the list seems almost limitless. And of course JeanJacques Rousseau attracted much attention by declaring, ‘‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’’ The American religious perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes agreed essentially with Rousseau, and told William Lloyd Garrison that racial slavery was simply a superficial symptom of a diseased and sinful society. Noyes advised Garrison ‘‘to give up his ‘fencing school’ skirmish against slavery and join the ‘general engagement’ by occupying the ground of universal emancipation from sin.’’≤∂ Given the abolitionists’ need to single out chattel slavery as a unique evil and prove that it was not simply part of a continuum of servitude and dependence, as Louisa McCord and other Southerners maintained, we must ask whether the alliance with feminism, vividly symbolized by Frederick Douglass’s active presence at the Seneca Falls Convention, weakened or strengthened both causes. I have no adequate answer to this question, though it is clear that in America attacks on slavery inspired attacks on the exploitation of women, on so-called wage slavery, and on war, capital punishment, and even the police powers of the state. From the 1780s to the 1830s British abolitionists could rely not only on an all-powerful Parliament but also on a remarkably unified public movement. Such leaders as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, James Stephen, James Cropper, and Thomas Fowell Buxton were not inclined, like the American Garrisonians, to broaden their mission by embracing feminism, pacifism, and other causes. This point was dramatized by the first World’s Antislavery Convention, which met in London in 1840. The British authorities refused to ac-

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cept or seat the American female delegates, thus infuriating the Garrisonians in particular. Moreover, if British abolitionists had campaigned against the wage slavery in British mines and manufacturing centers like Manchester, they would have played into the hands of West India lobbyists and proslavery advocates, who had been arguing at least since the 1780s that West Indian slaves enjoyed a virtual paradise when compared with the condition of male, female, and child laborers in English mines and factories. If British abolitionists had accepted even part of this comparison, it would have seriously diluted their portrayal of chattel slavery, the private ownership of human beings, as an unrivaled evil. It is surely significant that despite the pioneering efforts of such figures as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frances Wright, no feminist movement arose in Britain during the antislavery era, whereas in America there was much continuity in the movement for women’s rights from 1848 to the achievement of woman suffrage in 1920.≤∑ Yet even in America, when the chips were down and veteran male abolitionists refused to fight for the inclusion of women’s rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Wendell Phillips proclaimed, ‘‘One question at a time. This is the negro’s hour.’’ And if leading male abolitionists seemed to betray their feminist sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other champions of women’s rights now showed themselves capable of racist, nativist, and elitist prejudices as they fumed over proposals to ‘‘lift the negro above the woman, and make him her Ruler, Legislator, Judge and Juror.’’ Stanton, in particular, complained against being treated as inferior to ‘‘Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic,’’ to say nothing of the ‘‘unwashed and unlettered and ditch-diggers, boot-blacks, hostlers, butchers, and barbers.’’≤∏ It was this issue of priorities that brought the first major split in the American antislavery movement, in 1839, unless one counts the highly emotional repudiation of the idea of African-American colonization as the first purifying division. The British example would seem to show that a movement with a single clear-cut objective, such as outlawing the slave trade and then emancipating all colonial slaves, will gather far more public support than a blurred and multifaceted crusade for perfection. On the other hand, Ronald G. Walters argued long ago that the diversity and decentralization of the American antislavery movement broadened its appeal. In assessing this claim, we must remember not only that the United States lacked a powerful Parliament, but that the antebellum federal government was firmly in the hands of slaveholding Southern planters and their Northern supporters, with the exception by the late 1840s and 1850s of a

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handful of maverick congressmen. Even if the North had given rise to a far more moderate, unified, and sharply focused antislavery movement, perhaps advocating the sale of Western lands as a means of compensating slave owners in a gradual emancipation, one cannot begin to imagine the South or the existing federal government accepting such a plan. In the 1840s and 1850s slavery was simply far too profitable, and even during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln failed to persuade tiny Delaware and other non-Confederate Border States to accept compensated, gradual emancipation. As it happened, no antislavery president could have been more moderate or more reassuring than Abraham Lincoln. And yet he received no votes in the Deep South and his election brought on secession. And despite the fortuity of actual events from the Missouri crisis of 1819–1821 to secession in 1860– 1861, Lincoln did finally actualize the South’s nightmare and did destroy the South’s social order. This outcome was hardly predictable. Lincoln was a highly skilled politician who knew how to navigate the waters of social reality, including the urgent need to keep the slaveholding Border States within the Union. But he also fervently believed that slavery was both wrong and a sin for which all white Americans were accountable. And as Garry Wills has brilliantly shown in his Lincoln at Gettysburg, Lincoln considered the Declaration of Independence a far more important ‘‘founding document’’ than the Constitution. His call for ‘‘a new birth of freedom’’ was thus a profound and even revolutionary reworking of a ‘‘notable instrument,’’ in which, in Lincoln’s words, the founders ‘‘intended to include all men,’’ not equal ‘‘in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity,’’ but ‘‘equal in ‘certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ’’ This they said,’’ Lincoln added, ‘‘and this they meant.’’ For a quarter-century American feminists, aided by supporters abroad, had expanded the meaning of ‘‘equality’’ to include women in any pronouncement concerning ‘‘all men,’’ a synonym, they argued, for ‘‘all humanity.’’≤π We cannot be certain that Lincoln agreed. But in what Wills terms an ‘‘intellectual revolution contained in 272 words,’’ Lincoln addressed in effect a new nation and many future generations. He declared that the United States must face the most difficult and agonizing tests precisely because the country was founded on the need to approximate a transcendent ideal, the novel and radical proposition that all men (for us, meaning all humans) are created equal.≤∫ These thoughts and examples regarding equality are intended to raise some initial questions that readers can keep in mind as they move on through the following excellent chapters, meet a remarkable extended community of white and black women reformers, and visualize the beginnings of ‘‘the greatest revolution of all time.’’

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Notes 1. Like many of the authors of the following papers, I’ve found it appropriate to use the terms ‘‘feminist’’ and ‘‘feminism’’ even though they came into use only in the 1880s and 1890s. 2. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 76– 100. 3. Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 18–20; David Brion Davis, ‘‘At the Heart of Slavery,’’ The New York Review of Books, October 17, 1996, pp. 51–54 (reprinted in Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery [Oxford University Press, 2001], pp. 123–136). 4. Bonnie S. Anderson, ‘‘Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists,’’ see Chapter 4. 5. Orlando Patterson, Freedom, vol. 1, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (Basic Books, 1991), p. 412. 6. For a recent and thorough study of this often marginalized subject, see Robert C. Davis [no relation], Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Davis convincingly estimates that over one million European (and even Icelandic) whites were enslaved by Barbary Corsairs. 7. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (W. W. Norton, 1975). 8. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Modern Library ed., n.d.), pp. 747– 748. 9. Hosea Easton, ‘‘A Treatise on the Intellectual and Civil and Political Condition of the People of the United States,’’ in George Price and James Brewer Stewart, eds., To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), p. 97; Howard Holman Bell, ed., Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Color (Arno Press, 1969), p. 4. 10. Because blacks were barred from Fourth of July celebrations in many parts of the state, they postponed their own celebrations to July 5. 11. Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 17, 78–79. 12. For detailed studies of the Declaration, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Knopf, 1997); Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (Vintage Books, 1958; originally published 1922); Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Doubleday, 1978). 13. I have drawn all quotations regarding versions of the Declaration from The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, I, 1760–1776, Julian P. Boyd, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1950), pp. 276–432. 14. Wills, Inventing America, pp. 225–226. 15. Ibid., pp. 72–73. 16. Ibid., p. 74.

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17. David McCullough, John Adams (Simon and Schuster, 2001), p. 121. 18. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 173–174. 19. ‘‘Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention,’’ The Abolitionist I (December 1833), p. 178. 20. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 21. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 122. 22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I (Rochester, 1889), pp. 70–71. 23. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 242–289. 24. John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison, a Biography (Little, Brown, 1963), pp. 230–231. 25. Of course we still have a very long way to go before achieving true gender equality, as the final papers in this volume make clear. 26. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Vol. II, Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866–1873, ed. Ann D. Gordon (Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 194–198. 27. While it should be obvious, it is sometimes forgotten that the letters ‘‘m-a-n’’ appear in both ‘‘woman’’ and ‘‘human.’’ That does not diminish the patriarchal or male chauvinist assumptions that long accompanied ‘‘the rights of man,’’ though the phrase was sometimes understood as meaning ‘‘the rights of human beings.’’ 28. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 38–40, 90–147.

2

Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Antislavery Work and Women’s Rights Movements in the United States During the Twentieth Century judith resnik

[F]or ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions —these appear to me . . . unsuited to the female character. . . . I fear its tendency would be to mix them in all of the multiform warfare of political life. —William Wilberforce, writing in 1826 against women’s antislavery societies

Mining the interaction between antislavery work and women’s rights is a rich enterprise. Others writing in this volume consider the history of women’s involvement in antislavery movements, the centrality of slavery to the early women’s rights movements, and the reliance by activists for gender equality on analogies between women’s oppression and slavery. The many victories of the past centuries have not, however, eradicated slavery, whose horrors persist as does the need to complete the project of equality for women. In this chapter, I focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to analyze the issues faced today as women and men continue to work transnationally to combat slavery and to enable women of all colors and classes full participation in the political and social order. Deployment of nineteenth century terms— ‘‘sisterhood’’ and ‘‘slavery’’—remains useful because these words mark the capacity of groups that lack formal power nonetheless to work powerful transformations of law and practice. The two terms also denote distinctions in the forms and content of emancipatory work. At times, the projects of gaining equality for persons regardless

19

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of their gender and their race have been interwoven. At other points, women’s equality rights have been seen as separate from and even conflicting with other movements also aimed at furthering human dignity. Moreover, women’s rights advocates have been challenged for failing to shape reforms that are inclusive of women of all classes and colors. Today, as in earlier centuries, advocates debate whether to pursue a singly focused ‘‘women’s’’ agenda (however complex to define) or to rely on what is now called ‘‘mainstreaming’’ (denoting an effort to redress inequality by inserting gender analyses into all forms of policy making).∞ And, throughout the eras considered in this volume, the interactions among actors based in different countries (called in the policy literature ‘‘transnational advocacy networks’’ or ‘‘transnational norm entrepreneurs’’)≤ have been instrumental in shaping new understandings of the dignity of all humans. Below, I explore how, during the twentieth century, transnational women’s rights groups used the term slavery and emphasized the system of violence against women to redefine war crimes under international law, to organize legal opposition to trafficking in persons, and to change the understanding of the scope of human rights.≥ Thereafter, I consider some of the effects of these movements on the official policies of the U.S. government. After this nation acknowledged the noxiousness of slavery, the United States began to participate in transnational efforts to stem trafficking in women, expressly described as a form of slavery. By the late twentieth century, the United States had taken a leadership role in pressuring other nations to stem trafficking in persons. Yet the United States has been slow to join other transnational human rights efforts. The long road to women’s voting rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States parallels the country’s more recent hesitation to ratify and apply domestically the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, often referred to as CEDAW, the acronym of the expert Committee empowered with oversight of its deployment. In the United States, contemporary anti-trafficking, anti– sexual slavery activists have coupled concerns about women’s vulnerability with images of harms coming from abroad. Supporters of anti-trafficking laws do so based on their commitment to enabling all humans to be free from forced labor and from sexual exploitation, but these efforts also attract advocates who are influenced by protectionist, puritanical, and nativist impulses. In contrast, domestic support for transnational movements—such as CEDAW and other human rights initiatives that propose profound reorderings of gender and race hierarchies—is more difficult to muster. In such instances, lawmakers in the United States have repeatedly responded by protesting against

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‘‘foreign’’ influences. Sometimes, such objections are couched in the language of federalism—that the federalist form of the U.S. government imposes a special constraint on the national government, limiting its capacity to embrace international accords such as CEDAW. In short, a third term—sovereignty, is appropriately also in this chapter’s title, for the concept of sovereign or jurisdictional authority laces this and other discussions throughout this volume. In the United States and elsewhere, equality debates about sisterhood and about slavery entail discussions about political power, about the authority and ‘‘jurisdiction’’ to make change. Jurisdiction is central to slavery itself, for slave owners’ claims to dominion over other people cut slaves off from rights enjoyed by other persons. Jurisdiction is also a conceptual basis of the sex-gender system, insistent on distinctive roles for women and men. In addition jurisdiction marks the moment when trafficking, which is the illicit movement of persons across national borders, takes place. Further, within the United States, jurisdiction delineates ‘‘state’’ from ‘‘federal’’ authority; state prerogatives (their jurisdiction) have been repeatedly asserted within the United States as an argument against the use of national power to enact equality laws. And jurisdiction aptly denotes the effort to insulate U.S. laws from normative commitments about human dignity and equality that are not, yet, understood as part of what American law requires. But advocates of emancipation do not only bear the burdens that flow from the concept of jurisdiction. Civil rights workers of centuries past and present have themselves also been sources of new jurisdictions, as they repeatedly create and then use a multiplicity of venues—from local sewing circles to international organizations—to generate the very innovations that others sought to cabin through jurisdictionally based arguments. Excluded from formal sites of government, women were among the first to create alternatives— early NGOs —nongovernmental organizations offering other visions of what society might entail. Therefore, scholars of slavery, emancipation, and women’s rights need to attend to the multiple valences of jurisdiction, serving simultaneously as a form of oppression, an obstacle to reform, and a source of opportunity for those seeking to redefine rights. Further, the contemporary human rights literature needs to acknowledge its own roots in anti-slavery and in women’s rights projects of centuries past. Transnational efforts to engender better treatment, prompting domestic conflict about the propriety of such influences, are not phenomena that emerged during the twentieth century. As the many chapters in this volume demonstrate, the ability to move from venue to venue has long

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been an important technique by which reformers have made power and dislodged entrenched definitions of the bounded roles assigned to women and men of different colors, as well as to the nation-state.

Repeated Transatlantic Crossings Consider the many times that meetings have been convened to make new claims of right and the many individuals who have crossed boundaries to join those efforts. One such example is of recent vintage. In March of 2001, the International Bar Association (IBA), led for the first time in its history by a woman, convened its first-ever ‘‘World Woman Lawyer Conference’’ in London, England.∂ For that event, travelers from North America to London followed the same route that North American women had taken 160 years earlier to another ‘‘first ever’’ event—the World Anti-Slavery Conference, organized by the British Foreign Anti-Slavery Association. As Kathryn Kish Sklar, Clare Midgley, and others have explained, anti-slavery organizations in Britain were sex-segregated, while some of their counterparts in the United States were not. Women were among the delegates sent from the various local state-based societies but were not seated. The all-male World Anti-Slavery Conference debated the question of admitting women delegates and voted them out.∑ We know, however, that although these women were excluded, their work could not be. The 1840 conference was built on efforts of women and men working on both sides of the Atlantic, in Calcutta, Sierra Leone, and the Cape of Good Hope. During the 1820s and 1830s, around the world, women campaigned against slavery, sometimes in independent organizations (such as ‘‘The Female Society of Birmingham, England’’) and other times working in ‘‘auxiliary’’ institutions, the women’s wings of men’s associations.∏ From the perspective of those in the United States, the 1840 World AntiSlavery Conference was an important moment for domestic movements on slavery and on sisterhood. It was there that Lucretia Mott (a delegate from Pennsylvania) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (whose husband, Henry, was a delegate from Massachusetts) first met. In their exclusion from that meeting, they understood that they had something in common as women. As Mott wrote in her diary, ‘‘[We] resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women.’’π Coupled with the many other meetings and activities, the encounter in England led to the 1848 Convention at Seneca Falls. Women’s activities in both the movements against slavery and for women’s equality have served as paradigms for much subsequent emancipatory work.∫ Women—in groups ranging from sewing circles and religious communities to

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communes and legal action committees—have drawn together to forward an array of projects. The commonality sometimes stemmed from shared experiences of exclusion and marginalization in groups run by men. Women often responded by creating women-centered organizations aimed at altering power relationships by seeking to change laws and practices both within their own townships and around the world. Some of the societies, clubs, caucuses, and associations have been segregated by race; many were class-based, but some cut across these lines.Ω Repeatedly, controversies erupted about their focus and composition. American legal literature on transnational human rights work tends to place the beginnings of nongovernmental organizations in the early 1960s by citing the formation of some of the great international human rights organizations.∞≠ But I suggest conceptualizing the early women’s groups as the original NGOs. Long before that name became popular in the development literature, women were engaged in collective action to restructure civil society. Such groups were nongovernmental not by choice but by necessity. Until all too recently, women could not vote, run for office, become lawyers, serve in the military or as jurors, or, if married, contract or hold property in their own names. Yet, lacking juridical voice, women nevertheless voiced their views through the means then available, often inventing organizations that had small numbers but grand aspirations. From my own discipline of law come several examples. In 1886, a handful of women formed the Equity Club, the first national organization of women lawyers in the United States. That organization lasted only a short time, but was soon followed by another, the National Association of Women Lawyers, formed in 1899 and continuing today as a part of the National Conference of Women’s Bar Associations. In the late 1970s, a group of women judges created the National Association of Women Judges, which helped to prompt an International Association of Women Judges, now comprised of thirty-four national associations and more than four thousand members in eighty-five nations.∞∞ In 2001, the convening of a World Woman Lawyer Conference reflected the presence of women in leadership positions in the International Bar Association, which inaugurated a program linking the agendas of business lawyers and equality proponents. Recall that the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Conference’s goal was the abolition of slavery. Yet, one hundred and sixty years later, in 2001, the same aspiration remained—with practices called ‘‘slavery’’ again being challenged. Shortly before the IBA celebrated its first women-focused law conference, the International Court for the Former Territories of Yugoslavia (ICTY), constituted by the United Nations and sitting in The Hague, issued a ruling on

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sexual slavery.∞≤ As the New York Times put it, that decision was the first time that ‘‘an international tribunal [had] prosecuted and condemned sexual slavery’’ as a crime against humanity.∞≥ The presiding judge—Judge Florence Mumba of Zambia—gave the decision for the three-judge bench, on which Judges David Hunt of Australia and Fausto Pocar of Italy also sat. The ruling included hundreds of factual findings supporting its conclusion that the repeated rapes of women held as hostages and terrorized by their captors violated international legal norms. The contrast between 2001 and 1840 is in many respects stark. In 1840, women were not permitted to sit as delegates at the World Anti-Slavery Conference. But at the tribunal at The Hague in 2001, a woman prosecutor acting on behalf of the United Nations presented evidence to a three-judge tribunal about war crimes against women. Another woman served as the presiding jurist, and three perpetrators were found guilty. The outcome recognized sexual slavery as a war crime, thereby changing the meaning of war crimes.∞∂ Yet the continuity between 2001 and 1840 is central to my thesis. First, a trial on sexual slavery could not have happened but for movements and meetings akin to those formed in earlier centuries as sisterhoods in opposition to slavery. Second, the celebration of women today holding powerful positions must be tempered by the knowledge that, despite all those meetings and the resultant lawmaking, many women remain subjected to practices still fairly called slavery and requiring new lawmaking efforts to eliminate them.∞∑ Third, controversy remains about such reforms. Although the United States has been deeply involved in and supportive of the ICTY as well as of anti-trafficking legislation, this country has refused to join another international tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose charge includes responding to war crimes targeted at women, and the United States has refused to ratify CEDAW, a treaty aimed specifically at intervening to generate substantive equality for women.∞∏ Fourth, as in the nineteenth century, feminists in the twenty-first century debate priorities as their differing experiences of class, race, nationality, and ethnicity influence their understandings of the risks and benefits of various efforts at reform. Fifth, the means by which to achieve change continue to include activism operating at and on different levels of governance. Globalization and increased reliance on federated forms of government have enhanced the capacity for networks to crisscross wide geographic areas. But it would be a mistake to assume that such transnational work emerged only in the twentieth century, just as it would be erroneous to rely on any one level of power—the international, the transnational, the national, or the local—as an enduring source of equality. Rather, the need remains to work at multiple sites, to focus on the

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rights of all persons, to press gender rights into the mainstream, and yet also to focus specifically on the rights of women.

Creating Rightsholder Status for Women in International Law Political and social movements of the past several centuries have many times changed law. The recognition by the ICTY of sexual slavery as a violation of international law stems most directly from the last few decades of transnational efforts to focus international legal documents on women’s inequality and the physical dangers that women face.∞π In the recent past, the networks of particular relevance to these issues have developed at local, national, and international levels, operating in conjunction with and in rebellion against the United Nations. In the late 1940s, the United Nations created a Commission on the Status of Women (CSW).∞∫ As others have explained, the establishment of the CSW marked both a recognition of specific challenges related to achieving women’s equality and a conceptual and practical division between work styled ‘‘human rights’’ and programs denominated ‘‘women’s rights.’’∞Ω Through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several covenants (both general and specific to women) and through a series of Women’s Conferences identified by where they took place (Mexico City, Nairobi, Copenhagen, Vienna, Beijing), the United Nations has broadened its understanding of women’s equality, as NGOs pressed both national governments and international organizations to attend to a wider set of concerns. What constitutes equality and how to obtain government assistance to bring it about were debated in all these venues. Some groups, such as the ‘‘Women’s Caucus on Violence,’’ have concentrated on violence and war. Others identified trafficking and sexual exploitation as central problems, but diverged on how much to press a distinction between sex work and forced labor.≤≠ Yet others sought laws addressing all facets of women’s inequality. Conflicts about priorities among women, who vary by race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and class, made convergence on certain agendas difficult. Yet the issue of violence offered a sad commonality, for violence pervades the lives of women of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, nationalities, and classes. In the 1980s, many civil rights advocates came to understand that violence was itself a form of subordination of women. Various projects have since emerged to underscore how violence expresses inequalities based on gender.≤∞ This work has generated international as well as regional agreements,≤≤ new national laws, local ordinances, and the designation, at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, of a Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.

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In 1979, the U.N. General Assembly promulgated the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. CEDAW requires 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, for the purposes of guaranteeing them the exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms on a basis of equality with men.’’≤≥ In 1992, in General Recommendation 19, the expert committee charged with overseeing CEDAW’s implementation detailed how violence directed at women because of their gender or disproportionately affecting women constituted a form of discrimination to be redressed by signatory states.≤∂ Given CEDAW’s mandate that states take ‘‘all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination,’’ ‘‘temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between men and women’’ are encouraged.≤∑ Not only is affirmative action appropriate, but the definition of what constitutes inequality differs from that in current American constitutional law, which requires proof of discriminatory intent; CEDAW’s focus is on purpose and effect rather than intentionality.≤∏ Beginning in 2000, states could also join an Optional Protocol that permits individuals or groups, after exhausting national remedies, to file complaints directly against countries and that authorizes the oversight committee of CEDAW to initiate investigations.≤π More generally, CEDAW relies on member states to make reports to that committee, which engages in an exchange with each reporting state about its achievements and problems.≤∫ As of 2006, more than 180 countries have ratified the basic provisions of CEDAW, albeit sometimes with reservations limiting obligations on particular aspects. Seventy-six nations have also agreed to participate in the Optional Protocol. Although President Jimmy Carter signed CEDAW for the United States in 1980, subsequent administrations have either not succeeded in convincing Congress to ratify CEDAW or opposed its ratification.≤Ω In terms of contemporary problems of slavery, women’s networks have also helped international tribunals to recognize that enslaving women to provide sexual services to opposing armed forces violates international norms of war.≥≠ Those groups influenced the writing of The Statute of Rome, which, when creating the world’s first ongoing International Criminal Court (ICC), was also ‘‘the first international treaty to recognize a range of acts of sexual and gender violence as among the most serious crimes under international law.’’≥∞ The ICC recognizes women in three roles: as victims, witnesses, and decisionmakers. Within its definition of ‘‘crimes against humanity’’ (knowingly making

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a ‘‘widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population’’), the Court’s enabling statute specifies harms to women, including ‘‘[r]ape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual violence of comparable gravity.’’ Another such crime, enslavement, is explained with specific reference to trafficking in ‘‘persons, in particular women and children.’’ The crime of persecution is defined as ‘‘against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender . . . or other grounds. . . .’’≥≤ Further, the ICC recognizes that women testifying about such situations may need specific services. The Court’s statute and rules create a Victims and Witnesses Unit whose staff must have expertise in crimes involving sexualized violence. Further, the rules provide ‘‘principles of evidence in cases of sexual violence’’ that prohibit the inference of consent from conduct or words or silence in coercive environments and that make inadmissible a victim’s prior or subsequent sexual history.≥≥ Moreover, the statutory framework aims to put women into the governance structure of the ICC, which is (as Cate Steains comments) ‘‘the first time principles of female participation have been incorporated explicitly in an international treaty of this nature.’’≥∂ The text requires that countries, empowered to nominate judges and prosecutors, seek the ‘‘fair representation’’ of both women and men. Moreover, such judges and prosecutors should have expertise in issues including ‘‘violence against women or children.’’≥∑ The debate producing these provisions was intense. Representatives of the Vatican as well as of some countries that are identified with Catholicism or Islam raised concerns that proposed language about ‘‘forced pregnancy’’ could be grounds for seeking rights to abortion. Discord also surrounded whether violence predicated on gender was to be conceived as a subset of rights to personal dignity and against humiliation or whether that harm was to be understood as constituting an independent wrong. That gender is included specifically in the listing of predicates for persecution was a major victory for feminists. Another tension was whether the term ‘‘gender’’ recognized the rights of gay men and lesbians. The compromise resulted in a provision that, for ‘‘the purpose of this Statute,’’ the term gender referred ‘‘to the two sexes, male and female, within the context of society. The term ‘gender’ does not indicate any meaning different from the above.’’≥∏ Whether the addition of the phrase ‘‘within the context of society’’ could be read to leave open the possibility of inclusion of sexual orientation as a form of impermissible persecution is a question, but that formulation was the ‘‘only definition’’ that certain states were willing to support.≥π

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In addition to the ICC, slavery can also be found in another recent international document—the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, supplemented by two protocols, one to ‘‘Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children’’ and the other addressed to ‘‘The Smuggling of Migrants.’’ Both protocols, building on U.N. work in the 1940s and 1950s, became available in 2000 for signatories. Concerns about trafficking had gained renewed prominence with documentation of the persistence of this form of slavery. The 2000 Trafficking Protocol defines the problem to include the ‘‘exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery.’’≥∫As of 2006, more than 110 countries had signed, and more than ninety had completed their internal ratification processes to become parties to these protocols. Although the United States has declined to ratify CEDAW, this country has been a leader in anti-trafficking initiatives. In addition to supporting international work within the framework of the U.N. Protocols, the United States has enacted domestic law, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000, which creates an interagency task force chaired by the Secretary of State to monitor and combat trafficking by facilitating ‘‘cooperation among countries of origin, transit, and destination’’ to prevent and prosecute traffickers.≥Ω Further, Congress obliged the President to undertake ‘‘international initiatives to enhance economic opportunity for potential victims’’ by funding programs ‘‘in foreign countries to assist’’ victims of trafficking to reintegrate or resettle. In addition, Congress imposed ‘‘minimum standards’’ on other countries to prompt efforts to combat trafficking and announced that the United States would not ‘‘provide nonhumanitarian, nontrade-related foreign assistance’’ to governments that had neither met the standards nor made ‘‘significant efforts’’ to do so. Under the legislation, the Secretary of State must report about other countries’ compliance, and the President has the discretion to withhold various forms of aid.∂≠ Congress made ‘‘victims of a severe form of trafficking’’ eligible in limited circumstances for certain benefits such as legal assistance (otherwise unavailable under U.S. law). In 2003, the reauthorization of the TVPA created a new civil remedy enabling individual victims of trafficking to bring lawsuits for damages against perpetrators. Congress has also imposed new criminal penalties on traffickers.∂∞ This brief rendition of some forms of recognition provided to women by international and domestic laws should be read both as a radical advancement and as a limited improvement. Through examples such as the judgment of the ICTY that sexual slavery constitutes a crime against humanity, it becomes clear that women have not only gained recognition as rights holders:

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women have changed the meaning of what counts as rights. As explained by the U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, violence is a ‘‘manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which has led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women.’’ Violence is a ‘‘crucial social mechanism by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared with men.’’∂≤ But despite the many documents and provisions, international bodies and domestic governments have repeatedly failed to address many such injuries. A notable example is the challenge brought by ‘‘comfort women,’’ tens of thousands of whom were detained in Korea and required to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers during World War II. Responding as had members of earlier generations of women who were unable to obtain redress through formal channels, a group of late twentieth century activists created their own means by inventing an ad hoc court. There, they held a trial with international jurists and legal experts who rendered what they termed a judgment, detailing the illegality of the practices and holding Japan responsible.∂≥ Such extraordinary efforts to underscore harms against women are paralleled by sadly ordinary events throughout the world, many of which go unredressed. As is detailed by a 2000 UNICEF survey, Domestic Violence Against Women and Girls, violence against women remains ‘‘one of the most pervasive of human rights violations, denying women and girls equality, security, dignity, self-worth, and their right to enjoy fundamental freedoms.’’∂∂ As the report explains, most countries have laws prohibiting such violence but violations are common. Moreover, home-based abuse may be condoned by the passivity of state law enforcement. And, although the ‘‘family is often equated with sanctuary . . . [for many] it is also a place that imperils lives, and breeds some of the most drastic forms of violence perpetrated against women and girls.’’∂∑ Further, violence is but one marker of women’s inequality. For every one man who is illiterate around the world, two women are. Seventy percent of world’s poor are women, and women are ‘‘less nourished than men, less healthy, more vulnerable to physical violence and sexual abuse.’’∂∏ Moreover, the ratification of CEDAW was accompanied by a notably high number of reservations, bespeaking a constrained willingness from many countries to subscribe to all of CEDAW’s parameters. Indeed, several of the countries that have ratified CEDAW are identified with very oppressive conditions for women.∂π In short, despite the many textual commitments to equality and the laws now existing at all levels of government, millions around the world continue to face inequality in all its ugly forms.

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Engendered Insistence on Sovereign Prerogatives These many harms continue to prompt questions for advocates about what priorities to pursue within nation-states and in international organizations. Below, I examine the differing responses of lawmakers in the United States to efforts addressing gender inequality. When problems are pursued through arguments about the need to protect women, and especially to insulate women from sexualized aggression perpetrated by those styled ‘‘outsiders,’’ national legal prohibitions have been produced more readily than when claims are made about structural subordination. Race and ethnicity of the women and men affected also play roles in tempering or promoting legal intervention. Further, debates about equality in the United States continue to be cast in terms of jurisdiction, of the respective powers of states and the nation to define norms of acceptable interpersonal treatment. A. DOMESTIC EFFORTS TO DEFINE VIOLENCE AS INEQUALITY

The international focus on violence against women has a domestic analogue. In 1994, after four years of debate, Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which authorized millions of dollars for programs to train police and to provide shelters for victims. VAWA also created new civil and criminal provisions to ease interstate enforcement of protection orders.∂∫ Included was a ‘‘Civil Rights Remedy’’ permitting victims of ‘‘gendermotivated violence’’ to bring actions for damages in federal courts.∂Ω That limited and supplemental federal remedy was modeled after legislation on racial equality, and it was supported by some forty state attorneys general. Congress agreed, enacting VAWA under its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce and to ensure equal protection of the laws. But VAWA was also the subject of debate within civil rights communities. While the legislation was pending, NGOs and commentators voiced concerns that men of color would bear the brunt of the criminal sanctions, that women with few material resources would have little ability to use the civil remedies, and that immigrant women would be unable to obtain relief without jeopardizing their status in the country. After enactment, objections of a different kind (but familiar in the United States) came to the fore. In many debates about women’s rights, opponents of a particular innovation have not objected directly to the substance of a right but have argued instead that a government lacks the power—the jurisdiction —to generate that right. Sometimes the claim is that no government has that power; other times the argument is that the national government cannot proceed for the matter is one owned by state governments, and at other points, the

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objection is to allegedly impermissible influences coming from other jurisdictions, outside the United States’ borders. In the nineteenth century, opponents of civil rights had argued the permissibility of slavery and of male control over women, including the power of husbands to ‘‘chastise’’ their wives. Further, went their claim, even if such laws should be revised, states, rather than the national government, had exclusive authority over such ‘‘domestic’’ matters as the relationship between master and slave and between husband and wife.∑≠ Opponents of emancipation for slaves had similar attitudes: they resented rights movements from abroad and argued that foreign critics of slavery ought to stay out of America’s affairs, which they could not understand.∑∞ Even after the Civil War, as women pursued the vote, a parallel objection was made—that the national government should not and could not interfere with state decision-making. When women tried to rely on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to vote, they were rebuffed by the Supreme Court, which concluded that state law governed that right.∑≤ And, during the New Deal, as proposals surfaced to respond to economic emergencies, national policies gave states primary authority over forms of poverty identified with women, children, and people of color but located more federal control over wage work, identified with white men.∑≥ The allocation of power in this federated democracy is more complex than those embracing state prerogatives revealed. The word ‘‘federalism’’ does not appear in the U.S. Constitution, and the word was not used in Supreme Court opinions until the late 1930s. Moreover, the term did not become a synonym for discussions of states’ rights until a few decades thereafter. Further, state law has not, historically, had unfettered reign over relationships within families; the federal legal regime has dealt repeatedly with ‘‘domestic relations.’’ For example, after the Civil War, Congress insisted that newly freed slaves had the right to marry. Congress also regulated the marriage of members of Indian tribes and ‘‘whites,’’ and it prohibited Mormons from marrying more than one person at a time.∑∂ During the twentieth century, action on this federal front (like many others) expanded. Interest in developing federal family law stemmed from several factors including an increasingly mobile population, economic crises clarifying the relationship between individual circumstances of poverty and national markets, waves of immigration, and data demonstrating that the United States lagged behind other nations in addressing infant mortality and children’s health.∑∑ Congress enacted legislation determining the parameters of family units for federal tax, bankruptcy, pension, social benefits, and immigration law. The Supreme Court also ruled on the constitutional parameters of family

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life by, for example, prohibiting states from banning interracial marriages and limiting states’ authority to override parental objections to grandparents’ visitation of children.∑∏ As a consequence, contemporary federal family law is a mélange of national norms aimed at protecting family exchanges from state ‘‘interference’’ and some families from ‘‘immoral’’ practices, and at affirming certain conceptions about how families are constituted, about what relationships within families have primacy, and about the material consequences of family life.∑π From same-race marriage to same-sex marriage, battles are fought in part through arguments about jurisdiction—about which government (state or federal) holds the authority to legitimize such practices. Nineteenth century proponents of patriarchy and of slavery couched some of their arguments in terms of state prerogatives; twentieth century opponents of VAWA relied on what was, by then, called ‘‘federalism’’ rather than states’ rights. Opponents of VAWA argued that Congress had gone beyond its constitutional powers under the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment because (they claimed) violence against women was an aspect of criminal, tort, and family law that belonged to the states rather than a problem over which the federal government had power because it was intertwined with the economy and equality. A bare majority of five in the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, deeming aggression against women to be ‘‘non-economic, violent criminal conduct’’ that Congress could not redress by authorizing victims to pursue damage actions in federal courts against private persons.∑∫ Such division of state and federal authority was justifiable, according to the Court, because ‘‘the Constitution requires a distinction between what is truly national and what is truly local.’’∑Ω Although in the 1960s the Court had found congressional Commerce Clause powers sufficient to sustain national legislation aimed at eliminating racial discrimination, forty years later the Court refused to find VAWA constitutional on those grounds, thereby denying Congress and the federal courts a comparable role in developing national norms of equality based on women’s right to safety. B. NATIONAL AFFILIATIONS WITH INTERNATIONAL ANTI-VIOLENCE INITIATIVES

Just as objections to VAWA were predicated on arguments about jurisdiction, so too have objections to joining certain kinds of transnational human rights work been framed in terms of jurisdiction. Since the creation of the United Nations, some politicians in the United States have seen international

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human rights lawmaking as a threat to the nation and have relied on states’ rights as an argument against participation by the United States. That claim was raised in the early 1950s after the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Senator John Bricker, a Republican from Ohio, proposed that the Constitution be amended to state that: ‘‘No treaty or executive agreement shall be made respecting the rights of citizens of the United States protected by this Constitution.’’∏≠ According to one commentator, Bricker had support from leaders of the American Bar Association, a coalition of ‘‘Republican and conservative, mostly southern, Democrats’’ who had worked together against other legislative proposals, some businessmen who created The Foundation for Study of Treaty Law, doctors fearing ‘‘socialized medicine,’’ and the Vigilant Women for the Bricker Amendment (a group opposed to the influence of the U.N. and the International Labor Organization). All ‘‘wanted to insure that international agreements would not lead to United Nations interference or more liberal social and economic policies and legislation in the United States.’’∏∞ Although the Bricker Amendment did not become law, its effects can be seen through practices of the Senate that often limit the application of various international laws by reference to federalism.∏≤ For example, when the Clinton administration proposed that the Senate ratify CEDAW, the Executive also submitted ‘‘reservations, understandings, and declarations’’ (RUDs)—caveats used in international treaty-making to enable selective adherence to treaty provisions. The CEDAW RUDs specified that the Convention’s provisions would not give rise to independent domestic rights and that ratification would not result in ‘‘changing U.S. law in any respect.’’∏≥ Further, in what is termed a ‘‘federalism understanding,’’ the RUDs specified that ratifying CEDAW could not alter the allocation of authority between state and national governments. Parallel reservations accompanied the United States’ ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.∏∂ Thus, the United States protects an understanding of its own sovereign rights by asserting that it is required to ensure states’ sovereignty in this federation. States’ rights are one set of prerogatives delineated; adherence to gender roles is another. In a 2001 Heritage Foundation publication entitled How U.N. Conventions on Women’s and Children’s Rights Undermine Family, Religion, and Sovereignty, that objection was express. This report argued that the committee overseeing the implementation of CEDAW undervalued the nuclear family by encouraging mothers to ‘‘leave their children in the care of strangers’’ to enter ‘‘the workforce.’’∏∑ Complaining that the ‘‘United Nations has become the tool of a powerful feminist-socialist alliance that has worked

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deliberately to promote a radical restructuring of society,’’ the monograph called on Congress to devote time and resources to protect against the dangers that the United Nations poses to the sovereignty of the United States.∏∏ Objections to the United States joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) are also advanced on sovereignty grounds. Although representatives from the United States were deeply involved in the 1990s in shaping the ICC Statute and President William Clinton signed the treaty at the end of December of 2000, the Bush administration has posited the ICC as a particular threat to this country’s prerogatives. Congress concurred in 2002 by legislating against involvement in and cooperation with the ICC and by requiring that American armed forces involved in peacekeeping be immunized from extradition to and prosecution at the ICC.∏π Contemporary legal scholarship buzzes with a debate about whether federalism itself imposes a general limit on the national government’s treaty-making powers and about American jurisprudential sovereignty.∏∫ But jurisdiction has not always been used as a barrier preventing the United States from joining in transnational efforts focused on women. In the early part of the twentieth century, the United States signed an international agreement against what was then termed ‘‘white slavery’’∏Ω and what today falls with other activities under a rubric of ‘‘trafficking.’’ Citing that agreement and relying on its powers under the Commerce Clause, Congress changed federal criminal law when, in 1910, it enacted legislation known as the Mann Act (named after its sponsor) to make illegal the transportation across state lines of ‘‘any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.’’π≠ Like the Civil Rights Remedy of VAWA, the Mann Act was soon challenged as beyond national authority. However, the Supreme Court upheld the law, even as to interstate transportation not claimed to involve commercialized sex but only incidental to ‘‘immoral purposes.’’π∞ As the Court explained, the national government needed to protect certain forms of family life, for the ‘‘importation of alien women and girls for the purpose of prostitution ‘and any other immoral purpose’ . . . [permitted] an alien woman to live in concubinage with the person importing her,’’ thereby threatening the family—‘‘the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization.’’π≤ Further, in 1946, the Supreme Court upheld the statute’s application to polygamy.π≥ The Court’s rulings on the Mann Act fit with other judgments, sustaining congressional regulation of liquor and lotteries—all national-level programs aimed at exerting social control. National morality legislation remains a force today. The Mann Act, amended in 1986 to make its terms gender neutral, remains in use, now supplemented by anti-pornography legislation that has

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also been upheld over objections that federal power could not reach the private and local production of graphic images.π∂

Sovereignty, Morals, and Equality What informs the hesitancy to embrace CEDAW and the ICC but a willingness to respond welcomingly to transnational and national lawmaking focused on forms of slavery experienced by women? How do these responses illuminate contemporary problems of sisterhood and slavery? The refusal to ratify CEDAW and the ICC and the embrace of anti-trafficking work can be understood as cohering, for both responses are influenced by the same anxieties—that ‘‘foreign’’ decision-making could significantly change women’s roles domestically. Entering into agreements with foreign nations to oppose trafficking is a method of working with outsiders to maintain borders. Action against the ‘‘White Slave Trade’’ and legislation such as the Mann Act were inspired by ‘‘distinct strains of anti-urbanism, of xenophobia and opposition to continued large-scale immigration, and even of anti-Semitism.’’π∑ Analyses of prosecutions under the Mann Act have identified a high percentage of cases between the 1910s and 1940s that involved interracial couples, interstate adulterers, and breaches of promises to marry. One example was the federal prosecution against a ‘‘heavyweight boxing champion,’’ described as unwilling to be servile and breaching a prevalent norm by associating publicly with white women.π∏ As late as 1960, a Mann Act prosecution prompted a discussion by the Supreme Court about the purpose of the Mann Act to ‘‘ ‘protect women who are weak from men who were bad.’ ’’ππ Thus, such laws were not only aimed at protecting women but also at enforcing attitudes about the moral propriety of certain forms of sexual behavior. Parallels come from recent provisions in the TVPA, providing funding for anti-trafficking work but requiring that recipients of grants affirm that their programs do not ‘‘promote, support, or advocate the legalization or practices of prostitution.’’π∫ Today’s anti-trafficking laws continue to incorporate concerns about foreign influences, mobile women, female sexual predators, and disruption of families. To describe these efforts as founded on traditional assumptions is not to minimize the harms they address nor to denigrate the contributions made by efforts to prevent forced labor and slavery through transporting people far from their homes. But the ability to enact such provisions stems in part from the congruence between trafficking laws and anti-immigration policies in the United States, as well as from presumptions that individuals, and particularly

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women, do not wish to leave their countries of origin and do not want to use their bodies in sexualized ways to gain income.πΩ These multiple rationales for anti-trafficking policies caused disagreement among feminists and prompted efforts to change or limit provisions of the TVPA. Some feminists worried that the TVPA legislation was not sufficiently exacting, for its insistence on a showing of ‘‘force’’ too readily assumed the possibility of consent.∫≠ Others sought to redefine trafficking to enable women’s participation in markets for sex while preventing deceptive, exploitative, and coercive practices.∫∞ Some objected that the TVPA conflated enslavement with sex work and presumes the universal undesirability of prostitution. Objectors also argued that the TVPA concentrated too much on forced sex at the expense of enslaved labor of any kind. Another criticism was that the TVPA undervalued the importance of mobility for women and serves as a means of limiting women’s freedom to leave their countries and their families to travel freely or to sustain families by doing economically profitable work abroad. Moreover, absent a grant of the special visas, the TVPA could become the basis for deporting women who had hoped to remain in the United States.∫≤ Despite such objections, anti-trafficking legislation succeeded, in part because of the many awful examples of trafficked people and in part through appeal to concerns about the vulnerability of women to men and of the United States to foreign influences—both of which resonate with groups identified with conservative political and religious agendas.∫≥ In contrast, efforts to obtain ratification of CEDAW have foundered because CEDAW proposes an understanding of women’s lives that moves further afield from conventional conceptions of both women and the law in the United States. CEDAW defines discrimination to include any ‘‘distinction, exclusion, or restriction made on the basis of sex’’ that works an inequality in any field, ‘‘political, economic, social, cultural, [and] civil.’’∫∂ Pursuant to that mandate, the inquiries made of countries are far-reaching, seeking accounts of how gender affects the delivery of health care and family planning, safety, education, employment, recreation and sports, government benefits, and political power. From this perspective, the 2001 Heritage Foundation monograph on CEDAW, the ‘‘family, religion, and sovereignty’’ has correctly identified (if hyperbolically attacked) CEDAW’s challenge to the concept of women as obliged first and foremost to their households. CEDAW does call for both women and men to take responsibility for the ‘‘upbringing and development of their children,’’∫∑ and CEDAW does expect signatories to enable women to have access to a host of activities beyond family life. Under CEDAW, the United States—like nations around the world—would have to report to a committee of twenty-three

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experts about the ways in which the country was or was not fulfilling these mandates. Further, CEDAW’s openness to affirmative interventions and its definition of discrimination based on the effects of actions rather than on proof of the intent of the actors are arguably broader than interpretations of the U.S. Constitution.∫∏ Current law is ambivalent about affirmative action, focused exclusively on government actors and not the private sector, and insistent that claimants prove discriminatory intent. And even some of the federal statutes that reach private conduct do not do as much as provisions in some other countries. For example, the federal Family and Medical Leave Act makes national provisions for rights of leave from wage workplaces but, unlike laws in some countries, does not require such leaves to be paid either through public subsidies or through work benefits packages. In short, CEDAW aspires to reorganize internal norms of behavior and prompt new interventions, while anti-trafficking laws express condemnation of practices such as forced labor and forced sex that have become abhorrent worldwide. The political distance maintained by the government of the United States from CEDAW and the country’s embrace of anti-trafficking laws stem from the contrast between CEDAW’s co-venturing with foreigners to create new norms and the TVPA’s work with other countries to police extant norms, certain views about American identity, and the borders of the United States. Positioning women as vulnerable, raced, sexed, ethnicized, and in need of protection comes more easily to U.S. lawmakers than does inviting women to explore roles never held before and developing plot lines not yet imagined.∫π The divergent attitudes of federal courts toward VAWA and toward antitrafficking and anti-pornography legislation reflect this distinction. The question of the constitutionality of the exercise of congressional power over violence in the federal legislation, VAWA, turned in part on the reach of legislative authority under the Commerce Clause. When women argued that the Civil Rights Remedy in VAWA underscored their freedom to be owners of their own bodies and producers of property, the Supreme Court found insufficient the relationship between gendered identities, violence, and economic capacities; violence against women was deemed not to be ‘‘economic in nature.’’ In contrast, as illustrated by the anti-trafficking decisions, women are readily understood as subject to sale and purchase, making federal prohibitions on interstate trafficking permissible. By invalidating the Civil Rights Remedy in VAWA, the 2000 Court’s majority succeeded in constraining the permissible reach of federal law. Further, by limiting the potential for national intervention, the Court may also have limited the ability of the national government to affiliate with yet more inventive international efforts such as CEDAW. For, as argued to the Supreme Court,

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congressional power to enact VAWA could have been predicated upon its obligation to implement the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the United States has ratified)∫∫ and to enforce customary international law protecting women against violence based on gender bias.∫Ω If the majority’s view that Congress lacks power to redress ‘‘non-economic violence’’ despite the problem being one that is widespread and national in scope is sustained,Ω≠ Congress may well lack power to implement other international conventions as well as to be inventive domestically by creating other laws to respond to inequality. ‘‘Federalism reservations’’ thereby gain new strength as court rulings based on federalism rationales cabin certain forms of national power. Moreover, the refusal to see the link between violence and economic capacity and the insistence on state power over ‘‘family life’’ harks back to earlier eras in which, through ‘‘gender-coding,’’ domestic life was understood to be ‘‘about women,’’ while the economy was coded as male. In contrast, contemporary international development literature, like contemporary feminist literature, understands the interrelationship between families and the economy and the subsistence work women do inside and outside households. Lawmaking like CEDAW and commitments by both governments and institutions like the World Bank to ‘‘mainstreaming’’ demonstrate an appreciation for the relationships among gender, health, the environment, the legal system, the structure of governments, and the rules of war.Ω∞

V. Sisterhood, Slavery, and Jurisdiction I have examined the centrality of arguments about jurisdictional authority to emancipatory work in the United States. Discussions of jurisdiction have particular saliency to women because the legal concept of jurisdiction has served as a vehicle by which to preserve male control, first by a claim that the family was itself a jurisdiction free from state superintendence and then by arguing that the family was a specially situated arena sheltered from federal intrusion. Today, in the United States, we hear parallel arguments, that this federation must be organized through a gendered lens, with states given primacy over women’s safety. Moreover, the sex-gender system is itself based on claims about jurisdiction, about the power of gender to divide and bound the respective spheres of women and men and to justify certain allocations of power. But, nature does not mandate all these boundaries. People do. However, jurisdiction need not be only a source of constraint. The twentieth century has provided many examples of the opportunities provided to reformers by the existence of multiple jurisdictions. As chapters in this vol-

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ume so ably develop, women have long understood the utility of a mixture of local, national, and transnational organizing. That utility has been amplified through the diminished clarity of physical boundaries represented by the term globalization and through the creation of more federations (such as the European Union) and regional alliances. Current market and political conditions promote interest in forms of governance that regulate transactions outside and beyond the nation-state. That interest, in turn, has generated new opportunities for women to advance equality claims. Gaps in governance and alternative governments are spaces in which all power-seekers, be they entrenched or newly fabricated, try to gain toeholds. For example, although the United States has not ratified CEDAW, the City of San Francisco has made it a part of its own domestic law, implemented through requiring reports on the roles women play in departments ranging from Public Works to Probation. Dozens of other cities have called for ratification, just as many had promulgated anti-apartheid legislation and embraced international protocols to stem global warming.Ω≤ But multiple sites produce multiple burdens, and no particular level of governance inevitably ensures that equality movements will prevail. As the discourse on ‘‘mainstreaming’’ evidences, a focus on women (of all colors and ethnicities) requires that institutions and projects not formally denominated as women-centered and not heretofore coded as ‘‘about women’’ must learn to consider gender’s effects. The recent evolution of work under the major human rights conventions of the United Nations provides an example. CEDAW is a major achievement, but its implementing committee has not obtained as high a profile as many had hoped. That positioning is not unique. As Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink put it: ‘‘Although women’s rights projects are now permanent parts of the mainstream organizations, they are often marginalized, underfunded, and understaffed.’’Ω≥ Further, the expert bodies charged with oversight of other conventions have not always put gender at the fore of their concerns.Ω∂ Those challenges are why, unlike some commentators, I have not described CEDAW as the ‘‘Women’s Convention,’’ for to do so facilitates the assumption that other conventions—on political and economic rights— are somehow not centrally also about women. In earlier centuries, women did not have the opportunity to participate in many organizations and, hence, from necessity, crafted their own. What experiences of the twentieth century teach is that even when women gain entry into more organizations, they need to make such entities responsive to women’s concerns by continuing to work in groups constituted around gender. In those groups, what it means to enable equality remains contested, because gender is but one facet constituting identity. The need ‘‘to mainstream,’’ while

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simultaneously doing women-centered projects, imposes significant costs in terms of resources and energy on those participating. Federations and globalization thus offer yet more opportunities, multiplying the tracks to pursue, the number of meetings to attend,Ω∑ and the complexity of forging successful, focused, and collegial organizations. In all the many sites of work, women need to insist on the relevancy of gender even as they bemoan its centrality.

Acknowledgments This essay built on and contributed to discussions at a conference, Sisterhood and Slavery, organized by the Gilder-Lerner Center under the leadership of David Brion Davis and Robert Forbes in the fall of 2002, and on related articles, including Judith Resnik, ‘‘Categorical Federalism: Jurisdiction, Gender and the Globe,’’ 111 Yale Law Journal 619 (2001), ‘‘Law’s Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism’s Multiple Ports of Entry,’’ 115 Yale Law Journal 1564 (2006), and on ‘‘Gendered Borders and United States’ Sovereignty,’’ in Women and Immigration Law (eds. S.K. VanWalsum and T. Spijkerboer, Routledge-Cavendish Press, forthcoming). My thanks to Joshua Civin for suggesting that the Sisterhood and Slavery Conference cross centuries and disciplines and for his thoughtful readings of this essay, and to Kathryn Kish Sklar, Kate Andrias, Elizabeth Brundige, Dennis Curtis, Kate Desormeau, Amina El-Sayad, Ruth Fein, Karla Goldman, Deena Hurwitz, Vicki Jackson, Linda Kerber, Anita Khandelwal, Harold Koh, Peggy Kuo, Arlene Pacht, Francis Raday, Natalie Ram, Beate SchoppSchilling, Reva Siegel, Julie Suk, Patricia Wald, Angela Ward, and Joan Winship, with whom I have learned much about the issues raised here. Notes Epigraph: As quoted by Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (Routledge, 1992), p. 48. 1. The term is used by the Council of Europe, the United Nations, the World Bank, other international organizations, and many countries. The Third World Conference on Women in 1985 brought attention to this idea, which became a strategic objective as a part of the Platform of Action that was agreed upon at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. See ‘‘Special Issue: Gender Mainstreaming in European Public Policy,’’ 10 Feminist Legal Studies 209–328 (Fiona Beveridge and Jo Shaw eds. 2002). 2. See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics 1 (Cornell University Press, 1998) (also discussing specifically women’s networks); Harold Hongju Koh, ‘‘Bringing International Law Home,’’

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35 Houston Law Review 624–81 at 647 (1998). Many histories and analyses of women’s networking are available. See, e.g., Joyce Gelb, ‘‘Feminism, NGOs, and the Impact of the New Transnationalists,’’ 1 Dynamics of Regulatory Change: How Globalization Affects National Regulatory Policies 298 (David Vogel and Robert Kagan eds., Berkeley Electronic Press, 2002); Annelise Riles, ‘‘The Virtual Sociality of Rights: The Case of ‘‘Women’s Rights Are Human Rights,’’ in Transnational Legal Processes: Globalisation and Power Disparities 420–439 (Michael Likosky ed. Butterworths, 2002); Nitza Berkovitch, ‘‘The Emergence and Transformation of the International Women’s Movement,’’ in Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations Since 1875 100–126 (John Boli and George M. Thomas eds. Stanford University Press, 1999); Jane Connors, ‘‘NGOs and the Human Rights of Women at the United Nations,’’ in The Conscience of the World: The Influence of Non-Governmental Organizations in the UN System 147 (Peter Willets ed. Hurst, 1996); Louis Henkin, The Age of Rights (Columbia University Press, 1990); Human Rights of Women: National and International Perspectives (Rebecca J. Cook ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). The Internet has also created new opportunities for these kinds of efforts. See Global Network Electronic Conference: Women’s Organizations and the Building of Civil Society in the Twenty-First Century: An International Perspective (2000), at http://www.penelopes.org/archives/ pages/ntic/cyber/civile11.htm. Participants from six continents posted papers and held discussions on the Web, on topics including sexual violence, women’s health, market reform, political rights, and religion. 3. See generally Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin, The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (Manchester University Press, 2000); Kelly D. Askin, War Crimes Against Women: Prosecution in International War Crimes Tribunals (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1997); Charlotte Bunch, ‘‘Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,’’ 12 Human Rights Quarterly 486 (1990). 4. Dianna Kempe served as the president from 2000 to 2002. I was a keynote speaker for the first session, attended by more than seven hundred women lawyers and judges from around the world. A second conference with a focus on women was held in 2003. 5. See Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 158–61 (Routledge, 1992); Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘‘Women Who Speak for the Entire Nation: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,’’ in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America 301, 308–12 (Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne eds. Cornell University Press, 1994). Women also had their own conventions in the United States; for example, Lucretia Mott presided at the 1837 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. The admission of women to some anti-slavery societies in the United States was one of the reasons for the breaking apart of the American Anti-Slavery Society. See Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding 13 (Edinburgh University Press, 1974). See also Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-Slavery Cooperation (University of Illinois Press, 1972); Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth Century Feminism (University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (Northern Illinois Press, 2005).

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6. See Elizabeth Heyrick, ‘‘An Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women’’ (1828). Heyrick, one of the foremost antislavery pamphleteers, is credited with writing the pamphlet ‘‘Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effective Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery,’’ at http:// dlxs.library.cornell.edu/m/mayantislavery/browse — H.html (follow hyperlink for ‘‘Immediate, not gradual abolition’’). The pamphlet, published in 1824, was the first to call for immediate abolition. See McFadden, supra note 5, at 109–110; Sklar, supra note 5, at 322–323. Heyrick’s influence in the United States is detailed in Salerno, supra note 5, at 20–23. In England, in 1833, more than 187,000 women signed their names to a filing calling for the abolition of slavery. Some historians point to this protest as the first public presence in English history of women speaking out as a group but an earlier example can be found in efforts against sati. See Joshua Civin, ‘‘Slaves, Sati, and Sugar: Constructing Imperial Identity Through Liverpool Petition Struggles,’’ in Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Julian Hoppit ed. Manchester University Press, 2002). The practice of petitioning remained important in both Great Britain and the United States. For discussion of more recent petitions filed in the 1990s at the U.N. Conference on Human Rights, see Wendy Schoener, ‘‘Non-Governmental Organizations and Global Activism: Legal and Informal Approaches,’’ 4 Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 537, 560 (1997). 7. See Sklar, supra note 5, at 302 (quoting Mott). 8. See Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton University Press, 1997) (providing an analysis of the development of the International Council of Women, the International Alliance of Women, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). As Keck and Sikkink note, however, scholars outside of slavery and feminist disciplines have not much studied or appreciated these roots. See supra note 2, at 5–6, 39–40. 9. See Carolyn Williams, ‘‘The Female Antislavery Movement: Fighting Against Racial Prejudice and Promoting Women’s Rights in Antebellum America,’’ in The Abolitionist Sisterhood, supra note 5, at 159, 164–167; Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s, 165–73, 219–23 (Princeton University Press, 1993). Salerno, supra note 5, details the meetings and compositions of many of the U.S.-based women’s societies, as well as their decline after the Civil War. See id, Table A, 165–174. At the conference from which this volume emerged, Christine Stansell suggested that mixed race groups be termed ‘‘an amalgamation’’ rather than an ‘‘interracial’’ group, as the latter term was not used in the nineteenth century. 10. See, e.g., Michael H. Posner and Candy Whittome, ‘‘The Status of Human Rights NGOs,’’ 25 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 269, 270 (1994). 11. See Virginia G. Drachman, Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887–1891, 1 (University of Michigan Press, 1993) (discussing its thirty-two members, including several Europeans, while the group existed for four years); National Conference of Women’s Bar Associations, at http://www.ncwba.org/History.html; Gladys Kessler, ‘‘Foreword to the Symposium Issue: The National Association of Women Judges,’’ 14 Golden Gate Law Review 473 (1984) (describing the meeting of that group, with about one hundred women from

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around the country); International Association of Women Judges, at http://www.iawj.org (detailing its composition and purposes). See also Karen Berger Morello, The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America 1638 to the Present 54–55 (Random House, 1986). 12. The decision, Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac, and Vukovic, Case Nos. IT-96-23 and IT-96-23/1, Int’l Crim. Trib. for Former Yugoslavia, Trial Chamber I (Feb. 22, 2001) (at http://www.un.org/icty/kunarac/trialc2/judgement/jun-tj010222e.pdf), was affirmed in 2002 by a five-judge appellate court. See International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (Appeals Chamber) (June 12, 2002) (at http://www.un.org/icty/kunarac/ appeal/judgement/kun-aj020612e.pdf). The Court exists pursuant to the Updated Statute of the International Tribunal, S.C. Res. 808, U.N. S/RES/808 (Feb. 22, 1993), amended by S.C. Res. 827, U.N. Doc.S/ RES/827 (May 23, 1993) and by S.C. Res. 1166, U.N. Doc. S/RES/1166 (May 13, 1998), at http://www.un.org/icty/legaldoc-e/index.html (hereinafter ICTY Governing Statutes). The ICTY was a pathbreaking institution, with justices coming from many different countries, a staff of more than 1,200 from more than seventy countries, and a docket (as of 2002) of some fifty cases. Court proceedings are conducted through simultaneous translations in several languages and are televised except when security required otherwise. The United Nations has since established tribunals for Rwanda (see S.C. Res. 955, U.N. Doc. S/ RES/955 [Nov. 8, 1994]), East Timor (S.C. Res. 1272, U.N. Doc. S.RES.1282 [Oct. 25, 1999]), and Sierra Leone (S.C. Res. 1315, U.N. Doc. S/RES/1315 [Aug. 14, 2000]). The latter two courts have judges appointed through both national and international means and sit in the countries where the injuries occurred but rely on a mixture of international and national judges to apply international law. 13. See Marlise Simons, ‘‘Three Serbs Convicted in Wartime Rapes,’’ New York Times, Feb. 23, 2001 at A1, as well as Article 5 of the ICTY Governing Statutes, supra note 12. In contrast to the Times report, a syndicated Associated Press story focused on women’s victimization (rather than men’s aggression) as it described the judgment as ‘‘a milestone for the recognition of women’s special vulnerability during war.’’ See Jerome Socolosvsky, ‘‘U.N. Tribunal Convicts 3 of ‘Sexual Enslavement’ over Bosnian Atrocities’’ (reprinted by the New Haven Register, Feb. 23, 2001). The tribunal had before and has since tried cases of rape under the legal definition of ‘‘torture.’’ See generally Kirsten Campbell, ‘‘Legal Memories: Sexual Assault, Memory, and International Humanitarian Law,’’ 28 Signs 149 (2002). The proposition that rape fell within international human rights definitions of ‘‘protections of dignity and honour’’ was argued in Yougindra Khushalani, Dignity and Honour of Women as Basic and Fundamental Human Rights (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982). The statute establishing the ICC recognizes rape as a crime against humanity and as a war crime under Articles 7(g) and 8 of the ICC Statute. See United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 183/9 (July 17, 1998), at http://www.un.org/law/iccc/statute/romefra/htm (adopted July 17, 1998, to become effective after ratification by sixty countries) (hereinafter ICC Statute). 14. See Peggy Kuo, ‘‘Prosecuting Crimes of Sexual Violence in an International Tribunal,’’ 34 Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law 305 (Fall 2002). A woman also served as the legal adviser to the chief prosecutor for Sexual Assault Crimes,

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and the ICTY rules provide protections and services for victims of sexual assault. See Patricia M. Wald, ‘‘The Anonymous Past: Women and International Justice,’’ in Gender Matters 115–119 (Yale University, A Women Faculty Forum Publication, 2002), at http:// www.yale.edu/wff/gendermatters. The relationship of women to war is being reexamined in other cases before the ICTY. The tribunal has also recognized that a slaughter aimed at men of military age constituted, in the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention, a purposeful effort to destroy ‘‘in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part as such.’’ See Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic, Case No. IT-98-33-T, paras. 544–45 (ICTY, Aug. 2, 2001), at http://www.un.org/icty/krstic/TrialC1/judgement/krs-tj010802e.pdf. As one member of that tribunal subsequently explained, ‘‘the court reasoned [that] . . . the Serbs fully realized that the Muslim society in Srebrenica was a patriarchal one, and that by depriving family units of their principal breadwinners and male authority figures they ‘would profoundly disrupt the bedrock social and cultural foundation of the group’ ’’ because women would not return alone to that city. See Patricia M. Wald, ‘‘General Radislav Krstic: A War Crimes Case Study,’’ 16 Geo. J. Leg. Ethics 445, 464 (2003). 15. See ‘‘Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime,’’ Nov. 15, 2000, S. Treaty Doc. No. 108–16, 40 L.L.M. 335 (entered into force Dec. 25, 2003) at http://www.ohchr.org/English/law/protocoltraffic .htm (hereinafter 2000 Trafficking Protocol). 16. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 1249 U.N.T.S. 20378 (entered into force Sept. 3, 1981) (hereinafter CEDAW). See generally Arvonne S. Fraser, ‘‘The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (The Women’s Convention),’’ in Women, Politics, and the United Nations 77–94 (Anne Winslow ed. Greenwood Press, 1995). 17. For discussion of the focus on violence, see Kathleen Barry, ‘‘The Opening Paper: International Politics of Female Sexual Slavery,’’ in International Feminism: Networking Against Female Sexual Slavery: Report of the Global Feminist Workshop to Organize Against Traffic in Women (Kathleen Barry, Charlotte Bunch, and Shirley Castley eds. International Women’s Tribune Center, 1983); Ximena Bunster, ‘‘The Torture of Women Political Prisoners: A Case Study in Female Sexual Slavery,’’ id. at 94–102; Helen Durham, ‘‘Women and Civil Society: NGOs and the International Criminal Law,’’ in Women and International Human Rights Law, vol. 3, 819–43 (Kelly D. Askin and Dorean M. Koenig eds. Transnational Publishers Inc., 2001); Sourcebook on Violence Against Women (Claire M. Renzetti, Jeffrey L. Edleson, and Raquel Kennedy Bergen eds. Sage Publications, 2001). 18. See Economic and Social Council, E/RES/2/11 (June 21, 1946), creating the Commission on the Status of Women; Carolyn M. Stephenson, ‘‘Women’s International Nongovernmental Organizations and the United Nations,’’ in Women, Politics and the United Nations, supra note 16, at 135–53. 19. See Christine Ainetter Brautigam, ‘‘International Human Rights Law: The Relevance of Gender,’’ in The Human Rights of Women: International Instruments and African Experiences 3–29 (Wolfgang Benedek, Esther M. Kisaakye, and Gerd Oberleitner eds. Zed Books, 2002).

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20. See Barbara Sullivan, ‘‘Trafficking in Women: Feminism and New International Law,’’ 5 International Feminist Journal of Politics 67 (2003) (discussing the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women, founded in 1988 and 1994 respectively). 21. Keck and Sikkink, supra note 2, at 166–184. See generally Feminists Doing Development: A Practical Critique (Marilyn Porter and Ellen Judd ed. Zed Books, 1999); Council of Europe, Commission for Equality Between Women and Men: The Strategies, Roles, and Functions of NGOs Working for the Promotion of Equality Between Women and Men, Final Report of Activities (1996). 22. See, e.g., ‘‘Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Violence Against Women,’’ 33 I.L.M. 1534 (June 9, 1994) at http://www.oas.org/ cim/English/Convention%20Violence%20Against%20Women.htm (defining, at Art. I, ‘‘violence against women’’ to be ‘‘any act or conduct, based on gender, which causes death or physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, whether in the public or the private sphere’’). 23. CEDAW, supra note 16, at Art. 3. 24. See ‘‘Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,’’ General Recommendation 19, U.N. Doc. A/47/38 (11th Session, 1992). The absence of discussion of violence in the text of CEDAW illustrates that, in the 1970s, women’s transnational networks were then less focused on violence but in subsequent years moved that issue to the forefront. See Keck and Sikkink, supra note 2, at 166. In 1994, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights created the Office of Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. See United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Res. 1994/45 (March 4, 1994) at http://www.ohchr.org/English/issues/women/rapporteur. 25. CEDAW, supra note 16, at Art. 2 (e) and (f); Art. 4. When equality is achieved, temporary measures are to be discontinued. Id. Article 5 speaks of the need to modify ‘‘social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women’’ to eliminate stereotypes; Article 6 calls on state parties to reduce traffic in women; Article 7 calls for women’s equal participation in formulation of government policy, Article 11 for equal employment possibilities, and Article 16 seeks the elimination of discrimination against women in all matters relating to marriage and family relations. 26. A comparative analysis is provided by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Deborah Jones Merritt in ‘‘Affirmative Action, an International Human Rights Dialogue,’’ 21 Cardozo Law Review 253, 257 (1999). 27. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, U.N. Doc. A/RES/54/4 (Oct. 15, 1999) at http://www.un.org/ womenwatch/daw/cedaw/protocol/text.htm, adopted by the General Assembly in October of 2000 and entered into force, upon obtaining the requisite ten first signatories, in December 2000. See also United Nations, The Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: The Optional Protocol: Text and Materials 1–2, 6–7, 110–118 (U.N. Publications, 2001) (detailing the process; Article 17 states that any member state signing the protocol could not impose reservations). 28. CEDAW, supra note 16, at Articles 17 and 18. The Committee’s limited staff and significant workload is detailed by Dame Silvia Cartwright, in ‘‘The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women,’’ in Women and International Human

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Rights Law, supra note 17, at vol. 3, 165–181. See also Afra Afsharipour, ‘‘Empowering Ourselves: The Role of Women’s NGOs in the Enforcement of the Women’s Convention,’’ 99 Columbia Law Review 129 (1999); Assessing the Status of Women: A Guide to Reporting Under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (International Women’s Rights Action Watch, 2000). Some states that have signed CEDAW have failed to file reports; others have provided stale information. 29. The Clinton administration proposed adoption with a series of ‘‘reservations, understandings, and declarations.’’ See Committees on International Human Rights and International Law, ‘‘Recommendations on the Ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,’’ 53 The Record of the Bar Association of the City of New York 511 (1998); Malvina Halberstam, ‘‘United States Ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,’’ 31 George Washington Journal of International Law and Economics 49 (1997). The Bush administration has not sought congressional ratification, but stated its support of CEDAW when involved in the war in Afghanistan and then indicated that it was reviewing the effect of CEDAW on United States law. See Howard LaFranchi, ‘‘Women’s Treaty Revives Old Debates,’’ Christian Science Monitor 1 (July 30, 2002). 30. See Rhonda Copelon, ‘‘Gendered War Crimes: Reconceptualizing Rape in Time of War,’’ in Women’s Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives 197–214 (Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper eds. Routledge, 1995); Catharine MacKinnon, ‘‘Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights,’’ in Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Alexandra Stiglmayer ed. University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Dorean M. Koenig and Kelly D. Askin, ‘‘International Criminal Law and the International Criminal Court Statute: Crimes Against Women,’’ in Women and International Human Rights Law, vol. 2, 3–29 (Transnational Publishers Inc., 2000); Theodor Meron, ‘‘Rape as a Crime Under International Humanitarian Law,’’ 87 American Journal of International Law 424 (1993). 31. See ICC Statute, supra note 13. The debate occasioned by inclusion of these provisions is detailed by Cate Steains in ‘‘Gender Issues,’’ in The International Criminal Court: The Making of the Rome Statute: Issues, Negotiations, Results 357–64 (Roy S. Lee ed. Kluwer Law International, 1999). See also Simon Chesterman, ‘‘An Altogether Different Order: Defining the Elements of Crimes Against Humanity,’’ 10 Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law 307, 338 (2000) (describing the inclusion of ‘‘rape and sexual violence’’ as ‘‘the most controversial offenses’’ to be covered by international law); Judith Gardam and Michelle Jarvis, ‘‘Women and Armed Conflict: The International Response to the Beijing Platform for Action,’’ 32 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 1 (2000); Patricia Wald, ‘‘Judging War Crimes,’’ 1 Chicago Journal of International Law 189 (2000). 32. See ICC Statute, supra note 13, at Art. 7(1)(g), 7(2)(c), 7(1)(h). 33. ICC Rules of Procedure and Evidence ICC-ASP/1/3/(Sept. 2002), Rules 70 and 71, at http//www.icc-cpi.int/library.about/officialjournal/Rules — of — Proc — and — Evid — 070704-EN.pdf. 34. Steains, supra note 31, at 378. 35. ICC Statute, supra note 13, Art. 36(8)(a)(i) (iii), 36(8)(b), 42(9). Also required is

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equitable geographic distribution (Art. 36[8][a][ii]) and inclusion of the principles of differing legal systems (Art. 36[8][1][i]). 36. Id. at Art. 7(3). 37. See Keck and Sikkink, supra note 2, at 189–92; Steains, supra note 31, at 370–74. 38. See 2000 Trafficking Protocol, supra note 15, at Art. 3. Background on its enactment comes from Janie Chuang, ‘‘Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in Women: Definitions, Paradigms, and Contexts,’’ 11 Harvard Human Rights Journal 65 (1998); and arguments about prohibitions on slave bondage based in customary law from A. Yasmine Rassam, ‘‘Contemporary Forms of Slavery and the Evolution of the Prohibition on Slavery and the Slave Trade Under Customary International Law,’’ 39 Virginia Journal of International Law 303 (1999). 39. Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, Pub. L. No. 106–386, 115 Stat. 1464 (codified as amended at 22 U.S.C. §§ 7101–7110 [2000], and amended by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reorganization Act of 2003, Pub. L. No. 108–193 [2003], codified at 22 U.S.C. § 7101 et seq., and at 18 U.S.C. § 1595) (hereinafter TVPA). Other provisions are discussed infra, note 41. 40. TVPA, supra note 39, at 22 U.S.C. §§ 7106, 7107. The 2003 amendments also require reports on the numbers of individuals obtaining benefits and visa under the TVPA, as well as on the numbers of those convicted. The amendments also call for research by the Executive Branch on the effectiveness of programs against trafficking and new efforts to disseminate through international media information about the harms of trafficking and of sex tourism. 41. The phrase ‘‘severe forms of trafficking’’ is defined as ‘‘sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act’’ is under eighteen, and the activity entails ‘‘the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery’’ (22 U.S.C. § 7102 [8]). To obtain federal services, a person has to meet those requirements and be under the age of eighteen or obtain a certification from the U.S. government that the person is ‘‘willing to assist in every reasonable way in the investigation and prosecution of several forms of trafficking’’ as well as have either a bona fide application for a visa or an agreement by the attorney general that the person is needed in the United States to ‘‘effectuate prosecution of traffickers.’’ See 22 U.S.C. § 7105(b)(I) (C) and (E). Criminal provisions can be found at 18 U.S.C. § 2423 and 22 U.S.C. § 7109. More severe sanctions were added in 2003 through amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and when a version of the Sex Tourism Prohibition Act of 2002, H.R. 4477, became a part of Prosecutorial Tools and Other Remedies to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003 (PROTECT). Amended 18 U.S.C. § 2423 provides that persons traveling in interstate or in foreign commerce or into the United States to engage in sex with persons under the age of eighteen or to obtain financial gains by aiding others to do so could be imprisoned for not more than thirty years. 42. United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, G. A. Res., U.N. Doc. A/RES/48/104 (Feb. 23, 1994), at http://www.unhchr.ch/huridocda/ huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/A.RES.48.104.En?Opendocument.

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43. See Christine M. Chinkin, ‘‘Women’s International Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery,’’ 95 American Journal of International Law 335 (2001) (citing the research of Professor Yun Chung-Ok as instrumental in identifying the ‘‘brutal’’ treatment of Korean women). Jurists included Christine Chinkin, who is a law professor, Gabrielle Kirk MacDonald, who had been the presiding jurist at the ICTY, Carmen Maria Argibay, a criminal law judge from Argentina who had also served as the president of the International Association of Women Judges, and Willy Mutunga, a human rights lawyer from Kenya. Japan had neither paid reparations nor acknowledged responsibility in other ways. See Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II (Suzanne O’Brien trans. Columbia University Press, 2000). Efforts to gain redress through courts in the United States have also been unsuccessful. See Hwang Geum Joo v. Japan, 172 F. Supp. 2d 52 (D.D.C. 2001), aff’d, 332 F.3d 679 (2003); Mary de Ming Fan, ‘‘The Fallacy of the Sovereign Prerogative to Set De Minimis Liability Rules for Sexual Slavery,’’ 27 Yale Journal of International Law 395 (2002). 44. UNICEF, ‘‘Domestic Violence Against Women and Girls’’ (Innocenti Digest, No. 6, June 2000), at http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/digest6e.pdf. 45. Id. at 2 (Overview), 3. See also Bonita C. Meyersfeld, ‘‘Reconceptualizing Domestic Violence in International Law,’’ 67 Albany Law Review 371 (2003). 46. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2000) (also discussing, at 24–31, India’s ‘‘very woman-friendly’’ constitution but a ‘‘reality’’ of great inequality, citing examples including rape, child marriage, child labor, and violence). On education, see Ginsburg and Merritt, supra note 26, at 257. Literacy data can be found in the Gender-Related Development Index in United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 138–141 (Oxford University Press, 1999). See also Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). 47. See John Valery White and Christopher L. Blakesley, ‘‘Women or Rights: How Should Women’s Rights Be Conceived and Implemented?,’’ in Women and International Human Rights Law, supra note 30, at vol. 2, 51–75; William A. Schabas, ‘‘Reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child,’’ 3 William and Mary Journal of Women and Law 79 (1997). See also Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright, ‘‘Feminist Approaches to International Law,’’ 85 American Journal of International Law 613, 631–33 (1991). More generally, assessments of enforcement of human rights treaties do not reveal high levels of implementation. See Oona Hathaway, ‘‘Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?,’’ 111 Yale Law Journal 1935 (2002); Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, ‘‘The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms, and the ‘Rule of Law,’ ’’ 101 Michigan Law Review 2275 (2003). 48. See 42 U.S.C. § 10416; 18 U.S.C. §§ 2262, 2265 (2000). 49. 42 U.S.C. 13891 (‘‘it is the purpose of this part to protect the civil rights of victims of gender motivated violence’’). For more analysis see Judith Resnik, ‘‘Reconstructing Equality: Of Justice, Justicia, and the Gender of Jurisdiction,’’ 14 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 393 (2003). 50. See Reva B. Siegel, ‘‘The Rule of Love: Wife Beatings as Prerogative and Privacy,’’ 105 Yale Law Journal 2117 (1996); Jill Elaine Hasday, ‘‘Federalism and the Family

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Reconstructed,’’ 45 UCLA Law Review 1297 (1998); Amy Dru Stanley, ‘‘Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation,’’ 75 Journal of American History 471, 479 (1988). See also Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford University Press, 2004) (discussing eighteenth-century fears of foreign liberal influences). 51. Keck and Sikkink, supra note 2, at 42. 52. See Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 171 (1875), discussed in Allison Sneider, ‘‘Women Suffrage in Congress: American Expansion and the Politics of Federalism, 1870–1890,’’ in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited 77–89 (Jean Baker, ed. Oxford University Press, 2002). The Supreme Court concluded that the Constitution was silent on the issue and that, given no action by Congress, the court need not address whether ‘‘such interference’’ from Congress into state practices would be constitutional. Suffragists had then to deal with whether to pursue state-by-state or nationallevel strategies. See Ann D. Gordon, ‘‘Woman Suffrage (Not Universal Suffrage) by Federal Amendment,’’ in Votes for Women!: The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed. University of Tennessee Press, 1995). That volume and Votes for Women also focus on the differences, by region and state, in support for women’s voting rights. See also Reva B. Siegel, ‘‘She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family,’’ 115 Harvard Law Review 947 (2002). 53. Suzanne Mettler, Divided Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (Cornell University Press, 1998). 54. See Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation 9–23, 115–31 (Harvard University Press, 2000); Peggy Cooper Davis, Neglected Stories: The Constitution and Family Values (Hill and Wang, 1997); Katherine M. Franke, ‘‘Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriages,’’ 11 Yale Journal Law and Humanities 251 (1999); Judith Resnik, ‘‘ ‘Naturally’ Without Gender: Women, Jurisdiction, and the Federal Courts,’’ 66 New York University Law Review 1682 (1991); Judith Resnik, ‘‘Dependent Sovereigns: Indian Tribes, States, and the Federal Courts,’’ 56 U. Chicago Law Review 671, 723–24 (1989). 55. See, e.g., Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality (Oxford University Press, 2001); Alisa Klaus, Every Child a Lion: The Origins of Maternal and Infant Health Policy in the United States and France, 1890–1920 (Cornell University Press, 1993); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States 7–55 (Harvard University Press, 1992). 56. See Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967); Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000). 57. The legal routes to federal family lawmaking are—like federalism itself—premised on a range of constitutional provisions including the Commerce and Spending Clauses, the Full Faith and Credit Clauses, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Examples of federal statutory and constitutional laws on families can be found in Judith Resnik, ‘‘Categorical Federalism: Jurisdiction, Gender, and the Globe,’’ 111 Yale Law Journal 619 (2001); and in Resnik, supra note 54, at H66. In 2002 a constitutional amendment has been proposed to define marital status as limited to those weddings between a man and a woman. See, e.g., S.J. Res. 26, 108th Cong. (1st Sess. 2003). 58. See United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598, 617 (2000). As the Chief Justice

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explained: ‘‘Gender-motivated crimes of violence are not, in any sense of the phrase, economic activity.’’ Id. at 613. Compare Gayle Rubin, ‘‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,’’ in Toward an Anthropology of Women (Rayna R. Reiter, ed. Monthly Review Press, 1975). The Morrison ruling overturns only one provision within VAWA, its Civil Rights Remedy. The rest of VAWA’s provisions remained and were reauthorized and funded when the TVPA, supra note 39, was enacted in 2000. 59. Morrison, 529 U.S. at 617–18. See generally Catharine A. MacKinnon, ‘‘Disputing Male Sovereignty: On United States v. Morrison,’’ 114 Harvard Law Review 135 (2000). 60. S.J. Res. 130, introduced on Feb. 7, 1952, and reproduced as Appendix C in Duane Tananbaum, The Bricker Amendment Controversy: A Test of Eisenhower’s Political Leadership 222 (Cornell University Press, 1988). 61. Tananbaum, supra note 60, at 31, 43, 116–120. President Eisenhower, however, was not enthusiastic because he thought the amendment unduly restrictive. Id. at 79. 62. See Louis Henkin, ‘‘U.S. Ratification of Human Rights Conventions: The Ghost of Senator Bricker,’’ 89 American Journal of International Law 341 (1995). However, United States law has in fact been influenced by developments from abroad. See generally Judith Resnik, ‘‘Law’s Migration: American Exceptionalism, Silent Dialogues, and Federalism’s Multiple Ports of Entry,’’ 115 Yale Law Journal 1564 (2006) (hereinafter Law’s Migration). One example is that the word ‘‘dignity’’ was not used by the United States Supreme Court in relationship to constitutional rights until the 1930s and 1940s, as the term ‘‘dignity’’ gained prominence through documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. See Judith Resnik and Julie Suk, ‘‘Adding Insult to Injury: The Role of Dignity in Conceptions of Sovereignty,’’ 55 Stanford Law Review 1921 (2003); see also Vicki C. Jackson, ‘‘Gender and Transnational Legal Discourse,’’ 14 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 377 (2002). 63. ‘‘Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women: Hearing Before the Senate-Committee on Foreign Relations,’’ 103d Cong. 13 (1994) (Statement of Jamison S. Borek, Deputy Legal Advisor, Department of State); S. Exec. Rep. No. 103–38 (1994). Additional proposed reservations include rejecting regulation of what is termed ‘‘private conduct’’ beyond that already recognized under United States law, imposing no further duties for equality in employment and providing no guarantees on treatment of family planning. See Ann Mayer, ‘‘Reflections on the Proposed United States Reservations to CEDAW: Should the Constitution Be an Obstacle to Human Rights?,’’ 23 Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 727 (1998). 64. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Dec. 21, 1965, G.A. Res. 2106A, U.N. GAOR, 20th Sess., Supp. No. 14, U.N. Doc. A/6014 (1965). The United States ratified this convention in 1994. See U.S. Department of State, Treaties in Force 422–23 (1996). The caveats can be found at 140 Cong. Rec. S7634 (daily ed., June 24, 1994), S. Rep. No. 103–29 (1994) (treaty does not ‘‘federalize the entire range of anti-discrimination actions’’). In the fall of 2000, the United States filed its first report, as required under the Convention. Federalism reservations were also made to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). See 138 Cong. Rec. S4783 (daily ed., Apr. 2, 1992) (‘‘to the extent that state and local governments exercise jurisdiction over such matters, the Federal Government shall take measures appropriate to the Federal system to the end that the competent authorities of the state or local

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governments may take appropriate measures for the fulfillment of the Covenant’’). Ratification of the ICCPR was conditioned on the reservation of the ability to execute juvenile offenders. See Senate Exec. Rep. No. 102–23 (1992). Federalism concerns have also been proffered as the rationale for the United States’ refusal to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 65. Patrick F. Fagan, ‘‘How U.N. Conventions on Women’s and Children’s Rights Undermine Family, Religion, and Sovereignty,’’ Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder No. 1407, Executive Summary (2001), at http://www.heritage.org/Research/InternationalOr ganization/loader.cfm?url=/commonspotsecurity/getfile.cfm&PageID=95496. 66. Id. at 21. 67. See the American Service Members Protection Act of 2002, Tit. II, Pub. L. No. 107–206, 116 Stat. 820 (codified at 22 U.S.C. §§ 7401–33 (pocket part, 2003). 68. See, e.g., Edward T. Swaine, ‘‘Does Federalism Constrain the Treaty Power?’’ 103 Columbia Law Review 403 (2003); John Yoo, ‘‘Globalism and the Constitution: Treaties, Non-Self Execution, and Original Understanding,’’ 99 Columbia Law Review 1955 (1999); Peter J. Spiro, ‘‘The New Sovereigntists,’’ 79 Foreign Affairs 9 (Nov./Dec. 2000). 69. According to Alain Corbin, the first international conference on white slave trade occurred in 1899, when representatives of twelve countries came together and determined to set up an international mechanism to combat the problem; there occurred divisions between those seeking to abolish prostitution and those seeking to regulate it. Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France After 1850 at 278– 279 (Alan Sheridan trans. Harvard University Press, 1990). Corbin argued that trafficking emerged in response to demand that had, prior to that time, been met through brothels. An international agreement followed, entered into in Paris in 1904; it provided that, ‘‘within the limits of law,’’ contracting governments were to create means to centralize information about ‘‘traite des blanches’’ and attempt to apprehend individuals at ports of entry, return the women and girls to their countries of origin, and provide some facility for them in the interim. See International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, May 18, 1904, 35 Stat. 1979, 1 L.N.T.S. 83 (1904). The 1910 Convention implementing that agreement limited its reach to transportation of women for prostitution. While ‘‘retention, against her will, of a woman or girl in a house of prostitution’’ was a grave problem, the 1910 agreement did not include it because such problems were ‘‘exclusively a question of internal legislation.’’ International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic, May 4, 1910, 211 Consol. T. S. 45, 103 B.S.F.P. 244 (1910). 70. See ‘‘White Slave Traffic,’’ H.R. Rep. No. 47, Appendix A, at 15–18 (1909); Mann Act of 1910, ch. 395, 36 Stat. 825 (codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2424 [2000]). 71. Hoke and Economides v. United States, 227 U.S. 308 (1913), found the Act constitutional despite arguments that it violated rights of travel and the Commerce Clause and also that its text was so broad it could be applied to persons traveling to a jurisdiction to obtain a divorce. See ‘‘Brief and Argument of Basil Economides’’ (Effie Hoke’s co-defendant) at 26 in 17 Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States, Constitutional Law 223, 249 (Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper eds. University Publications of America 1975). See generally Ariela R. Dubler,

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‘‘Immoral Purposes: Marriage and the Genus of Illicit Sex,’’ 115 Yale Law Journal 756 (2006). 72. Caminetti v. United States, 242 U.S. 470, 486–87 (citing United States v. Bitty, 208 U.S. 393 [1908]). That holding was narrowed somewhat in the 1940s. See Mortensen v. United States, 322 U.S. 369 (1944); Gebardi v. United States, 287 U.S. 112 (1932). 73. See Cleveland v. United States, 329 U.S. 14 (1946). 74. See Child Sexual Abuse and Pornography Act of 1986, Pub. L. No. 99–628, 100 Stat. 3510, codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251 et seq., and also limiting Mann Act prosecution to cases involving interstate transportation for prostitution or ‘‘any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense’’—thereby linking a federal violation with those of state laws governing sexual behavior. See 18 U.S.C. § 2421. The United Nations had shifted to gender-neutral language some three decades earlier. See Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic of Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, Dec. 2, 1949, opened for signature March 21, 1950, 96 U.N.T.S. 272, 282 (entered into force July 25, 1951). 75. Alexander M. Bickel and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., The Judiciary and Responsible Government, 1910–1921 at 229 (Part I of Volume IX of the History of the Supreme Court of the United States, which is a part of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise, 1984). See also John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America 202–221 (University of Chicago Press, 2d ed. 1998); Frederick K. Grittner, White Slavery: Myth, Ideology, and American Law 127–34 (Garland Publishers, 1990). 76. David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act 179 (University of Chicago Press, 1994); see also Grittner, supra note 75, at 61–102. 77. Wyatt v. United States, 362 U.S. 525, 530 (1960) (citation omitted). The majority decision, by Justice Harlan, held that a wife, if taken across state lines for purposes of prostitution, could—in contrast to the common law tradition—be compelled to testify against her husband. Chief Justice Warren, joined by Justices Black and Douglas, dissented, arguing that the majority wrongly assumed the wife to be under the sway of her husband and that a rule applied in an earlier case, that a wife could not voluntarily testify against her husband in a criminal case, ought to remain the law absent legislative revision of this common law testimonial privilege. Id. at 532. 78. 22 U.S.C. 7110(g)(2). 79. Further, such legislation enables the United States to use its power to affect other countries’ views of the appropriate ages at which sex should occur. See statement of Representative Robert C. Scott, a Democrat from Virginia, in opposition to the Sex Tourism Prohibition Improvement Act of 2002, 148 Cong. Rec. H3884-01 (daily ed. June 25, 2002) (arguing that the bill was overbroad, making a felony of decisions by older high school students to cross state or national borders to ‘‘engage in consensual sexual activity, including what is referred to as heavy petting’’ and by ‘‘dictating to the world our notions of’’ serious crimes related to sex). 80. See, e.g., Beverly Balos, ‘‘The Wrong Way to Equality: Privileging Consent in the Trafficking of Women for Sexual Exploitation,’’ 27 Harvard Women’s Law Journal 137 (2004) (now Harvard Journal of Law and Gender). 81. See, e.g., Marjan Wijers and Lin Lap-Chew, Trafficking in Women, Forced Labour

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and Slavery-Like Practices in Marriage, Domestic Labour, and Prostitution 217–49 (Foundation Against Trafficking in Women, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, 1999); Marjan Wijers, ‘‘European Union Policies on Trafficking in Women,’’ in Gender Policies in the European Union 209–29 (Mariagrazia Rossilli ed. Peter Lang Publishing, 2000) (providing an overview of differing approaches taken by the member states of the EU). 82. See, e.g., Ratna Kapur, ‘‘The Tragedy of Victimisation Rhetoric: Resurrecting the ‘Native’ Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics,’’ 15 Harvard Human Rights Journal 1 (2002). Analysis of migration patterns of Asian women can be found in Reports of Preparatory Meetings and Activities at the International, Regional, and National Levels, U.N. Doc. A/CONF/189/PC.2/3, prepared for the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, 2d Sess. (Geneva 2001) 11–13. On the utility of mobility, see Saskia Sassen, ‘‘Toward a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy,’’ 4 Indiana Journal Global Legal Studies 7 (1996). Under the TVPA, victims may obtain visas to stay but only upon a person’s cooperation with law enforcement and only while that cooperation was deemed necessary by the Department of Justice. Given that the TVPA is a recent law, its effects cannot yet be readily measured. See, e.g., U.S. Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 17 (June 2002) (noting the difficulty of gaining accurate information and of distinguishing migrant smuggling from trafficking). Some NGOs have raised concerns that the focus is too much on sexuality and too little on other forms of forced labor, and that the ranking into three tiers by the State Department of countries varies with political appraisals of those countries’ relationship to the United States. See Human Rights Watch, ‘‘U.S. State Department Trafficking Report Missing Key Data, Credits Uneven Efforts,’’ June 6, 2002, at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2002/06/06/usint4023.htm. 83. See, e.g., Tony Carnes, ‘‘ ‘Odd Couple’ Politics: Evangelists, Feminists Make Common Cause Against Sex Trafficking,’’ 44 Christianity Today, Issue 3 (March 6, 2000); Statement of Rep. Christopher Smith, ‘‘Fighting the Scourge of Trafficking in Women and Judge,’’ 147 Cong. Rec. E2179-02 (Nov. 29, 2001) (describing as supporters several ‘‘outside advocacy groups,’’ including ‘‘the Conference of Major Superiors of Men,’’ the ‘‘leadership of the Catholic orders and congregations of the 20,000 vowed religious priests and brothers of the United States,’’ and ‘‘the Leadership Conference of Women Religious’’). 84. CEDAW, supra note 16, Art. 1, 3. 85. Id. at Art. 5. 86. Eager to have Congress enact the legislation, some argue its congruence with premises of United States’ law. See ‘‘Ratification of the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: Hearings Before the Senate Comm. on Foreign Relations,’’ 107th Cong. at 32–39 (June 13, 2002) (statement of Harold Hongju Koh). Further, some argue that the U.S. Constitution could be interpreted differently. See Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment (1994). In contrast, opponents argued that CEDAW is the Equal Rights Amendment ‘‘on steroids.’’ See Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, ‘‘US Pro-Life/Pro-Family NGOs Flood White House Switchboard Against CEDAW,’’ 5 FAX 24, June 7, 2002, at http://www.c-fam.org/FAX/Volume — 5/faxv5n24.html; Wendy McElroy, ‘‘Senate Must

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Not Ratify CEDAW,’’ Fox News, Aug. 13, 2002, at http://www.foxnews.com/story/ 0,2933,60218,00.html. 87. See Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1988). 88. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, G.A. Res. 2200, U.N. GAOR, 21st Sess., Supp. No. 16, U.N. Doc. A/6316, 999 U.N.T.S. 171 (entered into force March 23, 1976); U.S. Senate Resolution of Advice and Consent to Ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 138 Cong. Rec. S4783–84 (daily ed. Apr. 2, 1992). 89. Brief of the Amici Curiae on Behalf of the International Law Schools and Human Rights Experts in Support of Petitioners at 3–15, 22–30, United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000) (No. 99–5, 99–29). 90. See Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, ‘‘Violence Against Women in the United States: A Report of Trends, Legal Developments, and Best Practices, Prepared for Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women’’ (2002) (discussing the period of 1993–2002). 91. See, e.g., Emilie Hafner-Burton and Mark A. Pollack, ‘‘Gender Mainstreaming and Global Governance,’’ 10 Feminist Legal Studies 285, at 292–94 (2002) (discussing the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and the Organization for the Security and Cooperation in Europe). 92. See Resnik, ‘‘Law’s Migration,’’ supra note 62, at 1633–46. 93. Keck and Sikkink, supra note 2, at 184. 94. See Diane Otto, ‘‘ ‘Gender Comment’: Why Does the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Need a General Comment on Women?,’’ 14 Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 1 (2002). 95. See also Sonia Mazey, ‘‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategies in the E.U.: Delivering on an Agenda?,’’ 10 Feminist Legal Studies 227, 234–35, 239 (2002) (using the term ‘‘dualtrack’’ and raising concerns that, given mainstreaming, the ‘‘privileged status of women’s rights policies’’ will be ‘‘lost’’); Kathleen Staudt, ‘‘Transcending Nations: Cross-Border Organizing,’’ 4 International Journal of Feminist Politics 197 (2002).

P A R T

The Impact of Antislavery on French, German, and British Feminism

II

3

How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640–1848 karen offen

In the Paris springtime of 1848, the new leaders of the revolutionary French Second Republic accorded all French men the vote, in a move too long known as ‘‘suffrage universel’’—without the qualifier ‘‘masculin.’’ A small group of revolutionary French women protested their exclusion from the suffrage. To the male republicans’ claim that there were ‘‘no more proletarians in France,’’ the women responded that ‘‘if the revolution had been made for all,’’ women were assuredly ‘‘half of everyone,’’ and that ‘‘there could not be two liberties, two equalities, two fraternities,’’ that ‘‘the people’’ is ‘‘composed of two sexes.’’∞ They almost immediately instigated demands, not only for the vote but also for the right to work, for better education, and—most importantly—for marriage law reform and the right to divorce. What is particularly striking is the juxtaposition of these 1848 feminist demands on behalf of women (which included the demand for civil divorce) with the emancipation of black slaves in France’s colonies. Indeed, almost immediately upon assuming power, the new leadership of the republic had decreed (4 March) the definitive abolition of colonial slavery, and their action was subsequently confirmed by legislative vote on 27 April. Although for centuries it had been a proud maxim of French culture that ‘‘There are no slaves in France,’’≤ the women of La Voix des femmes insisted from the outset that there were indeed slaves in France, remarking in various articles and

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Figure 3.1. Nicolas Louis François Gosse (1787–1878), Liberté; Egalité; Fraternité; ou L’Esclavage affranchi; vers 1848. Oil on canvas, Beauvais, Musée départemental de l’Oise. Courtesy of the Musée départementale de l’Oise, Beauvais, France.

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editorials that a French woman, as wife, was ‘‘bent under the weight of the most extreme oppression,’’ ‘‘deprived of all her rights,’’ ‘‘nearly a slave.’’≥ In late March, the feminist Jeanne Deroin upped the ante, challenging the male revolutionaries by insisting that ‘‘the mothers of your sons cannot be slaves.’’∂ In France, demands for women’s rights and abolition of black slavery in the colonies developed in tandem many decades before 1848. Bonnie S. Anderson has categorically claimed that ‘‘Feminists began to apply the concept of emancipation to women’s situation during the French Revolution.’’∑ And, indeed, the feminist tracts of 1789 do ring out with appeals for emancipation based on the analogy between women as wives and black slaves. Indeed, claims for emancipating women and slaves were closely coupled by sympathizers, including Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges, both of whom were active in the Société des Amis des Noirs.∏ I will return to the revolutionary period and its aftermath shortly, but first I want to go still further back in time. For this symbolic connection between women’s status and slavery in French language, culture, and politics did not begin in 1789. Its roots can be tracked much further back—back to the mid-seventeenth century, well before the slavery of blacks from Africa in the French colonies had even become subject to public discussion. In this chapter, I extend the time frame back some two hundred years from 1848 to the 1650s, providing evidence of the slavery-marriage analogy in published literary and political works by women and men (who deploy it in support of what can only be termed, retrospectively, a feminist politics).π I will raise questions about exactly how we might interpret the feminist use of the slavery analogy as well as about how scholars and theorists have heretofore approached the separate subjects of women’s rights and slavery. I will begin with the latter point, however, since some of the evidence I am producing here should be of use in clarifying certain theoretical and interpretative concerns as well as in straightening out and enriching the historical record. By asking such questions, I am hoping also to jump-start a more fruitful dialogue between Anglophone and Francophone scholars of slavery and women’s rights than has heretofore existed. Among those French scholars who base their analyses of ‘‘what is thinkable’’ on the classics of political theory, Montesquieu generally gets the credit for bringing these issues of women’s rights and antislavery together in his important works, Les Lettres persanes (1721) and L’Esprit des lois (1748), both of which have been cited as starting points for serious (male) thinking about the evils of slavery as well as of women’s subordination.∫ And indeed, one cannot doubt Montesquieu’s importance, though his opposition to slavery is in fact far more progressive than his position on the woman question.Ω In the

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English-language literature, the remarkable Mary Astell is usually credited for first deploying the slavery analogy to denounce the situation of married women around 1700.∞≠ Her line ‘‘If all Men are born Free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves?’’ is widely quoted by scholars of the period.∞∞ My thinking about the significance of the slavery analogy for feminism has been provoked by a number of recent works by feminist scholars. The political theorist Carole Pateman has long insisted that behind the ‘‘social contract’’ there lay a ‘‘sexual contract,’’ but her analysis has been based primarily in the work of well-known male theorists who contributed to the development of ‘‘liberal’’ political theory, with the implication that the sexual contract had remained a well-kept secret.∞≤ Meanwhile, on the French side, the Americanbased historian Sarah Hanley has looked at the historical aspects of legal practice, identifying what she calls the ‘‘family-state compact’’ and ‘‘marital regime governance’’ that increased the power of husbands (as against that of fathers) during the reigns of the Bourbon kings, Louis XIII (1610–1643) and Louis XIV (1644–1715).∞≥ She has likewise examined the varied forms of protest by women who took their cases from court into the streets in the later seventeenth century, and has shown how these highly publicized actions may have fueled the feminist protests of the later eighteenth century. Indeed, Hanley has claimed that ‘‘For French women positing arguments against loss of liberty, life, and property, abduction, arrest, and captivity, tyrannical governance practiced in a harem or a household was as unnatural, improper, and illegal as was the slavery of other peoples, which they also decried.’’ In fact, she summarily insists: ‘‘women suffered marital servitude by law in a French state that legally disallowed slavery.’’∞∂ Complementing Hanley’s findings on the cultural history front, the American literary scholar Joan de Jean has provided us with a stunning re-reading of the novels of seventeenth-century French women novelists that emphasizes their contributions to feminist social criticism. In fact, she calls the French novel ‘‘a feminist creation.’’∞∑ Based on a recent reinterpretation of the contributions of François Poullain de la Barre, the Dutch historian Siep Stuurman adds to this perspective, arguing a strong case that demonstrates how seventeenth-century demands for women’s rights may have even provided the ‘‘unseen’’ springboard for the European Enlightenment.∞∏ But neither Pateman, nor Hanley, nor De Jean, nor Stuurman (nor anyone else whose work I have encountered to date, including Carolyn Lougee Chappell), have explored in any depth the repeated and persistent use in France by these women writers (and their associates) of the slavery analogy—and the accompanying invocations of liberty on their own behalf—even prior to the autocratic reign of the Sun King.

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Thus, at least 150 years before the French Revolution, a century before Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in The Social Contract (1762) that ‘‘Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains,’’ nearly 100 years before Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748), and fifty years before Mary Astell, and, indeed, even before black slavery as such had become an issue for moralists, French writers—women and some men—were already voicing condemnations of institutionalized marriage as slavery and as a violation of women’s individual freedom. These critics didn’t think either form of subordination was ‘‘natural.’’ Increasingly, they began to advocate dramatic emancipatory changes in the secular laws and practices governing marriage. They based their claims squarely on the analogy of women’s situation in marriage to slavery, accompanying these claims by calls, variously, for women’s ‘‘liberty’’ and, often in the same breath, ‘‘equality of the sexes’’ in various combinations and permutations, and juxtaposing ‘‘freedom’’ with ‘‘slavery.’’ Masters were, after all, masters, and bondage was bondage. Initially, they challenged the arbitrary parental practice of arranging (loveless) marriages, without the consent of the daughter concerned, and they sought to advance women’s choice of a mate based on ‘‘inclination.’’ They criticized the harsh practices that (in a situation where no divorce was possible, and legal separations were extremely difficult to obtain) husbands could—and did—deploy to control and punish recalcitrant or unruly wives. They also complained bitterly of women’s inadequate education, devised so as to ensure their submission. Ultimately, they demanded the right of divorce—and they demanded it from the civil authorities, that is, from the state, not from the church.∞π Who were these seventeenth-century French critics who introduced the slavery analogy in the 1640s and ’50s and why was the slavery analogy so important to them? And to what specific slavery were they comparing women’s subordination in marriage? Can we determine their points of reference? Their knowledge base? The Bible, especially the Old Testament story of Exodus? Aristotle? Rome or Athens? Contemporary political theorists? Halfknowledge about women in ‘‘oriental’’ harems? About Christian slaves in Muslim North Africa? Was it some understanding of slavery as developed elsewhere (especially in Spanish America) prior to the founding of the French West India Company (1664) and the elaboration of the Code Noir (1685)?∞∫ What, indeed, did ‘‘slavery’’ mean to these early critics of women’s status as wives? What did they mean by liberty? And what was the influence of this analogy, this rhetoric of slavery and emancipation with reference to wives, for subsequent considerations of emancipation more generally? I do not expect to answer all these questions in this chapter (indeed, some may remain unanswerable), but rather I will lay some groundwork for further exploration of a

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neglected link between debates about women’s subordination and that of slaves. I further intend to raise questions about chronology and causality that may be of considerable importance for scholars of the Enlightenment, the European revolutions, and, in particular, the nineteenth-century movement to abolish human slavery, with its fundamental challenge to the master/slave, command/obedience pairing. I am not prepared to argue that the women novelists invented this language of slavery/freedom, although they certainly appropriated it with gusto to ground their critique of marriage.∞Ω What I find interesting is that in these early French works, human bondage seems to have had no particular color or what we would now call racial components, though it clearly had a sex attached. This seems consistent with the findings of David Brion Davis, that non-racialized ethnicity or group belonging was more characteristic in speaking about slavery during earlier centuries.≤≠ The denunciation of women’s subjection in marriage was a much-remarked and repeated theme, if not a central argument, in the rambling fictional works pioneered by early French women novelists—the women novelists later branded (and slandered) as the Précieuses. In particular, we can point to the works of the Paris-based writer Madeleine de Scudéry—first, her Femmes illustres, ou les Harangues héroïques (1642), then in Artamène, or The Grand Cyrus (1649–53), and peaking in Clélie (1654–60).≤∞ The latter two novels became seventeenth-century best-sellers, so many readers in the extensive Francophone world were exposed to the denunciation of marriage as ‘‘slavery’’ and to the language of ‘‘chains’’ and ‘‘liberty’’ (well before the founding of the French West India Company in 1664 and the beginnings of extensive French involvement in the African slave trade). In these novels, especially, Scudéry attempted to develop a viable image of an independent, unmarried woman, even while shying away from publishing under her own name or playing the ‘‘savante.’’ She recognized marriage—as then institutionalized— as a trap that would provide a woman only with a master, rather than a lover or partner; she herself remained single. Such themes were further developed and popularized by the abbé Michel de Pure in his two-volume novel La Prétieuse (1656–58), where one character delivered a blistering denunciation of marriage, and a group of women and their friends subsequently discussed what could be done to remedy it. ‘‘Is there a tyranny in the world more cruel, more severe, more insupportable than that of these chains which endure to the tomb?’’ asks de Pure’s character Eulalie (in vol. 1), while in the section called ‘‘Remedies to the evils of marriage’’ (vol. 2), one female speaker, denouncing the slavery of women, proclaims that ‘‘I wish to work . . . toward the liberty of my sex; and to make a society dedicated to delivering the miserable, and which sacrifices its life, its cares, and its labors to

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the redress of this injury, and the destruction of this servitude.’’≤≤ This is more than mere ‘‘proto-feminism’’; this is the real thing! The particular issues that initially provoked the deployment of the slavery analogy by the writers of this period were (as indicated above) those of opposing the legal marriage contract and supporting women’s right to choose their partners according to their own ‘‘inclination’’—this in protest against the arbitrary decisions of aristocratic and/or wealthy fathers, the male heads of lineage families, to arrange otherwise unsuitable marriages for their daughters in the interest of family economic or political advancement. During the 1660s and early 1670s, these protests concerning slavery in marriage were taken up by the popular and well-connected dramatist Molière in his famous plays concerning the précieuses, husbands and wives, and the femmes savantes, or ‘‘learned ladies.’’≤≥ Ridicule and mockery have long provided means for defusing ‘‘objectionable’’ opponents, and certainly Molière’s satires scored points with contemporary audiences (indeed, they still do!). But precisely by making fun of the critiques of marriage, he (and those he satirized) educated others into understanding that there was a problem, and subsequent writers built on the criticism. Note well that all this was happening just prior to the publication by François Poullain de La Barre of his pathbreaking treatise, De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673), which claimed (building on the Christian notion of equality of souls) that ‘‘the mind has no sex,’’ and introduced Cartesian method for the first time to debates on the ‘‘woman question.’’≤∂ Thus, in France the issue of women’s subjection in marriage entered public discussion as a problem that could no longer be discussed in the reference to a faraway or Orientalized past. In short, mid-seventeenth-century feminists had publicly and repeatedly denounced what Carole Pateman refers to as ‘‘the sexual contract’’ with one word: ‘‘slavery.’’ Joan de Jean was dead right when she characterized the novel in France as ‘‘a feminist creation;’’≤∑ these novelists were very aware of what they were doing. It was precisely because male privilege was being exposed as ‘‘unnatural’’—as a sociopolitical construction, in fact (and this had begun already centuries earlier)—that feminists and feminist claims were considered increasingly dangerous and disruptive. But the French novel offers further important evidence that has been overlooked: de Jean signals a shift in women’s fiction from the 1680s on, to exploring the stories of women after their marriages, as contrasted with earlier narratives that led up to the ‘‘happily ever after.’’ In particular, she points to the publication in 1697 of the Mémoires de Madame la comtesse de M*** by a certain Henriette de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat, which, in the context of what I have said above, might qualify as the first ‘‘slave revolt’’ in French literature—as de Jean puts it, these mémoires ‘‘define

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female notoriety as the woman’s decision to challenge the state and its official religion in the person of the individual to whom it has delegated authority over her,’’ i.e., the slave master disguised as husband.≤∏ What did these seventeenth-century women novelists actually know about slavery as an institution? It is still quite difficult to say. Madeleine de Scudéry’s two giant novels were set, respectively, among the ancients—namely, the Medes and Persians, and the Romans. Both settings were those of slaveholding cultures, though this feature did not seem to have been emphasized as such. But due to her residency in Marseille in the 1640s, during the years (1644–46) her brother commanded the Citadel there, Madeleine de Scudéry had every opportunity to witness the French state’s own prisoner/galley-slaves as well as to observe the redemption processions organized by Catholic religious orders for European Christians formerly enslaved by Barbary Coast pirates on the Mediterranean.≤π It may be significant that Scudéry’s usage of the slavery analogy in her two long novels completely changed following her stay in Marseille. There are, to be sure, Orientalist overtones in her choice of novelistic settings, though in them the harem does not feature as an extreme site for criticism in the way it would later be deliberately featured by Montesquieu in the Persian Letters (1721). My preliminary soundings in these early texts have found no references to black slavery overseas, or to the French state’s use of Iroquois galley-slaves on the ships that plied the waters between France and its Canadian territories, or to the South Asian slaves kept by other French colonists. Nor have I so far come across any literary reference to the reality of slave ownership by French Catholic missionaries in the West Indies (such as Père Labat). There is more to be done; the novels are very longwinded and there are quite a few of them. Still, the slavery analogy was being utilized by other seventeenth-century writers; in particular, male explorers and commentators on the West Indies freely deployed it to describe the relations between the sexes among the indigenous peoples (les sauvages) of those areas: witness the Dominican father JeanBaptiste du Tertre, in his influential report, Histoire Générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1667): ‘‘the wives of the savages are rather the slaves than the partners of their husbands, and they are never idle . . . and it is considered shameful for a man to set his hand to women’s work.’’≤∫ And in the early eighteenth century, one case of a Circassian girl acquired by purchase in a Turkish slave market by the French ambassador to Constantinople and brought to France for education (the case of Mlle Aïssé) became well known to the Parisian public; her life was drawn on by the abbé Prevost for his Histoire d’une grecque moderne (1740).≤Ω By the mid-eighteenth century, feminist critics of the secular marriage con-

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tract in France had squarely identified it as abusive of control over property and person (yet, if anything, the powers of husbands over wives had increased). Was slavery not also primarily about control over property—unwilling property, in the form of persons? The marriage contract, though, was also ‘‘commercial’’ and about control over personhood; women’s consent was ostensibly required, but often not freely given. The labor of wives was appropriated for the benefit of the male chef de famille. French husbands could—and did, with impunity—circumscribe wives’ mobility and lock them up; deprive them of property, particularly dowry property; confiscate children after separating them from their mothers; administer physical punishment with impunity; destroy wives’ reputations.≥≠ Generic to slavery was the lifelong tyranny of a master, the requirement of submission (including sexual submission) and obedience, enforced by the threat of physical violence; so where was the difference, when marriage postulated the same? This is not to say that, on an individual basis, marriages could never be happy; I am speaking here of the institutionalized, legal form itself, and of its potential for abuse. By the time Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois was published in Geneva in 1748, the slavery analogy was already in full flower. But even Montesquieu’s denunciation of slavery did not encompass women. Other writings from his pen, in fact, reveal his underlying belief that, unrestrained, women (because of their powers of attraction and seduction) would absolutely lord it over men.≥∞ One of the most telling critiques of Montesquieu’s position (never published in its time, unfortunately) came from no less a commentator than the very wealthy and well-connected feminist Madame Dupin, wife of a rich fermiergénéral, who was attempting to redress women’s grievances by writing a history of women. Significantly, her hired secretary and research assistant on this project was none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In response to Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, and in the specific context of an argument that did encompass the issue of black slavery in the West Indies, Madame Dupin insisted (ca. 1750) that laws must be based in natural law and that their goal was human happiness through justice; she was thinking specifically of marriage as slavery for wives, precisely because of its indissolubility. Here I quote from a manuscript written partially in her hand and partially in the hand of Rousseau: ‘‘It is astonishing that in a country where Slavery is regarded with horror, one has become accustomed to impeding the freedom of married women in every imaginable way, and to finding them in a condition that does not even offer the hope of becoming free [affranchissement].’’≥≤ A leading Encyclopédiste, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, clearly agreed with Madame Dupin. In his 1759 published response to Rousseau, d’Alembert too deployed the slavery analogy, critiquing ‘‘The slavery and the kind of degradation

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in which we have placed women; the fetters we place about their minds and souls. . . . If most nations have acted like ours with respect to women, it is because everywhere the men have been the strongest, and everywhere the strongest have been the oppressors of the weakest.’’≥≥ This cautionary advice from d’Alembert did not dissuade Rousseau from deploying the slavery analogy entirely in the interests of men in The Social Contract (1762) and, virtually in parallel, spelling out the subordinate place of women in Julie and Emile. When Rousseau insisted, at the outset of The Social Contract, that ‘‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’’ he was deliberately talking about men as such, and his use of the term Man (L’Homme) did not encompass women.≥∂ (One wonders what Madame Dupin thought of this intellectual treason on the part of her former employee!) This did not prevent French feminists from continuing to insist in print and loudly on the pertinence of the slavery analogy to the legal subordination of wives.≥∑ To invoke slavery in the Anglophone context (as most of the chapters in this book make clear) is nearly always to invoke exclusively the case of blacks of African origin, the heinous Atlantic slave trade, and the specific abuses connected with plantation-based chattel slavery, both in the West Indies and on the North American continent. This was not, let me remind you, the association that French feminists initially made: indeed, in the beginning, the specific victims and the specific forms that slavery might take outside France seemed almost incidental to their use of the slavery analogy.≥∏ Public consciousness of black slavery in the West Indies plantation culture seems to have emerged only in the mid-eighteenth century, but when it did, it served to confirm the feminists’ political claims, which escalated even more in the early stages of the Revolution (the literary works by French women on the slavery question invoked by Doris Kadish and others testify to this connection).≥π That marriage in France could epitomize slavery; that husbands had the political and cultural authority to put their feet on the necks of wives, to ‘‘chain’’ them, was abundantly clear and seemed not to require extensive explanation. With the Revolution, feminist women and men saw French women as fully deserving of liberty, whereas even the Amis des Noirs—some of whom, like Condorcet, also supported women’s emancipation—feared complete emancipation for black slaves in the colonies.≥∫ In the summer of 1789—the first year of the French Revolution—the issue of slavery surfaced full-blown in debates over the admission to the National Assembly of delegates from the colonies. Following the Declaration of the Rights of Man in late August, the use of the slavery analogy with reference to women’s plight proliferated, along with the imagery of breaking chains—and equal rights. One remarkable document whose authorship is unknown delib-

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erately contrasted the fate of French women, unliberated by the Declaration, and black slaves, listed among a number of other categories of the oppressed (the poor villager, the unfortunate vassal, the timid soldier, the modest priest): ‘‘the black African will no longer find himself compared to a stupid animal which, goaded by the prod of a fierce driver, irrigates our furrows with his sweat and blood.’’ The implication here was (as would also be the case again in 1848) that all men, of whatever description, were to date the primary beneficiaries of the Revolution. Ah! our masters! will we then be the only ones for whom the iron age will forever exist . . . ? Will we be the only ones who will not participate in this astonishing regeneration that will renew the face of France and revive its youthfulness like that of the eagle? You have broken the scepter of despotism, you have pronounced the beautiful axiom . . . the French are a free people. Yet still you allow thirteen million slaves shamefully to wear the irons of thirteen million despots! You have divined the true equality of rights—and you still unjustly withhold them from the sweetest and most interesting half among you! . . .≥Ω

The references here point clearly to contemporary concerns of sexual inequality and injustice, particularly for women, within the kingdom of France. Among a number of other texts (and there are many more that remain to be investigated), the slavery analogy (and the chains imagery) is also present in the Vues législatives of Marie-Madeleine Jodin in 1790, albeit with an earlier Orientalist frame of reference. Addressing the revolutionary legislators, Jodin states: You are born our friends, not our rivals, and we emulate you. To reduce us to slavery is to abuse the force which was given to you to defend us; it is to deprive Society of what gives it charm and life. It is to imitate Orientals who, combining brutal passion with a sense of their own weakness, put women in chains, to prevent women doing the same to them.∂≠

Olympe de Gouges, author of the celebrated ‘‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’’ and a member of the Société des Amis des Noirs, deployed the slavery analogy in 1791, here to describe the similarity between commerce in slaves and the old regime’s traffic in wives: . . . the buying and selling of women was a kind of industry taken for granted in the first rank of society, which, henceforth, will have no credit. If it did, the revolution would be lost, and under the new order we would remain ever corrupt. Still, can reason hide the fact that all other routes to fortune are closed to woman, whom man buys like a slave on the African coast? The difference is great, as we know. The slave commands the master; but if the

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It would be impossible in this chapter to quote from all those who invoked the slavery analogy in the interest of asserting women’s rights. Moreover, there remains much work still to be done on this issue. Permit me, though, to invoke the words of one more male-feminist, the deputy Pierre Guyomar, who—as he insisted that the term homme included both men and women—made a remarkable intervention on behalf of women and blacks simultaneously in 1793 in the very heart of the revolutionary Convention. In Guyomar’s visionary text, the issue of black slavery seems to alternate position with the issue of the slavery of women, firmly pointing out that the revolutionaries still had a chance to avoid foreclosing on women’s emancipation at home, even as slavery in the colonies would soon be ended: Either the nation is composed of men and women, or it is only composed of men. In the first case, men form a body, against the spirit of the article; in the second case, women are the helots of the Republic. You must choose: in good faith, is the difference between the sexes a title for slavery better founded than the color of blacks? . . . Either I am seriously mistaken, or a white or black skin will no longer characterize exclusion from sovereignty in the human species than a male or feminine sex. . . . I submit that half the individuals of a society do not have the right to deprive the other half from the imprescriptible right of expressing their wish [voeu]. Let us free ourselves henceforth from the prejudice of sex, just as we have freed ourselves from prejudice about the color of blacks. . . .∂≤

Thus, a line of challenge to women’s subordination in marriage that had been developing from at least the mid-seventeenth century on, with explicit comparison to the institution of slavery, had, in the course of the French Revolution, become inextricably paired with objections to the institution of black slavery in the West Indies and Americas. Revolutionary legislators did (partially) address this issue of women’s subordination in 1791, when they passed legislation that would fully emancipate unmarried women who had reached the age of twenty-one, and when they initiated not only civil marriage but also—and in particular—on 20 September 1792, civil divorce by mutual consent, which provided a relatively painless escape from the ‘‘slavery’’ of unhappy marriage.∂≥ The Divorce Law of 1792 was incredibly liberal; it has been called ‘‘a victory against both the sacerdotal view of marriage endorsed by the Church and absolute male authority in the household.’’∂∂ Slavery in the French colonies ended only with the February

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1794 Abolition Law—a law that was in fact never applied, given the enormous turmoil in the Caribbean. My point here is that French women’s demands had been resolved first. And very favorably so. Tens of thousands of unhappy wives immediately began to take advantage of the new divorce law, as the research of Roderick Phillips and others has demonstrated.∂∑ It all seemed too good to be true. And, of course, it didn’t last long. In fact, the backlash had already begun. Suzanne Desan has documented a campaign in the Council of 500 to get rid of divorce on grounds of incompatibility alone.∂∏ Counterrevolutionaries of all stripes, including lawyers, jurists, and, of course, physicians, converged on both women and blacks in attempts to short-circuit such revolutionary developments by ‘‘proving’’ their inferiority and the ‘‘natural’’ necessity of their subjection. In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte, now Emperor, reestablished colonial slavery and in 1803 he severely amended the Divorce Law, though without abolishing it completely. And with the promulgation of the Civil Code in 1804, he personally insisted on institutionalizing the prerogatives of the husband and the obedience of the wife. The overturn of the divorce law in 1816 effectively reestablished the ‘‘slavery’’ of wives; this situation would endure until 1884 and well beyond, despite repeated denunciations and protests. Should we then be surprised that the outpourings of feminist rhetoric, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s, from George Sand’s early novels to the works of the Saint-Simonian women and Flora Tristan to the women of La Voix des femmes in 1848—are replete with invocations of women’s slavery in marriage?∂π The rhetoric of ‘‘femme libre’’ (the free woman) and ‘‘femme affranchie’’ (the freed woman) was endemic and, despite the fierce backlash that developed, it refused to go away. Indeed, it spread throughout Europe like wildfire, as the remarks of German writers and others influenced by the rhetoric of the French Revolution attest.∂∫ The revocation of the divorce law, the dramatic reconfiguration of marital authority in the French Civil Code, and the reestablishment of colonial slavery, combined with a massive surge of abolitionist activity in England spearheaded by British Quakers and their allies, served to mute memories of these remarkable developments in revolutionary France. By the early nineteenth century, moreover, the slavery analogy had become common to the rhetoric and claims of English as well as French feminists. The title of Thompson and Wheeler’s 1825 Appeal of One Half of the Human Race Against the Pretensions of the Other Half—Men—to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery speaks to this point. The venerable slavery/freedom juxtaposition applied to women was extremely applicable and transferable. But, as we have seen, in 1825 charges of ‘‘civil and domestic slavery’’ were far from new.

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In early nineteenth-century France, there was no organized mass movement either for the abolition of slavery or for the emancipation of women (keep in mind how difficult it was, in the repressive context of the Continental counterrevolution, even to organize political meetings, much less ‘‘movements’’). Nevertheless, there developed a quantity of contemporary literary protest to draw on as they began to launch organized efforts not only for these legal reforms but also to improve women’s education and employment opportunities, and to demand political rights. Indeed, some feminists did petition the legislative authorities during the mid-1830s. If having the right arguments in place could have resolved the question, French women would have been ‘‘liberated’’ long before their Anglophone counterparts. By 1848, the campaigns for reform of the Civil Code (particularly Article 213, which postulated wifely obedience in exchange for husbandly protection) and divorce could be seen as French women’s equivalents at home of the campaign to abolish colonial slavery, which was again picking up steam in the 1840s, thanks to the members of the Société de la morale chrétienne. And it bears underscoring that, with the outbreak of the 1848 revolution in Paris, the women protesters were organizing on their own, establishing their own newspapers and clubs—months before American women’s rights advocates convened in July in Seneca Falls, New York. The women of La Voix des femmes came, for the most part, out of the SaintSimonian ‘‘social’’ movement, whose male leaders (even while obsessing on the emancipation of Woman in its quasi-religious manner) had abruptly renounced its earlier inclusion of women in positions of organizational responsibility— just as their British and American counterparts had been denied positions of responsibility in the antislavery movement and had to found their own associations. Here was common ground. Male politicians, even the best-intentioned, were deliberately objecting to women’s participation, a move that took on international importance with the exclusion of the American Garrisonian women delegates at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.∂Ω The conjunction of women’s rights demands with antislavery sentiment in France was confirmed by the presence in 1848 Paris of the abolitionist and feminist English Quaker Anne Knight, who participated in the efforts of the Voix des Femmes team to formulate their protests. Anne Knight was (like many progressive English reformers at the time, including Anna Doyle Wheeler and John Stuart Mill) an ardent Francophile, and she had spent a good deal of time outside England; progressive causes obviously attracted her, not least the Saint-Simonian agitation of the 1830s. Her feminist consciousness had been ‘‘raised’’ at the aforementioned 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention.

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Knight recounted a conversation with an English lady friend in 1848, who was quoted as saying: ‘‘Now the Negroes are liberated, there is nothing more to do in Paris, is there?’’ To which Knight rejoined: ‘‘The Blacks are free, but there is still a slavery of the Whites. The French took liberty for all the men, and abandoned the rights of all their sisters.’’ It is easy to imagine Knight hopping the next boat across the Channel to come to the aid of the sisterhood.∑≠ The editors of the Voix des femmes first reported the presence of this new ally in the issue of 31 March. This introductory piece was followed by an article on Knight in mid-April, which included her critique of the revolutionary men: ‘‘The men are in the chariot of progress [char de progrès]; the women walk behind, fettered and dragged along like slaves.’’ ‘‘I have worked for twenty years against the oppression that is slavery—this question and that of women’s rights are one. I support them both.’’∑∞ By mid-June, Knight was protesting against the closing of the women’s clubs, led by the French Protestant pastor Coquerel, who had earlier been envisioned as a firm ally.∑≤ My point is this: Feminist use of the slavery analogy to underscore the need for emancipating women was launched, not in 1848, not in the earlier American or French Revolutions, not in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, not in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws or his Persian Letters, but among the widespread readers of the women’s novels of seventeenth-century France—readers who were not necessarily either French or living in France. These feminist novelists had been using the slavery analogy to sustain their own claims for marriage law reform and divorce far longer than has been evident to scholars of the modern period, and I think also, a good deal longer than in the British case, though this remains to be demonstrated. Even the German invocations of the slavery analogy remarked by Bonnie S. Anderson in the following chapter, from Hippel to Dittmar, seem clearly traceable to the French Revolution, if not indeed to the French debates that preceded it. Were the great names of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political theory, then, merely responding to concerns their readers were already familiar with? Would it be too much to claim that in France demands for the radical reform of marriage and individual liberty by feminists preceded, and may have even served as a mental template for, support of Enlightenment demands for liberty, equality, and justice, and for the antislavery sentiment that developed only a good deal later? To be able to claim, against the notion that ‘‘There are no slaves in France,’’ that there were indeed millions of slaves—all of the feminine gender—on home soil, was provocative, to say the least. In conclusion, I would argue that this French current of feminist thought which deployed the slavery analogy on behalf of women’s rights had far

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greater significance than has previously been thought for the unwinding of the ‘‘family-state compact’’ and patriarchal rule in Enlightenment thought and revolutionary practice. Its importance, since the French Revolution, for feminists and abolitionists in the Anglophone world, from William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler to Anna Knight, John Stuart Mill, the Grimké sisters, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—and the Germanophone world, including Louise Dittmar and Luise Aston—must not be underestimated.∑≥ By equating the legal subjugation of wives with slavery, and insisting that it be remedied, these French feminists (women and men) had heightened consciousness that all forms of slavery—wherever situated, and whomever oppressed— might be not only politically incorrect but morally wrong. Already by the time of the French Revolution, it was clear to many that to attempt restricting the understanding of ‘‘Man’’ (l’Homme) to men, and propertied European males (mostly though not all white) at that, to reassert male dominance in the face of a well-established critique, was morally and ethically intolerable. In the early French Revolution (1791–92), we see the mixing of the claims and a series of actual legislative triumphs for single and married women alike. That colonial slavery and marital obedience were both reinstated in the early 1800s does not deprive the earlier developments of their immense historical significance. An important precedent had been set. Yet it is often overlooked due to scholars’ prior fascination with the Jacobins’ exclusion of women from political citizenship.∑∂ From my perspective, that is the wrong starting point. Even as, in the early nineteenth century, some French women began to write eloquently about black slavery,∑∑ others continued to insist—as they had during the Revolution and well before—that women’s emancipation was the key to all other emancipations. Granted, there was no organized ‘‘movement’’ here in the conventional sense, due to harsh governmental restrictions that severely hampered political association and activity, and memories of seventeenthcentury novels may not have been uppermost in the minds of the agitators. But there was an atmosphere, a train of thought, of ‘‘the thinkable’’ that must have had a profound influence, if only in stirring up a resistance that tried, oh so very hard, to develop new, impenetrable lines of argumentative defense. Opponents quickly shifted from ‘‘public utility’’ arguments to arguments from ‘‘Nature.’’ The result was an elaborately constructed fortress of ‘‘scientific’’ arguments and publications supporting sexism and racism, which have since become all too familiar.∑∏ The power of the slavery analogy, for feminists, was its insistence that women, and particularly women who married, were individuals in their own right, that they possessed ‘‘human rights’’ and free will and could not be legally

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disposed of like chattel or forced, even for family reasons, to do things against their will. They sought ‘‘women’s rights.’’ The slavery analogy applied to marriage struck at the heart of institutionalized male domination in the family, and it continued to haunt the Western consciousness and to inspire subsequent generations of feminist action, both by women and by men well into the twentieth century, when in most countries the legal institution of marriage was totally (however reluctantly) restructured. It continues to characterize feminist campaigns against sexual slavery and the traffic in women into the twentyfirst century, as Judith Resnik’s chapter suggests. The Anglo-American narrative of slavery, abolition—and sisterhood—is not the only possible narrative. Wouldn’t it, then, be fitting to add Mlle de Scudéry and her successors who staffed La Voix des femmes in 1848 to the transatlantic feminist antislavery Pantheon? ∑π Wouldn’t it be fitting also to insist that we pay more attention to the impact of early secular French feminist criticism of gender relations (the critique of the marriage institution as de facto sexual slavery) in stimulating protests against all forms of slavery and exploitation, as well as the other way around? Notes In addition to the Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition at Yale University, in particular David Brion Davis and Rob Forbes, my thanks go to members of the Scholars’ Seminar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University; the New York French History Seminar (especially Jeff Horn, Tip Ragan, and Laura Schor); and to Sarah Hanley, Malik Ghachem, and Joan de Jean for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. 1. Quotes from ‘‘Les Femmes!,’’ La Voix des femmes, no. 3 (23 March 1848), p. 2. This document, dated Paris, 16 March 1848, signed by Antomine André de Saint-Gieles and a number of other women, was subsequently published in La Voix. A translation of the Saint-Gieles document, from an 1849 republication, can be consulted in Early French Feminisms, ed. Felicia Gordon and Máire Cross (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), pp. 67–69. On the specific question of women’s demands for the vote in 1848, see Karen Offen, ‘‘Women and the Question of ‘Universal’ Suffrage in 1848: A Transatlantic Comparison of Suffragist Rhetoric,’’ NWSA Journal, 11:1 (Spring 1999), 150–177, with additional documents in French and in English translation. 2. See Sue Peabody’s very informative study, ‘‘There Are No Slaves in France’’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) for a survey of the case law that resulted during the eighteenth century, when slave owners from the French West Indies tried to bring their slaves back to the mainland, or slaves who had arrived on French soil sued for their freedom. On p. 145, n. 14, Peabody points to the critical distinction between ‘‘né libre’’ (born free) and ‘‘affranchi’’ (emancipated).

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3. Texts from La Voix des femmes, as translated in Offen (1999), note 1 above. Note that the French word ‘‘femme’’ can mean ‘‘woman’’ or ‘‘wife.’’ Before marriage, the term was ‘‘jeune fille.’’ 4. Jeanne Deroin, ‘‘Aux citoyens Français,’’ La Voix des femmes, no. 7 (27 March 1848); doc. 2 in Offen (1999). 5. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings! The First International Women’s Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 115. 6. See the texts by Condorcet (1790) and Olympe de Gouges (1791), transl. in Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), I, docs. 24 and 26 (hereafter WFF). See also the paper by Gregory S. Brown, ‘‘Abolitionism and Self-Fashioning: Olympe de Gouges and her Esclavage des Noirs, 1783–1792’’ (1999) in Proceedings, Western Society for French History, ed. Barry Rothaus, vol. 27 (2001), 210–219. These texts, and the other feminist texts from the revolutionary period cited below and in my recent book, lie outside the corpus of officially solicited male-authored Cahiers de doléances, invoked by Seymour Drescher in his article in this volume to ‘‘prove’’ an absence of French interest in either women’s rights or antislavery. Many other published examples of women’s emancipation claims from the unofficial sector have been rediscovered and some have even been reprinted: see, for example, the two-volume collection Les Femmes dans la Révolution française, 1789–1794, présentés par Albert Soboul (Paris: EDHIS, 1982) and, more recently, Christiane Veauvy and Laura Pisano, Paroles oubliées: Les femmes et la construction de l’état-nation en France et en Italie, 1789–1860 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), a work that also underscores the use of the slavery analogy by feminists critiquing institutionalized marriage. 7. I deliberately use the words ‘‘feminist’’ and ‘‘feminism’’ to signify both the critical theory and practice of challenging male domination (or, to put it less confrontationally, contesting female subordination), even though the words were not in use until the 1880s and 1890s; see Karen Offen, ‘‘On the French Origin of the Words ‘Feminism’ and ‘Feminist,’ Feminist Issues 8, no. 2 (Fall 1988), 45–51, and ‘‘Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,’’ Signs: Journal of Women in Society and Culture 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1988), 119–57; see also Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). On occasion feminist activity can develop a magnitude of political activity and networks of supporters sufficient to allow us to speak of a ‘‘movement,’’ but although one might quibble about how many feminists it takes to make a movement, in no case can one view all ‘‘women’s movements’’ as feminist, nor can one view all activist women as feminists; indeed, men can be (and have historically been) feminists. The indisputably important British women’s antislavery movement, analyzed so well in this volume by Clare Midgley and Seymour Drescher, would not, for the most part, qualify as ‘‘feminist’’ in my historically grounded understanding of the term, which is not to say that feminist sensibility and/or activity does not emerge among some of its participants—as the cases of Anne Knight (below) and Marion Kirkland Reid (not discussed in these chapters) make clear. 8. On Montesquieu, see Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), esp. chap. 7, on the inconclusive debate among men in Letter 38 (1721) as to ‘‘whether the natural law

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subjects women to men.’’ Edward Derbyshire Seeber credits the beginning of antislavery opinion to Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois (1748); see his Anti-Slavery Opinion in France During the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Greenwood Press). Seeber’s otherwise useful discussion seems impervious to the ‘‘woman question.’’ Nor do his slaves have a gender; they all seem to be implicitly male. Hanley (AHR, 1997; see note 12 below) insists that Montesquieu, all too familiar with women’s juridical protests and factums during his years as a judge, ‘‘was determined to perpetuate marital-regime governance’’ and in fact attempted to discredit French wives’ complaints about their marital servitude (pp. 42–43) by pointing to the more extreme Persian harem example. Joan B. Landes, in her Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), is particularly critical of Montesquieu. Janet Gurkin Altman proposes a more subtle and progressive reading in ‘‘Strategic Timing: Women’s Questions, Domestic Servitude and the Dating Game in Montesquieu,’’ EighteenthCentury Fiction, 13:2–3 (Jan.–April 2001), 325–348. 9. An older article brings this point out beautifully. See Robert F. O’Reilly, ‘‘Montesquieu: Anti-feminist,’’ in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Bestermann, vol. 102 (1973), pp. 143–156. Montesquieu stated in several places that slavery was against natural law, since men were born free and independent. In his texts, ‘‘les hommes’’ clearly meant ‘‘men,’’ not ‘‘man.’’ 10. See Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), etc. My argument here initially follows rather similar lines—but diverges in not criticizing these authors for misrepresenting African-Caribbean slaves. Indeed, most of the early French authors I discuss here were not expressly referring to African-Caribbean, i.e., black, slaves as such; this had obviously changed by the late 1700s. But even then the references are rather vague. Few, if any of these writers had any direct exposure to slavery of blacks in the colonies. It is worth mentioning here that even before Astell or Aphra Behn, the slavery analogy had already been invoked, along with condemnation of men’s usurping tyranny and assertions of women’s equality to men in nature, in various works of the 1650s and 1660s by Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. On the Duchess, see the work of Hilda L. Smith, esp. Reason’s Disciples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); should we be surprised to discover that the duchess was reading her French contemporaries—the very authors who were also denouncing the slavery of women? 11. Cited in Moira Ferguson, p. 25. The quotation is from Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700). 12. Notably, in Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). Pateman argues that, with the development of modern contract theory, the shift was from the power of fathers to that of brothers. In the sources I am looking at, however, it is the power of husbands that is contested. 13. Louis XIV had been crowned at age six but did not take power in his own right until 1661, when he reached age eighteen. In the interim, the ‘‘Fronde’’—an outright civil war—had taken place, during which women played a considerable part. 14. In a 1994 article, ‘‘The Monarchic State in Early Modern France: Marital Regime Government and Male Right,’’ in Politics, Ideology, and the Law in Early Modern

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Europe, ed. Adrianna E. Bakos (Rochester: Univ. of Rochester Press, 1994), Sarah Hanley briefly refers to the ‘‘analogic equivalencies’’ between marriage and slavery (pp. 121– 122), but her point is that the tyranny/slavery juxtapositions could be used to undermine kingly authority, in his capacity of husband of his kingdom; she does not focus as such on what I would call feminist arguments. In a subsequent article, published in the American Historical Review in 1997 (‘‘Social Sites of Political Practice in France: Lawsuits, Civil Rights, and the Separation of Powers in Domestic and State Government, 1500–1800,’’ 102:1 [Feb. 1997], 27–52; quotes above, p. 45), Hanley’s implicit (subtextual) argument is that women’s attacks on male authority in marriage in the trial and pamphlet literature may have effectively served to undermine the French monarchy itself, undergirded as it was by arguments for male marital authority and the exclusion of women from succession to the throne; here the feminists’ criticism of the subjection of wives effectively become the vehicle for stating liberal principles, and in particular, arguing for a separation of powers. My argument here attempts to flesh out and build on Hanley’s earlier observations, but by going in a different, though complementary, direction. Hanley’s objective in the AHR article and in her forthcoming book is to demonstrate the centrality of gender politics to state-formation practices and political criticism in France prior to 1789, to move back the date at which ‘‘public opinion’’ begins to make a difference, and to locate its sites of practice in legal matters; my point in this chapter, which insists on the importance of French women’s political culture, is somewhat different. 15. Joan de Jean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), and ‘‘Notorious Women: Marriage and the Novel in Crisis in France, 1690–1715,’’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4:2 (1991), 67–85. 16. See especially Siep Stuurman, ‘‘L’Égalité des sexes qui ne se conteste plus en France: Feminism in the Seventeenth Century,’’ in Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History, ed. Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 67–84, and Stuurman, Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of Modern Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). In his Introduction, Stuurman insists that ‘‘To have turned gender into a publicly contested notion was perhaps seventeenth-century French feminism’s most enduring accomplishment, and, I would argue, its major legacy to the Enlightenment.’’ Note that this process began well before the attacks on the absolute authority of Louis XIV. 17. American women came to this place from the other direction, their critique of laws, education, and customs that held women back deriving from their critique of black slavery, as the remarks of Abby Kelley and others show; see David Brion Davis’s introduction and also Bonnie S. Anderson’s chapter. 18. Certainly the cruel treatment of slaves in the New World by the Spaniards was known to the French public, primarily through translations into French of Spanish works. 19. In fact, there were also sixteenth-century precedents. Agrippa de Nettesheim uses this language, as do other texts cited by Hanley, Pierre Matthieu’s Vasthi (1589). See also Nicole Estienne’s Misères de la femme mariée (1619), which speaks the language of subjection, tyranny, injustice, and deprivation of liberty; see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

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1990), pp. 272–273. See also Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995), for a mostly British account. Such critical allegations extended right up to 1789, as for example in Esprit Michel Laugier, Tyrannie que les hommes ont exercée dans presque tous les temps et les pays contre les femmes (London and Paris: chez l’auteur, 1788). 20. This is suggested by David Brion Davis, ‘‘Introduction: The Problem of Slavery,’’ in A Historical Guide to World Slavery, ed. Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xiii. 21. Madeleine de Scudéry, Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53) (Geneva: Slatkine reprints, 1972); Clélie, Histoire romaine (1654–60) (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1973). It should be pointed out, however, that in the ‘‘Sappho harangue’’ in her 1642 Les Femmes illustres, Scudéry is already using the language of slavery and chains, both in respect to the need for the education of slaves, but also to describe the sensual hold women exercise over men. Following Clélie, her next novel was Almahide, ou l’Esclave Reine, which began to appear in 1660. The question of slavery and the problem of independence for women was clearly of deep interest to Scudéry and, one presumes, to her readers. 22. Abbé Michel de Pure, La Prétieuse, ou le mystère des ruelles (1656–58), ed. E. Magne, 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie E. Droz, 1938), I: 281, and II: 268–69. As translated by Carolyn C. Lougee, in Le Paradise des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 22 and 17 respectively. 23. The famous playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin de Molière deliberately plays with the slavery/marriage analogy in several of his comedies. In Act III of The School for Wives (L’École des femmes) (1662; published 1663), the father figure Arnolphe gives his daughter Agnes a list of ‘‘Marriage maxims, or The Duties of a Married Woman,’’ to read. Included in the duties is to avoid meetings of women where marriage is criticized. In Act I of Les Femmes savantes (1672), Molière ridicules the aversion to marriage through his character, the intellectual Armande, who is critical of her sister’s intention to marry, but even he cannot resist the slavery analogy: ‘‘Why marry, and be the slave of him you wed? Be married to philosophy instead . . .’’ But Molière quickly redirects the criticism, focusing instead on his purported marriage critic’s aversion to ‘‘bestial natures’’ and ‘‘lusts,’’ i.e., insinuating that Armande is, at base, anti-sex, not anti-structure. He then puts the language of marital slavery into the mouth of Henriette’s suitor, Clitandre, and Chrysale (the henpecked father of Armande and Henriette) makes his celebrated speech against women’s learning philosophy and science at the expense of their household duties. The maid Martine becomes an apologist for male rule! The long-term impact of these plays and the way in which they promulgated the slavery analogy, as well as the better-known and deadly serious but wickedly amusing antifeminist criticism they contained, among French play-goers and readers over several centuries should not be underestimated. But these plays have been subject to far more study than the novels of the period. 24. François Poullain de La Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673); the first English translation was published in 1677, based on Poullain’s 2nd ed. (1676), and has been republished as The Woman as Good as the Man, Or, the Quality of Both Sexes, ed. Gerald M. MacLean (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). See also the new

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translation in François Poullain de La Barre, Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises: Introduction and Annotations by Marcelle Maistre Welch; Translation by Vivien Bosley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 25. De Jean, Tender Geographies, p. 5. The historian Lynn Hunt is now extending this point by revisiting the heroines in eighteenth-century novels by Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Pamela, Clarissa, and Julie. 26. Joan de Jean, ‘‘Notorious Women: Marriage and the Novel in Crisis in France (1690–1715),’’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, 4:2 (1991), 67–85; quote, p. 74. 27. See Gillian Weiss, ‘‘Processions of Redemption from Barbary to France,’’ unpublished paper presented to the French Culture Workshop, Stanford University, 25 January 2001, and Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves and Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). It is particularly interesting that in the years 1644–46 there were several processions of redeemed Christian slaves originating in, or passing through, Marseille, which Georges and Madeleine de Scudéry may very well have witnessed. 28. Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Paris: Th. Jolly, 1667), vol. 2, pp. 382–383 (Siep Stuurman’s translation). 29. On Mlle Aïssé, see the article by Valerie Lastinger and translated letters in Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women, ed. Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 543–557. 30. See Sarah Maza, Private Lives, Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). 31. See, for example, Montesquieu’s long unpublished fragment from ‘‘Mes Pensées’’: ‘‘Il faut remarquer qu’excepté dans des cas que de certaines circonstances ont fait naître, les femmes n’ont jamais guère prétendu à l’égalité: car elles ont déjà tant d’autre avantages naturels, que l’égalité de puissance est toujours pour elles un empire.’’ Oeuvres complètes, I:1076 (item 581). 32. Cited from the manuscripts by Anicet Senechal, ‘‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin, d’après de documents inédits, avec un inventaire des papiers Dupin dispersés en 1957 et 1958,’’ Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 36 (1963– 65), p. 243. My emphasis added in quote. As of the mid-1960s, when Senechal’s inventory was published, the original pages of Art. 27 had been acquired by the University of Texas, Austin, but I have not had the opportunity to verify this. Other related manuscripts from this immense collection are held at Yale University. 33. ‘‘Lettre de M. d’Alembert à M. J. J. Rousseau sur l’article, ‘Genève,’ tiré du VIIe volume de l’Encyclopédie . . .’’ (1759); in Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Oeuvres philosophiques, historiques, et littéraires, vol. 5 (Paris, 1805), 349–56. Transl. KO. Compare also the two slightly earlier articles in the Encyclopédie by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, ‘‘Esclavage’’ (vol. 5, 1755), and ‘‘Femme’’ (vol. 6, 1756). In the first, the author condemns slavery outright; in the second, he points out that ‘‘the reasons that can be alleged for marital power could be contested, humanly speaking,’’ and insists that marriage is nothing more than a contract whose terms might be flexible enough to rearrange male authority. 34. Quoted from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, trans. Lester G. Crocker (New York: Pocket Books, 1967), p. 7. See commentary on this point in my 1980s exchanges with a textbook publisher, who tried to

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defend the indefensible position that Rousseau’s use of ‘‘man’’ included women (Karen Offen, ‘‘Women’s History and Textbooks—A Moral Tale,’’ Newsletter of the Conference Group on Women’s History [CCWHP/CGWH], 14: 2 [ June 1983]). 35. See, among other examples, Esprit Michel Laugier, Tyrannie que les hommes ont exercée dans presque tous les temps et les pays contre les femmes (London and Paris: chez l’auteur, 1788). 36. By the mid-eighteenth century, the slavery analogy even appears in French discussions of captive animals, especially elephants who are put to work by humans; see Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), chapter 7—‘‘Elephant Slaves.’’ The naturalist Buffon seems to have been responsible for launching this usage. Thanks to Orest Ranum for this reference. The actual situation of black slave women in the Indies was not well documented. Only recently have scholars begun to piece together the evidence. See Arlette Gautier, Les Soeurs du solitude: La condition féminine dans l’esclavage aux Antilles du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions Caribéennes, 1985), and Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 37. See Doris Y. Kadish and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, eds. Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994). 38. See the appraisal of the French abolitionists’ concerns in the late 1780s and early 1790s by William B. Cohen, in his book The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 150–154. 39. Requête des dames à l’Assemblée Nationale (1789), reprinted in Les Femmes dans la Révolution française, 1789–1794, présentés par Albert Soboul, vol. 1 (Paris, 1982). Trans. by Karen Offen. This translation has been published in CD-ROM format, accompanying Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution, ed. Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001). 40. Marie-Madeleine Jodin, Vues législatives d’une femme, as trans. in its entirety by Felicia Gordon in appendix to Felicia Gordon and P. N. Furbank, Marie-Madeleine Jodin, 1741–1790: Actress, philosophe, and feminist (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate Publishers, 2001). 41. Olympe de Gouges, ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen’’ (1791), WFF, I, doc. 26, pp. 107–108. Trans. by Nupur Chaudhuri, with Bell and Offen. 42. Pierre Guyomar, Le Partisan de l’égalité politique entre les individus, ou problème très important de l’égalité en droits et de l’inégalité en fait (Paris, 1793), published in annex to Session of 29 April, Convention Nationale, in Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, 63 (Paris, 1903), 591–599. Trans. KO. The ‘‘article’’ referred to in Guyomar’s text is presumably from the draft constitution of 1793. 43. As Roderick Phillips and others have shown, women filed for divorce in numbers that, to critics, seemed alarmingly large. See James F. Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), and Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and his earlier work on divorce in France. The historian

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Elisabeth G(uibert) Sledziewski insists on the importance of the legal reforms of 1791–92 for emancipating French women, and thus changing forever the family structure that had bolstered the old society of orders. Her article in English, ‘‘The French Revolution as the Turning Point,’’ in A History of Women, ed. Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) briefly summarizes arguments elaborated more extensively in French; see ‘‘Naissance de la femme civile,’’ La Pensée, no. 239 (March–April 1984), 34–48, and ‘‘La Femme, objet de la Révolution, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 267 (Jan.–March 1987), 1–16. Barrie Rose also insists on this point in ‘‘Feminism, Women and the French Revolution,’’ Historical Reflections/Refléctions Historiques, 21:1(1995), 187–205. 44. Shanti Marie Singham, ‘‘Betwixt Cattle and Men: Jews, Blacks, and Women and the Declaration of the Rights of Man,’’ in The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 114–153; quote, 149. 45. See in particular, Roderick Phillips, Family Breakdown in Late Eighteenth-Century France: Divorces in Rouen, 1792–1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), along with his earlier articles. 46. For the adverse reaction to civil divorce (and its possibilities for women), see Suzanne Desan, ‘‘Marriage, Religion and Moral Order: The Catholic Critique of Divorce During the Directory,’’ in The French Revolution and the Meaning of Citizenship, ed. Renée Waldinger, Philip Dawson, and Isser Woloch (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993), 201–210. See also Desan’s new book, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004). 47. See the documents translated in Bell and Offen, Women, the Family, and Freedom (1983); in Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), and in Felicia Gordon and Máire Cross, eds. Early French Feminisms 1830–1940: A Passion for Liberty (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996). 48. See Offen, European Feminisms, chaps. 3 and 4. 49. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘‘ ‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,’’ Pacific Historical Review, 59 (1990), 453–499; reprinted in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 50. Undated 1848 letter from Anne Knight to an unnamed recipient, quoted in ‘‘Anne Knight, A Woman’s Pioneer,’’ in The Englishwoman’s Review, 15:1 (15 January 1884), p. 11. Despite her French connections, Anne Knight does not even merit mention in the study by Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 51. Voix des femmes, no. 11 (31 March 1848) and no. 24 (15 April 1848). 52. The French protestant pastor A. Coquerel was the nephew of Helena Maria Williams, a friend of Mary Wollstonecraft. Her husband, David Williams, had served in the revolutionary assemblies in the 1790s. Both were firm partisans of women’s emancipation. Coquerel had been raised by the Williamses, and thus his interventions on the

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woman question (in particular, his report to the National Assembly on closing the women’s clubs in June 1848) carried a great deal of symbolic baggage. 53. Even the French-based scholar Françoise Basch does not see this; see her article on the American case, ‘‘Rights of Women and the Wrongs of Marriage,’’ History Workshop Journal, no. 22 (Autumn 1986), 18–40. 54. I have argued against this approach in European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 55. Claire de Duras, Ourika (1823). This short, best-selling novel about a Senagalese girl raised in France as a Frenchwoman by an aristocratic patronesse has recently been republished both in French and in English translation (by John Fowles) by the Modern Language Association, New York. Fowles characterizes the book as the ‘‘first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind’’ (p. xxx, in the MLA English edition)— and, one might add, the world of unspoken but deeply felt racial prejudice. Significantly, the author’s mother’s family was from Martinique. 56. For an introduction to this massive backlash, see Geneviève Fraisse, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 57. Cf. Catherine Marand-Fouquet, ‘‘Olympe de Gouges au Panthéon,’’ in La Démocratie ‘à la française,’ ou les femmes indésirables, ed Éliane Viennot (Paris: CEDREF, Université de Paris VII, 1996), 269–278.

4

Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists bonnie s. anderson

In my book Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830 to 1860, I maintained that early radical feminists in both Europe and the United States seized upon the concept of emancipation to advance their unpopular cause. In this chapter, I will briefly recapitulate my reasoning there and expand it with regard to women in the German states and France. Throughout, I come to this subject from the direction of feminism, rather than antislavery. Although the two causes were often intertwined by American and British feminists in this era, who applied the concept of emancipation to women’s situation relatively easily, in Germany and France the word had different associations and resonance. In Europe, the French Revolution of 1789 extended the concept of emancipation to people who were not enslaved. ‘‘Emancipation’’ was increasingly used to signify the hoped-for liberation of oppressed groups: the Third Estate, the peasantry, serfs, and Jews. During the revolutionary era European feminists, among them Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, and the German Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, applied the term to all women, whether married or not. Hippel’s 1792 treatise, On Improving the Status of Women, declares that men have enslaved women since the dawn of time. Hippel forcefully maintained that ‘‘the oppression of women is the cause of all the rest of the oppression in the world.’’ He argued that this ancient enslavement intensified in his own day

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when the revolutionary French government refused to enfranchise ‘‘an entire half of a nation,’’ thus depriving the female sex of equal rights, even though they ‘‘worked themselves to break the fetters in which the nation lay.’’ An Enlightenment figure who supported the principles of the French Revolution while deploring its violence, Hippel, like other contemporary feminists, pragmatically urged the French government to ensure its democracy and liberalism by granting equal rights to women: even if slavery is tolerated and practiced on but a small scale, in the short or the long run it makes slaves of us all. Under a lenient, moderate governmental system whose powers are not unlimited, the woman has from time immemorial counted for more than in despotic states, where the slavery of the woman is politically necessary.∞

Hippel died in 1796 and his works fell into obscurity, but this association of feminist principles with the French Revolution severely handicapped Germans who wanted an improvement of women’s status throughout the nineteenth century. ‘‘Many excellent reforms have encountered a long and obdurate resistance on this side of the Rhine simply because they were said to be a product of the upheaval of 1789,’’ two German feminists wrote in 1884, and the women’s movement, in addition to its unfortunate origin [in France], was brought into disrepute as the ‘Emancipation of Women.’ The greatest stumbling-block in our way has been the signification given to this term, and we tacitly agreed to avoid its use, although it was impossible to find one which could exactly replace it.≤

Compounding emancipation’s unfortunate provenance for Germans was its use by the French Saint-Simonian movement in the early 1830s. The SaintSimonian concept of ‘‘emancipation of the flesh’’ was usually interpreted by both male Saint-Simonians and society as a whole as ‘‘free love’’—the right to end marriages, engagements, and sexual liaisons at will, regardless of law, religion, or the existence of children engendered by such unions. The French author George Sand’s immense influence as the embodiment of the ‘‘emancipated woman’’ beginning in the 1830s and her claiming ‘‘freedom of the heart’’ for the female sex contributed to the sexualization of the concept of female emancipation. Thus the linkage of women and any word meaning greater independence—emancipation, freedom, liberation, or liberty— was invariably interpreted sexually in this period, especially in the German states but also throughout the Western community. The all-male Young Germany literary movement of the 1830s ‘‘wanted the ‘femme libre’ [the SaintSimonian term for the ‘‘free woman’’ who practiced ‘‘emancipation of the flesh’’] and dreamed of unbounded sexual pleasure,’’ writes German literary

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scholar Renate Möhrmann.≥ Historian Carola Lipp comments that ‘‘45 years of enmity to France hindered the 1848 reception of Frenchwomen’s progress. When ‘emancipation’ was typically used in Württemberg, it meant emancipation in the french style’’ and presented ‘‘pictures which Württemberg women could hardly identify with.’’∂ Given these difficulties with the application of emancipation to women’s situation, what is surprising is how often German feminists used it in the 1830s and ’40s. Where did they encounter the concept? In her first feminist piece, published under the ‘‘half-pseudonym’’ Otto Stern in 1843 and titled ‘‘Female Emancipation,’’ Louise Otto called ‘‘emancipation . . . the catchword of our day.’’∑ In part, the word was in the air because of discussions about the retrograde political and social situation in the German states. The Germanies were considered politically backward in this period, a situation which conservatives lauded and liberals deplored. Lacking constitutions, basic civil liberties, and established rights, Germans turned to the language of liberation— both religious and secular—to transform their situation. German feminists certainly encountered the term ‘‘emancipation’’ in contemporary discussions about freeing German Jews from existing legal restrictions and penalties. But the discourse over ‘‘emancipating’’ Jews by admitting them to civil equality drew on the language of the universal rights of man while debating whether the Jews’ ‘‘faith’’ or ‘‘race’’ disqualified them from being part of a ‘‘fatherland’’ founded on Christianity and Germanic descent.∏ The vocabulary used by early German feminists was completely different. It reflected the belief that the situation of German women was not equal to that in other Western nations. Germans only think of woman ‘‘as a hausfrau, not a rational being and intellectual companion,’’ as English reformer William Howitt complained after he and his wife, Mary, had lived in Heidelberg from 1840 to 1843.π To protest this oppression, Germans who wanted to improve women’s status employed the language of abolitionism. Not only ‘‘emancipation,’’ but ‘‘slavery,’’ ‘‘chains,’’ ‘‘bondage,’’ ‘‘fetters,’’ and ‘‘masters’’ appear frequently in their writings. Linkage to the contemporaneous Anglo-American antislavery movements could have been provided by the press, by correspondence, and by foreign visitors like the Howitts. The couple arrived in Heidelberg right after the London World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, where they vigorously protested that body’s decision not to let the American female delegates take their seats.∫ Early German feminists frequently worked the radical concept that women were the slaves of men into their poetry, novels, and essays. While men could generally use such language free of sexual innuendo, women carried the extra burden of having to reject insinuations that they advocated their own emancipation only to be sexually liberated. They

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also came under far more severe criticism than their male counterparts if they dared to question religious orthodoxy, as in the case of Louise Aston. One strategy for Germans who wanted to claim more for women was to oppose the morality of their own countrywomen to the supposed licentiousness of the French. In her article on female emancipation, Louise Otto sought to distinguish between ‘‘the emancipation of women,’’ desired by ‘‘all who prize progress,’’ and ‘‘the emancipation of the flesh’’ of the French SaintSimonians, the source of ‘‘the shameless picture of the femme libre’’ before which ‘‘every German woman lowers her eyes.’’Ω A major theme in Ida Frick’s 1845 feminist fantasy, Women’s Slavery and Freedom, is that German women should reject the false French values of coquettishness, gallantry, and slavery to fashion in favor of superior German ‘‘simplicity,’’ ‘‘investigation of the self,’’ and freedom. Frick similarly opposed the ‘‘courage’’ of the women of early Germanic tribes to the decadence and false values of ancient Rome. Instead of chasing the ‘‘fool’s gold’’ of the social life of French salons, German women should cultivate ‘‘the moral purity of Northern women.’’∞≠ Linking women’s emancipation to Germanic values and nationalism was a strategy which would be employed throughout the nineteenth century—Louise Otto maintained it for much of her lengthy feminist career. But it contained problems of its own. Distancing female emancipation from both French revolutionary values and sexual liberation had the effect of weakening and diminishing the claims feminists were able to make on behalf of women. In this period the willingness to equate women’s situation with that of slaves is a marker of feminists’ radicalism. Otto herself was extremely wary of using such terms, reflecting the circumspection which led her also to downplay demands for women’s suffrage in these years. Once she dropped her male pseudonym, she avoided the language of slavery and emancipation and criticized those who employed it. Others were bolder. In her early novels, Luise Mühlbach repeatedly invoked these themes. The heroine of The Lively World (1841) refused ‘‘to be any man’s slave’’ because she ‘‘loves her freedom and will not surrender it for chains, whose weight one can never weigh before one has been fettered with them.’’ Her 1849 Aphra Behn compared the uprisings of Caribbean slaves to its heroine’s embrace of female emancipation. Based loosely on the life of the seventeenth-century English author, Aphra Behn contains powerful denunciations of female slavery: ‘‘I am a woman, that is my entire misfortune,’’ she said. ‘‘Men have taken everything from us, even the right of spiritual creation! We can only be the slaves of our husbands and bear their children, that is our duty and our

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Antislavery and Feminism profession. . . . But I, I want to be equal to men! I want to be free, not bound! . . . I don’t want to be a wife anymore, but rather a free, feeling, thinking, and purposeful human creature!’’∞∞

Other novelists, like Fanny Lewald and Ida Hahn-Hahn, also used emancipation and slavery to express their feminist ideas. In these years, when censorship still prevailed in many German states, writers worked feminist themes into their fiction and poetry, ensuring the spread of such ideas to a far wider audience than that reached by political tracts. In 1846, however, a real-life case involving the feminist author Louise Aston galvanized discussion of female emancipation in Germany. Unhappily married at twenty to an English industrialist twenty-four years her senior, Aston divorced her husband after nine years of marriage and moved to Berlin with her three-year-old daughter. Two years later, in 1846, she published a provocative poetry collection entitled Wild Roses. Many of her twelve poems challenged the limits of acceptable female expression. ‘‘A Sacred Ceremony’’ denounced both Christian priests and their religion for allowing marriages of convenience like Aston’s own. ‘‘Dithyrambe’’ thanked ‘‘the god of the grape vines’’ for destroying ‘‘the old world’’: ‘‘So might all that holds the heart in chains / Perish and die!’’ The refrain of ‘‘Life Motto’’ was ‘‘Free life, free love / May I always be true!’’ and the verses praised ‘‘the free choice of free hearts’’ and ‘‘love’’ which had been ‘‘oft enslaved, / Without rights or fatherland.’’ ‘‘To George Sand’’ extolled the French writer as ‘‘the free woman . . . Free from sin, because free from error. . . . Calmed by your spirit’s magic beams I can bravely scorn the crowd’s contempt: Let them pray before the golden calf And sacrilegiously slander the prophets; I stand with you, veiled from their eyes On the free heights in holy rapture!∞≤

A few days after the anthology appeared, the police, who had already received complaints about Aston’s presence in male taverns and cafés, reported her to the government. Interrogated by a Berlin magistrate about her beliefs on religion and marriage, Aston replied that she did not agree with either as currently constituted. The government then declared her ‘‘a danger to civic peace and order’’ and gave her eight days to leave the city.∞≥ Debate ensued in journals and newspapers. Aston publicized her side in My Emancipation, Proscription, and Justification, published of necessity in neutral Belgium later that year. She explained that what she longed for was Sand’s

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definition of female emancipation: ‘‘the right and dignity of women to participate in free relationships, in which an honorable approach to love can be cultivated.’’∞∂ Claiming the sexual side of female emancipation in Germany alienated many liberals. Louise Otto quickly distanced herself from Aston’s ‘‘immorality,’’ and Johannes Ronge, a leader of the German Catholic movement which supported feminist aspirations, denounced her. But Aston soon received important support from another emerging German feminist. Mathilde Franziska von Tabouillet, later Anneke, shared Aston’s experiences as an unhappily married woman, a divorcée, and a single mother attempting to raise a daughter on her own. In her 1847 defense of Aston, Woman in Conflict with Social Circumstances, Anneke questioned the double standard which blamed women for divorce and condemned them for the same religious beliefs admired in Spinoza and Hegel. She also expanded the argument that women were currently no better off than slaves. ‘‘Why do opinions which men have been able to hold for centuries seem so dangerous to the government when held by women?,’’ she asked, Because they nourish with their hearts’ blood . . . the belief . . . that they will never again let themselves be sold into slavery. Is this the reason? Yes it is, because truth upheld by women, goes forth as a conqueror which overthrows the thrones of tyrants and despots. Because truth alone will set us free and loosen the bonds of self-denial and the shackles of slavery.∞∑

An activist who ran a ‘‘communist salon’’ in Cologne with her second husband, a radical army officer, Anneke did not further develop her arguments about women’s slavery until she emigrated to America after the 1848–49 revolution. The revolution itself allowed German feminists to increase their demands for women and, in so doing, to use the radical imagery of slavery to make their case. Aston returned to Berlin after the March uprising and published her journal, The Freedom Fighter, there for seven months in 1848; its first issue asserted that women no longer had to remain ‘‘what they have always been— children or slaves.’’∞∏ Four other feminist periodicals appeared in these years: the Women’s Mirror, which has not survived, Anneke’s Women’s Newspaper, which ran for only three issues as a cloak for the outlawed socialist journal published by her husband, Otto’s Women’s Newspaper, and Louise Dittmar’s Social Reform. The last was the most radical. Dittmar, who published anonymously until her parents’ death, developed her feminist arguments at the freethinking Mannheim Monday Club, which included Jewish as well as Christian members. Alone

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among German feminists, she argued that there were no innate differences between the sexes. Dittmar analyzed women’s oppression as economically and politically based, argued for equal laws, education, and job training subsidized by the state, and defended the female right to sexuality. It is in the four issues of Social Reform, reprinted in 1849 as The Essence of Marriage, Along with Some Essays About Women’s Social Reform, that the concept of slavery is most frequently and forcefully applied to women’s situation.∞π ‘‘The freedom of women is the greatest revolution, not just of our own day, but of all time,’’ Dittmar proclaimed, ‘‘since it breaks fetters which are as old as the world.’’ Going on to argue that women were also enslaved by the ‘‘fetters of idealization’’ and the ‘‘shackles of beauty,’’ she concluded that women had been ‘‘victims’’ long enough. Unlike a number of American feminists, who tended to distinguish between slavery and poverty, Dittmar linked the two conditions. ‘‘As long as money rules, we [women] are slaves without money,’’ she asserted.∞∫ In her long essay on marriage, she argued that when women were financially and politically dependent, most marriages would be unhappy. Only the application of ‘‘democratic principles’’ to marriage itself could transform a situation in which ‘‘the political position of men vis-à-vis women is that of the patricians to the plebeians, of the free to the slaves.’’∞Ω In addition to her own writings, Dittmar published pieces from other writers and the radical revolutionary press. A lengthy essay from the Heidelberger Volksführer excoriated the current condition of most marriages: Men have, by virtue of the laws, put the weapons in their own hands . . . and many women bear, as signs of bondage and slavery, bruises on their bodies in honor of their husbands, since her strict married lord has inflicted these often for a meaningless petty crime. . . . Do not let mockery confuse the emancipation of women (liberation from slavish relationships) with those who make it seem ridiculous. . . . The fundamental rights of the German people have already been drafted. . . . It would be an insult to all noble-thinking men if they did not forthrightly help women to participate in this joyful freedom in all relations. Otherwise women must pass on their slave-chains from generation to generation.≤≠

Otto welcomed Dittmar’s Social Reform in the pages of her own Women’s Newspaper. Although she disagreed with some of Dittmar’s points, she supported her questioning of ‘‘the spiritual and material fetters of the entire female sex.’’≤∞ Similar opinions appeared in other radical papers. ‘‘Without exception, our women are more or less slaves of their husbands or relatives, or better said, the slaves of slaves,’’ wrote a Cologne journal in 1849, going on to

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urge new legislation and financial support to free poor women both from the ‘‘tyranny’’ of their husbands and the ‘‘inhumanity’’ of prostitution. ‘‘Freedom is moral; slavery immoral,’’ they concluded.≤≤ These writings represent the high watermark of German radicalism. As the revolution went under in the early 1850s, the use of slavery to characterize women’s lot disappeared from German discourse. Anneke and Aston went into exile, Dittmar never found another publisher, and Otto survived by remaining silent throughout the 1850s. Daring to criticize women’s oppression publicly by drawing on the vocabulary of abolitionism needed the support of a society which did not put people in jail at hard labor for voicing such opinions. When a German women’s movement reemerged in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was far more moderate and restrained than the radical feminism of mid-century. Although the denouement of French radical feminism mirrored that in the German states, its origins differed. Many French feminist documents of the 1789 era applied emancipation to women’s situation. While most Frenchwomen later repudiated both the Enlightenment and revolutionary models of womanhood in favor of domesticity, a native radical tradition survived. The early socialist Saint-Simonian movement was French in origin, and its selfnamed New Women frequently applied the analogy of slavery to the female condition. ‘‘Because we have deeply felt the slavery and nullity that weighs upon our sex, we are raising up our voices,’’ went the lead editorial of the first issue of the Saint-Simoniennes’ 1832 newspaper, La Femme Libre.≤≥ Sexual innuendoes in the male French press forced them to change its title, but these early feminists continued to use the term frequently. A women’s movement arose from the Saint-Simonian community because male leaders simultaneously nurtured female participation in the movement while severely limiting women’s agency. From its inception in the late 1820s, Saint-Simonianism welcomed women to its ranks, largely because of its belief that many of society’s ills had been generated by ignoring the supposedly innate female virtues of peace, harmony, and love. By the early 1830s, however, women within the movement complained that ‘‘male Saint-Simonians are more male than they are Saint-Simonian’’—that is, that the men were more interested in free love than in allowing women an equal share in the movement’s leadership.≤∂ In 1831 the few women already in the hierarchy were dismissed, and the movement’s new ‘‘Supreme Father’’ proclaimed that ‘‘female emancipation’’ could best be achieved by the ‘‘rehabilitation of the flesh’’ through free love while calling on women to ‘‘formulate for herself her law of the future.’’≤∑

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The result was the creation of the world’s first independent feminist movement. Naming themselves the ‘‘New Women,’’ Saint-Simoniennes analyzed their situation within both the community and society as a whole as that of slaves. ‘‘Women alone will say what freedom they want,’’ wrote ‘‘JoséphineFélicité’’ in the women’s journal, Whoever else may desire our freedom, I want it, and that is the essential point. I wanted it before encountering the Saint-Simonians or Monsieur Fourier. I want it in spite of those who oppose it, and . . . I am free. . . . It is now up to us to work for our liberty by ourselves; it is up to us to work for it without the help of our masters.≤∏

These New Women rapidly developed a new feminist vision of what society could become by rigorously applying the concepts of slavery and emancipation to existing structures and ideas. They discarded last names as signifiers of male dominion and female slavery. ‘‘If we continue to take the names of men . . . we will be slaves without knowing it,’’ wrote Désirée Véret; Jeanne Deroin asserted that ‘‘This custom which obliges the wife to take her husband’s name is nothing but a branding iron which prints on the slave’s forehead the initials of the master’s name.’’≤π The Saint-Simonian movement coined the phrase ‘‘the emancipation of the worker will lead to the emancipation of the woman.’’ The New Women first reversed this slogan, arguing that only female emancipation could lead to workers’ emancipation. Later they deconstructed this false opposition, arguing that since most women were workers, any true liberation must include both ‘‘material emancipation,’’ providing ‘‘everything that the people and women need,’’ as well as ‘‘social emancipation’’ from the false concept of male dominance. Building on the Saint-Simonian argument that capitalism had intensified the subordination of women, the New Women asserted that only egalitarian socialism could free women from slavery to men: ‘‘As long as a man provides us our material needs, he can also demand that in exchange we submit to whatever he desires, and it is very difficult to speak out freely when a woman does not have the means to live independently.’’≤∫ Increasingly, the New Women emphasized their need for financial emancipation from men through ‘‘a new organization of the household and industry.’’ While they debated the values and dangers of sexual liberation, they consistently stressed their need to be freed from the existing choices of marriage, prostitution, or jobs which did not pay enough to live on. ‘‘Once woman is delivered and emancipated from the yoke of tutelage and protection of man,’’ wrote Claire Démar, ‘‘once she no longer receives from man her food or wages, once man no longer pays her the price of her body, then women’s exis-

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tence and social position will derive only from her own ability and works.’’≤Ω Démar’s last writing, My Law of the Future (1833), attempted to envision what life might be like once ‘‘the heavy chain of slavery’’ had been cast off and woman had ‘‘repudiate[d] the injurious protection of the man who would call himself her master and is only her equal!’’≥≠ Arguing that women, like men, desired sexual change and freedom, Démar urged that society liberate women from the necessity to raise children by advocating ‘‘social motherhood.’’ First advanced in Plato’s Republic, this system had those best at it raise children instead of those who gave birth to them. Throughout, Démar used the analogy to slavery to urge the liberation of ‘‘man, woman, and child’’ from ‘‘the law of blood and from exploitation of humanity by humanity!’’≥∞ Démar’s pamphlet was reprinted in 1834, but later that year the SaintSimonian movement collapsed. Some of the New Women followed the ‘‘Supreme Father’’ to Egypt in a quest to find the female messiah; others continued to meet in Paris. From 1836 to 1838, they contributed to Gazette des femmes, a new feminist journal, edited by the de Mauchamps. Its strategy for feminist reform was to petition the legislature, a new tactic in France, and one which historian Claire Moses argues was adapted from the Anglo-American abolitionist movement. Between 1836 and 1839, numerous petitions for women’s rights were presented, unsuccessfully, to the French government.≥≤ One for the reinstatement of divorce asserted that Harmony between spouses, as in all kinds of association, can only result from relationship of equals . . . The hideous union of despotism and servitude perverts the master and the slave, and such is our nature that dependence obliterates all affection.≥≥

It was one of three petitions penned by the next French feminist to use the analogy to slavery to advance women’s rights, the individualistic and idiosyncratic Flora Tristan. Considering herself an independent loner, Tristan read and was influenced by Saint-Simonian writings. When she returned from her 1833–34 trip to Peru, she attended the weekly meetings of the Gazette des femmes editorial board. Her 1838 account of her South American journey, Peregrinations of a Pariah, is filled with comparisons of women to slaves. On a personal level, Tristan described her own situation as that of a woman ‘‘enslaved to a man at an age when all resistance was vain’’ by having married at seventeen. Arguing more universally, she declared that ‘‘In Europe, women are men’s slaves just as they are here [in Peru] and have to suffer even more from men’s tyranny.’’ Throughout, she analyzed the female situation as one of enslavement to individual men, as well as to the all-male institutions of church and state. She

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urged others to join her ‘‘in open revolt against a social order which sanctioned the enslavement of the weaker sex.’’≥∂ The paired themes of slavery and emancipation run throughout the remaining works of Tristan’s short life. Her dissection of social conditions in early industrial England focused on British hypocrisy, especially about freedom: In this country, which claims to be free . . . one half of the nation is not only deprived of its civil and political rights, it is also in many ways virtually enslaved; women can be sold in the market-place, and the legislative assembly denies them a place in its bosom. Oh shame! Shame on a society that persists in such barbarous customs! What ridiculous arrogance that England should insist on the right to impose her principles of liberty throughout the world! Yet where is there a country more oppressed than England: even the Russian serf is happier than the English factory worker or Irish peasant. Is there any place on earth where women do not enjoy more freedom than in the British Isles?≥∑

Tristan’s hyperbole should not obscure her perspicacious analysis of the situation facing English women and workers. Four years before Engels’s work on Manchester, she maintained that the condition of the English proletariat was even worse than that of most slaves, ‘‘but do not think for a moment that I should want to commit the sacrilege of condoning any form of slavery.’’ Early French feminists’ socialist background led them to see no conflict between the ‘‘pauperization’’ of industrial workers and the condition of chattel slaves— both seemed the inevitable result of exploitative economic systems. (American feminists generally argued that slaves were much worse off.)≥∏ In her last completed book, The Workers’ Union, Tristan continued to argue that ending the slavery of women through egalitarian, democratic socialism would benefit both the sexes and society as a whole. Her writings influenced other early European feminists. Subscribers to The Workers’ Union included Pauline Roland, Jeanne Deroin’s husband, and George Sand. The veteran English abolitionist Anne Knight copied pages of Tristan’s writings into her diary, in addition to most of Claire Démar’s My Law of the Future and other writings of the New Women. In the volatile months following the French Revolution of 1848, these women pressed hard for women’s rights, employing the argument that women’s situation resembled that of slaves or the proletariat, and that denying them basic civil liberties would cause the revolution to fail. Knight, who had welcomed the American female delegates to London in 1840, moved to Paris in 1847. During the revolution, she and Deroin addressed a number of public letters to government officials, urging ‘‘the com-

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plete abolition of all privileges of sex, of race, of birth, of caste, and of fortune’’ to ensure the success of the new republic. ‘‘I have fought for twenty years against the oppression of slavery; this question and that of the rights of women are one,’’ Knight wrote a French minister who had sponsored legislation outlawing women from joining political clubs.≥π Influenced by Knight, Tristan, and her early contact with Saint-Simonianism, Deroin worked this theme into her numerous writings of the revolutionary years—so much so that her biographer said that her life’s work could be summarized by a single word, ‘‘emancipation.’’ ‘‘Humanity goes forward . . . however, woman, still a slave, remains veiled and silent. . . . she has no name, no country, she is banished from the sanctuary . . . bent under the yoke of man,’’ she wrote in a series of lectures she delivered in 1848.≥∫ Her solution was complete equality, the ‘‘abolition’’ of all privileges. One of the first to oppose the socialist anti-feminism of P. J. Proudhon, in the pages of her feminist newspaper she deconstructed his famous dictum that women must be either ‘‘housewives or harlots’’: ‘‘To your dilemma, Monsieur, I will oppose another which for me is an axiom: slave and prostituted or free and chaste—for woman, there is no middle ground. Prostitution is the result of the slavery of women, of ignorance, and of poverty.’’≥Ω Deroin’s daring should not blind us to the difficulties that Frenchwomen faced in employing terms like emancipation and slavery. In March of 1848, a group of women formed the Society for the Emancipation of Women. Their manifesto demanded that liberty, equality, and fraternity be extended to the female sex to ensure the success of the revolution. But they felt compelled to add a footnote to the front page explaining their use of this controversial term: The word emancipation, in its positive and legitimate meaning, signifies, above all, intellectual and moral liberation. This first and superior condition being, for both sexes, the normal basis of all social progress. . . . The word emancipation is still so often abused that this explanatory note seemed necessary.∂≠

This diffidence—so similar to that of German women in the same era—presaged the imminent defeat of feminist claims. Activist women correctly feared that their demands and actions would be interpreted only sexually. In an era in which women in general were routinely referred as ‘‘the sex,’’ any attempt to introduce women’s rights to the legislature met with laughter and crude jokes. Female suffrage was defeated 899 to 1. The deposed king, Louis Philippe, had remarked that ‘‘she who gives birth should not rule,’’ and the male revolutionaries of 1848 expanded this dictum by insisting that women’s sexuality prevented them from any participation in the ‘‘public sphere’’ of government.∂∞ Proudhon’s views—that a woman’s value was two-thirds that of a man’s, that just as men could not be wet nurses, so women could not be legislators, that

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women divided into housewives or harlots—received the support of the left. The conservative right remained hostile to any extension of women’s rights. By the early 1850s, the French women’s movement, previously ‘‘the most advanced and the most experienced of all Western feminist movements,’’ writes Claire Moses, had been destroyed and silenced. Deroin went into exile in London, Roland died from her harsh life in prison, Suzanne Voilquin emigrated to Louisiana, others left for Belgium and Switzerland.∂≤ In the 1850s, a few stalwart Frenchwomen continued to press for feminism, but they were forced to begin by countering Proudhon. Juliet Adam’s Idées anti-proudhoniennes of 1858 continued to use the concept of emancipation on women’s behalf, but dropped any overt comparison to slavery. Over half her text was spent refuting the new socialist anti-feminism. Only Jenny P. d’Héricourt, previously associated with the Saint-Simonians, continued to use the slavery analogy consistently, and in the 1850s she could not get her writings published in France. But she too remained on the defensive. Her 1860 treatise, The Freed Woman, had as its subtitle A Reply to Monsieurs Michelet, Proudhon, etc. and d’Héricourt prudently avoided the French word ‘‘emancipée’’ in favor of the less provocative ‘‘affranchi.’’ However, d’Héricourt passionately battled Proudhon’s misogyny. In 1856, he had written that ‘‘the sort of crusade that is being carried on at this time by a few estimable ladies in both hemispheres in behalf of the prerogatives of their sex . . . [is] an infatuation that proceeds precisely from the infirmity of the sex and its incapacity to understand and govern itself.’’ D’Héricourt replied: An infatuation like that of slaves, pretending that they were created freemen; of the citizens of ’89 proving that men are equal before the law. Do you know who were, who are the infatuated? The masters, the nobles, the whites, the men who have denied, who do deny, and who will deny, that slaves, citizens, blacks, and women, are born for liberty and equality.∂≥

By 1860, when d’Héricourt wrote, this nation was on the brink of civil war. Within a few years, the United States ended legal slavery and Russia freed its serfs. Western feminists used the slavery analogy, which gained a great deal of its power from the actual existence of slaves within the Euro-American world, less often. When they did, they extended its reach. In 1867, when the Russian medical student Nadezhda Suslova successfully defended her thesis at the University of Zurich (one of the few medical schools to admit women in these years), Prof. Edmund Rose spoke on her behalf: ‘‘Her thesis proves the aptitude of women for scientific work better than any theoretical discussion of the Woman Question. Soon we are coming to the end of slavery for women, and

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soon we will have the practical emancipation of women in every country and with it the right to work.’’∂∂ ‘‘Soon’’ has not yet arrived, as Resnik’s chapter demonstrates. We can only hope that some of us may witness the time when the analogy of slavery to women’s situation will no longer be used because the conditions which created it have completely disappeared. Notes 1. Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Improving the Status of Women [Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber], trans. and ed. Timothy F. Sellner (1792; reprint, Detroit: Wayne State University, 1979), pp. 89, 188, 120–121, 104. 2. Anna Schepeler-Lette and Jenny Hirsch, ‘‘Germany,’’ in The Woman Question in Europe: A Series of Original Essays, ed. Theodore Stanton (1884; reprint, New York: Source Book, 1970), p. 140. 3. Renate Möhrmann, ed., Frauenemanzipation im deutschen Vormärz: Texte und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1978), p. 5. 4. Carola Lipp, ‘‘Frauen und Öffentlichkeit: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen politischer Partizipation im Vormärz und in der Revolution 1848,’’ in Carola Lipp, ed., Schimpfende Weiber und patriotische Jungfrauen: Frauen im Vormärz und in der Revolution 1848/49 (Moos & Baden-Baden: Elster Verlag, 1986), p. 298. 5. Otto Stern [Louise Otto], ‘‘Zur Frauenemancipation,’’ in Unser Planet: Blätter für Unterhaltung, Literatur, Kunst, und Theater, ed. Ernst Keil, 28 February, 1843, p. 107. Portions of this article are reprinted in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Die Anfänge der deutschen Frauenbewegung: Louise Otto-Peters (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), pp. 71–73. 6. For a nuanced discussion of these topics in Baden, see Dagmar Herzog, Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), chs. 2 and 3. Herzog argues that liberals were far more willing to accept Jewish emancipation than any feminist claims. 7. Cited in Amice Lee, Laurels and Rosemary: The Life of William and Mary Howitt (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 146. 8. For one example of the Howitts’ views, see Mary Howitt’s letter of 5 June 1840, printed in Mary Howitt: An Autobiography, ed. Margaret Howitt, 2 vols. (London: Wm. Isbister, 1889), vol. I, pp. 291–292. For a letter informing a German of the events at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, see Anna Jameson’s letter to Ottilie von Goethe, 2 July 1840, describing the rejection of the U.S. female delegates. Printed in G. H. Needler, ed., Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Goethe (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 126. 9. Otto Stern, ‘‘Zur Frauenemancipation,’’ p. 104. 10. Ida Frick, Der Frauen Sclaventhum und Freiheit: Ein Traum von Hans-HeilingFelsen (Dresden and Leipzig: Arnoldischen Buchhandlung, 1845), pp. 18, 52, 55. 11. This discussion is drawn from Renate Möhrmann, Die andere Frau: Emanzipationsansätze deutscher Schriftstellerinnen im Vorfeld der Achtundvierziger-Revolution

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(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1977), ch. III. The citations are on pp. 75 and 84. After 1850, Mühlbach, whose real name was Klara Mundt, turned conservative, renounced her earlier writings, and wrote historical novels about German royalty. 12. It is extremely difficult to obtain Aston’s writings today. The best source is Louise Aston, Ein Lesebuch: Gedichte Romane Schrifte in Auswahl (1846–1849), ed. Karlheinz Fingerhut (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1983), pp. 18–28. Fingerhut reprints only the four poems cited here. 13. Aston published the documents of her case in her book Meine Emancipation, Verweisung und Rechtfertigung (Brussels, 1846), pp. 11–34. These pages are reprinted in Möhrmann, ed., pp. 68–82. 14. Aston, Meine Emancipation, cited in Fingerhut, ed., p. 12. 15. Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnisse (1847), p. 11. The only existing copy of this work is in the Mathilde Franziska Anneke Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. 16. Portions of this first issue of Die Freischarler are reproduced in Ruth-Esther Geiger and Sigrid Weigel, eds., Sind das noch Damen: Vom gelehrten Frauenzimmer-Journal zum feministischen Journalismus (München: Frauenbuchverlag, 1981), pp. 47ff. 17. The best analysis of Dittmar is Dagmar Herzog’s encyclopedia entry, ‘‘Louise Dittmar,’’ in Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, eds., Women in World History (Waterford, Conn.: Yorkin Press, 1995), and Herzog’s chapter 5, ‘‘The Feminist Conundrum,’’ in her Intimacy and Exclusion. 18. Louise Dittmar, Das Wesen der Ehe, Nebst einigen Aufsätzen über dis soziale Reform der Frauen (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1849), pp. 119–120, p. 106. 19. Louise Dittmar, Das Wesen der Ehe (Leipzig: Otto Wiegand, 1850), pp. 5, 18–19. 20. Dittmar, Das Wesen der Ehe, Nebst. . . . , pp. 113–118. 21. Louise Otto, Frauen=Zeitung, #5, 19 May 1849, p. 70. 22. Der Verfolger der Bosheit, #33, 22 December 1849, p. 1ff., reprinted in Gerlinde Hummel-Haasis, ed., Schwestern zerreist eure Kettern: Zeugnisse zur Geschichte der Frauen in der Revolution von 1848/49 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), pp. 154–55. The title of this pioneering anthology of German feminist documents from 1848, Sisters, Break Your Chains, reflects the importance of the slavery analogy in that period. 23. La Femme Libre, vol. 1, #1, p. 6, reprinted in Claire Goldberg Moses and Leslie Wahl Rabine, Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 286. 24. Claire Goldberg Moses, ‘‘Saint-Simonian Men/Saint-Simonian Women: The Transformation of Feminist Thought in 1830s France,’’ Journal of Modern History, 54 (June, 1982), pp. 240–267; Suzanne Voilquin, Mémoires d’une saint-simonienne en Russie (1839–1846), ed. Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe (Paris: Editions des Femme, 1977), p. 15. 25. Moses and Rabine, p. 35ff. 26. Tribune des femmes, reprinted in Moses and Rabine, p. 291. 27. Tribune des femmes, reprinted in Moses and Rabine, p. 296; Jeanne Deroin, ‘‘Profession de Foi,’’ in Michèle Riot-Sarcey, ed., De la liberté des femmes: ‘‘Lettres de Dames’’ au Globe (1831–1832) (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1992), p. 135.

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28. Tribune des femmes, reprinted in Moses and Rabine, pp. 316, 290. 29. Tribune des femmes, reprinted in Moses and Rabine, p. 321. 30. Claire Démar, Ma Loi d’Avenir, reprinted in Moses and Rabine, p. 181. 31. Ibid., pp. 202–203. 32. Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 104–105; Moses and Rabine, pp. 76–77. For an analysis of female petitions to the French legislature between 1830 and 1848, see Michèle Riot-Sarcey, ‘‘Des femmes pétitionnent sous la monarchie de Juillet,’’ in Alain Corbin, Jacqueline Lalouette, and Michèle Riot-Sarcey, eds., Femmes dans la Cité (Grâne: Créaphis, 1997), pp. 389–400. 33. Cited in Máire Cross and Tim Gray, The Feminism of Flora Tristan (Oxford: Berg, 1992), p. 19. 34. Flora Tristan, Les Pérégrinations d’une Paria 1833–1834 (1838; reprinted Paris: Maspéro, 1979), pp. 173, 106, 174. 35. Jean Hawkes, trans., The London Journal of Flora Tristan (1840; reprint London: Virago Press, 1982), pp. 57–58. Tristan is referring to an account that a man had paraded his wife with a rope around her neck for sale at a Worcester market. For an analysis of this practice, see Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 85–87. 36. For a discussion of this topic in the United States, see Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), ch. 9, ‘‘The Problem of Slavery.’’ 37. Anne Knight, Jeanne Deroin, and A. François, ‘‘À M. le Président du Club du Peuple,’’ 18 June 1848, in the Anne Knight Papers, Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House, London; Anne Knight, ‘‘Lettre à M. A. Coquerel’’ (Paris: Madame de Lacombe, 1848), reprinted in La Voix des Femmes, #24, 25 April 1848. 38. Adrien Ranvier, ‘‘Une Féministe de 1848: Jeanne Deroin,’’ La Révolution de 1848: Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de la révolution de 1848, 4 (1907–1908), p. 321; Jeanne Deroin, Cours de droit social pour les femmes (Paris, 1848), p. 6. 39. L’Opinion des femmes, 2, 10 February 1849, p. 7. 40. Société pour l’emancipation des femmes: Manifeste, 16 March 1848, p. 1. 41. ‘‘Ce qui accouche ne doit pas régner.’’ Cited in Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 38. 42. Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 149. 43. Madame d’Héricourt, A Woman’s Philosophy of Woman, or Woman Affranchised (New York: Carleton, 1864), pp. 36–37. This is an abridged translation of d’Héricourt’s La Femme affranchi, 2 vols. (Brussels and Paris: A. Lacroix, Van Meenen, 1860). 44. Cited in Thomas Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 37.

5

Women’s Mobilization in the Era of Slave Emancipation: Some Anglo-French Comparisons seymour drescher

Opportunities for women’s participation in the public arena expanded in the period of the French Revolution. Voices in favor of European women’s rights and against Atlantic slavery became more distinct and more sharply focused on demands for action. It is less clear, however, that challenges to women’s subordination and black slavery in the Americas became equally salient or ‘‘inextricably paired’’∞ even during the Revolutionary era. A comparative perspective on two leading sites of agitation, Britain and France, may prove helpful in this regard. We must ask just how much public attention converged upon these two causes, and how salient each was for the other. We may then assess the impact of women’s mass mobilization against the Atlantic slave system. Was it also as significant in the history of women’s political empowerment as were the metaphors and movements more explicitly directed against the subordination of women to men? Finally, this chapter will briefly consider women’s involvement in antislavery as symptomatic of the long-term trajectory of Western civil society.

I. Before Mobilization Historians inclined to infer a logical or historical convergence between demands for an end to the oppression of slaves and demands for the empowerment of women are faced with the same contextual and analytic problems that 98

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have engrossed the attention of scholars of Atlantic slavery in general. By the time that the rulers of Spain and Portugal had established their overseas slaves systems Western Europeans were regarded as unenslavable by other Europeans. When northwestern European states joined the Atlantic slave system in the seventeenth century, their juridical traditions held that slavery could not exist in the air or on the soil of their nations.≤ Nevertheless, for three centuries after 1492 slave economies were successively founded and encouraged beyond the line of free soil Europe, and slaveholders claimed unabated rights to the property in persons that they had purchased or inherited abroad. For that long period historians of slavery are struck by a disjunction. Most of those who wrote critically about transatlantic slavery and the slave trade had virtually nothing to say about any parallel with conditions of contemporary European women. The same appears to be true of those Europeans who focused on the conditions of women in their own societies. If the analogy of marriage and slavery provided a springboard in advocating for women’s rights, as Karen Offen indicates, they did not appear to have extended the slave analogy to incorporate conditions of Africans in the New World. If future research uncovers an obscure example or two of such a linkage, that is unlikely to alter the general picture. The analogy of Afro-American slaves with European married women was unarticulated long after it was thinkable. British and French critiques of marriage-as-slavery long continued to confine their analogies to more Eurocentric or Eurasian locale.≥

II. The First Wave of Mobilization I begin with two events that occurred almost simultaneously in Britain and France. Clare Midgley has perceptively identified the British campaign to abstain from slave-grown sugar as a major event in both the history of antislavery and of women’s action. It helped to create a popular identification of sugar consumption and the Atlantic slave system. The campaign was also a major stepping-stone in the development of female activism within the abolitionist movement. Abstentionism was launched in 1791, partially in reaction to Parliament’s decisive defeat of Wilberforce’s first motion to abolish the British slave trade. It was an attempt to overcome a failure in politics by action in the spheres of civil society and the market. The initiators of the movement believed that women were both susceptible to the message and essential to the campaign.∂ Abstention did not overtly intrude into public space. It was an organized, unobtrusive, and nonviolent form of collective action. It did not even require the contentious gatherings that preceded other forms of antislavery agitation like national petitioning. The movement operated through private encounters, door to door, family to family, and dinner table by dinner table.∑ In

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1791–92, Thomas Clarkson, traveling the length and breadth of England and Wales in pursuit of a second mass petition, estimated that 300,000 persons of ‘‘all ranks,’’ party preferences, and denominations were participating. The boycott received press coverage in every major provincial town. The efficacy of women in linking sugar to slavery was widely recognized.∏ Just as British abstentionism was peaking, in the winter of 1791–92, women in France were also taking a prominent position in the sugar market. In January and February of 1792 Parisian citizens of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau began a taxation populaire. They seized goods from a warehouse and sold it to members of the gathered crowd at the traditional ‘‘just price.’’ The major novelty in this particular taxation populaire, which had heralded many gatherings to come, was the principal item seized and sold—colonial sugar from the French Caribbean. This ‘‘sugar riot’’ triggered a chain of confrontations, arrests, trials, and debate, from the local Assembly to the national Legislature. For our purposes, what distinguished the Parisian action was not its violent means, but its goal, which was to maximize popular consumption of a product that contemporary abolitionist women were trying to get fellow Britons to renounce.π The Parisian crowd, ‘‘above all the women, were most enraged’’ at having to pay double the price for an item that they had come to regard as an essential part of their consumption. Its use in colonial coffee kept them going until their late afternoon main meal. At the more exalted (and affluent) Jacobin Society a speaker responded to the journée by asking his fellow patriots to take a collective patriotic oath to abstain from sugar, except in cases of illness, until the price fell to its normal level. According to one account, the galleries rose and cried with one voice: ‘‘Yes, yes we make this same commitment,’’ and the Society ordered that this patriotic act be given an honorable mention in the minutes. What the crowd redistributed the patriots renounced. What neither they, nor anyone in the local or national assemblies, discussed, was the fact that the price rise had been caused by an unprecedented rising for liberty, in the world’s most dynamic sugar colony. So silent are the sources on this theme that the most eminent historian of French Revolutionary crowds did not even mention the words ‘‘slavery’’ or ‘‘slave revolution’’ in his accounts of the sugar riots of 1792.∫ In Britain a similar price rise occurred at the end of 1791. It stimulated much press criticism of the sugar merchants and the ‘‘overprotected’’ planters. The latter, of course, had little need of immediate protection in the wake of the St. Domingue uprising. The British abstention campaign was not aided by the rise in the price of sugar. In fact, St. Domingue sounded the death knell for abstention as an effective political tactic, because many of the erstwhile consumers of

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French slave sugar on the Continent more than compensated the British sugar business for any loss of abolitionist consumers. British anti-saccharites were also more highly selective than their counterparts across the Channel. Their movement primarily targeted the slave trade. And they selected only one tropical product to boycott. They never gave primacy of place to price.Ω At no point during the next half-century of battles against Atlantic slavery did British abolitionists, let alone its women’s organizations, agitate for a free trade in sugar in order to maximize benefits to consumers. Sugar abstention was a strategically chosen target, designed to put maximum pressure on the British slave interest without doing irreparable harm to the British domestic economy. During Clarkson’s campaign mobilization tour of 1791, Katherine Plymly, a sympathizer, responded to the call for a slave sugar boycott by asking why there was no parallel mobilization against cotton. Clarkson replied that the livelihood of a vast number of wage laborers depended upon its continued importation, whatever the source. Targeting cotton would have undermined the movement in all of the textile manufacturing towns of Lancashire, a hardcore antislavery county. Clarkson could hardly have considered turning on the very men and women of all classes who had transformed abolitionism into a national mass movement.∞≠ In the 1820s abolitionist women would make a symbolic gesture to extend the boycott to cotton by stuffing antislavery pamphlets into workbags made of East India (‘‘free labor’’) cotton, but sugar remained the main target of the movement. Only in the postemancipation era, after the victory of free trade over free-labor produce as a national policy, did a dedicated, but now marginalized, women’s antislavery movement expand the boycott movement to include cotton as well as sugar—to little effect. In none of these phases or variations did the abstentionist movement against slave-grown produce ever have any parallel in France.∞∞ By 1792, then, the ‘‘problem of slavery’’ was already embedded in British political culture.∞≤ Women had been present at the creation. In the fall of 1787 scattered sentiment against the slave trade was being transformed into public action. In Manchester, the pioneer urban center of that process, a special appeal to women was first launched. Ladies were targeted as, and credited with, having an inherent sensitivity to the sufferings of slavery, especially its female victims. This male-sanctioned feminization of the abolitionist appeal may well have been designed to forestall an anticipated counterattack from Manchester’s slaving interests. Yet, as Clare Midgley aptly concludes, the ‘‘feminization’’ of Manchester’s abolitionist appeal was a theme that would remain integral both to women’s mobilization and to the rhetoric of antislavery in general.∞≥

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In contrast, the Société des Amis des Noirs, established in Paris 1788, was never able to replicate the popularization of abolitionism within France. In Britain antislavery petitions flooded Parliament in 1788, and accounted for more than half of such documents. A comparison between the first British petition campaign and the Cahiers de doléances of 1789 underscores this disjuncture. In France, calls for taking any action whatsoever on the question of Atlantic slavery appeared in only a handful of general cahiers. Demands for women’s rights were absent from the thousands of local cahiers drawn up by the peasantry. One would certainly not expect even the national cahiers to be dominated by slave-related items in documents voicing all the grievances in France. Nevertheless, concern with overseas slavery lagged far behind almost every other form of unfreedom: prisons, galleys, serfs, corvees, etc. The only group that seems to have attracted even less concern in the cahiers was women. Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff’s exhaustive investigation of the cahiers ranked enfranchising women at the bottom of the table of subject frequencies: 1,088 for the parish cahiers, 1,121 and 1,125, respectively, for the Third Estate and the nobility (Table 5.1).∞∂ The comparative weakness of French antislavery is starkly revealed by the outcome of Thomas Clarkson’s first visit to Paris in 1789. He was attempting to stimulate the Amis to more vigorous public action. Clarkson hoped to set in motion a French national petition campaign on the English model. He was dismayed to discover that his Parisian counterparts placed their hopes in a petition to the new French National Assembly from the people of Britain. Clarkson correctly anticipated that such external pressure would expose French antislavery to the charge of submission to foreign influence. It was a charge that enemies of abolition were to use to good effect for the next half-century.∞∑ Despite the fact that the ideological basis for French women’s emancipation stemmed from the same revolutionary principles that drove analogous demands for the rights of Jews and blacks, the fate of women’s emancipation in France diverged sharply from that of colonial slaves. Before and after the sugar riots, small women’s groups escalated demands for equality. These were far more aggressively and publicly pursued than anything that occurred across the Channel. French women were more militant than either their British or American counterparts. For almost four years they were in the forefront of parades to the National Assembly demanding government-aided subsistence. They had spectacularly marched to Versailles and brought the royal family to Paris as virtual prisoners in 1789. They began to enter political clubs in 1790. They did not sit quietly in the galleries of political assemblies. They petitioned, they contributed to journals, they joined the mobilization of the nation in 1792 in

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Table 5.1. Revolutionary demands in the Cahiers de Dolánces of 1789; rank of document = level of frequency of each subject for each estate (rank 1 is highest) Subject

Parishes

Third Estate

Nobility

Serfdom Women’s franchise Slavery Slave trade Royal corvée Corporal punishment (military) Galleys Labor services (Seigneurial) Jews

285 1088* 1088* 1088* 6 1088* 891.5 51 367

364 1121* 533 745.5 64 307 621 24 492.5

539 1125* 419.5 836.5 164.5 81.5 753 380.5 470

*Least frequency. Source: Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Dolánces of 1789 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), Appendix I.

arms; and they formed fifty women’s Jacobins Clubs in 1791–93. On the opposite side of the Revolution other women demonstrated against revolutionary religious and civil festivals. They boycotted the nationalized clergy. They repaired churches, they defended the traditional observance, and they ultimately helped to swing the tide against revolutionary radicalism. The majority of radical male revolutionaries, however vocal their commitments to civil equality, did not support equal political rights for women. One vociferous segment of the women’s movement was briefly tied to the same political group that had founded the Amis des Noirs, reconstituted as the Circle Social. Unfortunately that group, the Girondins, was destined to perish under the attacks of the radicalized Jacobins in 1793. One of the charges against J. P. Brissot, a Girondin leader of the Amis, was that he had fomented rebellion in the colonies. By the fall of 1793 most of the former Amis were imprisoned, guillotined, or in flight. Almost simultaneously the Jacobins closed all women’s clubs and outlawed their autonomous collective activity.∞∏ Thus, by the time the Revolutionary Convention dramatically decreed colonial slave liberation in February of 1794, the action had nothing to do with the defunct Amis or public support by women’s groups. Emancipation was the ratification of a successful revolution by the slaves of Saint Domingue.∞π When Napoleon Bonaparte moved to restore slavery in the French colonies in 1802, the freedmen of Haiti would again have to ratify their emancipation by another bloody conflict with the French. After 1802 France’s only ex-slaves were

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those who had maintained their status by force of arms. The violence of the French Revolution therefore left both French antislavery and women’s activism with a heavy legacy. At the end of the Revolution, the position of French women was in some respects worse than it had been before 1789.∞∫

III. Continuities The first half of the nineteenth century continued the dual pattern. Further cycles of brief revolution and long reaction had a similar cyclical effect on French antislavery and women’s movements. Between the late 1790s and the early 1830s there was no organized antislavery movement in France. The Abbé Gregoire, one of the few surviving supporters of blacks and women, was treated as a political pariah until his death. Only under considerable British pressure did the twice-restored Bourbon monarchy (1814, 1815) reluctantly agree to prohibit the slave trade. French enforcement was consequently begrudging. Abolitionist pressure on the French government was minimal. The Bourbons, and their Orleanist successor in 1830, were intent on minimally accommodating the British and minimally rousing nationalist resentment against an overseas policy identified with foreign hegemony.∞Ω In the wake of British slave emancipation in 1833, however, some French politicians deemed it imperative to prepare for an emancipation on their own neighboring colonial islands. A French Society for the Abolition of Slavery was formed a few months after the implementation of British emancipation in 1834. It remained the preserve of a small group of notables meeting annually in Paris, in tandem with the sessions of the French Chamber of Deputies. Until pressured by more radical and provincial individuals in the late 1840s, the Society confined its activities to parliamentary interventions and participation in official investigating committees. Its members made no effort to found provincial branches or to organize large scale propaganda campaigns.≤≠ The first half of the nineteenth century reinforced the differential pattern foreshadowed by the initial divergence between British and French antislavery. While Napoleon was forcing a second slavery on the French tropical colonies, British antislavery began to revive. The abolition of the British slave trade was achieved in 1807. In 1815, under further British pressure, the great powers at the Congress of Vienna issued a joint declaration in favor of slave trade abolition.≤∞ In 1823, the British Parliament resolved on the gradual abolition of its overseas slave system. It fulfilled that commitment in 1833 and 1838. Popular antislavery was integral to each British legislative advance against the slave trade and slavery. Abolitionists selectively and successfully inter-

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vened in the general elections of 1806 and 1807, helping to seal the fate of the slave trade. Mass petitioning was revived as a mode of national collective action in 1814. The movement developed more permanent local and national associations in the 1820s. Formal structures of communication, fund-raising, and agitation helped to maintain antislavery societies for generations after the formal ending of British slavery in the 1830s, and of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1860s. The British antislavery society thus became the world’s oldest and most enduring nongovernmental organization monitoring human rights.≤≤ The women’s component of this movement evolved in tandem with the growth and development of British antislavery. As Clare Midgley has abundantly demonstrated, women proceeded to feminize the British antislavery movement, organizationally, symbolically, and ideologically.≤≥ Women participated only peripherally in the submission of early petitions, the hallmark of antislavery’s distinctive power as a national and popular movement. The first generation of abolitionists clearly retained a well-founded fear that female signatures might be used to delegitimize popular petitions. Women felt freer to participate as canvassers for signature and votes long before they could participate more directly in other political forms of agitation. By the time of the passage of slave trade abolition in 1807, women’s canvassing was a signature activity of the movement,≤∂ but the evidence for the process of feminization is abundant from the earliest mobilizations in 1787–92. It continued through the boycott campaigns of the mid-1820s and the multiform activities of the 1840s and 1850s. The formation of autonomous women’s locals is indicative of a growing feminine presence in the movement. What had been a family movement in the 1790s gradually became a more gendered associational division of collective labor by the 1820s. The rate of institutional growth on the eve of the climatic political mobilizations of 1830–33 is especially impressive. In 1826 the ratio of male to female associations was eight to one. By 1831 it was only two to one. There is evidence that women’s impact reached its peak in the final ‘‘antiapprenticeship’’ campaign of 1837–38. Thereafter, during antislavery’s declining decades of the 1840s and 1850s ladies associations remained more active than their male counterparts. British women also radicalized antislavery. They were major actors in the transformation of abolitionism from ‘‘gradualism’’ to ‘‘immediatism.’’≤∑ The most decisive evidence for the acceleration of women’s participation lies in their takeover of British antislavery’s signature institution, the mass national petition. From 1788 to 1838 British abolitionists set the standard for what constituted a mass petition. They set the records in terms of numbers of

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petitions, numbers of signatures, and, above all, their ability to outmobilize their opposition. That was the fundamental reason why the nation’s newspapers universally acknowledged that public opinion had spoken definitively at each stage in the dismantling process. During the first four national petition campaigns (1788, 1792, 1814, and 1823) the signers were almost exclusively male. Thereafter, the direct participation of women became massive and decisive. The final breakthrough came in 1830, when national Baptist and Methodist organizations began to welcome, and soon to plead for, women’s petitions. Separate signings obviated charges of illegitimacy previously raised against mixed gender petitions. Women also innovated brilliantly in the presentation of petitions by maximizing the visual impact of their signatures. In May 1833, on the day scheduled for the introduction of the Emancipation Bill to the House of Commons, the largest single antislavery petition in British history arrived at the doors of Parliament—‘‘a huge featherbed of a petition.’’ It was ‘‘hauled into the House by four members amidst shouts of applause and laughter.’’ It bore 187,000 signatures, ‘‘one vast and universal expression of feeling from all the females of the United Kingdom.’’≤∏ As with the establishment of women’s local societies, the proportion of women’s signatures increased with each successive campaign. Probably 30 percent (some 400,000) of the 1.3 million signers of the 1833 petitions for immediate emancipation were women. In 1837–38 the 700,000 female signatures ‘‘addressed’’ to the Queen amounted to more than two-thirds of the 1.1 million signatures reaching the House of Commons. The female ‘‘Address’’ from England and Wales, carrying 400,000 signatures, was again the most broadly signed address ever sent up from the country.≤π In terms of an Anglo-French comparison, the number of British women’s signatures gathered in each of those two years was probably greater than the total number of signatures on all reform petitions presented to the French Chamber of Deputies between the first motion for slave emancipation in 1838 and its revolutionary implementation ten years later. The contrast between French and British popular antislavery movements was still greater. Two modest French campaigns in 1844 and 1847 gathered about 21,000 signatures. In Britain the rate of women’s antislavery signatures per thousand was well over twenty times the rate of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen signatures combined. The large national antislavery women’s petition of 1833 alone probably accrued nearly ten names for every antislavery signature in France between the reestablishment of France’s second slavery in 1802 and the second emancipation in 1848.≤∫ If British women’s antislavery petitioning was overwhelming by comparison with that of French antislavery as whole, a woman to woman comparison

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is still more striking. The impact of English women’s petitioning was not unknown in France. One of the earliest French women’s political journals took brief note of the mobilization against British Negro apprenticeship in 1838. Individual French women attempted to use the right to petition as one of their few political rights.≤Ω The organizers of the working-class antislavery petitions of 1844 welcomed female signatures. Their subscription lists included laundresses, dressmakers, and milliners. One of the antislavery petitions contained the names of what one French colonial agent disparagingly dubbed, ‘‘one hundred maidens.’’ Obviously the evidence for women’s participation in 1844 was minuscule in proportion to the massive effort undertaken during the British antislavery campaigns of the 1830s.≥≠ In the French campaign of 1847 another small ‘‘Petition from the women of Paris’’ was sent to the Chamber of Deputies. This document consciously followed the English precedent. Its male organizers used the rationale of empathy with enslaved female counterparts to legitimate female participation. Victor Schoelcher, a prominent abolitionist and leader of the campaign, welcomed the petition. He took note, however, of the small number of signers, and complained that French women hesitated to compromise themselves by ‘‘too eccentric’’ an act. They apparently did not wish to seem guilty ‘‘of putting themselves forward.’’ Schoelcher urged French women to rival their British sisters.≥∞ The women’s petition of 1847 was therefore an exception that underscored the difference between the roles of women on opposite sides of the Channel. If French antislavery had two minuscule women’s petitions to its credit, its organizational history was still bleaker. From the formation of the Amis des Noirs in 1788, to the second emancipation sixty years later, there was no women’s antislavery organization in France, nor any women’s presence in the French Abolitionist Society. Schoelcher reprimanded the Catholic wife of a good friend for her lack of commitment to the abolitionist cause, again in sharp contrast to the example of British and American women.≥≤ The Revolution of 1848 brought no closing of the gap between antislavery and the women’s movement. Schoelcher convinced the Revolutionary Government to preempt another colonial slave revolt by making preparations for immediate emancipation. The decree was issued on March 4, 1848. The following day the government decreed universal male suffrage as the source of constitutional authority in the new French Republic. A women’s political club was quickly formed and petitioned for voting rights in the wake of the decrees. There was apparently no political interaction between the newly formed Comité des Droits de la Femme and the Club des Amis des Noirs. Neither club petitioned in support of the emancipatory demands of the other. The women’s Comité was certainly not among those petitioning Schoelcher’s emancipation

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committee in March and April of 1848. As far as I can tell, the women’s rights club grounded its demands for the suffrage on the basis of the government’s action in favor metropolitan of proletarians, not colonial slaves. For its part the revolutionary Provisional Government clearly stated that its obligations to French men and overseas slaves differed from what was due to French women. The government instituted the immediate abolition of slavery and universal male suffrage by revolutionary decree and on its own authority. In responding to the women’s Comité, however, the government maintained that only the National Constituent Assembly, elected by all adult male citizens, could alone decide on the enfranchisement of women.≥≥ There were significant differences between the political situations of the three affected groups. Schoelcher rushed to publish the emancipation proclamation on behalf of the slaves, before the opening of the National Constituent Assembly. He openly admitted that he did so in order to forestall its possible postponement by the new Assembly. In February of 1848, largely unenfranchised Parisian males overthrew the monarchy and demanded a republic. Although there was little evidence of broad national support for freeing the slaves, emancipation had been on the French legislative agenda for a decade before 1848. The petition campaigns of 1844 and 1847 reinforced the impression that there was at least some popular momentum in favor of emancipation. More importantly, in February 1848, supporters of colonial slaves, like those of the workers of Paris, posed a credible threat of collective violence to an insecure revolutionary government. Radical women had no prior presence, no record of recent public agitation, and no threat of violence. Nor, from the existing political record, could they make a case that they represented the demands of French women at large. When women did rise in revolt in Paris, it was alongside men after Paris’s National Workshops were closed in June 1848. The prior governmental closure of all women’s clubs earlier that same month triggered no such mass resistance.≥∂ As in 1793–94 the confirmation of French slave emancipation coincided almost precisely with a parallel suppression of autonomous women’s political activity.

IV. Aftermath The postemancipation pattern of women’s relationship to antislavery in Britain and France continued the general pattern established over the halfcentury before their respective emancipations. Organizationally, French antislavery ceased to exist when the French Abolition Society suspended its operations. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état of December 2, 1851, ensured that many radical former leaders were once again dispersed into physical or

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internal exile. A revival of antislavery sentiment had to await the coincidence of the American Civil War and the gradual liberalization of the Second French Empire in the 1860s. The French Protestant clergy launched a collective letter of support for the North, and, after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, some Catholic bishops urged their flocks to pray for American slaves. Immediately after President Lincoln’s assassination a French public campaign was launched in favor of a commemorative gold medal to be presented to his widow. When the campaign quickly attracted 40,000 subscribers, the government became alarmed over its potential domestic implications. The 40,000 names represented the largest mobilization in French history for a cause connected to antislavery.≥∑ A second venture, organized in the wake of the conflict, was the formation of a fund-raising drive on behalf of the ex-slaves. In forming a French Freedman’s Aid Society women’s leadership finally came to the fore. The movement’s largest meeting was held in Paris on November 3, 1865. At an antislavery rally of 1,000 people, women finally stood and spoke on the podium. Clarisse Coignet called for a national mobilization to be led by females. In England, she noted, it was estimated that one woman was worth thirteen and a half men for propaganda and charitable purposes. French women could not yet, of course, match the capabilities of their more highly organized British sisters. French Freedman’s Aid collected about $10,000 as opposed to $800,000 in Britain. Nevertheless, in this still more charitable than political campaign, Frenchwomen assumed roles of national organizational leadership on behalf of newly freed slaves.≥∏ The antislavery and women’s rights groups again briefly converged in 1872 when Schoelcher became a leading speaker at the first women’s rights banquet of the Third French Republic. Organized British antislavery continued to exist and to play a role in the generation following colonial slave emancipation. The British and Foreign Antislavery Society, the major organization of the British movement, relied heavily on the local ladies’ associations. These had proven to be more durable and active than most of their male counterparts, which underwent a serious decline in the 1840s and 1850s. The areas in which females had predominated, such as fund-raising, boycotts, and mobilizations for international activities such as support for American antislavery, became the main focus of British abolitionists.≥π Women were also responsible for the most massive antislavery action in Britain during the 1850s. In response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s triumphal visit to Britain, British women launched two addresses to ‘‘Their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America,’’ in November 1852. One of the addresses was criticized by the established antislavery movement for its failure to insist on immediatism and both were criticized by most of the

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British press for their interference in the explosive politics of another nation. Yet these addresses constituted the major abolitionist popular mobilization of the postemancipation generation. No addresses or petitions in Britain remotely approached their combined number of more than 750,000 women. This last great harvest of hundreds of thousands names on behalf of antislavery was 100 percent female.≥∫ These addresses and the multiple lesser actions of women in support of antislavery policies in America, Africa, and Asia had no parallel in France. Indeed, in its broad international focus, British women’s antislavery had no parallel in any other nation during the half-century after 1820.

V. Antislavery and Women’s Movements A comparison of women’s national mobilizations within the framework of antislavery helps to illuminate a number of important historical issues. Women’s entry into public space in modern Europe was inevitably conditioned by gendered asymmetries of power and culture. If women were to find a new place within a civil and political society of equal citizens they had to come to terms with both the opportunities and the constraints they may encounter in specific situations. In the case of Britain, abolitionism initially imposed many of the traditional constraints involved in all other political activities. Men held, and continued to hold, onto the commanding heights of national prominence within national legislatures and within the nongovernmental associations that conducted the extraparliamentary campaigns. Nevertheless, antislavery offered peculiar opportunities for the insertion of women into the processes of popular mobilization. Everywhere the perceived attributions of women could be used to rationalize both women’s participation and a particular ideological strategy. Overseas slavery differed from all forms of labor in Europe in two major respects. Its formation resulted from the forced and massive destruction of the family, the sphere of social life most easily identified as women’s space. Secondly, slavery subjected women’s bodies to a degree of sexual and disciplinary control unmatched in Western Europe. Masters could routinely escape punishment in the treatment of overseas slaves for acts that would have cost them their liberty or their lives in the metropolis. Some historians have seen this ideological opening as a low equilibrium trap, rather than as an opportunity. It reinforced the conservative maledominated separate-spheres hierarchy. It separated middle-class antislavery activists from their sisters in the working classes both at home and overseas, retarding the development of more fundamental challenges to the patriarchal hierarchy of European society. If one confines the history of women in slave

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emancipations to Anglo-America it may be difficult to decide where the balance of costs and benefits lay in relation to the emancipation of European women. (I set to one side the issue of the contribution of ‘‘separate spheres’’ to colonial women, although I think that it was probably most helpful to slave women immediately before and after their emancipation.)≥Ω Expanding the comparative perspective beyond Anglo-America casts the results of massive women’s involvement in antislavery in a different light. The tangible activities of women in British antislavery constitutes crucial evidence in favor of Linda Colley’s thesis concerning the role of British women in forging a public and nation-building role for themselves after the American Revolution. It is not difficult to imagine a historian of nation-building in France, Spain, or Portugal devoting a chapter to ‘‘Womanpower,’’ or to ‘‘A Woman’s Place Is in the Nation.’’∂≠ But it is difficult to imagine any history of Continental antislavery devoting a similar chapter to women as one of the principal class actors. Even in Britain the road was uphill and long. As late as 1829, a British Peer, introducing a petition signed by ‘‘a great many ladies,’’ could have the petition instantly ridiculed by another noble Lord inquiring ‘‘whether the petition expressed the sentiments of young or old ladies.’’ Just four years later, Daniel O’Connell, with the massive antislavery women’s petition on the table of the House of Commons, could cleverly mobilize both the old habits of mockery and the new ideology of ‘‘separate spheres’’ to shame opponents into respectful silence: He [O’Connell] would say—and he cared not who the person was of whom he said it—he would that that person had had the audacity to taunt the maids and matrons of England with the offence of demanding that their fellowsubjects in another clime should be emancipated. He would say nothing of the bad taste and the bad feeling which such a taunt betrayed—he would merely confine himself to the expression of an opinion, in which he was sure that every Member of that House would concur with him, namely, that if ever females had a right to interfere, it was upon that occasion. Assuredly, the crying grievance of slavery must have sunk deep into the hearts, and strongly excited the feelings of the British nation, before the females of this country could have laid aside the retiredness of their character to come forward and interfere in political matters . . . and, he hesitated not to say, that the man, whoever he might be, who had taunted the females of Great Britain with having petitioned Parliament—the man who could do that, was almost as great a ruffian as the wielder of the cart-whip.∂∞

Not a single Member of Parliament was prepared to risk responding with either humor or disapproval. Even those like William Cobbett, who resented

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the interference of ‘‘187,000 ladies’’ almost as much as he detested abolitionists and blacks, had to await a more convenient and less solemn moment to scold the ladies for their foolish abuse of political power.∂≤ In France the same traditions and sneers could not easily be breached. Women hesitated to use same political means at hand to further either their own legal interests or those of their overseas brothers and sisters. French antislavery never became sufficiently embedded as part of the national culture and organization to make it either a pathway to the exercise of power or a means to allow women to gain organizational experience. In Britain antislavery was part of what it never was in France, the vanguard of a new mode of collective action. In the half-century before British slave emancipation, British popular contention switched from older forms, still exemplified by the Paris sugar riots of 1792, to a new repertoire of public meetings, demonstrations, and special interest associations, while using newspapers to project their demands and presence onto a national and international stage.∂≥ Antislavery was a primary example of that transformation. Indeed, British antislavery made a successful ‘‘new mobilization’’ look all too easy.∂∂ In France, the crucial changes in forms of popular contention became standard instruments of popular policy only in the 1840s and 1850s. Harbingers of popular French antislavery were nipped in the bud by revolutions, emancipations, and repressions. More was involved in the intertwining of a British women’s movement and antislavery than a new mode of contention. The development of the modern social movement was embedded in a larger transformation—a new form of civil society. In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville observed, with astonishment, the enormous use that Americans made of political associations. But American political associations seemed to be only one variety amid an immense proliferation of civil associations. People of ‘‘all ages, all conditions, all minds,’’ he wrote, were constantly uniting, not only for commercial and industrial undertakings, but for matters religious and moral, solemn, and frivolous —to create festivals and seminaries, to distribute books to the unread and missionaries to the antipodes. Along with the free circulation of ideas in newspapers, the right of acting in common struck Tocqueville as ‘‘almost as inalienable in its nature as individual freedom.’’∂∑ The development of voluntary associations was not confined to the United States, nor was it entirely new. Rapid economic development, combined with a reduction of governmental authority and the decline of governmental censorship in Britain, produced the conditions for a rapid expansion of newspapers and voluntary associations in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The number of clubs in Britain tripled between the 1760s and the 1790s.

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In the Anglo-American world as a whole, their number stood at around 6,500 at the time of the British abolitionist explosion.∂∏ By contrast, the expansion of Continental voluntary associations was hampered both by government and civil institutions in eighteenth-century Europe. French governmental control over the formation of associations remained far stronger than in England. New forms of association in religion and welfare areas were also hampered by the institutional dominance of the Catholic Church. Competition from still vital networks of confraternities and journeymen campagnonages added to the difficulties entailed in creating of new forms of association.∂π The pattern changed during the three generations after the French Revolution, but not always in such a way as to encourage the development of enduring associations. The revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848 exponentially expanded the number of clubs, especially in the political arena. The longer lasting periods of repression that followed them, however, dramatically curtailed that potential. The turbulence of the ‘‘associational revolution’’ in France only reinforced the linkage of voluntary associations with instability and violence. Even where the French pattern of dramatic expansion and repression was absent, Continental antislaveries exhibited a pattern of inhibited female participation. In the Netherlands, as in France, women’s participation was restricted to charitable organizations for aid to slaves and ex-slaves. South of the Pyrenees, the newly formed Spanish Abolition Society published a series of letters in 1865 from British women’s antislavery societies to the ‘‘Ladies of Madrid.’’ Spanish women were encouraged to exercise influence over their male relations in favor of emancipation. Harriet Brewster de Vizcarrondo, the North American wife of a Puerto Rican abolitionist in Madrid, organized an ephemeral woman’s chapter of the Spanish Society.∂∫ One must carefully distinguish between the right to participate and to alter the policies in voluntary associations and the ability to hold formal power within them. Already by 1800, an increasing variety of clubs in Britain, including debating and mutual benefit societies, had been opened to, or created by, women. However, women’s organizations remained a small fraction of their all-male counterparts throughout the age of Anglo-American abolitionism. Thus the path to feminine participation was open but narrow. The main advance came with the nineteenth-century upsurge of public subscription associations, of which the Manchester abolition society of 1787 was a harbinger. These more structured societies could and did accommodate numbers of women as participants or in auxiliary branch units.∂Ω Some associations, women’s antislavery organizations foremost among

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them, offered women opportunities to create institutions, to master the arts of debating, to formulate resolutions, to hold office, to negotiate with other branches, and to form contacts and alliances at the local, national, and international level. In short, they were a major pathway in the formation of what might be called feminine social capital, the art of building effective networks, coalitions, and leaders.∑≠ The full quantitative and qualitative evaluation of antislavery as a mechanism for the production of social capital still awaits its historian or social scientist. We already have sufficient evidence, however, to savor one irony. Tocqueville carefully segregated his commentaries on women’s political role in democracies from his encomiums on association. Yet he ended his fervent hymn to voluntary organization by feminizing it: ‘‘the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.’’∑∞ The advances of antislavery women toward, if not into, possession of a national political presence involved clear constraints as well as opportunities. It has been widely noted that English women activists were less inclined to form more radical feminist associations from the 1830s to the early 1850s than were those in France and the United States.∑≤ Radical English feminists had to ‘‘go international,’’ linking up with counterparts in France or America. Neither the rebuff to American abolitionists at the World Antislavery Conference in London in 1840 nor the upheavals of 1848 on the European Continent immediately caused Britons to form a woman’s group with a specifically women’s rights agenda. Was it, as some have speculated, because British women were too conservative, or too bloated with pride in their own political and industrial systems or ‘‘a unique sense of national superiority’’? Or, lacking the stimulus of a revolution, were they simply unable to get over the personal animosities that women ‘‘transcended’’ in the United States, France, and Germany?∑≥ There may be a more plausible way to explain the failure of British women to imitate some of their American sisters immediately after the latter were refused official seats at the 1840 World Convention in London. The hesitancy of British antislavery women did not stem from nationalist pride in their political or economic system. It was rooted in their deep personal investment in the spectacular demonstration of their own efficacy within the most successful antislavery movement in the world. Some British abolitionists were more impressed by the counterproductivity of the ‘‘woman question’’ to antislavery in the United States after the 1840 convention. Commitment acted as a pragmatic check on their feminism.∑∂ British women still found ample room to extend their range of associational skills within the ever-broadening range of social problems being addressed by voluntary associations in a polity officially

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committed to laissez-faire in both economy and society. As Sir James Stephen, a Colonial Office abolitionist observed in 1849, there was now ‘‘an association for every sorrow.’’∑∑ There was also a cultural and class bias among most British antislavery advocates that limited the appeal of some radical affiliations and ‘‘Frenchstyle’’ agitational forms. The confrontational language adopted by some feminist agitators in France and the equally confrontational street tactics of some black women in the Caribbean were alien to them. The rhetorics of the victimized colonial slave and of feminine domesticity better served the goals of both West Indian slaves and abolitionists, at least until 1840. Postemancipation reports of female-led confrontations in the churches and streets of Jamaica, and on the barricades of Paris, were at odds with both of these ideals.∑∏ So, while many women rallied against the excesses of Governor Eyre after the suppression of the Morant Bay uprising in 1865, others rallied to his support. The Freedman’s Aid Movement split over the decision to send help to Jamaica as well as to the United States. Women’s meetings condemning military behavior routinely condemned murders by the rioters.∑π In assessing the constraints on radical action fostered by antislavery, one must also note its comparative insignificance. For three generations after the rise of abolitionism in Britain, feminism failed to achieve mass support in France. In the wake of four major revolutionary surges in France between the 1780s and the 1870s the women’s movement remained the concern of a small and divided minority. Far more women remained organized under the banner of traditional religious institutions than of all varieties of secular feminists combined. The absence of an antislavery movement and a tangible female presence within it availed women’s movements very little. Well into the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century French men and women who wished to rally around feminist banners found inspiration across the Channel, in the same region that had once formed the heartland of British antislavery. Between the end of the American Civil War and the consolidation of the French Third Republic at the end of the 1870s, British suffragists sent close to 1,000 petitions and over three million signatures up to Parliament.∑∫ The great crusade against slavery probably helped to foster the emancipation of women in many ways we have yet to discover. It certainly did not hinder that process. In taking a longer and broader view of Atlantic slavery in the age of slave emancipation, one conclusion seems warranted. Where popular antislavery flourished women’s participation generally flourished. Where antislavery associations encountered a hostile or repressive environment, receptivity to women’s movements was usually nasty, boorish, and short-tempered.

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For their helpful comments and suggestions I am deeply indebted to the participants at the Sisterhood and Slavery Conference, especially David Brion Davis, Maurine Greenwald, Gerda Lerner, Clare Midgley, Karen Offen and Kathryn Kish Sklar. 1. Karen Offen, ‘‘How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France,’’ delivered at the Sisterhood and Slavery conference, 1–6. 2. See David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 12–24; Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 225; Sue Peabody, ‘‘There Are No Slaves in France’’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 3. Offen, ‘‘Analogy of Marriage,’’ 1–6. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25, concludes that, almost as a matter of consensus, feminist authors were saying nothing about African slavery ‘‘that would cause any ‘true-blooded Englishmen’ to raise an eyebrow.’’ Convergence of widespread and incisive condemnations of European and African subordination were still almost a century away at the end of the seventeenth century. 4. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 35–40, 49–50; and Midgley, ‘‘Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture,’’ Slavery and Abolition 17:3 (December 1996), 137–162. See Also Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movement in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 4 ff. 5. Seymour Drescher, ‘‘Two Variants of Anti-Slavery: Religious Organization and Social Mobilization in Britain and France, 1780–1870,’’ in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 43–63; Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 6. In addition to Midgley, see Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London: Longman, etc. 1808), II, 350. 7. See Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789–1795, ed. Darline Gay Levy et al. (Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 103–122. 8. Ibid., 111–113, 115–118; and George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 95–98. 9. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 78–79, 217 n. 54; and Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 116 and 247n. 10. Salop County Record Office, ‘‘Katherine Plymly Diaries, 1791–1814,’’ vol. 5, entry of 27 February 1792. On the significance of Manchester, see Drescher, Capitalism and

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Antislavery, 67–77, 82–83; Drescher, ‘‘Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade,’’ Past and Present, 143 (May 1994), 136–166, esp. 142– 144; and Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 18–19. 11. Midgley, ‘‘Slave Sugar Boycotts,’’ 142–150; and Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 43–50. 12. Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 111–125. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture [1966], 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), preface. 13. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 19–20. 14. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 53–54; and Gilbert Shapiro and John Markoff, Revolutionary Demands: A Content Analysis of the Cahiers de Doleances of 1789 (Stanford, Calif., 1998), Appendix I. Ironically, French abolitionists of the 1790s were pioneers in admitting women to their Society, and in arguing for the general utility of admitting women into philanthropic societies. See ‘‘Compte rendu de la cérémonie commémorative du décret d’abolition, organisée le 16 pluviôse an VII (4 février 1799),’’ in La Société des Amis des Noirs 1788–1799: Contribution à l’histoire de l’abolition de l’esclavage, ed. Marcel Dorigny and Bernard Gainot (Paris: Éditions UNESCO, 1998), 393–394. Almost a decade earlier the first Société des Amis des Noirs recognized the support given by Olympe de Gouges ‘‘to the cause of the Blacks’’ (ibid., 265, 283). 15. Clarkson, Rise, II, 123–166. 16. See, inter alia, Daniel P. Resnick, ‘‘The Société des Amis des Noirs and the Abolition of Slavery,’’ French Historical Studies 7 (1972), 558–69; Valerie Quninney, ‘‘Decisions on Slavery, the Slave Trade and Civil Rights for Negroes in the Early French Revolution,’’ Journal of Negro History 55 (1970), 117–30; Yves Bénot, La Revolution française et la fin des colonies (Paris: La Decouverte, 1988); Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 214– 219. On women see, inter alia, the essays of Dominique Godineau, Harriet Applewhite, Darlene Levy, and Gary Kates, in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, op. cit. 17. Bénot, La Revolution, ch 7; Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and D. B. Gaspar and D. P. Geggus eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1997). 18. Candice E. Proctor, Women, Equality and the French Revolution (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), ch 10. 19. See Ruth F. Necheles, The Abbé Grégoire 1788–1831: The Odyssey of an Egalitarian (Westport, Conn., 1971); and Paul Michael Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 20. Lawrence C. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France, 1802–1848 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 21. Kielstra, The Politics of the Slave Trade, ch 2; and Betty Fladeland, ‘‘Abolitionist Pressure on the Concert of Europe, 1814–1822,’’ Journal of Modern History 38 (1966), 355–373.

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22. Peter Dixon, ‘‘The Politics of Emancipation: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1807–1833,’’ Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1971; and Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, chs 3–5. 23. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery, ch 1–3; and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London, 1992). 24. Drescher, ‘‘Whose Abolition?,’’ 136–166. 25. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 45, 51, 174. 26. Ibid., 62–66. 27. Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, 44–46, 57–77. 28. Ibid., 62–64. 29. Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 104–105. 30. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 240n; and Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 199. 31. Ibid., 239. A special plea for petitions was issued to women by the provincial French abolitionist Guillaume de Felice. See Emancipation immédiate et complète des esclaves: Appel aux abolitionistes (Paris: Delay, 1846). 32. Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 239. 33. For the Club des Amis des Noirs, see Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, 180, 193 n. 60. Karen Offen, ‘‘Women and the Question of ‘Universal Suffrage’ in 1848: A Transatlantic Comparison of Suffragist Rhetoric,’’ NWSA Journal 11:1 (Spring 1999), 150– 177. As far as I can determine the radical women of 1848 sought inspiration in their revolutionary metropolitan forebears, not in colonial slaves or Caribbean slaves of either gender. See Laura S. Strumingher, ‘‘Looking Back: Women of 1848 and the Heritage of 1789,’’ in Women and Politics in the Age of Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darlene G. Levy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1990), 259–285; and Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the Droits de la Femme, I have relied on Offen, ‘‘Women and the Question of ‘Universal Suffrage’ ’’ (‘‘Documents’’). David Barry, in Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996) discusses up to twenty revolutionary clubs, but not the Amis des Noirs. Women played a minority role in the Amis du Peuple, and were among those arrested in the June Days. 34. See Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 111–112. It would be interesting to know whether Parisian women’s newspapers supported Schoelcher when he ran for a seat from Paris to the Constituent Assembly in the Spring of 1848. He was not supported by the electoral coalition of workers’ corporations and radical clubs, and was sometimes charged with focusing on slave liberation rather than on universal emancipation. See Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom, 181, 193 n. 58. 35. Serge Gavronsky, The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War (New York, 1968), 186. 36. Le Lien, 16 December 1865, 16 January 1866, and 5 June 1867. As far as I can

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determine this was the first public antislavery manifestation in which women were both initiators and speakers. Clarisse Gauthier Coignet was the niece of Clarisse Vigoureux, the first ‘‘disciple’’ of the pioneer socialist, Charles Fourier. Vigoureux’s daughter married a leading Fourierist, Victor Considerant. Considerant first proposed extending the suffrage to single adult women in the National Constituent Assembly, in 1848. He was laughed off the floor. See Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 111. My thanks to Karen Offen for the biographical detail on Clarisse Coignet and her family. 37. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 124–127. 38. Ibid., 148–149. See also Howard Temperly, British Antislavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972), 224–228. 39. Mimi Sheller, ‘‘Quasheba, mother, queen: black women’s public leadership and protest in postemancipation Jamaica, 1834–1865,’’ Slavery and Abolition 19 (December 1998), 90–117. 40. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch 6, and 350–360. 41. Ibid., 279–280. 42. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 149. 43. Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain 1758–1834 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994), ch 2. 44. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 168–230. 45. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 184, 489. 46. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 128, fig 4.1. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 91–97, 117–118. In Brazil, female-led agitation in the summer of 1884 led to the emancipation of the slaves in Porto Alegre, four years before national emancipation. Elite women in the city were at the forefront of agitation against provincial political leaders. See Roger A. Kittleson, ‘‘Campaign All of Peace and Charity: Gender and the Politics of Abolitionism in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1879–88,’’ Slavery and Abolition 22:3 (2001), 83–108; and June E. Hahner, ‘‘Feminism, Women’s Rights, and the Suffrage Movement in Brazil,’’ Latin American Research Review 15:1 (1980), 65–111. 49. Clark, British Clubs, 130–132, 198–199. 50. On Manchester, See Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 18–19; Christine Bolt, Women’s Movements, ch 2; and F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in NineteenthCentury England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 22–46. For the incrementalism of petitioning social organization and political self-confidence in American women’s mobilization against slavery, see, inter alia, Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 118–128; Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery and the 13th

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Amendment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 38–39; and Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 51. Tocqueville, Democracy, 492. 52. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 157. 53. Bonnie S. Anderson, ‘‘The Lid Comes Off: International Radical Feminism and the Revolutions of 1848,’’ NWSA Journal 10:2 (1998), 1–12, esp. 8. 54. Bolt, Women’s Movements, 68, 69. On the contrasting social and political situations of British and American antislavery women, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘‘ ‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,’ American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,’’ in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 301–340. 55. Clark, British Clubs, 471. 56. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 190–194. 57. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 192. 58. See Sophia A. van Wingerden, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1866– 1928 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

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British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective clare midgley

This chapter seeks to throw new light on the relationship between antislavery and feminism in Britain by examining the link from two perspectives, the transatlantic and the imperial. In so doing, it addresses the broader questions posed by this book concerning the varied connections between abolitionism and feminism in different national contexts within the Atlantic world, and the significance of racial difference in shaping female activism. It begins by briefly surveying from a transatlantic perspective the historiography of female anti-slavery activism and its link to feminism, and then outlines an alternative imperial context within which to place the link between the two movements in Britain. These two perspectives are then deployed to examine two key aspects of the link between anti-slavery and feminism. First, the use of the womanslave analogy in the differing national contexts of Britain and America is addressed in an analysis which complements Karen Offen’s discussion (in an earlier chapter in this section) of the use of the marriage-slavery analogy by French feminist writers. Secondly, the discussion focuses on questions of ‘‘race’’ and the problem of defining feminism historically. Shifting from the approach adopted by most of the contributors to this book, which analyzes abolitionism and feminism as two distinct, though interconnected, movements, it assesses the implications of adopting an alternative analysis of female anti-slavery activism as a form of feminism.

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The Link Between Anti-Slavery and Feminism in Transatlantic and Imperial Perspective In 1898, American women’s suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton asserted that the World Anti-Slavery Convention that she had attended in London in 1840 had given ‘‘rise to the movement for women’s political equality in both England and the United States.’’∞ Her statement suggested that transatlantic anti-slavery networks were the key milieu out of which the women’s suffrage movement developed in both countries. Her contemporaries in the British women’s movement did not place such a strong emphasis on the link between transatlantic anti-slavery and the organized movement for women’s rights in their nation, but some did draw attention to it. Indeed feminists involved in the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts frequently referred to it as the ‘‘new abolitionist movement.’’≤ With the rise of a new wave of feminist activism and scholarship in the late 1960s and ’70s, U.S. historians immediately began to investigate the abolitionfeminism link, stimulated by their contemporary political interest in the Civil Rights Movement.≥ Historians of British women, however, at first ignored the topic. Judy Walkowitz, in her 1980 study of feminist campaigners against the Contagious Diseases Acts, drew attention to the fact that many came from anti-slavery backgrounds. However, three years later, when Jane Rendall published her important overview of the origins of feminism in Britain, France, and the United States, she regretted that her analysis of the link between antislavery and feminism was hampered by the lack of studies of women’s contributions to anti-slavery in Britain.∂ This gap in the scholarship on British women began to be addressed with the publication in 1985 of a pioneering article by Louis and Rosamund Billington, which specifically addressed the relationship between anti-slavery and feminism.∑ Black women’s contribution to British anti-slavery discourse was also acknowledged for the first time with the reissue of The History of Mary Prince (1831). While earlier reprints of this text had placed it among American slave narratives, Moira Ferguson’s new introduction recontextualized the work within its specific Caribbean and British contexts.∏ This pioneering work was followed in the early 1990s by full-length studies of British women’s antislavery campaigners by myself and by Karen Halbersleben, by a study by Moira Ferguson which highlighted the significance of the woman-slave analogy to British women writers from Aphra Benn onward, and by Vron Ware’s wide-ranging exploration of white women and racism, which included a section on the British anti-slavery movement.π Discussion of the relationship

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between anti-slavery and feminism in Britain could now be properly integrated into general histories of British feminism.∫ As the same time, work on American women abolitionists was also flourishing. It developed beyond the biographical approach of many early studies, drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives, and providing a rich basis for comparison with the British material. Jean Fagan Yellin focused on the iconography of the movement to explore the place of abolitionist feminism in American culture. Karen Sanchez-Eppler drew on a variety of literary and political texts to illuminate the use of the raced and gendered body in the intersecting rhetorics of abolitionism and feminism. The exclusions of white feminist scholarship on anti-slavery were addressed by Shirley Yee’s study of black women abolitionists, while local studies of specific women’s anti-slavery societies were also undertaken.Ω An edited collection of essays published in 1994 provided a useful overview of the field, while, more recently, Julie Roy Jeffrey has balanced the scholarly focus on abolitionist-feminists with a study of the ‘‘great silent army of abolitionism,’’ the majority of whom did not become advocates of women’s rights.∞≠ Study of American abolitionist-feminists has also been facilitated by the production of edited collections of documents. Though similar document collections on British women anti-slavery campaigners are still lacking, women’s pivotal role in the transatlantic network is highlighted in Clare Taylor’s edited collection of letters between British and American supporters of radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.∞∞ Such British and American scholarship laid the ground for a reevaluation of the date of the emergence of an international women’s movement, previously dated to the 1880s.∞≤ Bonnie S. Anderson has recently argued persuasively that ‘‘the first international women’s movement’’ can be dated back as far as the transatlantic abolitionist, feminist, and reforming networks of the 1830s– 1850s.∞≥ However, more work remains to be done on the important role of black women such as Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond both within such transatlantic networks and within what Paul Gilroy has described as the ‘‘Black Atlantic.’’∞∂ After completing my own study of British women’s involvement in the antislavery movement, I contemplated undertaking a comparative study of British and American women abolitionists, exploring transatlantic links and crossinfluences and examining similarities and differences in ideas and actions. However, an alternative approach presented itself, and it was this that I elected to pursue. I was keen to relate my work on British women and anti-slavery to an emerging body of critical feminist scholarship on western women and imperialism.∞∑ This was partly because I was disturbed by the tendency in

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historiography to separate out the history of slavery and abolition from the mainstream of British history, so that it had become a specialized sub-area of study with limited impact on rewriting either British or imperial history. Second, I was concerned that study of the relationship between feminism and imperialism tended to focus on the period after slave emancipation and after the emergence of the women’s suffrage movement in the mid 1860s. This left unanswered the question of the relationship between imperialism and the origins of modern western feminism in the period between the 1790s and the 1850s. In particular, I was keen to examine the period before that of the ‘‘imperial feminists’’ studied by Antoinette Burton in her influential Burdens of History, a book which revealed the link between British feminists’ concern for Indian women and their assertion of their own right to the vote.∞∏ My new research seeks to examine the relationship between early feminist discourse and what postcolonial theorists have labeled ‘‘colonial discourse.’’ It also aims to explore the nature and significance of British women’s involvement in philanthropic and reformist endeavors on the imperial stage. This provides an opportunity to place women’s anti-slavery work alongside their involvement in the campaign against sati (widow-burning) in British India, and their engagement with projects for the Christian education of colonized women. In examining how such campaigners articulated the nature of female oppression and the meaning of female emancipation, this research is also throwing new light on the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism, adding an imperial dimension to a hitherto domestically focused scholarly debate. The project as a whole thus aims both to contribute to the debate about the problem of defining feminism historically and to clarify what was ‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘western’’ about the feminism which developed in nineteenth-century Britain.∞π In endeavoring to place discussion of the relationship between anti-slavery and feminism in Britain within an adequate historical framework, this paper thus approaches the topic from two complementary angles: from a comparative transatlantic perspective, and through placing the material within its British imperial context. It focuses on two aspects of the link between abolitionism and feminism. First, it suggests reasons for the differing use of the womanslave analogy in the differing national contexts of Britain and the United States. Second, it critiques the conventional approach to studying the relationship between anti-slavery and feminism. This approach views them as two separate but interconnected movements, the first focused on black oppression, the second on female oppression; it also identifies a causal link between the two, with anti-slavery leading into feminism. Having pinpointed the problems inherent in this approach, this chapter then explores an alternative analytical

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framework based on interpreting female anti-slavery campaigning, with its focus on the emancipation of black women, as a feminist movement in itself.

The Woman-Slave Analogy in Differing National Contexts In the United States, women linked to the radical Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement combined advocacy of the rights of enslaved women with assertion of their own rights to speak at meetings and participate fully in decision-making within the anti-slavery movement. They also developed what has been labeled an ‘‘abolitionist-feminist’’ discourse that equated sexual and racial bondage. In contrast, women anti-slavery campaigners in Britain, with only one or two exceptions, proved reluctant to raise the issue of their own rights within the movement, and avoided attempting to discursively yoke together abolitionism and feminism. Instead, their anti-slavery rhetoric rested on assertions of their own privileges as women, and the desire to extend these privileges to others.∞∫ The reasons British and American women abolitionists adopted differing practical approaches and rhetorical strategies are to be sought in the broader differences in the place of slavery and anti-slavery in the body politic, and the differing intersections between the politics of ‘‘race,’’ class, and gender in the two nations. Some of these differences have already been sketched out by Kathryn Kish Sklar in her comparison of British and American women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. Sklar highlights two main differences in the political environment in the two nations that affected the nature of the link between anti-slavery and feminism: the differing determinants of political citizenship, and the differing significance of the institution of slavery.∞Ω These warrant further exploration with specific reference to the use of the woman-slave analogy in the two nations. In the United States race and gender were the two key determinants of full citizenship, at least once white working men had gained the vote over the 1812–1840 period. As Sanchez-Eppler points out, a disembodied ‘‘person’’ was accorded rights in the American constitution, but the raced and gendered bodies of blacks and women were excluded from this supposedly universalist notion of personhood: it was to this that abolitionist-feminists drew attention.≤≠ This contrasts to the situation in Britain, where class was effectively the determinant of enfranchisement, with socioeconomic position in terms of property ownership the key. Here, too, race-based slavery was largely a colonial problem, legitimated and framed by laws distinct from those operating within the metropolis. This is not to say that chattel slavery did not exist

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within the British Isles: it did. However, it was not a central institution, but rather a spillover from Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, with planters and slave traders bringing small numbers of enslaved Africans into Britain, where they acted mainly as servants in the homes of the wealthy.≤∞ The 1832 Reform Act, which introduced sex as a determinant of enfranchisement for the first time—when the word ‘‘person’’ in the wording of the Act was ruled to refer only to men—was swiftly followed by the 1833 Emancipation Act. The possibility for the development of an equation between the position of women and that of slaves within the political nation was thus closed down at just the time when it was opening up with the United States. In sum, then, equating the position of women and black people had less political salience in Britain than in the United States. This continued to be the case in the postemancipation period. In the mid 1860s, controversy over extension of the franchise centered in the United States on whether black men or white women should be the first to be granted the vote in the aftermath of the Civil War, whereas in Britain feminists criticized the 1867 Reform Act for giving precedence to the rights of working-class men over those of middleclass women. The greater salience of class than ‘‘race’’ in British domestic politics may also have impacted in other ways on the shape of the anti-slavery movement in the two nations. The middle-class activists who dominated the British antislavery movement, even those men and women with the most radical politics, attempted to keep anti-slavery a single-issue campaign. In contrast, the Garrisonian wing of the American movement was characterized by its willingness to embrace a wide platform of moral reform. This difference may in part relate to broad differences in pressure group politics in the two nations. As Sklar points out, the British campaign was able to operate through conventional political channels, successfully combining pressure from ‘‘within’’ with pressure from ‘‘without’’ to persuade Parliament to extend metropolitan privileges into colonial contexts. In contrast, in the United States, where governmental support for slavery was more entrenched, a sense of outsider status encouraged the radicalization of abolitionists. In Britain, the height of the campaign coincided with the 1832 Reform Act, which incorporated middle-class men within the body politic. After the passage of the Emancipation and Reform Acts, these ‘‘insiders,’’ who included the leaders of the anti-slavery movement, became concerned that working-class men might hijack for their own ends the continuing campaign in support of American abolitionists. Indeed in the 1840s anti-slavery meetings were disrupted by Chartists seeking to promote the rights of ‘‘white slaves’’ and criticizing middle-class philanthropists for paying more attention to suffering abroad than suffering at home. Visiting

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American Garrisonians were keen to build links with Chartists, while their supporters in Britain discouraged any yoking together of Chartist and antislavery causes, even when they were themselves supportive of the moderate wing of Chartism.≤≤ The fraught politics of class in Britain also impeded radicalization of the movement along gender lines. The construction of middle-class identity was, as Davidoff and Hall have shown, closely tied to promotion of ‘‘separate spheres’’ for men and women.≤≥ Middle-class men were concerned with constructing a new masculine public sphere of activity for themselves through such movements as anti-slavery, and nonconformists in particular saw such cross-denominational activities as ideal ways of establishing their status as respectable men. In this context, outspoken public or political action by their womenfolk was not welcomed. Indeed, since the 1790s advocacy of women’s rights had become discredited in middle-class circles by its association with support of the French Revolution and with the notorious private life of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). This negative view of outspoken women was articulated in 1840 by Elizabeth Fry’s daughter Katherine, who wrote with horror of an anti-slavery meeting at Norwich which she and other ladies had been forced to leave when it was disrupted by Chartists calling for the rights of English white slaves. Among the mob were ‘‘some women who excited the men, and those shrill voices outscreamed the roar of the men. I heard they were three well-known Socialist sisters, the vilest of the vile.’’≤∂ In the United States, in contrast, the fear of anti-slavery women was that their meetings would be disrupted by racist mobs. U.S. abolitionists had to confront widespread white hostility to anti-slavery linked to racism: racist attacks were directed against anti-slavery activists, especially at those who challenged racial segregation as well as slavery; association between white women and black women and men in the movement aroused particular hostility. The willingness of white middle-class American women in the 1830s and 1840s to challenge ‘‘separate spheres’’ ideology can thus be related to the embattled position of abolitionists in the United States. The lead was taken by women like public lecturer Angelina Grimké, the roots of whose radical feminist-abolitionism is explored in detail in Kathryn Kish Sklar’s chapter in this volume. Having broken racial taboos, such women were more willing to break sexual ones. American women abolitionists could hardly cultivate the cozy complacency of which Chartists accused their British sisters. For in the United States antislavery was always a minority stance, whereas in Britain, at least between the mid 1820s and early 1850s, it was seen as a respectable form of humanitarian philanthropy, representative of the views of the moderate majority.

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The absence of a substantial free black presence in Britain, in contrast to the northern states of the United States, also had an impact on the nature of women’s involvement in the movement. The contribution of free black women to the American movement was highly significant in pushing it in more radical directions: African-American women were pioneers in combining anti-slavery with assertion of their own rights both as women and as blacks. Indeed, at a later stage they also had an impact in promoting women’s right to full participation in the British movement: in 1859 Sarah Parker Remond became the first woman to lecture publicly against slavery in Britain. This was some twenty-seven years after Maria W. Stewart had become the first woman to lecture publicly against slavery in the United States. Transatlantic comparison of national social and political contexts thus helps to illuminate the reasons why British women abolitionists were more reluctant than their American sisters to combine anti-slavery and women’s rights or to make analogies between their position and that of slaves. Placing British women anti-slavery campaigners’ activities in an imperial context helps in turn to illuminate why they did not simply avoid the American abolitionist-feminist approach but rather adopted the opposite approach. This involved stressing their own privileges and their desire to extend these to women suffering under slavery. My recent research suggests that this approach by British women abolitionists was part of a wider strategy adopted by women who became involved in a range of early nineteenth-century campaigns aimed at improving the position of women in different parts of the Empire. Such imperial female philanthropy and reform expanded evangelical ‘‘women’s mission to women’’ from the domestic arena onto the imperial stage. British women abolitionists’ stress on their own privileges as women in contrast to their enslaved sisters very closely echoes the rhetoric of British women engaged in the contemporary evangelical missionary campaign against sati (widow-burning) in India. It also echoes the language of women concerned with promoting the Christian education of ‘‘heathen’’ women as their distinctive contribution to the foreign missionary enterprise that took off from the 1790s onward.≤∑ Female anti-slavery aimed to end black women’s oppression by corrupt white colonial men; anti-sati aimed to end Indian women’s oppression by indigenous Indian men. The treatment of women under colonial slavery was presented as a horrific anomaly ‘‘in Countries which acknowledge British Laws, which are governed, not by some half-wild, benighted native Race’’ but by Christian men ‘‘connected with us by the closest ties.’’≤∏ Sati, on the other hand, was presented as a striking reflection of the degraded and superstitious nature of Hindu society. In female imperial philanthropy the emancipation of

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women was thus seen as achievable through a combination of legal reform and the spread of Christianity in order to eradicate barbaric practices and thus bring to non-European women the privileges supposedly enjoyed by women in Christian Britain. Thus in Britain female abolitionist discourse, linked to a broader project of imperial philanthropy, became trapped in an assertion of white female privilege, and developed along a separate trajectory to discourse promoting the rights of white British women. All this does not mean that British women never made use of the analogy between women and slaves. In fact, the woman-slavery analogy is a recurrent motif in early British feminist tracts. However, it does not precisely mirror the use of the analogy by American abolitionist feminists. Again, to fully understand British feminists’ use of this analogy we need to appreciate its imperial context as well as its transatlantic parallels. This discourse developed in the context of Britain’s imperial expansion and indeed, contributed to the development of what postcolonial theorists have labeled ‘‘orientalism’’ or, more broadly, ‘‘colonial discourse.’’ When British advocates of women’s rights, from Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1790s to Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill in the 1850s–’60s, compare the position of British women to slaves they are referring on some occasions to African slaves in British colonies or the United States, on others to women enslaved in the ‘‘despotic’’ ‘‘oriental’’ harem, and on others to the ill-treatment of women in ‘‘savage’’ societies. In other words, this is not, as Moira Ferguson suggests, a univocal white woman–black male slave analogy, but rather what I have labeled a ‘‘triple discourse’’ of slavery. This drew on Enlightenment discourse which, developing in tandem with European overseas exploration and expansion, used the position of women as marker of level of civilization in a particular society. In drawing on, developing, and critiquing Enlightenment thought these early British feminists positioned the emancipation of women as the culmination of the progress of western civilization, and presented the oppression of women, like the enslavement of Africans, as out of place and out of time in developed Western society.≤π In Britain, then, women anti-slavery campaigners and women campaigning against sati and for missionary education presented their own position as a privileged one that they hoped to enable colonized women to attain. Simultaneously, advocates of British women’s rights stressed their current slave status, drawing analogies not only with enslaved Africans but also with women living in supposedly less civilized lands. This separation of anti-slavery and women’s rights discourse contrasted with the abolitionist-feminist discourse developed by Garrisonian women in the United States.

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‘‘Race’’ and Definitions of Feminism: Abolitionist-Feminism or Female Abolitionism as Feminism? One of the problems inherent in the use of the woman-slave analogy by nineteenth-century feminists was that it was premised on the (unarticulated) assumption that, to paraphrase the title of a pioneering black women’s studies’ text, ‘‘all the women are white, all the slaves are men.’’≤∫ This rendering invisible of the particular experiences and oppression of black women went against the central aim of female abolitionism, which was to make that experience visible and to campaign for enslaved women’s emancipation. In addition, while the woman-slave analogy might be a useful rhetorical tool for white feminists wishing to highlight their own oppression, its presentation of ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘slaves’’ as two distinct, nonoverlapping, sets of people made its use problematic for black women who were simultaneously oppressed on the basis of their race and gender. There is, I believe, a danger of replicating in contemporary feminist scholarship similar problems to those inherent in the use of the woman-slave analogy by nineteenth-century feminists. Contemporary scholars—and I include my own previous work here—seem willing to label female anti-slavery campaigning ‘‘feminist’’ only when white women campaigners begin to call for their own rights. The picture presented is often of two separate though interconnected movements, with (white) women moving from the first—anti-slavery —to the second—feminism. What this discounts is the possibility that all female anti-slavery campaigning that focused attention on black women’s oppression and emancipation—and this was indeed a central focus of both British and American women’s campaigning—has a claim to be labeled ‘‘feminist.’’ Perhaps part of the problem here is that we still tend to subsume female anti-slavery within the abolitionist movement as a whole rather than analyzing at it as a distinctive movement in its own right, one which worked in tandem with male abolitionists but pursued an agenda which was in some ways distinctive. The picture of two separate though interconnected movements of antislavery and feminism also, I believe, tends to sideline the contributions of free and freed black women to both movements. For these women there was not the clear-cut division between campaigning for others—enslaved women of their race—and campaigning for themselves—sufferers from racism as well as sexism. Writing in the early 1990s, Christine Bolt was hardly exceptional in electing to exclude women of color from her account of the development of the women’s movement in the United States and Britain on the grounds that their activities ‘‘warrant a separate treatment, in recognition of the equal sig-

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nificance of race and gender for such women.’’≤Ω What scholarship on white women over the past decade has surely demonstrated is that ‘‘race’’ was—and is—of crucial significance to white women too.≥≠ There was/is no ‘‘pure’’ feminism disarticulated from ‘‘race.’’ At the same time, black and Third World activists and scholars have made cogent critiques of the racism and Eurocentrism of Western feminism.≥∞ White Western scholars have begun to take on board the fact that we should no longer take white Western women’s campaigns as the feminist norm, and see black women’s activism as somehow not feminist because it did not focus ‘‘purely’’ on gender but also encompassed issues of race. However, as well as rewriting general histories of feminism in a way which fully takes into account black women’s activism, I believe we also need to consider the possibility that women’s anti-slavery campaigning be included in such histories not only because it led white women to campaign for their own rights, but also because it was itself feminist in the way that it highlighted the links between race and gender oppression and focused on the emancipation of black women from slavery. There are a number of indicators to suggest that, in focusing on the oppression of enslaved black women and campaigning for their emancipation, women abolitionists were indeed engaged in a feminist campaign. First, women abolitionists developed an analysis of the sexual as well as racial exploitation and oppression of enslaved women. Second, they campaigned for the emancipation of enslaved women from the bonds of this slavery defined in sexual as well as racial terms. Third, they developed a rhetoric of sisterhood that articulated a sense of empathy and identification with other women, and provided the basis for collective female organization against slavery. In other words, female abolitionism encompassed a feminist analysis, a feminist campaigning aim, and a feminist mode of organization. Let us look at each of these aspects of female abolitionism in a bit more detail. First, women abolitionists sought to draw attention to the specific sufferings of black women under slavery, showing that it was a system of sexual as well as racial exploitation and oppression. They highlighted the widespread violence against women by male planters and overseers, expressing particular horror at the flogging of pregnant women and the stripping of women for punishment. They made constant references to the ‘‘degradation’’ of women by slavery, though codes of respectability dictated that they could only make such veiled references to black women’s rape and sexual exploitation by white men. They also lamented the destruction of family life under the slave system, focusing particularly on the way children were torn from their mothers and sold away from them, and how women were forced to work even when their children were sick and needed their care. This analysis of female oppres-

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sion under slavery differed from feminist analysis of the oppression of white women, focusing as it did on the institution of slavery and planters’ treatment of their female slaves rather than on the institution of marriage and men’s treatment of their wives. However, it shared a feminist analysis of sexual exploitation and oppression, male violence, and women’s lack of rights over their own bodies. Here we can see a diversity of feminist analysis developing in response to a diversity of female experience. African-American women abolitionists, in particular, developed a black feminism that comprised three inseparable components: opposition to slavery; attacks on racism; and recognition of the particular sufferings of women under slavery. Sarah Parker Remond— the focus of Willi Coleman’s chapter in this volume—brought this analysis powerfully to the attention of the British public during her anti-slavery lecture tours of Britain in 1859–61. She stressed how their slave status made the suffering of black women far worse than that of the English seamstresses, whose plight was the subject of much philanthropic concern at this period. Second, women abolitionists aimed to emancipate women from these forms of sexual as well as racial oppression. Can this emancipatory objective be seen as feminist? Certainly, insofar as it involved a discourse of women’s rights: enslaved women had a right to freedom. It also involved a discourse of female emancipation which presented a vision of what freedom should mean. It is when we look at this vision of freedom that doubts surface about labeling female abolitionism ‘‘feminist.’’ British women expressed their desire to emancipate enslaved women so that they would be free to fulfill their domestic roles and duties as wives and mothers, living as Christians in nuclear families under the protection of their husbands. But this position was a subordinate one: British law granted married women no separate legal identity or rights. When British women talked of extending their privileges as British women to enslaved women they ignored the problem of their own subordinate status as married women. Their radical vision of slave women’s rights thus combined with a rather conservative vision of female emancipation. This dualism can be linked to a tension at the heart of the British anti-slavery movement between, on the one hand, the political radicalism of Thomas Clarkson and supporters of the ‘‘Rights of Man,’’ and, on the other, the political conservatism of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect Evangelicals. For the British abolitionist mainstream of the 1820s and 1830s freedom meant the freedom to be a responsible waged laborer and head of household in the case of men, freedom to be a devoted wife and mother in the case of women.≥≤ A domestic-focused vision of female emancipation very similar to that presented by female abolitionists was articulated by evangelical men and women involved in the anti-sati and female missionary education movements. Here we

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encounter the problem of defining feminism historically: are we to impose our contemporary definitions or are we to take the language of female emancipation at face value and see such a vision as a variety of feminism? This ties in to a wider debate about the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism: are we to see Hannah More and her sisters as anti-feminists because they opposed Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for women’s rights and instead stressed women’s social subordination to men and their domestic duties? Or should we interpret such evangelical women as conservative feminists because they asserted women’s spiritual equality and elevated women as moral guardians of the nation both through their domestic roles as the educators of children and moral advisers of husbands, and in their wider roles as philanthropists and moral reformers?≥≥ Clearly, there were a variety of contested views as to what female emancipation entailed in early nineteenth century. As feminist historians we need to explore such contests over the meaning of freedom for women. White abolitionists’ vision of freedom was developed with little reference to the visions of freedom that might have been held by enslaved Africans themselves. Herein lies another difficulty in describing female anti-slavery’s vision of freedom as feminist. The people articulating the vision were free, mainly white women speaking on behalf of enslaved women rather than enslaved women expressing their own views or using abolitionists as their mouthpieces. Obviously, this was partly the inevitable outcome of the slave system, which ruthlessly suppressed black self-expression. But in Britain, even when the opportunity arose to consult a black woman who had experienced slavery, as in the case of Mary Prince, it was not fully taken. Prince was seen by white abolitionist women as a victim of slavery who could contribute to the movement by telling her own tale of suffering. However, although she publicly presented herself as a representative of colonial slaves and called for their emancipation, she was never accepted as an anti-slavery campaigner by white women, probably because of her lack of formal education and her class position as servant in an abolitionist household. An opportunity to find out what African-Caribbean women wanted out of emancipation was thus lost. British women abolitionists thus developed a vision of freedom which, unchecked against the wishes of enslaved women themselves, influenced the shaping of postemancipation policy in the Caribbean in ways which reflected what white women thought would be good for black women rather than what they themselves desired. The situation was obviously different in the United States, where both fugitive slaves and free blacks played an important part in the abolitionist movement, but here racism and racial segregation impeded the development of a movement centered around the agendas of black activists. An important component of feminism that encompasses female autonomy

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and self-definition thus seems to be wholly or partially absent from the agenda of many white women anti-slavery activists. The third element we need to examine in exploring whether female antislavery was feminist is the use of the rhetoric of sisterhood in the movement. The motto ‘‘Am I not a woman and a sister’’ became a rallying cry for women anti-slavery campaigners, first in Britain and then in the United States. Its prime function was to assert sisterhood between free white women and enslaved black women. The question—the ‘‘yes’’ answer implied by the lack of question mark—drew attention not only to shared humanity but also to shared femaleness. This was articulated particularly around women’s shared experience of motherhood, which was seen as transcending any possible racial or cultural difference: the assumption was that black women felt for their children as strongly as white women. This egalitarian aspect of female antislavery rhetoric had its roots in British radicalism of the 1790s with its rhetoric of the rights of man and of women, and in the Christian monogenism which underpinned anti-slavery views of ‘‘race.’’≥∂ It was a feminization of the motto ‘‘Am I not a man and a brother’’ coined by the abolitionist and pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood. However, the potential egalitarianism of the motto was undercut by its association with an image of a kneeling, enchained, praying enslaved woman, which underscored that this was an appeal to be recognized as equal rather than an assertion of equality (‘‘I am a woman and a sister’’). Indeed the image stressed present inequality caused by slavery rather than presenting a vision of emancipation and empowerment. The white woman viewer of the image was addressed as the one with the gift of freedom to give, with enslaved women’s resistance rendered invisible. Thus the rhetoric of sisterhood was coupled with a maternalistic approach—white women spoke for black women and offered them protection. The presentation of black women as passive victims is inseparable from the empowerment of white women in this imagery. Such maternalism fits with the more conservative, evangelical strand in anti-slavery, which also surfaces in the approach by middle-class white women involved in both domestic and imperial philanthropy. The rhetoric of sisterhood, in providing a common focus around which female abolitionists could mobilize, also fostered female anti-slavery organization. Indeed ‘‘Am I not a woman and a sister’’ as motto and image was brought into circulation by the first female anti-slavery society in Britain in the 1820s, then exported to America when women began to organize anti-slavery societies there in the 1830s. In the transatlantic community of reformers the rhetoric of sisterhood was also mobilized to foster cooperation among female

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abolitionists across national boundaries. But, just as in female anti-slavery discourse there was a tension between egalitarian and maternalist strands of feminism, so in female anti-slavery organization there was a tension between inclusivity and exclusivity. In Britain, middle-class women ran female antislavery societies and working-class women were not recruited to committees, though they were encouraged to support the movement through donations, signatures to petitions, and participation in the boycott of slave produce. In the United States, while a few influential female anti-slavery societies were racially inclusive, and some leading white women activists publicly opposed racism, many white women abolitionists excluded black women from their societies and were reluctant to address the evils of racial segregation alongside the evils of slavery.≥∑ An analysis of female anti-slavery as feminism thus forces us to confront the articulation of racial difference as racial inequality inherent in the development of modern Western feminism from its very earliest stages. Interpreting female anti-slavery as feminism also calls into question standard chronologies of the development of feminism in a transatlantic context. British women formed the first anti-slavery organizations that focused attention of the sufferings of women under slavery, with American women following them and inspired by their example. Thus, as the risk of sounding nationalistic, I would suggest that, rather than seeing transatlantic feminism as growing from American anti-slavery, with the British women cautiously following in the wake of their American sisters, we should place greater emphasis on the British origins of transatlantic feminism.

Conclusion The relationship between different emancipation movements at national and transnational levels is both a question for historians and an ongoing political issue. In this chapter I have attempted explored the link between abolitionism and feminism in Britain within both a comparative transatlantic framework and an imperial context. In an earlier chapter Seymour Drescher has shown how differences in British and French political culture led to very different levels of popular and female engagement in anti-slavery in the two nations. In this chapter I have similarly suggested that the reasons why the abolitionist-feminism characteristic of Garrisonian anti-slavery in the United States did not take root in Britain lay in the differing political cultures and the differing dynamics of ‘‘race,’’ class, and gender in the two nations. I have also examined how the woman-slave analogy

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had rather different connotations in the two countries, with British feminist texts featuring a ‘‘triple discourse’’ of slavery which referenced the enslavement of women in ‘‘savage’’ African societies and under ‘‘despotic’’ Oriental regimes as well as the enslavement of Africans in colonial plantation societies. As Karen Offen has pointed out in her chapter discussing French feminist texts, the slavery analogy did not always refer to colonial slavery. In the second part of this chapter I have discussed the implications of shifting from an analytical approach which explores the relationship between anti-slavery and feminism to one which analyzes female anti-slavery as feminism. This is perhaps a contentious approach, but I think that it I can help us to reconsider how the politics of ‘‘race’’ have impacted both our contemporary scholarly definitions of feminism and the historical development of modern Western feminism. I have discussed definitions of feminism in this paper, but not definitions of abolitionism or anti-slavery. Hilary Beckles has suggested we view slave resistance as anti-slavery, thus putting abolitionism and action by slaves themselves within the same analytical frame.≥∏ If abolitionists wrote slave resistance out of anti-slavery how do we write it back in? If we do this, what new understandings of the diverse roots of feminism, and of the relationship between ‘‘Western’’ and ‘‘Third World’’ feminisms, can be gleaned from an examination of the forms of resistance by enslaved women and the actions of freed women after emancipation in both the United States and the Caribbean? To gain a full picture of the links between abolitionism and feminism in Britain I believe that we need to combine a comparative perspective with an exploration of transatlantic links, and to place the material within the context of Britain’s role as a leading imperial power. We also need to examine the relations between female anti-slavery campaigners and female slave resisters. While the latter project lies beyond the scope of this book I believe that it could provide further insights into the range and contested meanings of female emancipation among diverse historical actors. Notes 1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 82. 2. Judy R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 3. Key early works included: Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1967); Alma Lutz, Crusade for Freedom: Women of the Antislavery Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).

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4. Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), p. 247. 5. Louis Billington and Rosamund Billington, ‘‘ ‘A Burning Zeal for Righteousness’: Women in the British Anti-Slavery Movement,’’ in Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914, ed. Jane Rendall (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 82–111. 6. The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, ed. Moira Ferguson (new edition, London: Pandora, 1987), introduction, pp. 1–41. The History had previously been republished in collections of American slave narratives. 7. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery. The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992); Karen Halbersleben, Women’s Participation in the British Antislavery Movement (Edwin Mellen Press, 1993); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge, 1992); Vron Wale, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London, Verso, 1992). 8. Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 9. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters. The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty. Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Shirley Yee, Black Women Abolitionists. A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). 10. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood. Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 11. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870 (Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2000); Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974). 12. Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women. The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 13. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings. The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); see also Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy. The Transatlantic Sources of NineteenthCentury Feminism (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999). 14. For the concept of the ‘‘Black Atlantic’’ see Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). For the need to expand Gilroy’s analysis to include consideration of women and gender issues see Deborah Gray White, ‘‘Nationalism and Feminism in the Black Atlantic,’’ in Women’s Rights and Human Rights. International Historical Perspectives, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 231–242. 15. Pioneering works in this field were Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), and Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 16. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History. British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

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See also Inderpal Grewal, ‘‘Empire and the Movement for Women’s Suffrage in Britain,’’ in Home and Harem. Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), ch. 2. 17. Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire. Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790– 1865 (London: Routledge, forthcoming). For a brief summary of initial findings see Clare Midgley, ‘‘British Women’s Rights and Empire, 1790–1850,’’ in Grimshaw, Holmes, and Lake, Women’s Rights and Human Rights, pp. 3–15. 18. For fuller discussion of the British women anti-slavery campaigners’ approach see: Clare Midgley, ‘‘Anti-slavery and Feminism in Britain,’’ Gender and History 5 (Autumn 1993), pp. 343–362; Midgley, Women Against Slavery, ch. 5. My conclusion differs from Moira Ferguson, who suggests that, for British women writers, ‘‘pressing the freedom of slaves enabled them to distance yet circulate negative facts about white women’s experiences’’ and that such writing ‘‘provided a set of moral coordinates for articulating white female subjugation’’ and ‘‘constructed a paradigm of their own situation and a road map for its change’’(Subject to Others, p. 299). While such psychological dynamics may have been present, I have been unable to identify evidence for them in the documents produced by women’s anti-slavery societies in Britain. 19. Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘‘ ‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women Compared at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,’’ Pacific Historical Review (1990), pp. 453–499. 20. Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, introduction. 21. See Peter Fryer, Staying Power. The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984); Gretchen Gerzina, Black England. Life Before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995). 22. As was the case with Elizabeth Pease, for example—see Midgley, Women Against Slavery, pp. 150–153. It should, however, be noted that historians differ in their interpretation of the relationship between British abolitionism and Chartism—for two diverse perspectives see: Patricia Hollis, ‘‘Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform,’’ in Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey, ed. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), pp. 294– 318; Betty Fladeland, ‘‘ ‘Our Cause Being One and the Same’: Abolitionists and Chartism,’’ in Slavery and British Society 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 69–99. 23. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002). 24. Letter from Katherine Fry to Louisa Pely, 19 November 1840, Buxton Papers, vol. 20, pp. 37–43, MSS Brit. Emp. S.444, Rhodes House Library, Oxford. 25. See Clare Midgley, ‘‘Female Emancipation in an Imperial Frame: English Women and the Campaign Against Sati (Widow-Burning) in India, 1813–30,’’ Women’s History Review, vol. 9 (2000), pp. 95–122. 26. ‘‘An appeal from British ladies to the West India planters,’’ handwritten draft in Lucy Townsend, ‘‘Scrap Book on Negro Slaves,’’ MSS Brit. Emp. S.4, pp. 127–34, in Rhodes House Library, Oxford. 27. For a fuller discussion of my interpretation see: Clare Midgley, ‘‘Anti-Slavery and

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the Roots of Imperial Feminism’’ in Clare Midgley, Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), ch. 7. 28. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave. Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1982). 29. Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), p. 11. 30. Ware, Beyond the Pale; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters. The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 31. V. Amos and P. Parmar, ‘‘Challenging Imperial Feminism,’’ Feminist Review 17 (1984), pp. 3–19; C. T. Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 32. For discussions of the meaning of freedom that focus on emancipated men see: Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom. Race, Labour, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Frank McGlynn and Seymour Drescher, eds., The Meaning of Freedom. Economics, Politics, and Culture After Slavery (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1992). The gendered vision of freedom promoted by British missionaries in Jamaica is discussed in Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), Part 1. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), offers valuable comparative perspectives. 33. See, for example, Kathryn Sutherland, ‘‘Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism,’’ in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991). 34. Monogenism was the belief that all humans, regardless of ‘‘race,’’ are descended from the same origin—a scientific theory that was compatible with the biblical story of Adam and Eve. See Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800– 1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982). 35. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, pp. 83–85; Yee, Black Women Abolitionists. 36. See, for example, Hilary McD. Beckles, ‘‘Taking Liberties: Enslaved Women and Anti-Slavery in the Caribbean,’’ in Midgley, Gender and Imperialism, pp. 137–160.

P A R T

The Transatlantic Activism of African-American Women Abolitionists

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Sarah Forten’s Anti-Slavery Networks julie winch

At first glance, the career of Philadelphia abolitionist Sarah Louisa Forten hardly seems to exemplify the international dimensions of the antislavery movement. Here was a woman apparently rooted in her native city. With the exception of one memorable visit to New York City to attend an antislavery convention, she never traveled more than fifty miles beyond Philadelphia. And yet, if she did not cross the Atlantic to promote the abolitionist cause, as did other members of her circle, her words, in one form or another, reached antislavery audiences an ocean away. Moreover, through her reading, her correspondence, her many conversations with abolitionists from two continents who flocked to her home, she developed a sense of herself as a member of an international community of reformers. Born in 1814, she came of age in the tumultuous decade of the 1830s, when to be an abolitionist, especially an African American abolitionist, was to court everything from verbal harassment to physical assault, but her bold declaration that ‘‘I woman as I am— would never yield an inch in the prosecution of what I considered my duty’’ was no idle boast.∞ She knew her duty and she had no intention of shirking it. That it was a duty shared by thousands of men and women of goodwill on both sides of the Atlantic only strengthened her resolve. Why, then, given the depth of her commitment to abolition and the talent she displayed in her teens and early twenties as an antislavery writer, did Sarah

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Forten not achieve the prominence of Sarah Parker Remond or Mary Ann Shadd Cary? She lacked none of their ability, none of their fervor. Why did she not cross the Atlantic, or at least the boundaries of her native state, to bear witness to the evils of slavery and the perniciousness of racism? Poverty did not hold her back. She had the means to travel. Moreover, she was a member of a family that was an integral part of an international community of reformers. In Sarah Forten’s case, though, talent blossomed and fervor strengthened too early. Her brief career serves as an example of what might have been, had considerations of family, socioeconomic status, and community expectations about appropriate female behavior not conspired to force her from the field when she was only in her mid-twenties. Sarah Parker Remond and Mary Ann Shadd Cary were just emerging as activists at a time in their lives when Sarah Forten was retiring from the scene. They were crossing oceans and national borders when her horizon was narrowing to one small corner of Pennsylvania. The promise of Sarah Forten’s career as an activist and the rapid demise of that career speak volumes about the limitations imposed by gender. Sarah Forten could become an ardent advocate for the emancipation of the enslaved, but ultimately she would find herself in need of emancipation. Sarah Forten’s perspective on the antislavery movement was a uniquely personal one, based on ancestry, status, and the intellectual influences to which she was exposed. Her parentage made her an American in the most inclusive sense of the word, for she could trace her forebears to Africa, to Europe, and to the indigenous peoples of North America. Her father, James Forten, was the great-grandson of an African brought by force to William Penn’s infant colony shortly after its founding. That man lived and died a slave, but his son secured his freedom. Sarah’s grandfather and father were freeborn. Her mother, Charlotte Vandine, linked her not only to Africa but to the Lenni-Lenape, who had lived in the Delaware Valley for centuries, and to the Dutch pioneers, who had colonized the region long before English Quakers set foot there.≤ Sarah Forten also prided herself on being the daughter of a ‘‘founding father.’’ At age nine, James Forten had stood in the State-House Yard in Philadelphia and had heard the Declaration of Independence read in public for the first time, and at age fourteen he had gone off to fight for the Patriot cause. His children had been raised to believe that they were legitimate heirs of the Revolution, and that they, along with all Americans, irrespective of race and condition, were entitled to share in the promises enshrined in what Forten called ‘‘that glorious fabrick of collected wisdom, our noble Constitution.’’≥ Born into freedom in the North, Sarah Forten was more fortunate than so many Americans of African descent, and she knew it. She also knew she had

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material advantages enjoyed by few of her contemporaries, black or white. By the time of her birth, her father had established himself as one of the most successful sail makers in Philadelphia. He presided over a large racially integrated workforce and did business with some of the most respected shipowners up and down the eastern seaboard. He plowed his profits back into his sailloft. He also made judicious real estate purchases, acquired stock in a number of promising enterprises, and loaned money at interest. Although he did not flaunt his wealth, it was obvious to anyone who cared to look. He owned a fine three-story home, and his wife had servants to assist her in the running of it.∂ Not for Sarah and her sisters in their formative years would there be the household drudgery that was the lot of so many young women. They could devote their time to intellectual improvement and social reform. Given their status and their prospects, James and Charlotte Forten could have permitted, and even encouraged, their offspring to grow up thinking of themselves as members of a class apart, somehow untouched by the brutal realities of slavery. However, that was something they steadfastly refused to do. They regarded themselves and their children as members of the larger black community, enslaved and free, and believed that their privileged position only meant more was expected of them. Their superior education equipped them to be of use to the antislavery crusade. Sarah, along with her eight siblings, imbibed the lessons of responsibility her parents taught her. So deeply ingrained was her commitment to fighting human bondage and racial oppression that it is difficult to credit her statement to a white friend in 1837, when she was in her early twenties, that she had ‘‘untill [sic] very lately lived and acted more for herself than for the good of others,’’ or to accept that it was the emergence of radical abolitionism to which she was indebted ‘‘for arousing me from apathy and indifference.’’∑ As soon as she was old enough to be aware of the world around her, Sarah Forten had been drawn into the war to end slavery at home and abroad. By the time Sarah was born, the Forten name was already recognized in antislavery circles in the United States and beyond. In the 1810s, two African American reformers with strong ties to British antislavery activists ensured that those activists heard of James Forten and his family. The missions of Paul Cuffe and Prince Saunders—the former to repatriate former slaves in a new colony in West Africa, and the latter to advance black education—took them to Britain more than once, and they kept their various correspondents, among them William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, informed about the campaign for abolition in the United States and the men and women involved in that campaign.∏ Sarah Forten was probably too young to have any distinct memories of

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Cuffe and Saunders, but she would have had ample opportunity to hear of their work and read their letters. As for Benjamin Rush, one of her father’s white friends and a correspondent of British abolitionist Granville Sharp, he died the year before Sarah’s birth, but James Forten often spoke of him, praising him as one of the finest exemplars of the Revolutionary generation.π If Sarah did not know Rush personally, she certainly knew another white abolitionist, Philadelphia lawyer Richard Peters Jr., since he handled her father’s legal affairs. Peters was a powerful voice in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society until his resignation in the wake of the Missouri crisis. He was also the president for several years of the American Convention of Antislavery Societies and a friend of various British abolitionists, most notably Thomas Clarkson.∫ The antislavery endeavors of Cuffe and Rush, Saunders and Peters, Clarkson and Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and a host of other luminaries of the transatlantic movement for the abolition of slavery formed part of the intellectual backdrop to young Sarah Forten’s world. She had no need to go outside her own home to be involved in the international movement to end slavery. That movement came to her. As Sarah and her siblings pursued their education at the school James and Charlotte Forten had joined with other affluent black parents to establish—a testimony to the policy of racial exclusion practiced by most of the private academies in the City of Brotherly Love—there was no shortage of material at home on which to hone their reading skills.Ω They were steeped in AngloAmerican culture. They read Shakespeare and Milton. Their father was a great admirer of the works of the early eighteenth-century British Whig Joseph Addison, and they were almost certainly exposed to his works. They read their share of novels, history, and theology, and their writings indicate that Sarah and her sisters were familiar with the English handbook of virtuous and genteel female behavior, Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Education with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent Among Women of Rank and Fortune.∞≠ What lessons the Forten daughters imbibed from More about the fate awaiting those ‘‘women of rank and fortune’’ who departed from the paths of female virtue and gentility remained to be seen. In addition to the works that any well-read young person might be expected to become acquainted with, the Fortens absorbed the literature of AngloAmerican antislavery. They could hardly avoid it, for it was everywhere in the family home. They read the poetry of William Cowper and the tracts of Anthony Benezet, James Forten’s childhood benefactor, whose writings circulated among abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. They read Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, and the pioneering African American newspaper Freedom’s Journal, which their father helped fund and some-

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times wrote for.∞∞ In their reporting, the editors of both newspapers focused not merely on developments in the United States but on the progress of the antislavery cause throughout the Atlantic world. James Forten’s growing circle of friends at home and abroad also sent him pamphlets, newspaper clippings, copies of speeches, and proceedings of various abolitionist organizations, all of which were shared with Sarah and her siblings and helped shape their antislavery consciousness. Perhaps of special significance to Sarah as a budding poet was a two-volume set of the works of African-born writer Phillis Wheatley, who had been lionized by London society in the early 1770s, only to die in poverty in Boston a decade later. Back in 1801, James Forten and some two dozen other free men of color in Philadelphia had helped finance an edition of Wheatley’s poems, along with a translation of an (admittedly rather turgid) antislavery novel by a French writer, the Marquis de Bois-Robert.∞≤ If Sarah needed any encouragement to put her own literary talents to the service of the abolitionist cause, she received it from many quarters. Although none of her early writings survive, Sarah Forten may well have been trying her hand at literary composition long before she had anyone beyond her immediate family and a few close friends to share her efforts with. That changed on New Year’s Day, 1831, with the appearance of the Liberator. Some months earlier, William Lloyd Garrison had sought out her father as someone with both the means and the inclination to help him in his latest venture in publishing—a radical antislavery weekly. James Forten had given the project his wholehearted support, and he was warm in his praise of the newspaper when it eventually appeared. So was Sarah. When she read in the Liberator Garrison’s appeal to women, especially women of color, to contribute poetry and prose for inclusion in the Liberator’s ‘‘Ladies’ Department’’ she was one of the first to respond, albeit not under her own name but as ‘‘Ada.’’∞≥ It may have been modesty that prompted Sarah Forten to hide her identity under a nom de plume, or it may have been a desire to have her writings judged on their own merits. Perhaps she feared Garrison would find space for them in his newspaper not because he thought them intrinsically worth publishing but because she was the daughter of a generous sponsor whom he was loathe to displease. She certainly had no fear of parental disapproval. When her father discovered who the mysterious ‘‘Ada’’ was, and let Garrison in on the secret, Sarah was not ordered to stop writing. In fact, James and Charlotte Forten took pride in her poetry and judged it a highly appropriate use of her talents.∞∂ Now, week after week, Sarah Forten had a means of communicating with her fellow abolitionists. Although it teetered on the verge of bankruptcy many times in the early 1830s, Garrison’s newspaper reached a wide audience at home, and the occasional copy found its way across the Atlantic. Growing

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numbers of antislavery sympathizers had the opportunity to read ‘‘Ada’s’’ verses, and sometimes to enter into poetical dialogue with her.∞∑ As for the range of her poems, some tackled themes common enough among nineteenthcentury sentimental writers—bidding farewell to a young man with whom the writer has shared ‘‘friendship’s early dream,’’ or the grief of a widowed mother (at this stage of Sarah’s life only imagined) at the loss of her one remaining child, or the uncertainty of life and the inevitability of change.∞∏ But the plight of the slave would almost always intrude, however conventional the theme. In ‘‘Past Joys,’’ for instance, ‘‘Ada’’ wrote of the sorrow anyone could expect to experience at leaving home and parting with loved ones, but she begged her readers to consider the far more poignant sufferings of ‘‘Poor Afric’s son.’’ For him the separation brought about by sale was as complete as death. His is a sorrow deeper far, Than all that we can show; His is a lasting grief, o’er which No healing balm can flow.∞π

She wrote of her sense of what it meant to be an American—her intense patriotism, tinged with sadness at what she viewed as a betrayal of the principles of the Revolutionary generation. Can the name of ‘my country‘—the deeds which we sing— Be honored—revered—midst pollution and sin? Can the names of our fathers who perished in fight, Be hallowed in stone, midst slavery’s blight? . . . . . . Speak not of ‘my country,’ unless she shall be, In truth, the bright home of the ‘brave and the free!’∞∫

One of her poems, ‘‘The Grave of the Slave,’’ was set to music by African American composer Francis (Frank) Johnson, who worshiped at the same church as Sarah Forten and her family, and it became a standard at antislavery rallies. When Johnson and his band traveled to England in 1837, they performed at a number of venues and were well received by their British audiences, who included the young Queen Victoria and members of her court. It is possible that, thanks to Johnson, at least some music lovers in Britain heard ‘‘Ada’s’’ moving verses on the suffering of the enslaved.∞Ω When Sarah Forten turned to prose, she did so as ‘‘Magawisca,’’ a pen name that reveals much about both her reading and her sense of identity. Magawisca was the proud and eloquent daughter of a Pequot chief in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in Massachusetts.≤≠ If Sarah Forten was an African American, her mother’s complex racial ancestry made her a Native American as well, and in her essay ‘‘The Abuse of Liberty’’

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she drew on that fact, with appeals to the ‘‘Great Spirit’’ and denunciations of the greed and inhumanity of the ‘‘pale faces’’ in their dealings with those who ‘‘cannot show a fair exterior, no matter what be the noble qualities of their mind.’’≤∞ As she matured as a writer, she found others who shared her intellectual aspirations and her dedication to antislavery. She joined the Female Literary Association, a black women’s literary society established in Philadelphia in 1831. Garrison welcomed contributions from members of the Association, and works by the likes of ‘‘Zoe,’’ ‘‘Zillah,’’ ‘‘Bera,’’ and others joined those of ‘‘Ada’’ in the columns of the Liberator.≤≤ In the fall of 1833, Sarah, her mother, and her sisters signed their names to the constitution of the newly formed Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.≤≥ Through her service as an officer of the society, and through her family’s increasing visibility in antislavery ranks, she was drawn more and more into the cause. She helped organize the society’s annual fund-raising fair. Like her British counterparts, she joined in petitioning male politicians. British women sent enormous petitions to Parliament calling for West Indian abolition. Sarah Forten and the other members of the Philadelphia Female AntiSlavery Society, in common with antislavery women in many other communities, badgered people to add their signatures to petitions to Congress calling for the outlawing of slavery in the District of Columbia and the rejection of the annexation of Texas—an initiative fraught with international implications as well as domestic ones. Sarah sold shares to finance the building of Pennsylvania Hall—and grieved with many of her friends as the new meeting place for antislavery advocates and supporters of other radical causes was burned to the ground by an angry mob within days of its opening.≤∂ With two of her sisters, she made her way to New York in 1837 for the meeting of the first national women’s antislavery convention. When the officers of the convention decided to print and circulate An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, a pamphlet they hoped would win more converts to their cause, it was a verse from one of Sarah’s poems that was selected to grace the title page.≤∑ Her growing circle of abolitionist friends, black and white, in Philadelphia and far beyond, broadened Sarah Forten’s horizons and directly influenced her writing. If she could turn out sentimental verse about life and friendship seemingly on demand for the albums of her genteel acquaintances, she could produce much more besides.≤∏ For the album of white abolitionist Gerrit Smith’s teenage daughter, Elizabeth, she sketched a motif instantly recognizable by antislavery sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic, an image of a kneeling female slave with her hands raised in supplication. She also wrote a short but eloquent piece testifying to her understanding of what it meant to be an

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abolitionist: ‘‘In the album of an Abolitionist we look for effusions whose genial influence shall . . . be shed abroad like the waters of healing—make pure the darkened mind—bringing light to the blinded eye—and convictions to the hands and heart. We look for that holy enthusiasm which the cause demands . . . Oh! May this Book be destined to convey, in language firm yet affectionate, admonitions of love and charity to all who read—while from the altar of the heart we will offer up incense and a pure offering to him who has thus far bles[s]ed this righteous work.’’≤π That this ‘‘righteous work’’ was under way on both sides of the Atlantic was a fact Sarah had long been aware of, but her own growing involvement in antislavery drove that fact home with even greater force. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society received communications from women’s groups in Britain outlining their activities and asking the Philadelphia women about their own efforts. Various speakers, among them two of Sarah’s brothers, addressed the society, calling on the Philadelphia women to emulate their British sisters in campaigning tirelessly and very vocally for an end to human bondage.≤∫ A number of Sarah’s male friends traveled to Britain to advance the cause. William Lloyd Garrison, for whom she had the deepest admiration, spent some time with her family in 1833 before his departure for Britain, and she dedicated a poem to his ship, the Hibernia, the ‘‘gallant bark’’ that would carry to ‘‘old Britain’s shore, The Champion of the slave.’’ He goes to raise the standard high, And freedom’s flag unfurl, And to proclaim the rallying cry Of freedom to the world.≤Ω

The following year, Sarah’s brother-in-law, Robert Purvis, embarked for Britain. As Sarah knew, although a native of South Carolina, her sister Harriet’s husband was himself half-British, the son of an Anglo-Scottish merchant, William Purvis, and Harriet Judah, the African American woman who had been for almost two decades the older Purvis’s ‘‘beloved friend.’’ Early in life, the wealthy and well-educated Robert had dedicated himself to the antislavery cause and, despite the fact that he could easily ‘‘pass’’ as white, he had chosen to identify as a man of color, and to select an African American woman to be his wife.≥≠ In his letters from Britain to his Forten in-laws back in Philadelphia, Robert Purvis dwelled on the warmth of his reception. He was especially impressed by the Irish patriot and champion of West Indian emancipation Daniel O’Connell. The two were introduced in the lobby of the House of Commons by a mutual friend. O’Connell took one look at Purvis—obviously

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a southerner but much less obviously a man of color—jumped to the conclusion that he was a rich white planter seeing the sights of London as part of the Grand Tour, and turned his back on him. When Purvis’s true identity was revealed, as well as his purpose in visiting Britain, O’Connell hastily turned around and offered him his hand, explaining, ‘‘Sir, I will never take the hand of an American . . . without first knowing his principles in reference to American Slavery.’’ Eloquent and well-connected, Purvis soon found himself ‘‘antislavery property.’’ He spoke at various venues in England and Scotland, and put the women of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Sarah Forten among them, in touch with groups of British antislavery women.≥∞ More male members of Sarah Forten’s circle visited Britain in the 1830s and reported on the progress of antislavery there. Her brother James’s friend, New Yorker James McCune Smith, went to Scotland to study for the medical degree he knew he could never receive in the United States. He took time away from his studies to join the Glasgow Emancipation Society and, like Purvis, served as a link between antislavery advocates in Scotland and those in the United States.≥≤ Another Forten friend, and an old schoolfellow of Sarah’s, portrait painter Robert Douglass Jr., spent many months in Britain getting the professional training denied him back home. His sister was someone Sarah saw on a regular basis, since both young women were officers of the Female AntiSlavery Society and the Female Literary Association. Sarah Forten had ample opportunity to hear about Robert Douglass’s contacts with British abolitionists.≥≥ (In time, Sarah’s own brother Robert Bridges Forten would settle in London and become an active member of the London Emancipation Committee. Her elder sister, Harriet, would also consider moving to Britain with her husband and children.)≥∂ Sarah Forten knew the antislavery struggle was not confined to the Englishspeaking world. She was certainly of an age to take note of the lavish celebrations Philadelphians organized to mark the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette to the city in 1824 on his triumphal tour of the United States. Her brother James was a passionate admirer of the Frenchman for his vocal opposition to slavery, as well as for his role in the American Revolution, and her father was one of the ‘‘worthy and highly esteemed . . . citizen[s]’’ appointed by the black national convention in 1833 to write to Lafayette and explain that the honorary vice-presidency the hated American Colonization Society had conferred upon the veteran abolitionist was no honor at all.≥∑ Since she and her sisters had been tutored in French, as befitted well-educated young women, Sarah had the linguistic facility, as well as the inclination, to follow the progress of antislavery in France.≥∏ Still, it was the British wing of the antislavery movement that Sarah looked

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to more often than its counterpart across the Channel. Not only did she have friends and family members who traveled to Britain, she also had the chance to meet with British antislavery sympathizers in Philadelphia. In fact, during the 1830s the Fortens were one of the prominent American families on whom any self-respecting British visitor with an interest in social reform in general and abolition in particular was expected to call. Maybe Sarah took the opportunity to discuss her own writings with novelist Harriet Martineau, who spent Christmas Day of 1834 with the Fortens.≥π Earlier that year, prison reformer and antislavery sympathizer Edward S. Abdy visited the Fortens. English Quakers Joseph Sturge and John Joseph Gurney also called, as did various luminaries of the abolition movement.≥∫ But the visitor from Britain who made the greatest impression on Sarah Forten was George Thompson. As far as Sarah was concerned, Thompson was a celebrity of the first order, and she was ecstatic when he visited Philadelphia in the spring of 1835. Thompson provided arguably the most direct connection she would have with British antislavery. She attended every one of his lectures. At one, so she told a New England friend, Elizabeth Whittier, sister of the Quaker antislavery poet John Greenleaf Whittier, a disaster was narrowly averted. The gallery of the church in which Thompson was speaking showed signs of collapsing under the weight of the crowd that had assembled to hear the controversial Englishman. All passed off safely, though, and Sarah could hardly contain her enthusiasm. ‘‘Never before have we listened to such surprising powers of oratory— never has there been such an awakening of consciences—his eloquence surpasses any thing ever before heard.’’ She was particularly gratified that he had addressed the Female Anti-Slavery Society, reporting that his presentation had resulted in an influx of new members. ‘‘I have had many opportunities of being in Mr. Thompson’s society and find him a most delightful and companionable person, he is witty—full of anecdotes—and very lively . . . and we really loved him—not only for his greatness—but for his goodness.’’ He had stayed with Sarah’s sister and brother-in-law. Garrison and his brother-in-law were also in town, and the Forten household was lively indeed. ‘‘You will scarcely be able to read this hasty scrawl. I am writing with four or five Gentlemen (all abolitionists) talking about Thompson of course I cant [sic] help giving my ears to them, while my eyes only rest upon the paper.’’≥Ω Her reverence for Garrison and Thompson, and her candor with Elizabeth Whittier, speak volumes about Sarah Forten’s conviction that the antislavery movement could erase the lines of race and nationality. She was not naïve, though. As she wrote to antislavery activist Angelina Grimké, she knew there were those who called themselves abolitionists but who seemed unable to shed

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the ‘‘dark mantle’’ of prejudice. Still, she hoped they would eventually outgrow their preconceived notions about race. Did she ever feel slighted? She confessed she did. ‘‘[I]t has often engendered feelings of discontent and mortification in my breast when I saw that others were preferred before me, who by education, birth, or worldly circumstances were no better than myself, their sole claim to notice depending on the superior advantage of being White.’’ However, she was confident that a change was coming, that a more just society could indeed be achieved as ‘‘true-hearted’’ abolitionism gained in strength.∂≠ Sadly, for one who was so vocal and so motivated, Sarah Forten’s career as an abolitionist came to an abrupt end, not through death but through matrimony and motherhood. Although she had spoken humorously about ‘‘the thrall’’ of marriage, and seemed resolved to remain single, in 1838 she accepted the hand of Joseph Purvis, Robert Purvis’s younger brother, running off with him to New Jersey to be married by a justice of the peace. Why she opted to marry a man whom she had known for years and whom she must have realized shared few of her intellectual interests and little of her commitment to antislavery is not easily explained unless one delves more deeply into her circumstances. Certainly, James and Charlotte Forten did not compel their daughters to marry. Harriet had chosen matrimony, but the eldest of the Forten daughters, Margaretta, remained single and became a teacher. Still, if the Forten sisters, like other well-to-do young women of color of the ‘‘best’’ families, had a choice when it came to matrimony, they had none as regards female ‘‘respectability.’’ Sarah Forten evidently violated the code of female virtue and found herself obliged to pay the price for that transgression. The timing of the birth of Sarah and Joseph’s eldest child suggests a powerful motive for elopement. Sarah was almost certainly pregnant, and a hasty marriage was the only solution to her situation. Had she and Joseph done as her sister and his brother had done and embarked on a lengthy (and chaste) courtship, there would have been a formal betrothal, followed by an elegant wedding in the bride’s home (as was the case with Harriet and Robert) or at the church the family attended. Her flight to New Jersey with a man who was her partner in the physical sense but not in the spiritual or intellectual sense marked the beginning of the end of Sarah Forten’s career as an abolitionist. But in the context of the time, the place, and her family’s social standing, what other option was open to her?∂∞ If James and Charlotte Forten had misgivings about the suitability of Joseph Purvis as a son-in-law, they were proven right. Unlike Robert, Joseph was, at best, a lukewarm abolitionist. Harriet Forten and Robert Purvis were true

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collaborators in the antislavery movement. Sarah Forten and Joseph Purvis were not. Joseph would never emulate his elder brother by sailing to Britain, seeking out the leaders of British antislavery, and going on the lecture circuit. No British reformers would call at Joseph and Sarah’s Bucks County farmstead. Harriet Purvis kept open house for foreign visitors, and she and Robert were renowned in antislavery circles on both sides of the Atlantic as gracious hosts. Her growing family prevented Harriet from traveling very extensively, but the antislavery world came to her in the home she shared with her husband just as it had in her childhood home. That would not be the case for Sarah Purvis. No activist himself, Joseph had no wish to have an activist for a wife, and his influence soon won out. Within weeks of her marriage, Sarah resigned from the Female Anti-Slavery Society, while her sister remained a lifelong member. She ceased writing poetry. She attended no more abolitionist meetings, helped organize no more antislavery fairs. She exchanged the life of an abolitionist for that of a farmer’s wife. Her marriage cut her off almost completely from the world she had known, the world of international antislavery. She seldom went to Philadelphia. Marriage and the birth of eight children in twelve years eclipsed antislavery as her ‘‘righteous work.’’ When Joseph died in January of 1857, leaving her beset by financial troubles (he had been a failure as a businessman as well as a soul mate), she soldiered on, devoting her energies to her children’s education and welfare. In a sense, ‘‘emancipation’’ had come, in that she was free of a marriage that had offered so little by way of intellectual companionship, but she was not ‘‘free.’’ While Sarah Parker Remond was setting sail for England, preparing to spread the antislavery message and seek a college-level education for herself, Sarah Forten Purvis was worrying about hiring enough workers to get the harvest in. While Mary Ann Shadd was traveling the eastern provinces of Canada and publishing her own newspaper, Sarah was struggling to pay off her husband’s debts and keep the family farm solvent. What the erstwhile activist knew of the abolitionist crusade at home and abroad she knew as an observer, rather than as the eager participant she had once been. The occasional letter from an old friend or visit from a relative kept her in touch with the progress of the cause, but her fate as an abolitionist mirrored that of many of her sisters in the United States and Britain. They were hardly lacking in compassion, but ‘‘what they considered their duty’’ inevitably changed as the demands of home and family superseded those of the slave. And if, as was Sarah’s case, they were tied to men whose compassion and commitment to antislavery lagged so far behind their own, their fate as abolitionists was sealed. The price of domestic harmony was retirement from the fray.

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Notes 1. Sarah Forten to Elizabeth Whittier, November 9, 1835, George Whittier Pickard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard. 2. On Sarah Forten’s ancestry see Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 8–13, 111–12. 3. Ibid., 30–52; James Forten, Letters from a Man of Colour on a Late Bill Before the Senate of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1813), 1. 4. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 77–106. 5. Sarah Forten to Angelina Grimké, April 15, 1837, in Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844 (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), 379. 6. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 177–95, 211–13. 7. Ibid., 97, 136–37, 140–42, 173. 8. Ibid., 98–100, 198, 205–6, 212–13. 9. Pennsylvania Freeman, March 17, 1841. 10. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 117, 170. 11. Ibid., 15–16, 24–25, 28, 62–63, 203–5. 12. Ibid., 158; The Negro Equalled by Few Europeans. Translated from the French. To Which Are Added, Poems on Various Subjects, Moral and Entertaining; by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1801). 13. On Sarah Forten’s use of the pen name ‘‘Ada’’ see Todd Gernes, ‘‘Poetic Justice: Sarah Forten, Eliza Earle, and the Paradox of Intellectual Property,’’ New England Quarterly 71 (June 1998), 229–65. 14. James Forten to William Lloyd Garrison, February 23, 1831, Antislavery Manuscripts, Boston Public Library. 15. Liberator, February 22, 1834; March 1, 1834. 16. Ibid., June 30, 1832; July 7, 1832; August 3, 1833. 17. Ibid., March 19, 1831. 18. Ibid., January 4, 1834. 19. Ibid., January 22, 1831. Charles K. Jones and Lorenzo K. Greenwich II, comps., A Choice Collection of the Works of Francis Johnson (New York: Point Two Publications, 1987), vol. 2, 200–1. 20. On Sarah Forten’s identification with the character in Sedgwick’s novel see Gernes, ‘‘Poetic Justice,’’ 233–34. 21. Liberator, March 26, 1831. Despite her choice of an Indian name, ‘‘Magawisca’’ did not take the Jackson administration to task for its treatment of the Indian nations of the southeast. Her focus was exclusively on the enslavement of African Americans. 22. On the work of the society see Julie Winch, ‘‘ ‘You Have Talents—Only Cultivate Them’: Philadelphia’s Black Female Literary Societies and the Abolitionist Crusade,’’ in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 101–18.

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23. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 257. 24. For details of Sarah Forten’s involvement in the work of the society see Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Minute Books, 1833–1870; Board of Managers Minute Books, 1833–1839; Correspondence Incoming; Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 25. Sarah Forten to Angelina Grimké, April 15, 1837, in Barnes and Dumond, eds., Weld-Grimké Letters, 381–82. An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, Issued by an Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held by Adjournments from the 9th to the 12th of May, 1837 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), 1. 26. See, for example, ‘‘Original and Selected Poetry of Amy Matilda Cassey,’’ and Album-Scrapbook of Mary Ann Dickerson, Library Company of Philadelphia. 27. Elizabeth Smith Album, Francis J. Grimké Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 28. Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Correspondence Incoming; Liberator, March 7 and 21, 1835; James Forten Jr., An Address Delivered Before the Ladies’ AntiSlavery Society of Philadelphia, on the Evening of the 14th of April, 1836 (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Gunn, 1836). 29. Liberator, May 25, 1833. 30. On Robert Purvis’s ancestry and background see Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 118–22. 31. Liberator, August 23, 1834; Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Correspondence Incoming. 32. James Forten Jr. to James McCune Smith, September 8, 1835, Antislavery Manuscripts, Boston Public Library. 33. On Robert Douglass’s experiences in England see Pennsylvania Freeman, June 11, 1840, and March 14, 1844. 34. Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 344–45, 353. 35. James Forten Jr. to James McCune Smith, September 8, 1835; Minutes and Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention, for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in These United States, Held by Adjournments in the City of Philadelphia, from the 3rd to the 13th of June Inclusive, 1833 (New York: By Order of the Convention, 1833), 30–31. 36. Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869; rpt. New York: Arno, 1968), 187–88; Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 272–73. 37. Harriet Martineau to Charlotte Forten, February 18, 1857, in Anna Julia Cooper, ed., Personal Letters of the Grimké Family (Washington, D.C.: For the Author, 1951), 39. Martineau remained in touch with the family for some years. In 1841, she sent James Forten a copy of her new novel, The Hour and the Man, based on the life of Haitian hero Toussaint L’Ouverture. Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 218 (entry for May 12, 1857). 38. Edward S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April 1833, to October 1834 (London: John Murray, 1835; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), vol. 3, 321; John Joseph Gurney, A Visit to North America, Described in Familiar Letters to Amelia Opie (Norwich, England: Josiah

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Fletcher, 1841), 102; Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1842; rpt. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969), 10. 39. Sarah Forten to Elizabeth Whittier, March 23, 1835; Whittier Papers, Central Michigan University (Black Abolitionist Papers microfilm). 40. Sarah Forten to Angelina Grimké, April 15, 1837, in Barnes and Dumond, eds., Weld-Grimké Letters, 379–80. 41. Sarah Forten to Elizabeth Whittier, November 9, 1835. On the circumstances surrounding Sarah Forten’s marriage see Winch, A Gentleman of Color, 271.

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Incidents Abroad: Harriet Jacobs and the Transatlantic Movement jean fagan yellin

The life of fugitive slave, antislavery activist, and author Harriet Jacobs, and the publishing history of her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, provide a personal focus to the history of the contributions of African-American feminists to the transatlantic antislavery movement in the nineteenth century. Like the fugitive slave Ellen Craft and the freeborn Sarah Parker Remond, Jacobs—who traveled abroad three times—participated directly in the international movement.∞ Harriet Jacobs’s Edenton, North Carolina, childhood provided her with an easy familiarity with the international context characteristic of the cultures of the Atlantic rim, and after her escape from slavery, her world view deepened through her involvement with the internationalist black and white Garrisonian abolitionists in Boston and Rochester, activists who participated in the cosmopolitanism that enriched Sarah Forten and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. In Jacobs’s earliest anonymous public writings, she expresses this broad awareness, first participating anonymously in the transatlantic debate over slavery, and then openly raising a public voice as an African-American woman engaged in the international movement for freedom. Again and again in her letters, in her narrative, in her only recorded speech, and in her organizational work, Jacobs makes clear that the scope of her concerns is not local, regional, or national, but international. Her presence on the transatlantic

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scene, like her deeply feminist narrative, speaks to her ongoing concerns with the condition of all women. This chapter begins with a few words about Jacobs’s home town of Edenton, North Carolina, her first trip abroad, and her life and work within the transatlantic abolitionist context. It then discusses her later trips to England, the international character of her public writings, and the international character of her relief work during the Civil War and Reconstruction. It ends with a few observations on the significance of Jacobs’s life and work today. Harriet Jacobs was born into North Carolina slavery and, after almost seven years in hiding, fled the South in 1842. She lived and worked in New York and Massachusetts for ten years before she was freed by purchase. She then began writing her slave narrative, which she finally published early in 1861. In the months after the attack on Fort Sumter, she went back south to minister to the ‘‘contraband’’ (fugitive slaves behind the Union lines) and to the Freed People —first in Washington, D.C., then in Union-occupied Alexandria, Virginia, and later in Savannah, Georgia. Following the appearance of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Jacobs became a public figure, known among the reformers as an antislavery activist and as ‘‘Linda,’’ the pseudonymous author and first-person narrator of her narrative. The slave culture of Edenton, North Carolina, into which Jacobs was born in 1813 was extremely complex. She grew up at the Horniblow’s tavern, the stagecoach stop next to the courthouse down near the public wharf. The tall ships crowding Edenton’s harbor, which were manned by sailors of all nations and colors, both free and slave, sailed not only up the coast to New York, but to the West Indies and even across the Atlantic. Nervously aware of the potential threat the seamen posed to Edenton’s closed hierarchical society, the local Gazette periodically condemned the dram shops on the wharf where white and black men, both slave and free, gathered. Just as the nearby Collins plantation, where slaves had been imported directly from Guinea, made Africa seem not so distant, Edenton’s broad harbor opened the young slave girl’s imagination to free lands across the water. Revolutionary Haiti was not very far away, and the presence of the Cabarrus Pocosin (the ‘‘snaky swamp’’ just to the southwest) invited her awareness of the maroons of fugitives living freely just beyond the town’s boundaries. Jacobs’s Edenton was in no sense an isolated upcountry southern setting like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictional Legree plantation up the Red River, but a multifaceted community of people—black and white, slave and free—actively participating in the dynamic conglomerate culture of the Atlantic rim.≤ Jacobs was in her teens when the governor warned ‘‘to the necessity of

Figure 8.1. Portrait of Harriet Jacobs. By permission.

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Figure 8.2. Map of North Carolina in 1770 by John Collett. Courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.

arresting the circulation’’ of David Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. Only weeks later, a local free man of color publicly testified that although he had been sent two copies, he had never been a subscriber to another ‘‘inflammatory’’ publication, the New Jersey newspaper The Rights of All, published by black activist Samuel Cornish. His disclaimer raises some interesting questions. Who else in Edenton read those two issues, as Cornish’s paper was passed from hand to hand? Harriet Jacobs writes that even as a little girl, she knew that her slave father’s ‘‘strongest wish was to purchase his children’’ and that freedom was on her mind [p. 5]. Could her first contact with the writings of black abolitionists—with their voiced awareness of the international character of the struggle and their demand of equal rights for all—have come as early as 1830?≥ Following her six years and eleven months in hiding, and three years after her escape from Edenton, Jacobs traveled abroad, sailing to England as a nursemaid in the employ of the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis who, in the wake of the death of his English-born wife, wanted to take his little daughter Imogen to visit his grieving in-laws. From London, Jacobs and Imogen were sent out to

Figure 8.3. ‘‘Slavery as It Exists in America; Slavery as It Exists in England,’’ ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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Steventon, in Berkshire, where they stayed at the vicarage, home of Willis’s sister-in-law and her husband. None of Jacobs’s letters from this period survive, but she later wrote that her months at the vicarage sparked her spiritual renewal. She had been disgusted by Edenton’s St. Paul’s: repelled by the ‘‘contemptuous manner’’ in which African-Americans were offered communion, revolted by the church membership of her master, and sickened at seeing ministers of the gospel buying and selling slaves. But at Steventon, everything was different. In contrast to Edenton’s slave-trading clerics, she found her host ‘‘a true disciple of Jesus.’’ Impressed by the ‘‘beauty’’ of his life, she felt inspired with faith.∂ For Jacobs, this visit to England signified not only freedom from slave catchers and racists, but also spiritual rebirth. Nevertheless—unlike Frederick Douglass, who would find his years abroad transformative—she returned to America a fugitive. Back home, she continued to distance herself from the abolitionist activists with whom her brother John S. (now also a fugitive slave) was increasingly involved. But there is no way that she was unaware of the Boston abolitionists and their diasporic vision, voiced by Maria Stewart’s protest, ‘‘How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?’’ And there is no way that she was unaware of the international character of the celebrations they organized around West Indian Emancipation. That August 1, 1834, event was commemorated every year both in England and by American abolitionists. On a hot August day in 1847, it is likely that Jacobs and her daughter Louisa joined the crowds celebrating West Indian Emancipation. If they did, they watched 150 black Bostonians proudly parading on horseback. Their appearance, Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper reported, ‘‘was good, and they demeaned themselves with great propriety as they passed through State Street (with their mounted white band) which was filled with spectators.’’∑ Two years later, Jacobs followed her activist brother John S. west to Rochester where—as an intermittent member of the household of the Quaker Amy Post, and as clerk in her brother’s Anti-Slavery Reading Room, housed downtown above Douglass’ newspaper The North Star—she joined Rochester’s circle of feminist abolitionists. As Nancy Hewitt points out elsewhere in this volume, in its ‘‘Foreign News’’ section Douglass’ paper provided full coverage of political events throughout Europe, the British Isles, and the West Indies. The earliest piece of Jacobs’s writing that has been found is a note to Post, away visiting her family. In it, Jacobs signals the international dimensions of the movement in Rochester as she writes, ‘‘I suppose we shall have Frederick and the Miss Griffiths here on Sunday to draw a full house.’’ ‘‘Frederick’’ is of course Frederick Douglass; ‘‘the Miss Griffiths’’ she mentions are the English sisters

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Julia and Eliza Griffiths, who had come to Rochester to help Douglass in his work. The presence of Julia Griffiths, who stayed on to become the permanent secretary of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and the editor of two volumes of Autographs for Freedom, brought home to Jacobs the international character of women’s involvement in the movement every day.∏ In 1852, after her freedom was bought, Jacobs wrote to Amy Post that ‘‘since I have no fear of my name coming before those whom I have lived in dread of I cannot be happy without trying to be useful in some way.’’ When her friend suggested that she could make a contribution to the movement by writing her life, Jacobs’s first thought was to gain the ear of an author who could tell her story. The obvious choice was Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was rapidly becoming America’s best-selling book. Contacting Stowe presented a challenge, however, and Jacobs asked her friend Amy to speak with the Anti-Slavery Society about approaching the famous author. Then, reading in the press that Stowe planned to travel to England, Jacobs thought she saw an opportunity both for her daughter, trained as a teacher, and for the book she had begun planning. Travel abroad, she was sure, would give Louisa a chance to experience living, as Jacobs had a few years earlier, free of American racism. And perhaps, she fondly thought, it would even enable her to make a name for herself in the international antislavery movement, as Sarah Parker Remond and the Georgia fugitive Ellen Craft would do. Traveling with Stowe, she might be able to convince the famous author to write Jacobs’s life story. Jacobs reported to Amy that she had proposed her plan to her employer and friend Cornelia Grinnell Willis, who offered to write to Stowe suggesting that she add Louisa to her traveling party. She had savings enough to pay her daughter’s expenses, and ‘‘I thought if I could get her to take Louisa with her she might get interested enough if she could do nothing herself she might help Louisa to do something besides I thought Louisa would be a very good representative of a Southern Slave she has improved much in her studies and I think that she has energy enough to do something for the cause. She only needs to be put in the field.’’π But hope soon turned to outrage. Jacobs poured out her indignation to her friend. Stowe, she reports, had answered Mrs. Willis that ‘‘it would be much care to her to take Louisa as she went by invitation it would not be right and she was afraid that if her situation as a Slave should be known it would subject her to much petting and patronizing which would be more pleasing to a young Girl than useful and the English was very apt to do it and she was very much

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opposed to it with this class of people.’’ With her rejection, Stowe had enclosed Amy Post’s letter and asked Mrs. Willis to verify its description of Jacobs’s sexual history. If the story were true, she suggested, she would incorporate it into The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she was rushing to complete before sailing to England. To Post, Jacobs angrily condemned Stowe’s behavior as both disgraceful and threatening. ‘‘I had never opend my lips to Mrs Willis concerning my Children—in the Charitableness of her own heart she sympathized with me and never asked their origin my suffering she knew it embarrassed me at first but I told her the truth but we both thought it was wrong in Mrs Stowe to have sent you letter.’’ Mrs. Willis, she continues, responded to Stowe in ‘‘a very kind letter beging that she would not use any of the facts in her key saying that I wished it to be a history of my life entirely by itself which would do more good and it needed no romance.’’ She was smarting from the racial insult in Stowe’s dismissal—‘‘think dear Amy that a visit to Stafford House [a center of British reform] would spoil me as Mrs Stowe thinks peting is more than my race can bear well what a pity we poor blacks cant have the firmness and stability of character that you white people have.’’ This episode demonstrates not only Stowe’s abuse of Jacobs. It also testifies to Jacobs’s familiarity with the British antislavery movement.∫ After this debacle, Jacobs began writing by sending letters to newspaper editors. Her very first appearance in print expresses her internationalist perspective. Signed ‘‘Fugitive,’’ this letter was published in June 1853 in the New York Tribune. Jacobs composed it in rebuttal to the public response of Julia G. Tyler, wife of the ex-president of the United States, to ‘‘An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of the Women of England to their Sisters, the Women of the United States of America.’’ Usually known as the Stafford House address, in this major international political statement a halfmillion British women joined the Duchess of Sutherland to condemn chattel slavery and to appeal to American women, ‘‘as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction from the Christian world.’’ In response Tyler, defending the institution of chattel slavery and indicting the British women for ignoring their native poor, asserted that ‘‘the negro of the South lives sumptuously in comparison with the 100,000 of the white population of London.’’Ω Reading Tyler, Harriet Jacobs impetuously decided to insert herself into this international public debate. Presenting as her credentials for participation her status as a fugitive slave, writing in the first person, and addressing her audience as ‘‘Christians,’’ in her Tribune letter Jacobs challenges Tyler’s assertion that slaves are sold ‘‘only under very peculiar circumstances.’’ Describing the

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sale of a slave woman who was discarded by her master after being used as a sexual object, she charges that the institution of chattel slavery degrades all women—both slaves and slaveholders.∞≠ In this letter, Jacobs does not mention her experiences abroad. Only later, after she graduated from letter writing to composing her slave narrative, did she discuss her visit to England. Then, writing pseudonymously as ‘‘Linda Brent’’ and using the first person, she announced that her time abroad was memorable because ‘‘for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast.’’ By 1845, the date of Jacobs’s visit, slavery had been ended in Great Britain. It was not uncommon, however, to find its defenders in the English press, where sketches of the easy life of an American slave were contrasted with the miserable life of a member of the British working class. Jacobs contested this view. ‘‘The people I saw around me [in England] were, many of them, among the poorest poor. But when I visited them in their little thatched cottages, I felt that the condition of even the meanest and most ignorant among them was vastly superior to the condition of the most favored slaves in America.’’∞∞ In the spring of 1857, Jacobs was completing her book manuscript, struggling to voice her experiences as a woman held in slavery and her victorious freedom struggle for herself and her children. Free for five years, an activist for almost a decade, Jacobs was no longer a novice in the antislavery camp. In Incidents, her alter ego ‘‘Linda’’ not only condemns the institution of chattel slavery and its ideology of white racism, but she also challenges patriarchal institutions and ideologies. The manuscript finished, Jacobs again demonstrated her international perspective by asking black abolitionist William C. Nell to arrange a meeting with Maria Weston Chapman, a leader of the Garrisonian Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Chapman, who had recently returned to America after years abroad, agreed to read her manuscript and to provide letters of introduction to prominent abolitionists in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Armed with Chapman’s endorsements, in 1858 Jacobs set sail on a second trip to England. This time she was traveling not as a fugitive slave tending her employer’s child, but as a free African-American woman with the credentials to participate in the international antislavery arena—as she had dreamed of her daughter Louisa doing a few years earlier. Her endorsements by Boston abolitionists, coupled with the British contacts made by her activist brother John S., now working as a seaman out of London, enabled Jacobs to meet MP George Thompson’s journalist son and daughterin-law Amelia Thompson Chesson and other members of the London Eman-

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cipation Committee. Although the prominent Irish Garrisonian editor Richard Davis Webb judged Jacobs ‘‘one of the truest heroines we have ever met with,’’ ultimately her British colleagues counseled her to publish her narrative in America before attempting an English edition. She returned home, as she had left, an unpublished author.∞≤ Early in 1861, Jacobs finally got out Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself in Boston, and only weeks later, her brother John S.’s brief narrative, ‘‘A True Tale of Slavery,’’ appeared in a London periodical. Having published her book at home, as advised, Jacobs now sent the plates of her book to the Chessons in London. They arranged for its publication, retitled The Deeper Wrong: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. They also managed to get the book noticed—not only in the reform journals, but in the mainstream press. Judging from its lengthy British reviews, Jacobs’s book made a significant contribution to the abolitionists’ efforts to win public support in their effort to stop Great Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. The London Morning Star and Dial wrote, ‘‘We would have every English matron exposed to the insidious influence of high-bred visitors from the Southern Confederacy, be armed beforehand with an insight into the precise nature of the wrongs which are inseparable from slavery in its outwardly most inoffensive and harmless guise. We can imagine nothing better calculated to affect such a result than this thrilling history of a slave girl’s experiences.’’∞≥ Although both the American and the English editions of Jacobs’s book appeared pseudonymously, her name was connected with it from the beginning. (Only in the twentieth century was this knowledge lost.) In Great Britain, as in America, the appearance of her slave narrative made Jacobs something of a personage among antislavery activists—and especially among abolitionist women. After the fall of Fort Sumter, she used this prominence to support the mission she decided to initiate among the refugees. Union Army authorities were not prepared for the ‘‘contraband,’’ later the ‘‘emancipated,’’ who were appearing in large numbers behind the Union lines. At times they sent them back into slavery, at times they granted them asylum, and at times they put them to work. But no army commander wanted civilians—certainly not women and children—in his camp. Nor were the refugees welcomed by civil authorities in cities where they sought asylum, cities like Washington, D. C., Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia, where Jacobs chose to work. Throughout the Civil War and the first years of Reconstruction, Jacobs and her daughter Louisa labored among these black refugees. They also wrote about their experiences—not only penning formal reports to the organizations supporting them, but reaching out to a broader international audience

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through the columns of the African-American press and of liberal and movement newspapers in the United States and in Great Britain. The form adopted by Jacobs and her daughter—and by other women writing in the papers—was a gendered public correspondence presenting a woman’s voice that challenged gender norms by inserting itself into the public debates on public issues. It is not their form that makes Jacobs’s Civil War letters distinct from other on-thespot reports. It is their message. Jacobs writes that despite their heritage of enslavement, the refugees will make excellent American citizens. And her letters are also unique because of their narrative voice—the voice of an activist black woman who had been held in slavery. For example, Jacobs’s April 1863 letter to Rev. J. Sella Martin appeared in the organ of the newly formed London Freedman’s Aid Society, which was concentrating on raising funds to help the fugitives fleeing the southern plantations. (Like Jacobs, born a North Carolina slave, by 1863 Martin, who had been her pastor in Boston, was preaching and organizing aid for the ‘‘contraband’’ at the Free Christian Church in Bromley-by-Bow in London’s East End.)∞∂ The way in which Jacobs’s letter appears in the Freedman’s Aid Society publication is of particular interest. The editor’s decision to publish her report on her refugee work suggests the interest of his readers in her work, and hence holds the promise of her continuing relationship with the British antislavery public. Its heading, ‘‘Letter from Mrs. Jacobs,’’ signals that the editor is confident that his audience is familiar with her name. And its headnote identifying Jacobs as ‘‘the ‘Linda’ of the ‘Deeper Wrong’ ’’ testifies to the impact of Jacobs’s book among this British readership. Another example, closer to home, testifies not to Jacobs’s international celebrity, but to her ongoing international perspective. On August 1, 1864, she dramatized her transatlantic worldview for the Union soldiers in Alexandria, Virginia, when, after weeks of careful planning, she presided over Alexandria’s first commemoration of British West Indian Emancipation. This event centered on the presentation of a flag to the ‘‘Colored Hospital,’’ renamed L’Ouverture in honor of the Haitian patriot. Organizing the celebration, Jacobs and her daughter had collected $60.00 from the sick and wounded, arranged for Philadelphia friends to donate the flag, and worked with local women to present dinner and an entertainment. At one p.m. the band marched onto the piazza on schedule and began to play, and at two the convalescent soldiers paraded out with four sergeants at their head. After a prayer by a local black minister and a stirring rendition of ‘‘Hail, Columbia,’’ Harriet Jacobs spoke. Formally addressing her audience of ‘‘Physicians, Soldiers, and Friends,’’ she began by noting that West Indian Emancipation had taken place thirty-one years earlier. Today, however, she proclaimed, ‘‘we are passing through times that will se-

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cure for us a higher and nobler celebration. . . . Soldiers, what we have got came through the strength and valor of your right arms . . . you have made . . . [this flag] the symbol of freedom for the slave . . .’’∞∑ While the L’Ouverture flag presentation—along with the establishment of the Harriet Jacobs free school—crowned her work in Alexandria, over the next few years dozens of letters from Jacobs and her daughter appeared in black newspapers and in the reform press in the United States. In the spring of 1866, excerpts from three of these letters—all written from Savannah, Georgia, and all initially published in the New York Freedman—appeared in the London Freed-Man, an organ of the Freedman’s Aid Society. These writings brought to an English audience Jacobs’s firsthand accounts of the betrayal of Reconstruction as she witnessed it, day by day, in rural Georgia. In the first, she writes: [O]n either side [of the river] . . . are the plantations given . . . [to the people] by Gen. Sherman, to work for themselves three years, paying a certain percentage to the Government. . . . Now these people are found fault with for believing the government would help them.

And two weeks later, They are turning most of the people from the plantations. It is a pitiful sight to go down to the Bluff where the poor creatures are landed. You will see crowds of them huddled around a few burning sticks, so ragged and filthy they scarce look like human beings. . . . Some of the river plantations that I visit are sending off all that will not make yearly contracts. . . . Some of the conditions of these are very unjust. They are not allowed to have a boat or musket. They are not allowed to own a horse, cow, or pig . . .

And a few weeks after that, I must tell you about my island poor: they have increased in numbers, mostly women and children. They are not allowed to plant, and are expecting every day to be driven off.∞∏

Jacobs’s final international publication is very different from these. After years of work among the black refugees in the South, in 1868 she returned to England for a third trip, this time at the behest of the Savannah AfricanAmerican community, which hoped to build an orphan asylum and a home for destitute aged freed people. In London, she used the Anti-Slavery Reporter to appeal for funds for her project. Here again, as in her 1863 letter to J. Sella Martin, the apparatus surrounding Jacobs’s text testifies to her presence on the international reform scene. The editor’s headnote makes clear that she is well known and respected by British activists: ‘‘We have much pleasure in

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publishing the following Appeal. It is made by a well-known victim of Slavery, Linda Brent, now Harriet Jacob, whose narrative, entitled ‘Linda,’ every one should read. We hope her appeal will be met with a generous response.’’∞π The end matter makes the point even more clearly. It notifies potential contributors that they can send their money to Stafford Allen (a prosperous Quaker who for a half century worked with the British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society), to Robert Alsop (Quaker Minister at Stoke Newington and Secretary to a Committee for the management of the Yearly Meeting’s Negro and Aborigines Fund), and to Clementia Doughty Taylor (wife of the radical politician and Unitarian Peter Taylor, MP for Leicester, who during America’s Civil War was the first member of parliament to associate himself with the federal party, and who had served as treasurer of the London Emancipation Society). It testifies, that is, that in support of her relief mission, Jacobs had gained the public endorsements of leaders of what was left, in 1868, of England’s abolitionist establishment. In her appeal, Jacobs (who, to make her identity clear to British readers of her narrative, signs herself ‘‘Linda Jacobs’’) again writes out of her own experience: ‘‘I know the degradation of Slavery—the blight it leaves; and, thus knowing, feel how strong the necessity is of throwing around the young, who, through God’s mercy, have come out of it, the most salutary influences.’’∞∫ She petitions on behalf of ‘‘the aged freedmen,’’ who ‘‘infirm, penniless, homeless . . . wander about dependent on charity for bread and shelter,’’ and explains the goal of the Savannah society—to raise funds to buy land and to build a self-sustaining institution. Addressing her British audience directly, Jacobs writes to them as supporters of an important international cause: ‘‘I am deeply sensible of the interest taken and the aid rendered by the friends of Great Britain since the emancipation of Slavery. It is a noble evidence of their joy at the downfall of American Slavery and the advancement of human rights.’’ Her appeal was successful. The National Freedmen’s Aid Union of Great Britain and Ireland voted to send her sponsors, the New York Quakers, one hundred pounds sterling ‘‘for use in the benevolent objects of Harriet Jacobs, and especially in the erection of a proposed asylum in Savannah, Georgia, for destitute colored widows and orphans.’’ Their generosity, however, did not signal the success of the proposed project. In Georgia that year, the Klan was riding and burning. The papers of the New York Quakers further record that, in addition to receiving the money to support Jacobs’s ‘‘benevolent objects,’’ they also received a letter from Jacobs herself. In her letter, they report, she commented that, ‘‘on account of the unsettled state of affairs at the South, she did not deem it advisable to commence building the asylum at present.’’∞Ω When in 1868 Jacobs left England for the last time, she knew that although

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Reconstruction was still the official agenda, the dream of a free, nonracist America was finished—at least for the present. With the death of that dream, her career as an international activist was over. To little Hatty, the bright-eyed slave girl, the waters washing Edenton’s harbor had sounded of places far beyond the town’s hierarchical slave society. Years later, Jacobs’s contact with antislavery and feminist activists in the North spurred her involvement in the international abolitionist debates. She began writing pseudonymously in the daily press, then, transforming herself into ‘‘Linda,’’ narrated and published Incidents, and finally spoke and wrote on both sides of the Atlantic as the reformer ‘‘Mrs. Jacobs.’’ Not only was Jacobs’s life situation, like that of Sarah Forten and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, shaped by international influences, but—like Sarah Parker Remond—she herself helped shape the nineteenth-century international movements for freedom. Today, in an exploration of the complex interactions of nineteenthcentury abolitionism and feminism on a world scale, it is fitting that Harriet Jacobs has again become known, and that her book is currently in print not only in numerous English editions, but also in German, Portuguese, French, and—most recently—in Japanese.

Notes 1. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston: For the Author, 1861); ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); for information concerning Jacobs’s life, see this edition. For Ellen Craft, see R. J. M. Blackett, Beating Against the Barriers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986); for Sarah Parker Remond, see Willi Coleman’s chapter in this volume. 2. For Jacobs’s Edenton, North Carolina, see Thomas D. Parramore, Cradle of the Colony: The History of Chowan County and Edenton, North Carolina (Edenton: Chamber of Commerce, 1967). Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). 3. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. 1830; rpt. ed. Peter P. Hinks, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. For the impact of Walker’s Appeal, see John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 622–70. Letter from Rigdon M. Green, Edenton Gazette, October 4, 1830. 4. Incidents, 185. Maria W. Stewart, ‘‘Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build.’’ Repub. Marilyn Richardson, ed. Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 5. ‘‘Emancipation Day,’’ Liberator, August 13, 1847. 6. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, May 1849, Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, Rush

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Rhees Library, University of Rochester; Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Auburn and Rochester: Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, 1853, 1854). 7. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, February 14 [1853], n.d., #84, Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester. 8. [Harriet Jacobs] to [Amy Post], March [crossed out] April 4 [1853]. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, March [crossed out] April 4 [1853] Harriet Jacobs to [Amy Post] [1853] # n.d., 80. All of Jacobs’s correspondence cited here is from the Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester. The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). 9. Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post, February 14 [1853], Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers, Rush Rhees Library, University of Rochester; quoted in A Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 1839–1858, ed. Annie Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg (n.p.: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1927), notes 33 and 34, pp. 40–42 from Christian Times December 3, 1852, and February 25, 1853. 10. ‘‘Letter from a Fugitive Slave,’’ New York Tribune, July 21, 1853. 11. Incidents, 183, 184. 12. (London) Anti-Slavery Advocate 2: 53 (May 1, 1861). 13. [ John S. Jacobs], ‘‘A True Tale of Slavery,’’ The Leisure Hour (London), February 7, 14, 21, and 28, 1861; The Deeper Wrong; Or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child (London: W. Tweedie, 1862); ‘‘Domestic SlaveLife in the Southern States,’’ (London) Morning Star and Dial, March 10, 1862. 14. ‘‘Letter from Mrs. Jacobs,’’ Freedmen’s Aid Society. Press copy. Rhodes House, MSS British Empire G88, Freedmen’s Aid Society, p. 7. For Martin, see ‘‘John Sella Martin,’’ in R. J. M. Blackett, Beating Against the Barriers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1986), 210, 215. 15. ‘‘Flag Presentation at L’Ouverture Hospital, Alexandria, Va.,’’ Anglo-African, September 3, 1864. 16. Harriet Jacobs’s letters of December 25, 1865, January 9 and February 10, 1866, in (London) The Freed-Man, May 1, 1866. 17. ‘‘Savannah Freedmen’s Orphan Asylum: An Appeal,’’(London) Anti-Slavery Reporter, March 2, 1868. 18. For Stafford Allen (1806–1889) see The Annual Monitor for 1890; or the Obituary of the Members of the Society of Friends in Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1889 (London: Samuel Harris & Co, 1889), 3–12; for Robert Alsop (1803–1876), see The Annual Monitor for 1877, or Obituary of the Members of the Society of Friends in Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1876 (London: Samuel Harris & Co., 1876), 153–58; and for Peter and Clementina Taylor, see The Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898–99), XIX, 455–56. 19. New York Yearly Meeting of Friends, Meeting for Sufferings, Eighth Report of the Committee for the Representatives of the New York Meeting of Friends upon the Condition and Wants of the Freedmen (1869), 4.

9

‘‘Like Hot Lead to Pour on the Americans . . .’’: Sarah Parker Remond—From Salem, Mass., to the British Isles willi coleman

Months before the attack on Fort Sumter signaled the start of America’s Civil War, members of England’s Ulverston Ladies’ Anti Slavery Society and a ‘‘large and respectable audience’’ gathered to listen to an unusual guest from the United States. Anticipating the approaching storm in the land of her birth, Sarah Ann Parker Remond stated her case in no uncertain terms. She had made her way across the ocean to ‘‘gather up polite sentiment and pour it like hot lead on the Americans.’’∞ Attempting such a voyage to place her ideas on public display would have been unusual for any woman in the nineteenth century, but a black woman standing before an audience in England’s Victoria Concert Hall was an oddity. The trajectory of her life as a third-generation free woman calling America to judgment on an international stage made her truly exceptional. Long before arriving in England in 1859, Remond had already declared her own state of war against her country. It was a battle from which she would never retreat. Circumstances of birth had in many ways prepared Sarah Parker Remond for a world that could exist for her only outside of her native land. Perhaps the most important factor shaping Sarah Parker Remond’s life was the accident of birth into a free and financially secure black family in Salem, Massachusetts. Black Salem was a small but vibrant community and the federal census of 1790 listed none of its residents as slaves. Increasing slowly, the

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black residential population was estimated at 282 in 1837, most of whom lived within a ‘‘colored’’ enclave known as ‘‘Roast Meat Hill.’’ As a seaport town Salem featured a shipping industry, which provided employment on the wharves, with a few black men signing on board vessels as sailors. Others were involved in service occupations such as gardeners, chimney sweeps, and stable hands. Women and children could find jobs in household service and as cooks. Particularly unusual was Chloe Minns, who in 1807 was hired as a teacher for black children, a position she held for nearly two decades.≤ Although freed from the scourge of slavery, blacks were not integrated into the white community. In the first decades of the nineteenth century racial separation, sometimes benign but always present, was the norm in every aspect of life. Within this structure Salem’s black community continued to develop. Black men and women formed their own societies and organizations, holding public functions sometimes in conjunction or competition with a more populous Boston, which was just a few miles away. In the early 1770s, along with other black New Englanders, those in Salem adopted the practice of gathering for an annual festival to elect their own ‘‘governor,’’ or ruler.≥ Social activities did not supplant or prevent agitation for equal rights, and a campaign for integrated public facilities was under way before 1840. Education was a major focal point in the overall push for full citizenship rights. In collaboration with white reformers, Salem’s black citizens lobbied politicians, boycotted black schools, and mounted petition drives protesting separate and unequal treatment. In April 1855 the Massachusetts state legislature signed the bill making that state the first in the country to outlaw racial segregation in schools, a right that citizens of Salem had been demanding for over a decade.∂ This was the broader community into which Sarah Remond was born. As the ninth child in a family of upper class African Americans Sarah was an anomaly to most blacks and to all whites. But the Remond family had its beginning in unusual circumstances. In 1798 John Remond, the family patriarch, had been sent by his mother from Curaçao across the ocean to America. He had arrived in America, a free black child immigrant under the protection of a ship captain, with few if any immediate connections to the African American populace. Making his way to Boston, he learned the trades of barbering and catering. In 1807 John’s marriage to Nancy Lenox added a crucial element to the lives of their future descendents. As a matriarch, she provided incontestable American roots and clear expectations of full citizenship rights. Lenox had herself grown up in a large, free black family of moderate but stable comfort. Her own father, Cornelius Lenox, had fought in the Revolutionary Army, and by 1800 had become a tax-paying free-holder in the town of Newton, Massachusetts. His children, including Nancy, were all educated in trades

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customary for free blacks of the period. With the expectation that they would all join him in the family-owned hair-dressing salon, he had the boys trained as barbers. Nancy was sent to Boston to learn catering and fancy food preparation. It was a skill which would bring her economic stability and a measure of public recognition as well. An advertisement in an 1849 issue of the Salem Gazette suggests an assertive businesswoman soliciting ‘‘a share of public patronage’’ for ‘‘cakes of various kinds made to order.’’ She also served ‘‘mock-turtle soup, venison . . . and some times ducks.’’∑ With her nuptials to John Remond, Nancy Lenox embarked upon a life that was in many ways typical for nineteenth-century women. Giving birth ten times between 1809 and 1826, she had a life that was centered, out of necessity, on her family.∏ It was, however, family life that also included her involvement in the public arena. The Remonds, much like other free blacks in the North, could not afford or did not choose to secret women behind closed doors. By 1824 and the birth of their daughter Sarah, the Remonds were a wellentrenched family of Massachusetts entrepreneurs. Serving prepared food from the back door of their living quarters, as well as catering gatherings for the wealthy, the growing family expanded their business to take advantage of other opportunities as well. Undoubtedly it was the skill of a spouse trained in fancy food preparation that allowed John Remond, also trained in catering, to boastfully advertise in a Salem newspaper. Customers were promised delivery of oysters anywhere in Salem cooked to satisfaction and guaranteed to arrive hot.π It is little wonder that as an adult, Sarah Remond would remember her mother as having ‘‘indomitable energy,’’ bearing responsibility for training all her children to ‘‘the habits of industry.’’∫ With a foothold in food preparation, the family moved to supplying ships and local merchants with a variety of foodstuffs. The amazing array of items included ham from Virginia, smoked beef from Albany, cigars from Spain, wine from Lisbon, and soy from India.Ω Such was the environment into which Sarah Remond was born. Residing in one of the largest seaport towns in the country, coupled with family economic involvement in trade, shaped her early development. More than for most Americans, the trappings of that which was ‘‘foreign’’ were connected to Remond family life and livelihood. At one end of the spectrum was a world that Sarah understood as larger than her immediate physical surroundings. At the other end was the day-to-day reality of black life in America where ‘‘even those coloured people who were free were only nominally so, except in Massachusetts; and even there their due rights were obtained by supernatural efforts.’’∞≠ Of all the Remond children, Sarah was the only one who did not find her niche in any family enterprise. In a clan in which ‘‘every member of the family was expected to contribute a share towards the general whole,’’ her

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siblings developed a network of businesses, some of which would pass on to a third generation. Working alongside her mother until her late twenties, Sarah seemed only passively involved in any of the economic ventures or antislavery activities occupying a large part of Remond family life.∞∞ Among free blacks of the North, black women’s involvement in abolition and racial progress efforts was expected and indeed dependent upon the norm. As males organized, joined, and supported a wide range of African American and integrated antislavery and racial-uplift efforts, women were involved in comparable ‘‘female’’ activities. Most understood and worked within the boundary lines described by escaped slave-turned-abolitionist William Wells Brown: ‘‘sewing circles will have a salutary effect upon all. Nothing looks more cheering to me than to see a circle of women working with their own hands for the redemption of their enslaved countrymen. . . . And why should they not labor for the downfall of slavery? Are not more than a million of females driven daily to the sugar, the cotton, the rice and tobacco plantations of the south? Are they not denied the marriage rite.’’∞≤ Given the gender conventions and race restrictions of the day, the space that black women carved out for themselves was remarkable. Indeed, it was perhaps just this position that pushed Salem’s ‘‘women of color’’ to organize America’s first female antislavery society in 1832. Using sewing circles, bazaars, and church societies, they mapped out their own complementary agenda directed toward freeing slaves, acquiring equal rights, and establishing ‘‘racial uplift.’’ The broad array of efforts benefiting from their work included the antislavery press, abolitionist lecturers, and support for runaway slaves.∞≥ While women of the Remond clan occupied leadership positions in Salem’s women antislavery movement, Sarah’s interest can be measured primarily by attendance at antislavery lectures.∞∂ It was not until 1853, at the age of twentyseven, that Sarah Remond began to show signs of just how much she had absorbed. She was particularly close to her brother Charles, and it was his style of public confrontation which she would first attempt to emulate. Unlike other members of the family, Charles Remond had committed himself to the unpredictable and dangerous life of a professional abolitionist. Preceding Frederick Douglass, Charles reigned as the first and most eloquent black abolitionist lecturer appointed by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Giving voice to the increasingly independent and more militant black agenda, Charles Remond warned blacks that ‘‘we need more radicalism among us . . . we are too indefinite in views and sentiment . . . too slow in movements.’’∞∑ As a delegate to the World Anti Slavery Convention in London, in 1840, he acted on such beliefs. Charles Remond, along with William Lloyd Garrison, protested the exclusion of women from the conference floor by joining them in the balcony.

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It was an act which Garrison later described as having ‘‘done more to bring up for the consideration of Europe the rights of women than could have been accomplished in any other manner.’’∞∏ In accounting for his own actions, Charles Remond responded directly: ‘‘In the name of heaven, and in the name of the bleeding, dying slave, I ask if I shall scruple the propriety of female action, of whatever kind or description. I trust not—I hope not—I pray not.’’∞π Just as Charles Remond had taken a seat in the balcony as a means of protesting the treatment of women in the fight against slavery, Sarah Remond signaled her movement onto the public stage in similar fashion. In defiance of established custom (if not law) Sarah along with her younger sister Caroline refused to accept seating in the black gallery section of a Boston theater. After demanding seating on the main floor reserved for whites, and for which tickets had been purchased, Remond and her sister were forcibly removed from the theater. Within months of winning the subsequent lawsuit which they filed, Sarah Remond involved herself in another incident in Philadelphia. This time Sarah, along with two friends, were ejected from an exhibition hall after being accused of not having purchased tickets. On this occasion the lawsuit filed by another member of the group was not successful, but for Sarah a corner had nonetheless been turned. Treating the inevitable reality of racial prejudice as a frustrating fact of life, black women chose more than one way of negotiating the terrain outside of their homes. Though the Remond women were not expected to court physical confrontation, it was not assumed that they should or would silently accept illtreatment. When refused service in a Philadelphia ice cream establishment, Sarah’s youngest sister, Caroline, ‘‘told one of the people some wholesome truths, which cannot be soon forgotten.’’ When ordered into a ‘‘colored car’’ on another occasion, Caroline once again ‘‘indignantly refused to do so and was obliged to return home and wait for the 10 o’clock . . . in which she had no difficulty.’’∞∫ In an increasingly escalating pattern, Sarah’s behavior moved beyond the customary range of conduct for female resistance. The first instance of filing a lawsuit in a situation which she had instigated or at least anticipated places her on the attack. Having launched herself into the public debate, she continued to carve out her own direction. Once again with the encouragement of her brother Charles, Sarah joined him as an antislavery lecturer. By the end of 1856, she was honing her skills with lectures in New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Canada. Joining the American Anti-Slavery Society, Sarah was elected one of the association’s vice presidents, serving on the finance committee alongside Susan B. Anthony.∞Ω By the end of 1858, with improved skills and an enlarged appetite, Remond admitted to ‘‘an intense desire to visit England, that I might for a time enjoy freedom.’’ Without

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severing ties to the antislavery society, she proceeded with her own plans going forth ‘‘on her own responsibility, not representing any society.’’≤≠ Remond’s choice of England as a destination was based on more than uninformed longings. For decades Great Britain had enjoyed a reputation of being open to reformers, radicals, and exiles. London itself had become both temporary destination and home to ‘‘Poles escaping repression following the Cracow uprising of 1846, Italian proletarians, Turks, Russians, Scandinavians, and Dutch.’’ Professional abolitionists, blacks escaping slavery, and others seeking educational or professional opportunities denied in their own homeland all helped to solidify Great Britain’s image as ‘‘the moral arbiter of the western world.’’ At least one arrived with her own spiritual mission. Describing herself as ‘‘a coloured female preacher,’’ Zilphas Elaw was convinced that Londoners still needed her brand of evangelism. Elaw spent her first Sunday ‘‘in the metropolis of the most Christian country in the world . . . much surprised to see the shops open, and many kinds of business in the course of transaction, women crying fruits for sale, and the people intent on traffic and marketing.’’ Elaw lived in England for five years convinced that her ministry was ‘‘a blessing to hundreds of persons . . . living in sin and darkness before they saw my coloured face.’’≤∞ By the early 1850s the list of black Americans making their way to Great Britain included both Frederick Douglass and Sarah’s beloved brother Charles Lenox Remond. Something approximating a transatlantic propaganda machine had evolved as black Americans resolved to draw attention to their plight and build opposition against slavery. Working both as free agents and with various factions of the British antislavery movement they carved out a place for themselves as leaders of an international movement.≤≤ This was the environment into which Sarah Remond chose to envelop herself. Her arrival in Liverpool in January 1859 coincided with an important juncture in the antislavery movement. While the flow of blacks across the Atlantic had slowed to a trickle, women’s involvement in the British antislavery movement had begun to pick up pace. It formed a part of the larger campaign for women’s rights.≤≥ But even in this environment, Sarah represented a rare experience for the British public. Unlike the infamous Frederick Douglass, she was not the charismatic fugitive slave. Nor could she be mistaken for other black women already known to the British public. Unlike Mary Prince, Ellen Craft, or Harriet Jacobs, she was a free-born black American woman, and neither her parents nor her grandparents had been slaves.≤∂ With the prevailing image of black women as hapless victims few Europeans had any exposure to other representations. Indeed, by 1828 the dominating symbol of the British antislavery campaign was that of a kneeling slave woman with clasped hands, her

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wrist encircled in chains. Sarah Remond was a real life response to the implied question in the motto surrounding the visual image, ‘‘Am I not a woman and a sister.’’≤∑ Here was in fact a black American woman whose life and personal agenda brought to the surface questions that lay at the convergence of beliefs about race and class as well as gender. In pursuit of her own agenda, Sarah Parker Remond ultimately became the first woman to address the question of slavery before the masses in Great Britain.≤∏ In spite of the lingering side effects Remond experienced as a result of a rough transatlantic crossing, her first lecture, in Liverpool in January 1859, was followed in rapid succession by others. Credited with pumping new life into a flagging movement in Warrington, England, she made three appearances between January 24 and February 2 of that year. She was rewarded with contributions for the coffers of the American Anti-Slavery Society and over three thousand signatures on a petition condemning slavery in America.≤π During the following two years, both as a lone speaker and in joining with other reform lecturers, Remond established herself. The prospect of hearing a black woman deliver a public lecture undoubtedly helped to attract overflowing crowds in London, Manchester, and Leeds. In Bury, Remond held forth ‘‘with hundreds of persons seeking in vain to gain admission.’’ In Ireland and Scotland, the press recorded equally large crowds who had gathered to hear and see ‘‘a native of a village near Boston.’’≤∫ As she was an agent for no specific organization, Sarah crafted and delivered her own message. At the center of her discourse was a double-edged attack on the illegal and unconstitutional nature of slavery in America and the specific sufferings of slave women. In no uncertain terms, she took to task ministers of the gospel and politicians of the South. Theirs were sins accomplished with the aid of ‘‘Northern states where slavery did not exist.’’ English men and women were asked to ‘‘send forth . . . indignant protest against this glaring system.’’ As bold as her attacks were on the political system and on powerful men of America, a far more perilous topic was the ‘‘degradation’’ a woman dare not mention.≤Ω Described by the press as possessing ‘‘womanly dignity’’ and accepted by the ladies of Warrington as a sister, Sarah called attention to the suffering of sisters not so fortunate as those gathered before her. As she intruded into public space reserved for men, Sarah Remond risked scorn by including the specifics of female enslavement. Drawing scenes of an ‘‘open market place’’ where ‘‘women are exposed for sale . . . their persons not always covered,’’ Sarah warned English men and woman that females ‘‘are sold into slavery with cheeks like the lily and the rose, as well as those that might compare with the wing of the raven.’’ Employing the image of slaves with skin as white as any in her audience, the ‘‘gifted lady from across the Atlantic’’ pointed out, ‘‘the more

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Anglo-Saxon blood . . . the more gold is poured out when the auctioneer has a woman for sale, because they are sold to be concubines for white Americans.’’≥≠ Calling forth the lives of fictional characters as well as those such as Margaret Garner, an escaped slave mother who had taken the life of her child to prevent recapture, Remond discreetly called attention to those who ‘‘suffered greatest’’ under slavery.≥∞ With antislavery lecturing as the grounding force in her life, Remond began to pursue a second goal which had pulled her across the Atlantic. By October of 1859, settled in London, she was entrenched in a community of women social reformers and was taking courses at Bedford College for Women.≥≤ A strong network of antislavery feminists provided both a surrogate family and political kindred spirits. By 1860, Remond had begun to study nursing while continuing to lecture as an agent for the Leeds Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society. Later that year and into the next she lectured throughout Scotland.≥≥ By 1861, as Northern forces fired on Fort Sumter, signaling the start of the war between the states, Remond’s strong ideological differences and personal distaste for her homeland did not waver. Now she predicted the only road to emancipation was ‘‘a great shedding of blood.’’ The only remorse was for the slaves ‘‘who the South could not keep and the North did not want.’’≥∂ This pointed reference to the nebulous state of the future for blacks in America was reflected among the British as well. An official governmental declaration of neutrality did not curtail continuous discussion in the public and political arena. Summing up a broad range of reactions Sarah applied her energies directly to what she saw as weak points that needed shoring up. She advised, ‘‘Let no diplomacy of statesmen, no intimidation of slave holder’s, no scarcity of cotton, no fear of slave insurrection, prevent the people of Great Britain from maintaining their position as the friend of the oppressed Negro; which they deservedly occupied previous to the disastrous Civil War.’’≥∑ Dispatching with the very real problem of a textile industry intricately tied to slave-produced cotton, she directed an overflow crowd of six hundred gathered in Edinburgh to consider ‘‘cotton from India.’’≥∏ As the war continued, Remond’s lectures were supplemented with more concrete forms of action. She supported the American antislavery press by forwarding a ‘‘mite’’ to William Lloyd Garrison for help with his newspaper The Liberator.≥π Joining the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society in their effort to educate the public and garner support for newly freed blacks, Remond assembled one of the association’s tracts.≥∫ As the title suggests, she designed ‘‘The Negro Anglo Africans as Freedmen and Soldier’’ to present black Americans as active participants in the struggle to end slavery. As such,

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they were worthy of support. With the use of reports from the U.S. Secretary of War, she called attention to the needs of both black and white refugees. As the war progressed, whites, some of whom were British, had been trapped in the midst of the battle.≥Ω Such tracts became an important weapon in efforts to steel British hearts and minds against pro-Confederate sympathies. Indeed the war progressed alongside a discernible wave of anti-black feeling within the British population. In the past blacks had experienced very little of the direct and open hostility that was a part of daily life in the United States. But the decade leading up to the war a discernible shift began to take place. By 1860 Frederick Douglass, whose ‘‘purchase price’’ had been paid by an English abolitionist, had cause to warn British humanitarians of a growing tide of racism among their countrymen.∂≠ A few years later his concerns were corroborated by William Craft, who had also escaped slavery and who was living in London. In 1863 Craft forced a session of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to adjourn early when he challenged papers delivered by two leading social scientists. John Crawfurd and James Hunt, both officers of the Anthropological Society of London, presented research pointing out differences between the Negro and the European. In both papers the conclusions placed Europeans in the position of superiority while the ‘‘pure Negro’’ was deemed incapable of ‘‘advances further in intellect than an intelligent European boy of fourteen.’’ Conference members were asked to accept further evidence of Negroes and Europeans as two distinct species. In responding to the papers, William Craft exhibited both humor and calm indignation. Pointing to differences in skin color between southern and northern Europeans Craft asked the audience to consider ‘‘that climate had a tendency to bleach as well as to blacken. The thickness of the skull of the Negro had been wisely arranged by Providence to defend the brain from the tropical climate in which he lived. If god had not given them thick skulls their brains would probably have become very much like many scientific gentlemen of the present day.’’∂∞ Undoubtedly by 1865 ideas and beliefs about race were fueled by events that struck closer to home than the prospects and possibilities of newly freed blacks in America. Reacting to a black uprising to protest cruel treatment in British Jamaica, colonial authorities responded with full military might in October of that year. Before order was restored over four hundred blacks were executed, hundreds of women and children were flogged, and over a thousand homes deliberately destroyed. For much of the English public, the entire episode was reduced to images of mindless black savages lusting for the blood of whites. It was not a far leap to acceptance of the uprising as proof that blacks were unfit for life as free people. An English newspaper advised that

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American legislators would do well to ‘‘keep in mind the sad past and present misery of Jamaica’’ when considering the political status of their own emancipated blacks.∂≤ In the years that had transpired since Sarah had come to England in search of ‘‘a little freedom’’ she like most of her countrymen had chosen to overlook racial incidents or at least not publicly criticize one’s adopted homeland. Whatever indignities endured abroad compared weakly to treatment suffered in America. Determined to keep the focus on blacks in the United States, most shared the sentiments of Frederick Douglass. In describing a visit to Eaton Hall, Douglass informed the antislavery press in America that ‘‘the statuary did not fall down, the pictures did not leap from their places, the door did not refuse to open, and the servants did not say ‘we don’t allow niggers in here.’ ’’∂≥ In the aftermath of the uprising in Jamaica Sarah found reason to include Britain in her unrelenting attack on race hatred. With British newspapers generally supporting the actions of the military in defending English honor in Jamaica, Sarah responded with her own letter to the London Daily News. The tone of the letter reveals a level of disappointment and outrage previously directed at the United States. Without equivocating Remond opened her letter by declaring she did not accept as true ‘‘all the cruelties reported during the recent insurrection.’’ In the words that followed Sarah linked the treatment of blacks in Jamaica to that of blacks in America. Charging the British public with ‘‘a change in opinion . . . in reference to the colored race,’’ they had become indistinguishable from ‘‘any Southern Confederate or negro hating Northerner.’’ Readers were challenged to compare reported charges of black savagery in Jamaica to the southerners in American who ‘‘for eight generations have mutilated their slaves, and not unfrequently during the present generation burnt their victims to death . . . notch the ears of men and women, cut pleasant poesies in their shrinking flesh, learn to write with pens of red-hot iron on human face.’’∂∂ For Sarah Parker Remond, England, the place that had once offered her safety, had come to resemble America so closely that it could no longer serve as her real or imagined refuge. Ignoring suggestions that she belonged ‘‘in the midst of the emancipated negroes, nursing the wounded or educating the others,’’ Sarah as always began to chart her own course.∂∑ Leaving London on the August 10, 1866, she traveled first to Switzerland and then to her destination in Italy. Although she gave little information as to why she made this specific plan of action, it is nonetheless clear that this was not a decision based on whim. Remond was now a woman who had proven her ability to survive alone outside of the confines of the United States. Life as a black abolitionist abroad had placed her in contact with various reform causes and individuals.

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Indeed, by November of 1866 Remond would almost casually write to friends in America, ‘‘I had a very interesting interview with General Garibaldi last week. He is a true friend of the colored race and liberty everywhere.’’∂∏ Remond had also met another Italian revolutionary, Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini, a leading force in the fight for an independent and unified Italian kingdom, envisioned a broad movement that ‘‘respected no boundaries with workers, women, peasants, serfs, and slaves . . . among its beneficiaries.’’∂π Long before Sarah’s arrival in England, Mazzini had already spent decades in unrepentant political exile but still of influence in his own homeland. As one who admired John Brown, spoke out against slavery, and defended women ‘‘against unfair charges and mistreatment by . . . men,’’ he would undoubtedly have earned Sarah’s interest as a kindred spirit. She would have also understood Italy as a destination not without its own challenges. Nonetheless she went about describing her movements in the language of a vacation travelogue. Readers of the National Anti Slavery Standard were entertained with her voyage to Italy: ‘‘glorious mountain scenery . . . must be seen to be appreciated. . . . Lugano looked somber in the moonlight. . . . Garibaldians in their bright red shirts and caps . . . A most becoming dress for an Italian. They are very handsome men.’’ As she made her way toward ‘‘the brightest and fairest land’’ she had ever looked upon, she also presented a darker side in her letter. In what can easily be read as a farewell letter to America Sarah Remond is unable to avoid ‘‘a sadder topic,’’ the ‘‘difficulties of reconstruction.’’ With a clear assessment of the power that slavery had exercised in shaping American culture and institutions, Sarah predicted, ‘‘the hatred of race . . . is now the ruling element. . . . No one who really comprehended the terrible influence which for so many generations has corrupted the moral sense of the people, ever supposed that the contaminating influence of the system would be readily effaced. . . . What a record could the victims of this terrible hatred present against the dominate race. . . . It never will be written. It never can be written.’’ The choice of language used in correspondence has a clear tone of final separation: ‘‘May the colored race receive a fresh increase of the power to endure and bear, with such patience as they can command, fresh insults and injustice. . . . May God and their Integrity keep them in this new conflict.’’∂∫ Assigning the fate of black Americans to a higher power and to their own devices, at forty years of age Sarah Remond continued the work of creating a life of her own design. She was ‘‘uncertain how long I shall remain in Florence . . . I am not here for pleasure, but for study.’’∂Ω And study she did. By 1870 Remond was listing her occupation in the Italian census as that of physician.∑≠ The young woman who had once been disparagingly described by white abolitionists in America as having ‘‘manners

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and ways . . . peculiar to her race . . . and not in the least like the pretty one we saw at the New England convention,’’ had come into her own. Those who stood in judgment now confronted a mature woman fit to serve as an example to others. When antislavery activist Elizabeth Buffum Chase visited Florence in 1873, she returned to America with descriptions of ‘‘a remarkable woman . . . with a fine position in Florence as a physician.’’ Chase included a compliment not imaginable in America: ‘‘If one tenth of the American women who travel in Europe were as noble and elegant as she is we shouldn’t have to blush for our countrywomen as often as we do.’’∑∞ It was in Italy in the final decades of her life that Sarah Remond came closest to living the life that she desired as a free and independent woman. Once she was established in Italy, some aspects of her life took on the veneer of a typical, privileged European woman. Beneath that surface and at the center was a still extraordinary black American woman who had chosen exile over inequality. This in turn gave even her social life its own particular nuance. A broad array of her visitors included English abolitionist William Robson and American’s Lucy Chace, as well as Frederick Douglass. Artists included black American sculptor Edmonia Lewis as well as Anne Whitney, a white sculptor from Massachusetts.∑≤ In 1877 Sarah Parker Remond’s personal life took one more unexpected turn. She embarked upon a short-lived marriage to Lazario Pintor, a native of Sardinia. This was followed by a period of not-so-genteel poverty. Within two years, Pintor seems to have disappeared from her life.∑≥ By 1885, Sarah’s family in Italy had expanded to include more Remonds from America. A scarcity of records make it difficult to determine the exact relationship that now existed between Sarah and the larger extended Remond clan. Whatever the nature of that relationship, it was most likely maintained through her sister Caroline. As early as 1859, just months after Sarah’s initial arrival in England, Caroline, a young widow of independent means, had made the first of a series of visits to Europe. As Caroline’s business partner, another unmarried sister, Maritche Juan, remained in Massachusetts in charge of their lucrative business ventures.∑∂ By 1885, as life for blacks in America became increasingly defined by the rules of discrimination and inequality, both Caroline and Maritche Juan joined Sarah to take up residence in Rome. In describing his 1866 visit to their home, the Palazzo Maroni, Frederick Douglass noted, ‘‘Like myself, the Remond sisters—there was a third in Rome as well—with the exception of Caroline have grown quite old but in all of them I saw much of the fire of their eloquent brother Charles.’’∑∑ In her own search for freedom and equal rights, Sarah Parker Remond proved to be more like her father than even John Remond himself might have expected. Decades after his own voyage across the

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ocean, from the island of Curaçao to America, his daughters repeated the pattern. With Sarah in the lead, they became transatlantic voyagers who made lives for themselves on yet another continent. Like her mother, Sarah Remond had secured a means of providing for herself economically. Unlike her mother, she remained childless but was in the end still surrounded by family. At the age of seventy, having lived by the dictates of her own desires, Sarah Parker Remond died of undisclosed causes on December 13, 1894. She was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Notes 1. Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser, January 17, 1861. Ulverston, England. 2. Sibyl Ventress Brownlee, ‘‘Out of the Abundance of the Heart: Sarah Ann Parker Remond’s Quest for Freedom,’’ Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1997, 81. For conflicting date of birth see Dorothy B. Porter, ‘‘Sarah Parker Remond, Abolitionist and Physician,’’ Journal of Negro History 20, no. 1 (January 1935); and Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2, 972. 3. Arthur O. White, ‘‘Salem’s Antebellum Black Community: Seedbed of the School Integration Movement,’’ Essex Institute Historical Collection, April 1972, vol., CVIII, 99–101, 105–106. 4. Dorothy Burnett Porter, The Remonds of Salem Massachusetts: A Nineteenth Century Family Revisited (American Antiquarian Society, 1985), 261. Also see Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Norton, 1984), 108–109; William Piersen, Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth Century New England (University of Massachusetts, 1988), 118. 5. Porter, 262–267, 272; see also Gloria C. Oden, ‘‘The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: The Salem-Philadelphia Years Reexamined,’’ in Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in United States History, vol. 3, 128–129. 6. The Remond children included Nancy 1809; Charles 1810; John Lenox; Susan 1814; Cecelia 1816; unnamed male died at birth 1817; Maritche Juan 1817; Mary 1821; Sarah Parker 1824; Caroline 1826. See Brownlee 47–48 and Oden 125–136. 7. Salem Observer, vol. 4, no. 1, January 1828. 8. Sarah Parker Remond, autobiographical sketch in Matthew Davenport Hill, Our Exemplars, Poor and Rich: Biographical Sketches of Men and Women Who Have by an Extraordinary Use of Their Opportunities Benefited Their Fellow Creatures (Cassel, Petter & Galpin, London 1860), 276; Oden, 128–129. 9. Dorothy Burnett Porter, The Remonds of Salem Massachusetts: A Nineteenth Century Family Revisited (American Antiquarian Society, 1985), 269–271. 10. Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser, England. January 17, 1861. 11. Remond, 282; Ray Allen Billington, ed., The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era (Dryden Press, 1953), 59. 12. William Wells Brown, an escaped slave from Kentucky, became an antislavery lecturer with a career both in the United States and in Britain. In 1852, based on his

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experiences abroad, he wrote a travelogue, Three Years in Europe. His novel Clotel, long considered the first black American novel, was written the following year. C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), vol. 4, 3–6. 13. Janice Sumler-Lewis, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (W. W. Norton, 1984), 281–288; Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (University of Tennessee, 1992), 87–89; Ripley, vol. 4, 38–41, 245. Also see Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (Citadel Press, 1991), vol. 1, 161–163; Sterling, 116–119; Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions: 1840–1865 (Temple University Press, 1980), vol. II, 146. 14. Ripley, vol. 1, 472; Foner, 208–209. Also see Fortin, 99; Brownlee, 94; Yee, 34–37. 15. Ripley, 50. 16. Louis Ruchames, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge, 1971), vol. 2, 680. 17. Aptheker, vol. 1, 197. 18. Billington, 103. Caroline Remond Putnum was Sarah’s younger sister. 19. Dorothy Burnett Porter, ‘‘The Remonds of Salem Massachusetts: A Nineteenth Century Family Revisited’’ (American Antiquarian Society, 1985), vol. 95, 284; Black Abolitionist Papers, Microfilm, University of Michigan, 1981–83, Reel 10, for all of the following: ‘‘William C. Nell to Amy Post,’’ Boston, September 22, 1857; ‘‘Report of the Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Meeting at Rochester, N.Y.,’’ February 10 and 11, 1857; and ‘‘Anti-Slavery Bugle,’’ December 12, 1857. 20. Remond, 286; Ruchames, vol. 4, 600. 21. R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Louisiana State University, 1983), 4; William L. Andrews, Sisters of the Spirit: Thee Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Indiana University Press, 1986) 139–216. 22. For a listing of black Americans abroad see Blackett, 209–216. 23. The organized fight for women’s rights included the first feminist periodical in 1857 and a year later the Association for the Promotion of the Employment of Women. Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (1992), 170. 24. Ripley, vol. 1, 5–6; Blackett, 209–216; Midgley, 125, 86–92, 142, 9–14. 25. Midgley, 99–101. For an excellent reading of the image see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminist in American Culture (Yale University Press), chapter one, ‘‘The Abolitionist Emblem.’’ 26. Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionist: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh, 1974), 143. 27. Ripley, vol. 1, 445–446, doc 74; 476, doc 81. 28. Soulby’s Ulverston Advertiser, January 17, 1861. 29. The Anti-Slavery Advocate, London, November 1, 1859, no. 35, vol. 2; Ripley, vol. 1, 435–440, doc. 73; 457 doc. 77. 30. Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 11, ‘‘Warrington Times.’’ 31. ‘‘Warrington Times,’’ January 29, 1859; Anti Slavery Advocate, London, September 1, 1859; Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 11, ‘‘Miss Remond’s First Lecture in Dublin.’’

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32. Midgley, 163, 132–136. Bedford was the first college in England run by women for women. Remond boarded with Elizabeth J. Reid, abolitionist and founder of the college. 33. Anti Slavery Advocate, February 1860, 306, and November 1860, 377. 34. Black Abolitionist Papers, reel 13, ‘‘Abolition of Slavery in America,’’ Non Conformist (June 19, 1861). 35. Sarah P. Remond, ‘‘The Negroes in the United States of America,’’ reprinted in Journal of Negro History XXVII (April 1942), 218. 36. Anti Slavery Advocate, February 1861, 399. 37. Sterling, 179. 38. Founded in 1863, the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society had over two hundred members, the majority of whom had not been involved in the antislavery cause. Members and supporters included Italian nationalist Signor Mazzini and escaped slave Ellen Craft. It published a dozen tracts within a year, and more than 12,000 copies were circulated. See Midgley, 180–183. 39. One government publication reporting on refugees in New Orleans documented 32,000 whites receiving assistance, 17,000 of whom had been born in Britain. The 10,000 blacks consisted mainly of women and children. Remond, ‘‘The Negroes & Anglo-Africans as Freedmen and Soldiers Compiled by Sarah Parker Remond, Tract # 7 Published for the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society By Emily Faithful,’’ London 1864, 9. 40. Blackett, 191. 41. Blackett, 191–193; Ripley, vol. 1, 539, 540. 42. Douglass A. Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-nineteenth Century (Leicester University Press, Holmes & Meier, 1978), 181–182. 43. Blackett, 107. For African Americans who do point out anti-black feelings see Blackett, 158–160. 44. Ripley, vol. 1, 569. 45. Brownlee, 152. 46. National Anti Slavery Standard, November 3, 1866, Letters and Personals. 47. Roland Sarti, Mazzini: A Life for the Religion of Politics (Praeger, 1997) 1, 102– 105, 205. 48. National Anti Slavery Standard, November 3, 1866, ‘‘Letters.’’ 49. National Anti Slavery Standard, November 3, 1866, ‘‘Personals.’’ 50. Anne Whitney Papers, Letter # 4: Correspondence Between Anne Whitney and Sarah Whitney, April 17, 1868; Dorothy Porter’s research cites 1871 as the year that Remond ‘‘received a diploma certifying her for Professional Medical Practice’’ from Santa Maria Nuova Hospital. Porter, 288. 51. Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806–1899 (1914), vol. 2, 42–43. Chace was the Rhode Island abolitionist who had years earlier arranged lectures for Sarah in New England. 52. Chace, vol. 2, 42–43; Villard Family Papers 6 MsAm 1321, folder 784, Francis J. Garrison to Fanny Garrison Villard, March 30, 1879, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Edmonia Lewis was the daughter of an African American

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father and a Chippewa mother. For meeting between Douglass, Remond, and Lewis see William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 310, 328–29. 53. Archivio Storico del Comune, Florence, Italy, as reported in Porter, 288. 54. The two sisters owned wig shops and manufactured hair tonics in Salem from the 1840s to 1885. Porter, 291–292. 55. McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 329.

10

Literary Transnationalism and Diasporic History: Frances Watkins Harper’s ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ 1859–60 carla l. peterson

Between November 1859 and March 1860 The Anglo-African Magazine published a series of five brief stories, or, as the second half of each title indicates, ‘‘Fancy Sketches.’’ The first sketch’s title begins with ‘‘Chit Chat,’’ suggesting that readers are being invited into a parlor to eavesdrop on—and perhaps imaginatively participate in—a conversation that is lighthearted, maybe even frivolous and gossipy; and given assumptions about gender characteristics, we may readily speculate that the conversationalists are women. Indeed, we soon discover that the sketches’ main characters, all drawn from a northern free black community, consist of the narrator Jane, her aunt Melissa, and the latter’s daughter, Miranda. The second sketch’s title reads ‘‘Town and Country, or Fancy Sketches.’’ Here, the readers’ physical horizons broaden as the story transports us from one geographical location (town) to another (country). Yet a sense of proximity remains as we imagine that we are being taken on an outing to the country, perhaps to visit friends or merely to breathe some restorative air. This sense of local place is reinforced by the name that signs all five sketches: Jane Rustic. Jane connotes an ordinary, down-to-earth girl, while rustic evokes a simple, rural environment. The fourth sketch of the series, however, is titled ‘‘Zombi, or Fancy Sketches’’; it takes us to still an-

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other country, one that is far away in both place and time. Indeed, Zumbi (whose name the author spells incorrectly as Zombi) was the leader of a band of escaped slaves—or maroons—who established an independent community in Palmares, Brazil, in the seventeenth century. According to history and legend, Zumbi successfully resisted the Portuguese colonizers for many decades only to die heroically after a long and protracted siege. In this chapter I elucidate the ways in which fiction can so usefully serve the purposes of history as it reinterprets, imagines, or even invents past and present events and peoples, and explores the political and social values that motivated them. I seek to understand the impulses that might have led to the writing of the ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ at a time of intense debate over the issues of slavery and race within the nation, the black community, and abroad. The stories’ ever-expanding geographic movement from local to global invites readers to ask: what is the significance of this shift from domestic urban parlor to country house to outdoor wilderness; from an insular free black community in the northern United States to a slave community in the African diaspora? How does Zumbi—the maroon warrior—figure in a female-authored ‘‘fancy sketch’’? Finally, who might be the sketches’ author, Jane Rustic?∞ The answers suggest that these seemingly trivial sketches are in fact the exact opposite; they raise fundamental questions about social value, political strategy, and literary composition of vital interest to free blacks in the antebellum North. Jane Rustic was in fact none other than Frances Ellen Watkins, a major figure in abolitionist and racial uplift movements from the 1850s until her death in 1911. Born free in Baltimore in 1825, by the 1850s Watkins had committed herself fully to the abolitionist cause, traveling extensively in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic states to deliver antislavery and racial uplift lectures; several of these were later reprinted or commented upon in black and abolitionist newspapers. During this period, Watkins also published two editions of a volume of poetry, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854, 1857), and became a regular contributor to the short-lived Anglo-African Magazine. Married to Fenton Harper in 1860, she moved with him to Ohio and curtailed her public activities, resuming them only after his death in 1864. From the late 1860s until her death, Watkins Harper published several more volumes of poetry and a novel, Iola Leroy, in book form, and produced many poems, sketches, and essays as well as three serialized novels for the Christian Recorder and the A.M.E. Church Review. Of all these publications, The Anglo-African Magazine’s ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ are the only ones signed with a pseudonym, and have thus far escaped the notice of Watkins Harper critics. But it is safe to assert that they were authored

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by Watkins; not only do some of the speeches and characters of the fifth sketch echo her short temperance story, ‘‘The Two Offers,’’ that appeared in the September and October 1859 issues of The Anglo-African, but a series of ‘‘Fancy Etchings’’ that Watkins Harper published in the Christian Recorder between 1871 and 1874 are structured around the same device of parlor conversation among an aunt, her niece, and their visitors.≤ In this chapter, I focus on The Anglo-African Magazine sketches not merely because they encapsulate in a highly concentrated form many of Watkins Harper’s major concerns—her racial uplift agenda, antislavery convictions, and feminist beliefs—but also because she presents these in part from an African diasporic perspective that I believe is unique to her prose writings. Given Watkins’s extensive publishing record in The Anglo-African Magazine and elsewhere, her recourse to a pseudonym to sign the ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ was not motivated by any need to conceal her feminine identity. The AngloAfrican was a serious race magazine published in New York by Thomas Hamilton and addressed to the North’s small free black literate population. If the ‘‘Apology’’ that inaugurated the first issue initially appears to have been written from a gendered perspective, asserting that the magazine’s aim was ‘‘to uphold the now depressed hopes of thinking black men, in the United States,’’ it in fact explicitly recognized that this goal could be fulfilled only through ‘‘the products of the pens of colored men and women, from whom we earnestly solicit contributions.’’≥ The magazine was indeed far more interested in emphasizing the race of its authors than their gender. Such a concern for ‘‘colored’’ authorship was fully in keeping with Hamilton’s background and agenda. His father, William Hamilton, was an early black activist, one of the founders of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, a member of the Colored Conventions in the 1830s, and a prominent participant in the antislavery movement. Seeking to further his father’s causes, Thomas Hamilton turned to journalism. He worked for Samuel Cornish’s Colored American, David Ruggles’s Mirror of Liberty, as well as the National Anti-Slavery Standard, edited by the white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, before launching The Anglo-African Magazine in January 1859. In so doing, he clearly recognized the need for an independent black press to foster what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘‘imagining of community,’’ in which disparate and scattered members of a nation or subordinated group are bound together in solidarity by means of print culture.∂ The works featured in the pages of The Anglo-African Magazine included imaginative writing, art and literary reviews, as well as essays on social, political, and historical events of special interest to black Americans. To a certain extent, these submissions were gendered as women such as Sarah Mapps

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Douglass, Grace Mapps, and Watkins herself contributed mainly poems, while men wrote in all genres. In addition to ‘‘The Two Offers,’’ the ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ and her poems, however, Watkins published a short essay on racial elevation, titled ‘‘Our Greatest Want’’; and both Sarah Mapps Douglass and Mary Ann Shadd wrote articles on similar uplift themes. The list of male authors reads like a veritable who’s who of the northern free black leadership of the period. Among their contributions were James McCune Smith’s articles on civilization and citizenship, Amos Beman’s comments on education, a lengthy and appreciative obituary of Thomas Jennings, as well as anonymous submissions dealing with the first Colored Convention, the Nat Turner rebellion, and the execution of John Brown. Significantly, the magazine did not limit itself to local or even national issues but displayed a truly diasporic vision. For example, it published J. W. C. Pennington’s and Edward Blyden’s essays on the slave trade that sought to distinguish African from European slavery; James Theodore Holly’s ‘‘Thoughts on Hayti,’’ a series of six articles promoting Haitian emigration; Robert Campbell’s analysis of the historic struggle for freedom and effects of emancipation in Jamaica. In addition, the February 1860 issue in which the ‘‘Zombi’’ sketch appeared contained a scathing critique of the London Times’s negative comments on West India emancipation. All these contributors came from the ranks of the North’s free black community, and they addressed themselves directly to its members, challenging them to think about such questions as: what must we do to further the antislavery cause? How may we uplift our own people here as well as throughout the nation? What is our relationship to other peoples of the diaspora? Finally, what strategies must we pursue so that all blacks might find a home in the American nation? Neither Watkins’s female identity nor the sketches’ content thus compelled her to resort to the use of a pseudonym. Perhaps either author or publisher or both were worried that she had already published too much in the magazine under her own name, and felt the need for a disguise. I would argue, however, that the sketches’ idiosyncratic style would have led any reader familiar with Watkins’s work immediately to recognize her authorship. The pseudonym operates here, then, as an open secret that refuses to conceal authorial identity. Instead, it invites readers to recognize the writer as one of their own for whom periodical publication has become a primary means of fostering the imagination of community among concerned black Americans—whether positioned inside or outside this specific reading community. Watkins’s chosen pseudonym—Jane Rustic—is thus an important part of her narrative strategy and indeed of the story itself. It announces both the main character—the firstperson narrator, Jane, from whose point of view we witness events and listen

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to conversations—and the main theme—the plain-speaking country girl who relies on her wit and political acumen to spark debate among the supposedly more sophisticated city folk. Indeed, the chitchat of the ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ turns out to be much more than idle parlor gossip. Rather, it consists of a series of dialogues conducted by characters with one another as well as with the magazine’s elite readership. Exemplifying what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed the ‘‘dialogic,’’ these conversations initiate and encourage discussion among representatives of the diverse ‘‘socio-ideological belief systems’’ within the black community concerning the past history, troubled present, and future direction of Africans in the Americas.∑ In so doing, Watkins hoped to shake what she believed to be the all too complacent attitude of the magazine’s readers and galvanize them into devising strategies that could uplift the race. The sketches’ conversationalists readily agree that what is needed is ‘‘Negro courage,’’ but argue over its form as well as its core values. If the first sketches look to models of black women’s government of the domestic household, the ‘‘Zombi’’ story in the fourth sketch promotes ideals of black men’s government in national affairs. Yet, the narrative suggests a commonality of values between these male and female forms of government that lays the foundation for nation building for both the black community and the American body politic. Moreover, as she turned to the diaspora for examples of male governance, Watkins chose to focus not on Haiti, whose revolutionary history had provided such a beacon of hope to U.S. blacks throughout the nineteenth century, but on the much less well-known maroon community of Palmares and its leader, Zumbi. As she composed her stories around the trope of country and city, Watkins appropriated discourses of Romanticism and the form of the sketch that had come to the United States from England in the early nineteenth century. In so doing, she acknowledged the importance of identifying literary models that would help black Americans develop ‘‘literary character’’ and thereby prove their capacity for membership in Western culture and national civic life.∏ In her ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ then, Watkins engaged the transnational from a double perspective: that of the literary and that of the sociopolitical. Western literary discourses and genres proved useful to her in embedding her plot in a specifically U.S. black locality and then expanding it to encompass a broader diasporic history. Her ultimate goal in thus connecting the local and the global was to find a home for black Americans in the national body politic. Like many other black women of the period—Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Parker Remond, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and the women graduates of Oberlin College —Watkins Harper was committed to a life of social activism and ‘‘racial uplift’’ work. Like them, she believed in the power not only of deed but of the

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word as well. Like them, in articulating her racial uplift agenda she invoked— only to disrupt—the paradigm of gendered spheres that was so ingrained in America’s national political culture. It was her self-conscious literary transnationalism, however, that distinguished her from these other black women activists. Watkins’s first sketch introduces us to Jane, the narrator-protagonist, who has just arrived from her country village to attend a wedding among the city’s black elite. Conversing in the parlor with the other assembled guests, Jane immediately sets her country values in opposition to those of the city. She explicitly refers to herself as ‘‘being a country girl, and having, possibly, a little prejudice against city folks, who would not tolerate my country notions and rustic ways’’ (AAM, Nov. 1859, 342). Jane’s ‘‘country notions’’ are grounded in her commonsense views of what she believes should be the proper conduct of free blacks in the urban North. She satirizes the ostentatious display of wealth by members of the black elite, suggesting that their extravagant lifestyle represents a vain attempt to hide the commonness of their daily occupations: ‘‘Necks that had sweated in getting up excellent dinners for ‘white folks’ were adorned with golden chains, and arms that had been weary in carrying heavy burdens were gleaming with golden bracelets’’ (341). From a material point of view, such conspicuous consumption is wasteful and foolhardy; from a moral point of view, it encourages vanity and selfishness. Taken together, these behaviors underscore the physical and moral unhealthiness of city folk best illustrated, in Jane’s metaphorical language, by their preference for the artificiality of ‘‘gas-light’’ over the natural light of sunshine that suffuses the country. Against their excessive expenditure on needless ornamentation, Jane promotes the thriftiness of ‘‘rustic ways.’’ Here, dress is old-fashioned, jewelry unknown, and life simplicity itself as one need only ‘‘get up early in the morning, when the crystal lays heavy on bright flowers; go among the haystacks and hunt for fresh eggs, pick vegetables, fresh vines and stems, luscious fruits from well-laden boughs’’ (343). This conflict of values between Jane and the city folk is a fictional reworking of the thesis of Watkins’s earlier essay, ‘‘Our Greatest Want,’’ in which she argued for ‘‘a higher cultivation of all of our spiritual faculties’’ over the mere accumulation of money.π In the ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ Watkins frames the black elite’s social dilemma within a larger conceptual paradigm: the difference between ‘‘aping’’ and ‘‘imitation.’’ Both are rooted in engagement and dialogue with the dominant culture. Aping, however, does not take into account the specific circumstances and needs of the black community; thus, it can only lead to ‘‘servile . . . or abject mimicking’’ and produce debased copies (AAM, Nov. 1859, 342). To

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Jane, the city folks’ ostentatious display of wealth is but a form of aping. In contrast, imitation is designed for the improvement of one’s self and the social group; it can rival, or even surpass, the original. Jane argues that instead of aping, the city folk need to imitate those attributes of white America that will enhance the ‘‘productive industry’’ of both the black community and the nation. Jane names ‘‘adeptness’’ in the arts of ‘‘mining, agriculture, manufacture and commerce’’ (342) as important models of imitation. In composing her sketches, however, Watkins herself was engaging in yet another form of imitation—literary imitation. Her literary imitativeness here is the result of a textual transatlantic crossing: the terms ‘‘fancy’’ and ‘‘rustic’’ that grace each of the five sketches’ titles and signatures refer readers back to the British Romantic poets, Wordsworth in particular. In the preface to the second edition of The Lyrical Ballads (1802), Wordsworth had boldly proclaimed his belief in ‘‘humble and rustic life’’ as the most apt subject of poetry. He suggested that in common folk ‘‘the essential passions of the heart . . . are under less restraint [and] . . . elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity’’ since these ‘‘are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.’’ Furthermore, it is under such circumstances that both ‘‘elementary feelings’’ and ‘‘the manners of rural life germinat[ing] from them . . . may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated.’’ To depict rural life, the poet cannot resort to high-flown poetic diction, but rather must imitate the simple language of his subjects. At the same time, however, he should throw a certain ‘‘colouring’’ of the ‘‘fancy or imagination’’ over the ‘‘ordinary things’’ of common life that will make them appear unusual, and thereby excite the readers’ interest and sympathy.∫ In Wordsworth’s poems, the country represents the purity and simplicity of the natural world and stands in opposition to the city, which, under the impact of industrialization and capitalization, has created alienation, disconnection, and confusion among its inhabitants. Yet in their depiction of the rural poor, the dispossessed, and the vagrant homeless, many of his poems suggest the degree to which the pressures of modernity have penetrated and unsettled country life. British Romantic prose writers were equally invested in exploring the meanings of rustic life and, to do so, turned to the form of the sketch from the 1820s on. Preeminent among them was the female author Mary Russell Mitford, who began her collection of sketches, Our Village (1824–32), by announcing her decided preference for a ‘‘confined locality’’ and inviting her readers to ‘‘walk with me through our village.’’Ω Similar depictions of country life were taken up in the United States by women regionalist writers, most notably the Ohioan Alice Cary, with whose writings Watkins might quite possibly have been familiar. Like Wordsworth’s poems and Mitford’s stories, Cary’s Clovernook

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Sketches (1851, 1853) represent an attempt to paint ‘‘pastoral life in our country,’’ and specifically ‘‘scenes in our neighborhood.’’∞≠ Both Mitford’s and Cary’s villages are embedded in the natural beauty of the countryside. Beyond that, they constitute what Raymond Williams has called a ‘‘knowable community’’ of face-to-face contacts and day-to-day experiences.∞∞ Yet, as in Wordsworth’s poetry, these villages are populated by different kinds of people—common farmhands, city folk who pay social visits to the country or relocate to it due to hard times—whose very diversity gives rise to social tensions. Mitford and Cary both sought to grant value to the most marginalized inhabitants—the poor, the displaced, the lonely, the celibate. Even though Cary in particular recognized the psychic cost to the individual, both writers nonetheless emphasized the ways in which their fictionalized rural communities are rooted in a common ‘‘grammar of morality’’ that demands conformity to the norms of domesticity: individuals must bond in order to ensure domestic and familial harmony as well as assimilation into the larger social body.∞≤ In both authors’ sketches, it is primarily the female characters who take on the task of educating village folk into the values of proper domesticity and good citizenship. Their success—more prevalent in Mitford than in Cary—is measured by the narratives’ conclusion in satisfactory marriages and family relationships. In her Anglo-African sketches, Watkins imitated many of the same themes that characterized Mitford’s and Cary’s sketches—the country/city paradigm, the celebration of domesticity, the role of women as moral educators. In doing so, Watkins tapped into her own ‘‘fancy’’ to adapt them to the historical situation of black peoples in the Americas, and thereby encourage her readers actively to imagine community.∞≥ In one important respect, however, Watkins’s sketches differ sharply from those of both women writers and align themselves instead with Wordsworth’s poems. Coleridge’s critique of his friend’s work in Biographia Literaria (1817) fully applies to Watkins here: her characters are not really taken from rural life, their language is not rustic, and the readers are not common but, rather, educated men and women.∞∂ In fact, Watkins’s ‘‘country’’ is not a locality that can be described physically; it is not a geographical but an unspecified place that may be found anywhere and everywhere. It is a metaphor for autonomous black space— whether rustic or urban, domestic household or slave community—and fulfills the ideological conditions of ‘‘maroonage.’’ In the history of the African diaspora, maroonage occurred whenever African-descended peoples in the Americas banded together under conditions of enslavement and oppression to carve out an existence separate and independent from their hostile environment. Maroonage points to the precarious position and fundamental home-

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lessness of blacks in the New World. Yet the communities thus constituted often functioned as temporary havens by limiting contact with the dominant society, negotiating with it on favorable terms, establishing their own core values, and creating their own forms of government and cadre of leaders.∞∑ By extension, the concept of maroonage applies as much to populations of escaped slaves in the seventeenth-century Brazilian wilderness as it does to northern free blacks in the nineteenth-century United States; it is the foundation of black nationalist thought. Through Jane’s prodding, the characters of Watkins’s sketches debate the core values that enable and enhance maroonage. Much like the writings of Mitford and Cary, Watkins’s stories promote the norms of domesticity, but in so doing deconstruct the conventional binaries of masculine/feminine and public/domestic. All five sketches blur the lines between public and domestic spheres, and challenge traditional views of men and women’s proper place. In the first two sketches, it is men who inhabit the city parlor and engage in chitchat while a woman—Jane herself—is left on her own to promote the benefits of outdoor country life. In addition, it is in the domestic parlor—both city and country—that the characters debate public issues: it is there that men of the black elite argue over strategies for racial uplift in the first sketch and the student, Mr. Ballard, tells the story of Zumbi in the fourth. Finally, if the issues of home life and family discussed in the middle sketches appear to be purely domestic concerns, they are quickly shown to have important public implications. In the sketches, it is the ‘‘country’’ that persistently works to undo these rigid binaries constraining the social and emotional life of black Americans to promote instead the value of ‘‘sympathy.’’ The country is not yet a physical home but a place of maroonage in which its inhabitants nurture and deploy what Jane refers to as ‘‘the deep sympathies of nature’’ (AAM, Nov. 1859, 342). Sympathy was of course a reigning value in U.S. antebellum sentimental culture, shaping in particular the writings of white women like Harriet Beecher Stowe. But the concept has a longer literary genealogy given its transatlantic origins in British Romanticism. Much as for the terms ‘‘rustic’’ and ‘‘fancy,’’ Watkins was indebted to Romantic poets and prose writers for her understanding of sympathy as the capacity to be deeply affected by the condition of others to the point where one may, in Wordsworth’s terms, ‘‘slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify [one’s] own feelings with theirs.’’∞∏ In the sketches, Jane is the very model of a sympathetic person. In the first story, she extends her sympathy to the sickly student, Mr. Ballard, whose devotion to book learning has led him to neglect the care of his body. In the last

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sketch, her sympathy embraces both an unnamed female lecturer whose exterior poise belies intense internal suffering and an unhappy young woman, Emma, who has reluctantly broken off her engagement to a man she loves but who has brought dishonor on himself. To Emma’s aunt, Jane insists that no marriage should take place where there is no sympathy, ‘‘no congeniality of souls, no union of hearts’’ (AAM, March 1860, 87). Watkins’s deployment of the value of sympathy here takes specific form. The feeling subject identifies with the suffering object in order to understand his (or her) plight and come to his (or her) aid. Yet, identification leads neither to a collapse of boundaries between the two nor to the subject’s domination of the object. Rather, it promotes ‘‘congeniality,’’ relationships of interdependence and mutuality; and it accommodates the possibility of a reversal of position whereby the sympathizing subject comes to need the compassion and help of others. A vocal participant in the chitchat of the first sketch, Jane takes it upon herself to point out the lack of sympathy, brought about by aping, that exists in the social circles of the city. The male conversationalists do indeed discuss the serious issues of abolition, racial uplift, and acquisition of national citizenship. Jane, however, has nothing but disdain for those who propose emigration and slave insurrection while at the same time aping the materialistic values of the dominant culture. In the mid 1850s, calls for emigration and slave rebellion were in fact put forth by radical leaders such as Martin Delany, James Whitfield, and Henry Highland Garnet and could in fact be considered innovative. In proposing a National Emigration Convention in 1854, for example, Whitfield declared that, given their uprooting from Africa as a consequence of the slave trade, black Americans had become a ‘‘denationalized people’’; nevertheless, it was their ‘‘manifest destiny’’ to form ‘‘a great nation, or family of nations, occupying the tropical regions of this continent and its islands, in which the black is to be the predominant race . . . politically, as well as numerically.’’∞π Coming from parlor men of privilege, however, these proposals smack of hypocrisy, of a fundamental lack of sympathy. The only speech that Jane wholeheartedly approves of is the ardent plea made by Mr. Ballard, in favor of education although at this point it is never specified what form this education should take. Above all, Jane chafes at the dismissive attitude of black men toward women, whom they refuse to envision as either proponents of ideas or agents of change. In the city parlor she must summon all of her female courage to make her speech about the difference between imitation and aping. Even more alarming is Jane’s elucidation of the ways in which, much as in earlier British Romantic writers, the values of ‘‘un-sympathy’’ invade the country. When she returns to Aunt Melissa’s country house in the second sketch, Jane dreams that

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she is attending an Anti-sunshine convention called for the purpose of creating an Anti-sunshine Society. Organized by men who prohibit women from becoming officeholders, the Society is designed to promote the notion that ‘‘gaslight’’—city men’s propensity for the servile aping of the dominant culture— is to be preferred to ‘‘sunshine’’—country girls’ embrace of natural rustic ways. When Jane tries to rebut their ideas, she is declared out of order as a lady speaker. Jane returns to this issue of black male hostility toward female lecturers in the final fifth sketch. The arrival of a female antislavery speaker to the country gives rise to her suspicion that even Mr. Ballard, the narrative’s most sympathetic male character, ‘‘thinks it is not woman’s province or place to be a public lecturer,’’ and to the sad realization that the community interprets stereotypically the lecturer’s repressed suffering as the ‘‘distant and repelling . . . manners . . . of a heartless old maid’’ (AAM, March 1860, 84–85). This portrait of the female lecturer is strongly reminiscent of one of the protagonists of ‘‘The Two Offers,’’ a young woman who suffers from disappointed love, never marries, but finds fulfillment in her social activism. Moreover, both figures are self-fictionalizations of Watkins herself, who frequently found herself speaking in front of disapproving audiences—whether composed of whites or blacks. Jane (and Watkins) use these episodes to express their opposition to the unsympathetic views of black men about black women’s participation in the public sphere, in particular in public debate. In thus adopting a feminist position and championing a role for black women in the public sphere, Jane refuses to valorize marriage as the only acceptable social arrangement for women. At the beginning of the second sketch she airily dismisses the nuptial celebration that had brought her to the city with the abrupt comment ‘‘The wedding over, the guests dismissed’’ (AAM, Dec. 1859, 383). Indeed, despite this initial narrative premise none of the sketches rely on the traditional courtship-marriage plot as the epitome of feminine fulfillment that structured so much of nineteenth-century fiction (including Mitford’s sketches). Jane is even more explicit about her reservations toward marriage in her conversations with Emma and her elderly aunt in the fifth sketch as she supports the young woman’s decision to break off her engagement and advises her to rid herself of ‘‘false notions and romantic ideas’’ in order to focus on the ‘‘duties which you owe yourself and society’’ (AAM, March 1860, 86). Issues of flawed marriages and their domestic consequences are in fact the central topics of conversation in the two middle sketches. Safely ensconced in Aunt Melissa’s country parlor, aunt and niece discuss the histories of two of their neighbors—the appropriately named Mrs. Highflyer and the misnamed

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Julia Strong—and the miseducation of their many children. Both women are married, have families, and fulfill the traditional roles allotted to them by society. They take charge of the house, while their husbands, who have been contaminated by city values, labor long hours in the public workplace, pursuing wealth and material comfort. Jane accuses both women of failing to enact proper ‘‘family government’’ (AAM, Feb. 1860, 34). Themselves spoiled and petted as children, these mothers know only how to spoil their own children. They encourage dependence rather than self-reliance, excitement rather than usefulness, and are incapable of ‘‘moulding and developing aright the plastic mind of childhood, and of writing upon the tablet of childish innocence the holiest and purest maxims and lessons to be enforced by example’’ (35). They have not taught their children the lessons of sympathy. No understanding exists among family members nor any willingness to help one another; under this emotional strain, family structures break down. The consequences of such a lack of sympathy are clear. Aunt Melissa notes that disease has spread through the Highflyer family, suggesting that the moral deficiencies of parents and children alike have spread through their physical bodies. More broadly, Jane and Mr. Ballard both fear that without ‘‘a right home culture’’ it will be impossible to train the next generation of ‘‘future men and women’’ (35) to become leaders of antislavery and racial uplift causes. All present understand the vital importance of ‘‘family government’’ and ‘‘home influences’’ in public affairs, of the ways in which values formed in the domestic circle contribute to the creation of useful members of society. In thus promoting women’s home influences, Watkins could well be accused of retreating from her feminist stance and ‘‘aping’’ the domestic ideologies of white women like Catharine Beecher and Sarah Hale that promoted conjugal union and domesticity as the normative social structures for middle-class white women. The cult of domesticity was designed to conserve the status quo and maintain women in their proper roles by putting them in charge of regulating the domestic sphere.∞∫ But here, too, Watkins was not engaging in servile mimicking but rather in an imitation adapted to the specific circumstances of the black community. Indeed, by recognizing the importance of proper family government, Watkins was subversively situating black Americans squarely within the dominant American cultural values of domesticity. Just as importantly, however, Watkins was making a startling connection between black domesticity and a larger public history. Embedded between the domestic tales of Mrs. Highflyer and Julia Strong is a conversation in the third sketch between Mr. Ballard and Jane’s cousin Miranda on the topic of ‘‘Negro courage.’’ Joining them, Jane initially defines Negro courage in terms of heroic individual actions carried out in the public sphere, in particular among slave

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populations. As examples, she refers to ‘‘some of the most daring feats . . . in both men and women; in men who dared all the perils of re-capture, in women who had suffered themselves to be boxed up as freight or goods, and transported from State to State, to gain their personal freedom’’ (AAM, Jan. 1860, 10). Yet after the subsequent discussion of Julia Strong’s mismanagement of her household in the fourth sketch, Jane comes to realize that true Negro courage lies as much in proper family government as in exploits of physical daring. In fact, her linking of domesticity to courage is already evident in her coupling of two key phrases at the beginning of the third sketch’s title, ‘‘Home Influences and Negro Courage, or Fancy Sketches.’’ Of Julia Strong’s failed attempts at ‘‘family government,’’ Jane can only conclude: ‘‘This work may need more true courage and fortitude than the battle-field calls for, and higher tests of valor than bloodstained warriors ever know’’ (AAM, Feb. 1860, 35). Her statement here intimates that courage in the ‘‘domestic sphere’’ is as true a form of courage as that found in the ‘‘public’’ arena. The discussion of Julia Strong’s misfortunes constitutes a narrative detour on the way to Mr. Ballard’s historically grounded answer to the question that Miranda had posed about Negro courage during their conversation in the third sketch as she wondered, ‘‘what has been our history?’’ and searched for examples of Negro courage amid the only history of black Americans that she knows—that of victimized slaves and their descendants (AAM, Jan. 1860, 10). Responding to Miranda, Mr. Ballard explicitly invokes the historical conditions of maroonage as he tells the story of Zumbi de Palmares. In both its context and text, Mr. Ballard’s narration challenges once again the values traditionally attached to country and city, domestic and public, masculine and feminine. Revitalized by country sunshine, Mr. Ballard is finally able to return to intellectual activity and speak on the topic of slave resistance. Zumbi’s story is one of male heroism, but it is told from within a country parlor and is framed by stories of female domesticity. The juxtaposition of Zumbi’s history to that of Julia Strong continues Watkins’s blurring of the distinctions between domestic and public courage to interpret these two forms of valor as complementary aspects of maroonage. Through Mr. Ballard’s retelling of Zumbi’s history, Watkins not only connects public to domestic but also past to present, and local to global. According to Mr. Ballard, the maroon community of Palmares took root after the cessation of hostilities between the Dutch and the Portuguese in seventeenthcentury Brazil: ‘‘peace, like a refreshing shower, descended where an unholy strife had spread desolation and ruin around’’ (AAM, Feb. 1860, 36). The truce allowed the escaped slaves to establish a kingdom for themselves in the district of Porto do Codvo. ‘‘Occupy[ing] a fertile boundary, and increas[ing]

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with astonishing rapidity,’’ they soon constituted a nation called Palmares and formed a government under an elected king, Zombi (36). The maroon community thus constituted was based on principles of sympathy totally foreign to colonial rule: ‘‘They established equal laws among themselves, no hideous slave-code, all drenched with blood and stained with tears from eyes long used to weeping, disgraced their statutes’’ (36). Fearful of possible Portuguese hostilities, however, the maroons provided for their own self-defense, building a stockade and stockpiling weapons from their earlier military skirmishes while also acquiring new armaments. Their suspicions were well founded as the Portuguese eventually decided on their extermination and sent an army under the command of John de Lancastro to destroy them. Although the maroons put up strong resistance, the Portuguese were able to lay siege to Palmares, cut off supplies, and eventually invade the community. Many of the captured inhabitants were sold as slaves but, realizing their fate, ‘‘Zombi and his chief adherents resolved not to be taken alive. . . . Over the high and rocky precipices of the fort they leaped, and were dashed to death’’ (36). What were Watkins’s sources for Mr. Ballard’s narration of the history of Palmares? Miranda asks the student to ‘‘read’’ the story of Zumbi; thus, we could speculate that Watkins lifted his account directly from a contemporaneous text and inserted it into her own without attribution, a not uncommon practice in African-American literary composition at the time. Yet, the language and tone of the narrative—the sublime descriptions of early peace, harmonious government, and the maroons’ heroic death—point to Watkins’s own authorship. It is more plausible, then, that Watkins turned to an English language history of Brazil to cull the facts of the maroon community of Palmares and put them in her—or rather Mr. Ballard’s—own words. Furthermore, since Mr. Ballard is a student, it would be important that he not merely engage in recitation but read from his own composition. As in her search for models of discourse and genre, Watkins’s source for Zumbi’s history most probably derived from yet another transatlantic crossing that led her to the British Romantic writer Robert Southey’s History of Brazil, published in three volumes between 1810 and 1820 and reissued in an enlarged version in 1821. Poet laureate of England, Southey was as well known for his History of Brazil as he was for his poetry. Like many other Romantic writers—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others—he had been a radical in his youth—republican, abolitionist, supporter of legislation favoring the poor, defender of the French revolution, and fierce opponent of Napoleon. Despite such radical tendencies, however, in his account of Palmares Southey ultimately sided with the Portuguese colonizers, accepting the legitimacy of their historical perspec-

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tive: ‘‘The only account of their [the maroons of Palmares] short but memorable history, comes from the people who exterminated them; but it renders them full justice.’’∞Ω Southey does discuss with approbation the administrative and legal system of the Palmares community just as he mentions the maroons’ extensive trade with the Portuguese and their formidable defensive structure. But the language and attitudes of the European colonizer clearly color his narrative. The Portuguese are passive while it is the maroons who go on the offensive and ‘‘infect’’ the district of Porto Calvo (III: 23). In their isolated society, the Negroes maintain ‘‘superstitions of their own’’ deemed to be remnants of ‘‘African idolatry’’ (III: 24–25). Some of the slaves determine to escape from Palmares in order ‘‘to rejoin masters whom they loved’’ (III: 25). In sum, the maroons are an ‘‘evil [that] had become very great [and] the necessity of rooting out such enemies from their [the Portuguese] own border is clear and indisputable’’ (III: 25, 29). Many of the details of Southey’s and Watkins’s narratives are the same, yet their interpretations are not. Watkins is not aping the earlier writer, but offering her own innovative perspective. It is impossible to ascertain which account comes closer to the actual historical facts of the Palmares community since, as Southey correctly pointed out, its history has been recorded only from the point of view of the conquerors. In his widely influential essay, R. K. Kent suggests that the inhabitants of Palmares were in fact peaceable people and that any aggressive actions on their part were largely defensive. According to Kent, the very existence of this society of escaped slaves was a threat to the Portuguese, who constantly debated its overthrow. Consequently, the maroons were forced to adopt a defensive posture and enclose themselves within walled fortifications. Survival of the community then necessitated raids on people and goods in the surrounding countryside and led to conflicts with the Portuguese over what was considered free land.≤≠ In crossing the Atlantic to uncover this moment in African diasporic history, Watkins found herself engaged in a highly complex set of negotiations in which she cannily reversed the direction and outcome of what I call a literary Middle Passage. Zumbi’s origins lay in Africa, but his acts of slave resistance took place across the Atlantic in the European colonies of South America. For these exploits to be preserved by and for (Western) history, contemporaneous accounts of them recrossed the Atlantic to colonial centers to be narrated by a European historian and preserved in the archives of Lisbon. To correct the colonialist bias of this literary migration, Watkins brought Zumbi’s story back across the Atlantic and retold it from her particular perspective as a black American woman writer.

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Watkins’s revisions are instructive. Southey did acknowledge traits of civilization among the maroons—the existence of laws, the ability to trade, the manifestation of physical courage—but emphasized the fundamental racial difference and hence inferiority of these African people, summing them up as ‘‘evil.’’ Watkins’s judgments are the exact opposite. Reaffirming her feminist standpoint, Watkins has Mr. Ballard condemn the slave men for their initial treatment of women, conceding that they carried off ‘‘every woman of color’’ in ‘‘a rather unceremonious way of courting’’ to provide themselves with wives. Yet the student points out that in so doing the maroons’ behavior was no different from that of the ‘‘ancient Romans’’ (AAM, Feb. 1860, 36). And he forcefully intimates that the Palmares community was ultimately able to overcome its violent origins and regulate itself according to the values of sympathy. Its birth represents ‘‘the evangel of freedom.’’ Constituting its people into a ‘‘nation, ‘‘it created a ‘‘new government’’ committed to the welfare of its people, establishing ‘‘equal laws,’’ ‘‘equal rights,’’ and a ‘‘common defence’’ for all (AAM, Feb. 1860, 36). Watkins’s Palmares lives up to the ideals of good government. As such, it stands in sharp contrast to the unequal, rapacious, and destructive rule of the Portuguese colonizers in Brazil and, by extension, to that of all other imperial and slaveholding powers who cannot overcome the violence of their past and present histories. In having Mr. Ballard retell Zumbi’s history, Watkins was by no means promoting emigration to South America. She was in fact in full agreement with her cousin, William J. Watkins, who responded to James Whitfield’s call to emigrate by complaining that emigrationists ‘‘are confounded with that despondency and despair which preclude the possibility of their working for their elevation here, with that hopeful ardor which is the life-blood of the antislavery enterprise,’’ and asserting that ‘‘we are part and parcel of the American Nation’’ (original emphasis).≤∞ Rather, Watkins was encouraging her readers to look to a variety of historical figures for examples of Negro courage. Before settling on the story of Zumbi, Mr. Ballard gives a lengthy speech in which he names many different possibilities: ‘‘And yet,’’ said the student, ‘‘there is courage among us, courage that has been thrillingly sublime. Amid the annals of the past, have we ever had anything to exceed the courage of that Tennessee hero, who knew the plan of some of his fellow slaves to obtain their freedom, but, rather than betray them, received 750 lashes, and died. . . . Oh! If I had children, the memory of this man should be stored up in their earliest recollections. . . . I would gather them by my side, and tell them stories of Margaret Garner, of Aunt Sally, of Toussaint L’Ouverture, of Denmark Vesey, of Nathaniel Turner, of Zombi and others.’’ AAM, Jan. 1860, 11

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The student’s list includes both well-known (Nat Turner, Toussaint L’Ouverture) and less well-known (the Tennessee hero, Zombi) examples, both male and female figures, and heroes from both the United States and the diaspora; readers may well want to include Mr. Ballard himself. We might be tempted to blame patriarchal prejudices for Mr. Ballard’s choice of story to tell until we realize that Watkins herself wrote a series of poems, starting with ‘‘The Tennessee Hero’’ in 1857 and ending with ‘‘Maceo’’ in 1895, which all honor the achievements of male heroes.≤≤ These figures are variously drawn from the Bible (Moses), American history (President Lincoln, the abolitionists Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner), the black community (leaders like A. M. E. Bishop Daniel Payne and the Reverend Alexander Crummell, who spent several decades as a missionary in Liberia; anonymous figures like the Tennessee hero mentioned by Mr. Ballard and the martyr of Alabama killed for refusing to dance for the entertainment of white men), and finally the African diaspora (Zumbi and Maceo, the Afro-Cuban general executed by the Spanish in 1896 while fighting for the liberation of Cuba). These poems underscore the extent to which Watkins, much like other antebellum black women activists, believed issues of black male leadership to be a vital concern of black feminism. In her eyes, men such as these deserve to be honored because of their preoccupation with questions of freedom, equality, racial uplift, and loyalty on local, national, and diasporic levels. It is notable, however, that of all the heroes Mr. Ballard enumerates— Toussaint L’Ouverture, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Zombi—Watkins demanded that he tell the history of the last named. She undoubtedly assumed that her readers would be familiar with the first three men named and so sought to give prominence to a much less well-known figure of the African diaspora. Yet a significant result of her choice was the marginalization—deliberate, I believe—of a well-established historical canon of male warriors who, as instigators of violent slave rebellions, could be charged with African savagery and barbarity. Indeed, Mr. Ballard’s frames his narrative by neatly sidestepping the turbulent history of Haitian independence: ‘‘Zombi was the only Negro king, or elector, of the only Negro kingdom that ever existed, that I know of, on this Western continent’’ (AAM, Jan. 1860, 11). J. Theodore Holly’s six-part series, ‘‘Thoughts on Hayti,’’ which ran in the June through November 1859 issues of The Anglo-African Magazine, offers a telling illustration of African Americans’ ambivalent attitudes toward this black republic.≤≥ Initially, Holly claimed ‘‘for the Haytian people a solitary pre-eminence, in their Revolutionary independence,’’ but then regretfully acknowledged the ways in which ‘‘the leaven of despotism soon manifested itself in the infant nation’’ in the figures of Christophe, Boyer, and Faustin Soulouque (AAM, July 1859, 219). As a result,

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Haiti has regressed into a nation ‘‘sadly deficient in the elements of morality and industrial progress’’ in which ‘‘no tributary streams of social regeneration have poured their swelling waters into this national channel of almost stagnant life’’ (AAM, Sept. 1859, 299; Aug. 1859, 241). Where there is no sympathy, there can be no well-regulated system of government. Through Mr. Ballard, Watkins indirectly contrasts the heroic history of the Palmares community to Haiti’s tragic history of degeneration. For her, Palmares is the ideal form of government because, while born of acts of violence, it nonetheless determinedly established itself according to principles of sympathy that confound distinctions between public and domestic concerns. Antedating the founding of many republics in the Americas—including the United States where ‘‘the nature of slavery, its terrible invasion of human rights and its fearful reaction on Church and State’’ still make their mark—Palmares reverses the assumed processes of imitation to present itself as the model of human emulation (AAM, March 1860, 84). At first glance, Watkins’s ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ appear to have little literary value. They present themselves as trivial narratives, written in a minor genre and written off with a pseudonym, unacknowledged by their author and forgotten by literary scholars. Yet, Watkins’s stories are situated in broader contexts than that of a local U.S. black community, and illuminate serious ideological debates taking place among free blacks in the North on the eve of the Civil War. The first context places Watkins within contemporaneous Anglo-American literary culture and suggests the extent to which literary imitation in her hands readily transformed itself into innovation. The second asserts a historicized diasporic vision through which Watkins connected past to present and local to global. From these perspectives, her sketches are truly provocative and unsettling. They appear on the surface to be rooted in a specific sense of geographic place as delineated by the paradigms of city/country, domestic interior/outdoor wilderness, local/global sites. In fact, however, the country/city dichotomy elaborated in the first sketch becomes blurred, and the movement from local parlor to diasporic wilderness in the fourth sketch underscores the profound homelessness of Africans in the Americas. As a result, geography in the ‘‘Fancy Sketches’’ transmutes into ideology, specifically into the concept of maroonage. Whether deployed on the level of domestic household, community, or nation, maroonage is the condition under which black men and women come together in mutual sympathy, and summon all their courage to work toward the common goals of social harmony and good government. It is the necessary foundation for the creation of a solid black community. Beyond that,

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it asserts itself as the model for all nations to imitate, and so holds out the hope that a restored America might at last provide a home for black Americans.

Notes 1. Jane Rustic, ‘‘Chit Chat, or Fancy Sketches,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, November 1859: 340–43; ‘‘Town and Country, or Fancy Sketches,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, December 1859: 383–85; ‘‘Home Influences and Negro Courage,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, January 1860: 8–11; ‘‘Zombi, or Fancy Sketches,’’ The AngloAfrican Magazine, February 1860: 33–37; ‘‘Fancy Sketches,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, March 1860: 83–87. Later sketches might also have been written, but there are no extant copies of the magazine beyond March 1860. All further references to the sketches are placed parenthetically within the text. 2. For a more comprehensive discussion of these other short stories, see Carla L. Peterson, ‘‘Doers of the Word’’: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830–1880 (Rutgers University Press, 1998), chs. 6 and 8. 3. ‘‘Apology,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, January 1859: 3–4. 4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6–7. 5. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Cary Emerson and Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981), 311. 6. For a more extensive discussion of the concept of literary character, see Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 85. 7. Frances Ellen Watkins, ‘‘Our Greatest Want,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, May 1859: 160. 8. William Wordsworth, ‘‘Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads,’’ in Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 734–35, 737. 9. Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1936), 3, 4. 10. Alice Cary, Clovernook Sketches and Other Stories, ed. Judith Fetterley (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 7, 140. 11. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 166. 12. The concept of a ‘‘grammar of morality’’ is also derived from Williams, The Country and the City, 166. 13. The terms ‘‘fancy sketch,’’ ‘‘fancy piece,’’ ‘‘fancy picture,’’ and ‘‘fancy portrait’’ were in common use in nineteenth-century American literary culture. 14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1975), 190, 196–97. 15. For another discussion of maroonage as a conceptual paradigm, see Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 76–80. 16. William Wordsworth, ‘‘Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads,’’ 737.

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17. Arguments, Pro and Con, on the Call for a National Emigration Convention (Detroit: George E. Pomeroy, 1854), 3, 9, 14. 18. For the use of the term ‘‘conjugal union’’ in African American literary studies, see Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 19. Robert Southey, History of Brazil, 1822, rpt. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), III: 24. All further references are place parenthetically within the text. 20. R. K. Kent, ‘‘Palmares: An African State in Brazil,’’ in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 181–83. 21. Arguments, Pro and Con, 21–22. 22. For a comprehensive compilation of Watkins Harper’s poems, see Frances Smith Foster, A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Reader (New York: The Feminist Press at the City of New York, 1990). 23. J. Theodore Holly, ‘‘Thoughts on Hayti,’’ The Anglo-African Magazine, June 1859: 185–87; July 1859: 219–22; August 1859: 241–43; September 1859: 298–300; October 1859: 327–29; November 1859: 363–67.

P A R T

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, 1828–1838 kathryn kish sklar

Angelina Grimké was thirty-two years old in 1837 and one of the most popular speakers for the American Anti-Slavery Society when, on a speaking tour of Massachusetts, she defied custom and her abolitionist colleagues by defending women’s rights as a cause equal in importance to slavery. Her actions created a new path for women in the antislavery movement, who, with women in the temperance and moral reform movements, inspired the emergence of an autonomous women’s rights movement in 1848. An analogous women’s rights movement did not take shape within the British antislavery movement. How and why did Angelina Grimké successfully launch a women’s rights movement within American abolitionism? What was present in the American context but absent in the British? New answers to these questions can be found in the diaries that Angelina Grimké kept between 1828 and 1835. Grimké’s diaries help us see that there was nothing inevitable about her transformation from dutiful daughter to fiery antislavery lecturer. Her departure from slave-owning Charleston did not predict her prominence as an antislavery orator. Although her years in Philadelphia are often seen as a stepping-stone from Charleston to Massachusetts, in Philadelphia her antislavery impulses were in fact thwarted. And although her defense of women’s rights can be seen as a logical extension of her antislavery work, that defense had deeper roots in the religious discourse she mastered before she took up the cause of slave emancipation. 211

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Figure 11.1. Angelina Grimké at about age 39, ca. 1845. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

Religion became the site where Angelina Grimké re-created herself by drawing on discourse that empowered her subjectivity and shaped her interaction with the communities through which she passed. Dissenting religion in the new American republic and in Great Britain greatly expanded civil society, creating new social and political space independent of state-sponsored religious institutions, especially in the United States, where all religious denominations were shifting to voluntary rather than state support.∞ In this context civil society became infused with popular forms of religious discourse and religion became the means by which Angelina Grimké explored new forms of citizenship as well as subjective aspects of her personal identity.≤ Historians have noted the personal sensibilities of antislavery advocates and how that subjectivity provided a new basis for human rights claims.≥ Grimké’s

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diaries expand our understanding of that process, showing us how her rich interior life was shaped by religious channels that flowed into American public life. When she joined the antislavery movement in 1835, Grimké stopped keeping a diary, but letters to a close friend give us access to her private thoughts in 1836 and 1837, when she launched the women’s rights movement. Like other women writers and activists in the transatlantic antislavery movement, Angelina Grimké viewed slavery as a gendered institution. Like Madame Dupin in France around 1750, Louise Otto in German a century later, Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Taylor in Britain in the 1790s and 1850s, and American contemporaries between 1830 and 1860, both white and African American, Grimké drew new conclusions about the rights of women from her understanding of the wrongs of slavery. The chapters in this book show us that Grimké was part of a very large process by which the reevaluation of slavery led to a reevaluation of gender relations. What made Grimké different was her ability to express that reevaluation in compelling public speaking—a vital form of popular entertainment—in ways that gained a large public following and earned her the reputation for being as potent as any man. This skill made her an effective agent of change. How did she develop her speaking skills? Where did they originate? To answer these questions this chapter explores Grimké’s personal writings before and during her historic speaking tour of Massachusetts in 1837. Grimké described women’s rights as ‘‘god given,’’ and her supporters within the antislavery movement immediately echoed this claim. For example, in 1837 the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Providence, Rhode Island, resolved to support women’s rights with these words: ‘‘we act as moral agents and Christians fearlessly in this cause—thinking and acting in view of our accountability to our Maker—remembering that our rights are sacred and immutable, and founded on the liberty of the gospel, that great emancipation act for women.’’∂ Was this religious stance just posturing?—the empty recitation of a prepared cultural script? Or did it reflect deep cultural links between ‘‘the powers of the weak’’ in antebellum Christian discourse and women’s claims to be fully and equally human? Seen from a transatlantic perspective, how does this religious trope clarify differences between the British and American contexts for women’s rights discourse in the 1830s? This chapter addresses those questions by exploring the spiritual record of Angelina Grimké’s diaries and her subsequent letters to a close friend in five chronological segments. First, in Charleston in 1828 we see how the disestablishment of state-supported religion promoted competition among churches and led Grimké to value the promptings of her own heart over sectarian beliefs.

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Second, in Philadelphia between 1829 and 1835 we consider the effects of schism among Anglo-American Quakers, which led Grimké’s Philadelphia community to ban the discussion of slavery, thereby fueling her passionate resistance to their authority and deepening her reliance on her own judgment. Third, we note how she re-created herself through her 1835 conversion to Garrisonian abolitionism. Fourth, we explore how Grimké became a charismatic antislavery lecturer in 1836 and 1837. Finally, we see that her enriched self-awareness carried her beyond the antislavery community to make human rights claims for women. Crucial to Grimké’s trajectory from 1828 to 1838 was her capacity to reinvent herself by constructing a large interior space for private reflection at the center of which was the ‘‘throne’’ of her heart. This chapter focuses on Angelina Grimké rather than on Angelina and her older sister, Sarah, because the sisters’ spiritual journeys were so different. Twelve years older than Angelina, Sarah left Charleston in 1821 to reside with Quakers who befriended her and her father when they visited Philadelphia in 1819 to seek medical treatment for his fatal illness. Sarah was happy in Philadelphia.∑ During a visit to Charleston in 1827, she urged Angelina to join her, precipitating a crisis in the younger sister’s life.∏ Yet while Sarah led the way out of Charleston, Angelina led the sisters’ way into Garrisonian abolitionism. At first Sarah strenuously opposed Angelina’s affiliation with the reviled movement, joining her only after a Quaker elder’s insult drove her out of their community. Thereafter Sarah acknowledged her younger sister’s leadership in setting their future course. When both sisters became speakers for the American Anti-Slavery Society, Angelina was the one people flocked to hear. Angelina’s riveting public performance generated the crowds that drew the opposition that prompted the sisters’ defense of women’s rights. As a speaker Sarah was adequate but not compelling.π Angelina’s prominence meant that the decision to defend women’s rights was hers to make; she defined the terms under which the sisters spoke. And Angelina was the first to state the sisters’ fundamental claim ‘‘that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.’’∫ Sarah’s speaking was integral to the sisters’ celebrity as antislavery speakers, and her writings were central to their championship of women’s rights. But because Angelina was the catalyst for both sisters’ direct action, the younger sister’s choices illuminate more sharply the historical processes that generated women’s rights claims within the American antislavery movement.Ω

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I. Angelina’s departure from Charleston, 1829 Across the top of the first page in her first diary Angelina wrote: ‘‘Take heed lest there be more of self than of Christ in the diary.’’∞≠ Luckily for us she ignored that admonition most of the time. Focusing almost exclusively on herself, her diaries nominally explored the state of her soul, but substantively concentrated on her evolving sense of self and her communion with that self in the private space she constructed for her spiritual quest. Gerda Lerner has described Angelina’s shifting religious affiliations in Charleston that took her from her mother’s Anglican church to Presbyterianism and finally to the city’s tiny Quaker meeting as she became increasingly disaffected with Charleston’s religious resources and the horrors of slavery. She tore up her novels, adopted plain Quaker dress, and seldom attended religious services.∞∞ Her diary highlights the subjective empowerment of her religious journey. Although she had been part of a vital Presbyterian congregation, she left that community and preferred solitude. ‘‘My mind is composed and I cannot but feel astonished at the total change which has passed over me during the last 6 months,’’ she wrote in April 1828. Then I delighted in going to meeting 4 & 5 times every week, but now my Master says ‘‘be still’’ and I would rather be at home, for I find that every stream from which I used to drink the refreshing waters of Salvation is dry & that I have been led to the fountain itself. Once Oh how precious were the means of grace to my soul with how much power did sermons come home to my heart, but now I sometimes wish I could close my ears to the preacher’s voice & retire into the closet of my heart & ‘‘hold converse with Him who speaks as never man spake.’’∞≤

Shunning organized religion, Angelina valued her own heart as the best path to God. She drew especially strongly on this radical subjectivity when she struggled to leave Charleston and follow her sister to Philadelphia. Anchoring her in Charleston were her mother’s opposition to her emigration and her need to resolve their troubled relationship. Yet she found it impossible to live in what she later called ‘‘slave country.’’ She particularly abhorred the cruelties that her brother Henry inflicted on house servants. ‘‘O who could paint the horrors of slavery,’’ she wrote in February 1829. No wonder poor John ran away at the threat of a flogging when H[enry] has told me more than once that when he H last whipped him, he felt it physically for one week afterwards, so I don’t know how the boy must have felt indeed that night was a night of agony to me for it was not only dreadful to hear him beating him but the oaths & curses he uttered went like daggers to my heart—& this was done too in the house of one who is regarded as a light in the Church.∞≥

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Feeling keenly the ‘‘daggers’’ to her heart caused by her sympathy for John, she expected her heart to resolve the conflict between her desire to leave Charleston and her need to remain with her mother. Her first diary entry noted, I may be mistaken but it does seem that if I am obedient to the still small voice of Jesus in my heart that he will lead into more difficult paths & cause me to glorify Him in a more honorable & trying work than any in which I have yet been engaged.∞∂

Her diary launched a dialogue with her heart. Like many young people in the new republic during the Second Great Awakening, Angelina was attracted to religion as an arena where she could test herself and find larger meaning in her life.∞∑ In this respect she was quite ordinary. Also ordinary was her effort to place her destiny in God’s hands, paradoxically retaining control over her life by connecting herself with a higher power. As she wrote in the midst of this struggle in April 1829: ‘‘Sometimes I think resignation has been attained to, that I have given up the North & am willing to stay here. . . . [T]his much I can say, that I do sincerely desire to give up my own will.’’∞∏ Not ordinary, however, was Angelina’s growing esteem for her hidden personal power. The more she concealed her feelings the more incandescent they became. In the spring of 1829 she penned a vivid description of her interior life as a wealthy house that required vigilant defense. It was shown me I must be very careful not to unfold my feelings to any, for none here could understand me, the case of Hezekiah was brought before me how he shewed to the stranger of Babylon the house of his precious things, the silver & gold, the spices & precious ointment and all the house of his armour & all that was found in his treasures & how the Lord commissioned Isaiah to tell him that in consequence of his doing so, he should be deprived of every thing, nothing should be left. I think I was mercifully preserved from speaking to others about things. I knew they would either not believe or not understand. . . . I think I was very careful not to give to others the bread which was handed for my own sustenance.∞π

By October 1829, when she obtained her mother’s approval to emigrate, Angelina’s religious reflections routinely invested her motives with sacred significance and deployed religious metaphors with forceful effect. She especially invoked religious metaphors related to hidden strength, writing in April 1829, ‘‘A deeper spring was opened in my heart & my soul daily drank of these hidden waters & whilst many were saying that it was impossible I could enjoy any but a false peace, I felt that my ‘life was hid with Christ in God.’ ’’∞∫

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II. Angelina’s moratorium with conservative Philadelphia Quakers, 1829–1835 The next stage in Angelina’s spiritual journey created even stronger patterns of resistance to social norms, developed even stronger command of scriptural metaphors, and required even stronger veiling of her emotions. Her religious diary shows that her years in Philadelphia constituted a moratorium —a retreat into herself even more than had been true in Charleston. During that moratorium she separated from southern culture but also remained alienated from northern culture. Toward the end of this period she wrote, ‘‘no earthly love interposes for a moment to usurp the throne of my heart.’’ As was the case with Martin Luther, her moratorium ended with a burst of transformative energy.∞Ω Historians have noticed that Angelina was not happy in Philadelphia. Gerda Lerner summarized the doldrums of those years in her comment on the sisters’ use of a simplified spelling system developed by their brother: ‘‘That was their life, their substitute for a life in 1833.’’ Lerner also noted that this period in Philadelphia was ‘‘like the long incubation of the butterfly in the cocoon.’’≤≠ If we look more closely at the spiritual journey that Angelina depicted in her diaries, we can see inside the cocoon. Three levels of activity seem especially important: Angelina’s immediate and enduring dislike for aspects of the conservative Anglo-Quaker community in which she and Sarah lived; Her continued reliance on her interior life to cope with that dislike; Her anger at slights by the community, especially when one of its most powerful families excluded her from its ranks. Combined, these trends help us see that her growing alienation from her transatlantic Quaker community occurred alongside her growing need for social engagement. This tension meant that by 1835, when she encountered Garrisonian abolitionism, she was tinder awaiting a match. When Angelina first arrived in Philadelphia she sought nothing more than a refuge among strangers. In November 1829, she described her isolation: ‘‘My home now is just what I asked for ‘a quiet retreat.’ I feel like a hidden one tho’ in the city & exposed to much company, still my lips are mostly sealed when among strangers & I think they know me not.’’ Strangeness quickly hardened into dislike. A month later she thought that Satan was persuading her that she was ‘‘too good to be one of them’’ and showing her ‘‘the inconsistency of the people.’’≤∞

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By ‘‘inconsistency’’ she might have meant ‘‘hypocrisy,’’ for while these conservative Quakers declared slavery a sin, they prohibited public discussion of slavery and other potentially disruptive social issues. In 1837 the Arch Street congregation voted explicitly against supporting Garrisonian abolition, and during Angelina’s time among them they ignored the emergence of this radical movement. As Angelina wrote her brother Thomas in 1832, ‘‘We mingle almost entirely with a Society which appears to know but little of what is going on outside of its own immediate precincts.’’≤≤ Quaker worship consisted of spontaneous speaking by those who felt moved to speak—an outward expression of private reflection. Although Sarah spoke often, Angelina remained silent, a consequence of her disdain for, as well as her discomfort in, the community. Angelina thought ‘‘it seemed impossible that I should ever be willing to join S[ociety of ] F[riends]. I felt my heart was full of rebellion & I even dared to think it hard I should have to bear the burden of a people I did not, could not love.’’ But she benefited from the fact that Quaker worship matched her propensity for silence and encouraged her capacity for self-sufficiency. In November 1829, she decided: ‘‘This evening in my season of silence felt that Jerusalem is indeed a quiet habitation her gates are praise and her walls salvation, there ‘every man may sit under his own vine & his own fig tree.’ ’’ Yet by 1836 Angelina had had enough of Quaker silence. She was glad to leave the community, writing Sarah: ‘‘I feel no openness among fds, my spirit is oppressed and heavy laden and shut up in prison.’’≤≥ Who were these Quakers—more like prison guards than liberators? Like most Philadelphia Quakers, those with whom Angelina and Sarah took up residence in 1829 had been persuaded by London missionaries in the 1820s to adopt British innovations designed to make Quakers resemble other Protestant denominations, including advocating creeds like the divinity and atonement of Jesus, and practices like the hiring of paid ministers. In the ‘‘great schism’’ of 1827, Anglophile innovators gained control of most of Philadelphia’s Quaker congregations, named themselves ‘‘Orthodox,’’ and dubbed those Quakers who retained a belief in the primacy of individual conscience ‘‘Hicksites.’’ To avoid further schism Orthodox meetings banned the discussion of controversial topics.≤∂ These divisions within Anglo-American Quakerism highlight the importance of Hicksites within American abolitionism and the conservative effects of Orthodoxy within British abolitionism on the question of women’s rights. While Angelina and Sarah Grimké lived with Philadelphia’s Orthodox Quakers, Lucretia Mott and other Hicksite Quakers were affiliating with the American Anti-Slavery Society and William Lloyd Garrison’s radical call for imme-

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diate abolition. If we look ahead to 1840 and the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, we see that the British convention hosts, many of whom were Orthodox Quakers, refused to seat Mott and other Hicksite women sent as Garrisonian delegates to the convention, viewing them as heretical religious radicals as well as disruptive political radicals. As one British Quaker said to Lucretia Mott in explaining why he did not invite her to his home, ‘‘I fear thy influence on my children!!’’≤∑ Like Mott, most of the American women delegates to London in 1840 were Hicksite Quakers whose religious communities retained more of the original radicalism of seventeenth-century Quakerism than did those of British Quakers, including, for example, ideas about the illegitimacy of governmental authority. This radical stream diminished greatly in Great Britain between 1700 and 1800 as some Quakers became enormously wealthy and many sought access to political and civil rights denied to them as non-Anglicans. In this context many middle-class British Quakers tried to look respectable enough to be trusted with the vote; to aid that effort they adopted rituals and beliefs similar to the Anglican church. American women Hicksite Quakers who insisted upon being treated as equals at their convention threatened to destabilize these assimilationist strategies.≤∏ The assimilationist agenda within British Quakerism meant that most British Quaker abolitionist women had different priorities from their American counterparts, civil and political rights for propertied Quaker men being at the top of their list. Even after the Reform Act of 1832 allowed Quaker men to hold public office, Quaker communities remained embroiled in debates generated by their assimilation into British political institutions—not a propitious environment for the assertion of women’s political and civil rights. In this context most British women abolitionists supported the exclusion of the American women delegates from the 1840 convention.≤π Dublin abolitionist Elizabeth Pease explained in a letter to Boston abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman that women’s rights was not a priority for British reformers because they needed to combat political inequities that did not exist in the United States. I find very few people who are aware that with you all white men are on a legal equality & that consequently our class restrictions, religious disabilities, landed propertied monopolies etc. etc. all the host of oppressions under which we groan resolve themselves with you into distinctions of sex or of color. If the English public had this key to the enigma they would be a little more merciful to the transatlantic Amazons as they suppose all the advocates of woman’s rights to be.≤∫

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Thus at a time when universal white male suffrage was well established in the United States, limitations on the political rights of many white British men continued to absorb the energies of men and women reformers in Great Britain.≤Ω The London convention was held only a year after the American antislavery movement split into two groups over the issue of women’s rights, with Garrisonians retaining control of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and opponents forming the ‘‘new organization,’’ the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Following the example of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the new American organization relegated women to auxiliary organizations and denied them the full participation that Garrisonian women enjoyed.≥≠ In 1838 Garrisonian abolitionist Lydia Maria Child said that one sign of Angelina’s influence ‘‘is that ‘the sound part of the community’ (as they consider themselves) seek to give vent to their vexation by calling her Devil-ina.’’≥∞ Not surprisingly, when the British and Foreign Society organized the London conference in 1840, they demonstrated their support for the new anti-Garrisonian organization in the United States by refusing to seat the Garrisonian women. At the convention Garrison sat in the visitors’ gallery with the American women delegates, expressing his alienation from the ‘‘new organization’’ and their British allies as well as his support for women’s rights. In London the controversy drew Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott together and prompted their resolve to hold a women’s rights convention in the United States, which they eventually did in Seneca Falls in 1848.≥≤ Responding to British women abolitionists who shunned the American women’s efforts to be seated at the convention, Lucretia Mott wrote in her diary that she was ‘‘much disappointed to find so little independent action on the part of women.’’ Some, particularly Elizabeth Pease and Anne Knight, befriended the American gender radicals—but religious differences loomed large in their interactions. On her first walk with Elizabeth Pease, Lucretia Mott told her diary that they ‘‘talked orthodoxy.’’ Three days later Mott met Anne Knight, who ‘‘enlarged on the importance of belief in the Atonement.’’≥≥ Returning to the religious context of Angelina Grimké’s struggle with Orthodox Quakers in Philadelphia in 1833, we find that her diary contains one brief but fascinating reference to the new British rituals in her Orthodox community. In May 1833 she joined a reading group ‘‘the most serious & interesting’’ member of which ‘‘had been disowned [expelled from church membership] some years before, because she would not rise in meeting during the time of supplication.’’ Angelina’s critique of this event went beyond sympathy with the dissenter to express spiritual—perhaps also physical—attraction.

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I never believed that either self will or obstinacy had been the cause of such a deviation from our established order, but a deep conviction of duty & tho’ I felt no unity with the spirit which I believed had induced her to pursue such a course yet there was something so sweet, so meek & lowly about her that I could not help feeling drawn to her and she was as unexpectedly & as strongly attracted to me & even more so, I think. . . . [F]rom time to time my mind has been exercised about her & lately I have apprehended that when opportunity offered I should have to open a conversation with her about it.≥∂

Thus one of Angelina’s most vivid expressions of solidarity during four years of diary writing about her life in Philadelphia was her attraction to this dissenter against the new British-based ritual of rising during prayer. Almost certainly this dissenter was Jane Smith, the friend to whom Angelina would later write intensely personal letters about her experience as an antislavery speaker in 1836 and 1837.≥∑ Smith’s example of ‘‘deep conviction’’ appealed strongly to Angelina, and in May 1833 the reading group gave her an opportunity to respond to their mutual attraction. As their friendship matured between 1833 and 1835, Angelina gained a valuable friend outside the Quaker community. Later, during the women’s rights crisis of 1837, Smith became her confidante. Dissent from British Quaker liturgy was the seed from which this rewarding friendship grew. Angelina’s friendship with Jane Smith occurred in a context in which the southern migrant felt rejected by important members of her community. Her diary dwelt on two examples, both of which show that her capacity for deep feeling was flowing in negative rather than positive channels. In July 1830 she was deeply wounded by the accusation that she had abandoned her aged mother in Charleston. Insulted and distraught, she thought it ‘‘peculiar’’ that ‘‘any one who had embraced the principle of Friends’’ would be forced ‘‘to live in a Slave country’’ and insisted ‘‘that it was not only with her [mother’s] consent that we had left C[harleston], but that knowing how much we suffered there she did not wish to see us live there.’’≥∏ Angelina’s application for membership in the community was still pending and she greatly resented being judged as unworthy. Yet even after she was accepted as a member of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, community slights often sent her into an emotional tailspin. Her diary dwelt on her rejection by one of the most powerful families in the community whose son had once courted her. After he died in a cholera epidemic in September 1832, they refused to grant her a place of honor among the grieving family members. Angelina reacted by using rich religious metaphors to describe her hidden feelings.

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Transatlantic Influences on Women’s Rights The sorrows of my heart are like hidden waters in a deep well, unseen, unknown even to my dearest friends. God only knows the grief of my soul even now when I remember the wormwood & the gall. I have exercises & feelings to pass thro’ on this subject which I dare not divulge to any human being secret baptisms which often beget the fervent prayer, that I may be purified in the furnace . . . for I do believe if I am not measurably purified in these flames I must be destroyed by them.≥π

With this 1833 entry toward the end of her diary Angelina was even more deeply engaged with the power and drama of her feelings than she had been when she began her diary in 1829.≥∫ Two years later her feelings propelled her departure from her Quaker community through the well-known process of ‘‘conversion.’’

III: Angelina’s conversion to Garrisonian abolition, 1835 Angelina Grimké escaped from the Arch Street congregation by committing herself to the campaign for the immediate, unconditional end of slavery. Historians have noticed but they have not problematized how she drew on the ritual of religious conversion to achieve the personal transformation that this commitment required. That ritual generated a new personal and public persona that admitted her to a new community. Through it she carried her passionate subjectivity into American civil society. Garrisonian abolitionism became a sacred cause and she its acolyte.≥Ω Angelina was jarred out of her Philadelphia moratorium in the summer of 1835 by the surge of mob violence against Garrisonians in the North and South, including Charleston, where a mob burned Garrison in effigy.∂≠ In March she had heard British abolitionist George Thompson speak in Philadelphia, and in May she had attended a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, where she might have witnessed Lucretia Mott in action. She began to read The Liberator, finding accounts of mobs incited by community leaders who said Garrison headed a revolutionary conspiracy. Above all, she learned about the heroism and martyrdom with which abolitionists confronted the mobs. Garrison called the violence a ‘‘Reign of Terror,’’ and insisted ‘‘we shall not yield an inch.’’∂∞ Galvanized by these events, Angelina joined the embattled movement, writing Garrison a letter that matched his militancy. ‘‘The ground upon which you stand is holy ground; never—never surrender it.’’ She was willing to be a martyr: ‘‘It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, that this is a cause worth dying for. . . . Let us endeavor, then, to put on the whole armor of God, and, having done all, to stand ready for whatever is before us.’’ Garrison, knowing of her

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Figure 11.2. Text from Angelina Grimké’s diary, May 18, 1833. Courtesy of the William L. Clements Library.

prominent slave-holding family, published her letter with a saccharine introduction: ‘‘It comes to us as the voice of an angel,’’ he wrote, mentioning ‘‘[i]ts spirit, dignity, endurance, faith, [and] devotion.’’ Nevertheless, he concluded on a militant note more appropriate to Angelina’s feelings: ‘‘We publish it, that all who are toiling with us for the redemption of the bodies and souls of perishing millions, may be with us quickened and confirmed in our good work.’’∂≤

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Angelina had already left her Philadelphia community when she wrote Garrison, having found refuge with a sympathetic friend in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. A month later Sarah had recovered sufficiently from the shock of her sister’s actions to write disapprovingly in her diary, ‘‘The suffering which my precious sister has brought upon herself by her connection with the antislavery cause, which has been a sorrow of heart to me, is another proof how dangerous it is to slight the clear convictions of truth.’’∂≥ For Sarah ‘‘the clear convictions of truth’’ lay in the Quaker admonition to be still and avoid conflict. To defend herself against Sarah’s harsh judgment, Angelina wrote her sister a full description of the spiritual struggle that underlay her commitment to the radical project of immediate abolition. She described her conversion to immediate abolition in terms that followed the classic religious stages of uncertainty, surrender to God’s will, and acceptance of God’s will. This process began when she mailed her letter to Garrison. I . . . laid it aside, desiring to be preserved from sending it if it was wrong to do so. On Second day night on my bended knees, I implored Divine direction and next morning, after again praying over it, I felt easy to send it, and after committing it to the [post] office, felt anxiety removed, and as though I had nothing more to do with it.

Ahead lay total self-annihilation, then an infusion of divine love, and a newly reconstructed and empowered self. I think on Fifth Day I was brought as low as I ever was. After that my Heavenly Father was pleased in great mercy to open the windows of heaven, and pour out upon my grief-bound, sin-sick soul, the showers of His grace, and in prayer at the footstool of mercy I found that relief which human hearts denied me. . . . Since then I have been permitted to enjoy a portion of that peace which human hands cannot rob me of, though great sadness covers my mind; for I feel as though my character had sustained a deep injury in the opinion of those I love and value most—how justly, they will best know at a future date.∂∂

Angelina’s conversion illuminates the radical location of Garrisonian abolitionism in American public life. To join that community Angelina had to break with her sister and reconstruct her identity.∂∑ Thus Angelina’s journey was not a simple geographic one from Charleston to Philadelphia, but a wrenching psychological one in which she exchanged respectability and comfort to join a group vilified in Boston and Philadelphia as well as Charleston. Garrison’s call for immediate, unconditional emancipation carried with it a vision of race equality that challenged the economic,

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social, political, and cultural status quo in the United States, placing that movement outside the range of acceptable behavior for most Americans. Those who gathered to found the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia in 1833 met secretly, fearing that a public announcement of their goal of immediate emancipation would precipitate violence. Although Garrison’s movement garnered widespread support among African-Americans, its white leaders were a tiny minority whose spirits were sustained by religious discourse that did not recognize the authority of proslavery organized religion. ‘‘Are we [Americans] pagans, are we savages, are we devils?’’ Garrison asked in 1832, and offered a radical scriptural answer: ‘‘In Christ Jesus, all are one; there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female.’’∂∏ Garrisonians needed to invoke the power of religious discourse in their unequal struggle with the entrenched power of slavery in American life, which was buttressed by the integration of northern and southern regional economies and the unwillingness of northern churches to oppose slavery. Although slavery was abolished in British territories by an act of Parliament in 1833, it took one of the bloodiest wars in human history to achieve the same result in the United States a generation later. The British antislavery movement flowed in the political and religious mainstream, but those who joined the contemporary American movement put their lives at risk.∂π Angelina welcomed that risk as a release from the social isolation she had cultivated since 1829. As she drew on her storehouse of spiritual energy, her days of secret interior communion gave way to new forms of public expression. Joining the abolitionist fold allowed her to combine the force of her subjective spiritual quest with the power of a secular community. This combination made her an agent of significant historical change. Sarah joined Angelina in the summer of 1836 only after push factors within her community grew too strong to ignore. Male elders had never approved of her speaking at meetings, and now—perhaps because she had become associated with the taint of Garrisonian abolitionism—they openly expressed their disapproval. As she spoke in a meeting, a presiding elder cut her off, rising and saying, ‘‘I hope the Friend will now be satisfied.’’ Silenced, Sarah sat down. This breach of Quaker etiquette was clearly meant to silence her permanently in the meeting. Sarah wrote Angelina, ‘‘my dear Savior designs to bring me out of this place,’’ and Angelina replied, ‘‘I will break your bonds and set you free.’’∂∫ Within a few weeks Angelina had convinced Sarah of the righteousness of her Garrisonian views, and Sarah acknowledged the younger sister’s leadership in setting their future course.

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IV: Angelina’s charismatic antislavery oratory, 1836–1837 In New York City in November 1836, Angelina and Sarah trained as abolitionist lecturers under the tutelage of Theodore Weld, one of the most popular and charismatic Garrisonian speakers. Popular women preachers had previously drawn crowds of listeners, but Angelina and Sarah were the first American women to lecture on political issues with the backing of a secular organization.∂Ω The American Anti-Slavery Society assigned radical abolitionist Henry Clark Wright to serve as the sisters’ agent and care for their needs on their unprecedented speaking tour of Massachusetts in the summer of 1837. The sisters stayed in Wright’s home when they first arrived in Boston; Angelina called him ‘‘one of the holyest men I ever saw.’’∑≠ Wright booked their speaking schedule, arranged their publicity and lodging, and strongly supported their decision midway through their tour to emphasize women’s rights in their lectures. The sisters attracted huge audiences. In June they spoke seventeen times in ten towns with over eight thousand attending. In July they gave nineteen lectures in fourteen towns, reaching nearly twelve thousand souls.∑∞ Although both sisters spoke on most occasions, Angelina was the one people flocked to hear. Those in their audience who reported on the sisters’ lectures did not remark on Sarah’s oratorical talent, which if it resembled her prose style, was heavy-handed and lacked what Gerda Lerner called the ‘‘sprightly lucidity of Angelina’s style.’’∑≤ Through her compelling oratory Angelina performed the equality of the sexes because she spoke as well as any man. Wendell Phillips, a Bostonian who became antislavery’s preeminent orator, said that she expressed ‘‘eloquence such as never then had been heard from a woman.’’ He thought that her power derived from ‘‘the profound religious experience of one who had broken out of the charmed circle, and whose intense earnestness melted all opposition.’’ He was impressed by ‘‘her serene indifference to the judgment of those about her. Self-poised, she seemed morally sufficient to herself.’’ She ‘‘swept the cords of the human heart with a power that has never been surpassed, and rarely equaled.’’ Angelina’s capacity to express her feelings made audiences feel that ‘‘she was opening some secret record of her own experience’’; their ‘‘painful silence and breathless interest told the deep effect and lasting impression her words were making.’’ One Boston minister from whose pulpit she lectured said, ‘‘Never before or since have I seen an audience so held and so moved by any public speaker, man or woman.’’∑≥ In a remarkable series of letters to her friend Jane Smith, Angelina described

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the religious sensibility that sustained her charismatic podium presence. As she prepared for her first talk in December 1836, she overcame stage fright by drawing on religious strategies that had helped her in the past. I laid my difficulty at the feet of Jesus. I called upon him in my trouble & he harkened unto my cry, renewed my strength & confidence in God, & from that time I felt sure of his help in the hour of need. My burden was rolled off upon his everlasting arm, & I could rejoice in a full assurance of his mercy & power to be mouth & wisdom, tongue & utterance to us both.∑∂

These strategies led both sisters through the unfamiliar territory of speaking to audiences that included men. Angelina wrote Jane Smith: It is wonderful to us how the way has been opened for us to address mixed audiences, for most sects here are greatly opposed to public speaking for women, but curiosity in many & real interest in the AS [antislavery] cause in others induce the attendance of our meetings. When they are over, we feel as if we had nothing to do with the results. We cast our burden upon the Lord, & feel an inexpressible relief until the approach of another meeting produces an exercise & sense of responsibility which becomes at times almost insupportable. At some of the meetings I have really felt sick until I rose to speak.∑∑

At the age of thirty-two Angelina drew effectively on the religious resources that she had cultivated since girlhood. By casting her ‘‘burden upon the Lord’’ Angelina drew on antinomian traditions within Anglo-American Protestantism that had challenged ruling authorities for more than two hundred years. Like Anne Hutchinson and a long line of women religious leaders from the 1630s to the 1830s, she claimed personal contact with God to buttress her defiance of the established order. Like other antinomians, she used conventional rituals of prayer and conversion for unconventional ends, deploying scriptural metaphors of struggle and renewal to endow her words with holy purpose, and rooting her authority in her ability to interpret the will of an unknowable God.∑∏ And like inspired women before her, she generated forceful opposition among the established clergy. In early July the Massachusetts Congregational clergy issued a Pastoral Letter that denounced women’s public speaking and urged churches to close their doors to women who assumed ‘‘the place and tone of man as a public reformer.’’ The missive did not censure the sisters by name—its timing in the midst of their speaking tour achieved that goal. Nor did the letter censure women who advocated immediate abolition, though most northern clergymen opposed abolition as disruptive and antisocial as late as the 1850s. Neither did the letter censure women who claimed to know God’s will independent of ministerial authority—the clergy no longer had the

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power to combat heresy in lay speakers. Instead the letter deplored women who played an ‘‘obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform.’’ ∑π The letter endorsed ‘‘the unostentatious prayers and efforts of woman in advancing the cause of religion’’ and presumably its signers would not have objected if the sisters had attracted only small audiences. The sisters’ threat to the established order arose from their ability to attract large audiences and large numbers of potential converts to their cause. That ability arose in part from the content of their speeches—from their ability to speak autobiographically about the horrors of slavery and about the sexual exploitation of women slaves. (The Pastoral Letter warned against ‘‘the intimate acquaintance and promiscuous conversation of females with regard to things which ought not to be named.’’) But in an age in which public speaking was the chief form of entertainment, Angelina’s commanding style and the ‘‘ostentatious’’ place it created for her within the antislavery movement became as important as the content of the sisters’ speeches. If Angelina had been a mediocre speaker with talents equivalent to her less gifted sister, their lectures would probably not have attracted such crowds, their tour would not have elicited the full force of clerical opposition, and the women’s rights movement might not have emerged at the moment that it did. Be that as it may, Angelina was a riveting speaker who attracted unprecedented crowds as well as vehement opposition. When she and Sarah responded defiantly to that opposition, they launched a robust women’s rights movement within abolitionism.

V: Angelina asserts women’s moral equality, 1836–1837 Men and women in the Garrisonian community nurtured Angelina’s commitment to women’s rights. At the beginning of her speaking career, abolitionist minister Theodore Weld used women’s rights ideas to overcome her stage fright. Angelina explained to Jane Smith in December 1836 that Weld had expressed his full unity with our [holding meetings], and grieved over that factitious state of society which bound up the energies of woman, instead of allowing her to exercise them to the glory of God and the good of her fellow creatures. In the case of the slaves, he believes, she has a great work to do & must be awakened to her responsibility &c.∑∫

Garrisonian leaders like Weld who wanted to harness Angelina’s oratorical powers for the antislavery movement encouraged her to step beyond what was customary for women. Angelina courageously took that step, and when she did so she added the

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new domain of women’s rights to her rhetorical landscape. Her oratory became a mixture of sacred and secular discourse. While religious discourse sustained her deeply personal testimony, it was profoundly subjective and not supported by organized religion. To justify her actions in a way that could be universalized and could embrace other women, she needed to draw on a different discourse. This she found in the secular, objective, universalizing language of human rights. Although this language was readily available to her and Sarah in the antislavery movement, no one expected them to use it to make claims for themselves and other white women. They began to do so as early as February 1837. By that time they had created a division of labor in which Sarah spoke about the theological aspects of abolition and women’s rights, and Angelina spoke about the practical application of ideas about abolition and women’s rights. That month, for example, before they had begun to speak to mixed audiences, Angelina wrote Jane Smith, Sister spoke one hour on the effects on the soul, & I finished off with some remarks on the popular object Slavery is a political subject, therefore women should not intermeddle. I admitted it was, but endeavored to show that women were citizens & had duties to perform to their country as well as men. . . . I tried to enlighten our sisters a little in their rights & duties.∑Ω

Thereafter Angelina and Sarah wove secular terms like ‘‘citizens’’ and ‘‘rights’’ into their public discourse. In New York City in early May 1837 at the first of three national antislavery conventions of women, Angelina offered a resolution that justified women’s public speaking and reform activism in terms that served her well in the months ahead. Resolved, That as certain rights and duties are common to all moral beings, the time has come for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture has encircled her.

Lucretia Mott seconded the motion, which passed (with dissenting votes) after ‘‘an animated and interesting debate respecting the rights and duties of women.’’∏≠ Rights were not abstractions for Angelina; they sprang from her selfrespect, from the ‘‘throne’’ of her heart. An important bridge between the sacred and secular aspects of her rights discourse was a third set of terms pertaining to her gender identity—her ‘‘womanhood.’’ In a speech before the Boston Female Moral Reform Society in late May 1837, she encouraged her

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audience to consider the subjective, personal impact of gender inequalities. ‘‘My heart is pained, my womanhood is insulted, my moral being is outraged continually,’’ she said, by men who failed to respect women. She urged her audience to value themselves more highly. ‘‘We broached one part of the subject,’’ she wrote to Jane Smith, ‘‘which I doubt not was new to many, i.e., that this reform was to begin in ourselves.’’∏∞ When the sisters met with Boston abolitionists preparatory to their speaking tour of Massachusetts they encountered widespread support for their views on women’s rights. ‘‘I had a long talk with the brethren on the rights of women & found a very general sentiment prevailing that it was time our fetters were broken,’’ Angelina wrote Jane Smith. ‘‘I feel as if it is not the cause of the slave only which we plead, but the cause of woman as a responsible moral being.’’ Support for this new cause surprised and overwhelmed her. ‘‘What an untrodden path we have entered upon! Sometimes I feel almost bewildered, amazed, confounded & wonder by what strange concatenation of events I came to be where I am & what I am.’’∏≤ Vital gender-specific support came from Maria Chapman, secretary of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, who issued a letter ‘‘To Female AntiSlavery Societies throughout New England,’’ urging members to ‘‘help these women, who have laboured thus in the Gospel.’’ Chapman endorsed ‘‘the elevated and Christian point of view from which they behold the condition of woman; her duties and consequent rights.’’ She vouched for the outsiders and urged Massachusetts women to accept them even if they appeared a bit strange. ‘‘Trust us when we say that we have found those the most effectual helpers who come to us least encumbered by the trappings of this world, and unfettered from the thraldom of its ways.’’∏≥ With this support the sisters wove women’s rights into their speeches on slavery and the need for immediate abolition. In June Angelina matched her huge audiences’ ‘‘[g]reat openness to hear’’ with her own ‘‘ease in speaking.’’∏∂ Yet in early July the Pastoral Letter created a crisis in which most of their male supporters urged her and Sarah to cease speaking on women’s rights. Henry Clark Wright defended their choice to continue, but Theodore Weld urged the sisters not to make themselves ‘‘so obnoxious as to cripple your influence on the subject of slavery.’’∏∑ Seeking to break Wright’s influence with Angelina, Weld had him transferred to Philadelphia.∏∏ When abolitionist leaders urged her in August 1837 to say that her interest in women’s rights arose from her Quaker beliefs, Angelina emphatically rejected the idea. ‘‘We do not stand on Quaker ground, but on Bible ground & moral right. What we claim for ourselves, we claim for every woman who God has called & qualified with gifts & graces.’’∏π

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Defying Weld and working independently of the antislavery movement, in August 1837 the sisters began publishing letter essays that were compiled as books and published in 1838, Angelina’s as Letters to Catharine Beecher . . . on Slavery and Abolitionism, and Sarah’s as Letters on the Equality of the Sexes.∏∫ Angelina first articulated their most basic idea—that women and men were moral equals—in her twelfth letter, published in The Liberator in August 1837: ‘‘Human Rights Not Founded on Sex.’’∏Ω There she quoted scriptural authority for women’s moral equality, ‘‘In Christ there is neither male nor female,’’ and argued that women’s equality derived from the moment of creation. [W]oman never was given to man. She was created, like him, in the image of God and crowned with glory and honor; created only a little lower than the angels,—not as is too generally presumed, a little lower than man; on her brow, as well as his, was placed the ‘‘diadem of beauty,’’ and in her hand the scepter of universal dominion.

Angelina also spoke of rights as originating in human nature as well as in God’s creation. In words that have been widely quoted by women’s rights advocates ever since, she described how the antislavery cause became ‘‘the high school of morals in our land’’ through which we are led to examine why human beings have any rights. It is because they are moral beings; . . . and as all men have this moral nature, so all men have essentially the same rights. These rights may be plundered from the slave, but they cannot be alienated.

The same moral lesson applied to women. Now it naturally occurred to me, that if rights were founded in moral being, then the circumstances of sex could not give to man higher rights and responsibilities, than to woman. . . . My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do.π≠

The phrase ‘‘my doctrine’’ boldly asserted her own authority, marking the moment when her spiritual loyalty to the ‘‘throne’’ of her heart blossomed into a new social vision of the moral equality of women and men. Angelina’s Twelfth Letter explained that ‘‘no Christian Society’’ had ever acknowledged woman’s rights ‘‘on the broad and solid basis of humanity.’’ Some denominations permitted women to preach, ‘‘but this is not done from a conviction of her equality as a human being, but of her equality in spiritual gifts—for we find that woman, even in these Societies, is not allowed to make the Discipline by which she is to be governed.’’π∞ Her oratorical skills had established her equality as a public speaker alongside other lay leaders like

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Theodore Weld. She wanted more than the equality accorded to itinerate women preachers. She wanted exactly what the Pastoral Letter sought to deny her and other women: ‘‘the place and tone of man as a public reformer.’’ Angelina did not keep copies of her speeches; we have only one transcription—her talk at Pennsylvania Hall in May 1838, which was part of the second national women’s antislavery convention. A mob attacked the hall during her speech and later that night burned the building to the ground. She spoke autobiographically about her opposition to slavery, including a contrast between her life with Philadelphia Quakers and with the Garrisonian movement. I fled to the land of Penn; for here, thought I, sympathy for the slave will surely be found. But I found it not. The people were kind and hospitable, but the slave had no place in their thoughts. . . . I therefore shut up the grief in my own heart. . . . But how different do I feel now! Animated with hope, Nay, with an assurance of the triumph of liberty and good will to man, I will lift up my voice like a trumpet.π≤

Thanks to the antislavery community, Angelina’s voice had become a trumpet. Her speech sacralized that community and the power of the weak within it: ‘‘The great men of this country will not do this work; the church will never do it. . . . They have become worldly-wise, and therefore God in his wisdom, employs them not to carry on his plans of reformation and salvation. He hath chosen . . . the weak to overcome the mighty.’’ She also sacralized women’s rights and urged her predominately female audience to use those rights. ‘‘Men who hold the rod over slaves, rule in the councils of the nation; and they deny our right to petition and to remonstrate against abuses of our sex and of our kind. We have these rights, however, from our God. Only let us exercise them.’’π≥ Sarah did not speak that day in Philadelphia, but almost certainly Angelina could not have achieved what she did between 1828 and 1838 without her sister. The phenomenon of two sisters from South Carolina attracted larger audiences than Angelina could have attracted on her own. Sarah provided essential emotional and logistic support. And in the realm of ideas Sarah fully shared what Angelina called ‘‘my doctrine’’ of the moral equality of men and women.π∂ Yet during their historic assertion of women’s rights in 1837, Angelina ‘‘performed’’ women’s equality by demonstrating her equality as an orator, and, drawing on that experience, in 1838 she articulated the moral basis of women’s equality more clearly in her writings. In 1838 and subsequently Sarah wrote at greater length about women’s rights. But while Sarah was the theoretician who struggled with scripture, Angelina was the catalyst for their direct action.π∑

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Because other forces in addition to the antislavery movement were generating new forms of subjective self-respect among women in the 1830s—including temperance societies and the female moral reform movement—the women’s rights movement would almost certainly have emerged in the 1840s and ’50s if the Grimké sisters had not launched it in 1837. But Angelina’s part in that launching highlights crucial aspects of American public life that promoted the emergence of women’s rights generally. The hegemony of religious pluralism, following the disestablishment of state-sponsored religious denominations, opened opportunities for individuals to pursue personal religious goals. Complementing that trend, the Second Great Awakening promoted personal feeling over theology, deepening women’s focus on their feelings and needs. American Hicksites remained loyal to their radical Quaker origins, creating a critical mass of women who supported the Grimkés’ claims to equal space in public life. And in comparison to British abolitionism, the embattled supporters of immediate abolitionism in the United States needed all the help they could get—even if it meant giving public prominence to women. Centered on ‘‘the throne of my heart,’’ Angelina Grimké’s confidence in the validity of her subjective experience confirmed her resolve to leave Charleston, hardened her opposition to Orthodox Quakerism, kindled her conversion to immediate abolition, and inspired her commitment to women’s rights. Like Garrisonian abolitionists, she challenged not just the southern system of slavery but the entire construction of social authority in American life. Just as the profoundly disruptive vision of racial equality relied on discourse that linked it to greater-than-human powers, so too did Grimké’s profoundly disruptive vision of gender equality draw on that discourse. When the women’s rights movement became independent of the antislavery movement in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, the defense of women’s rights shifted to the more secular basis of political documents like the Declaration of Independence and issues like women’s property rights.π∏ But Angelina Grimké in 1837 and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848 shared a profound commitment to the value of their personal convictions and an ability to seek communities that would confirm that value. Notes It is a pleasure to acknowledge friends and colleagues who provided helpful comments on this chapter when it was first presented at the Yale conference and to those who read and commented on subsequent drafts, especially Robert Abzug, William Christian, Thomas Dublin, Lewis Perry, Deborah Rosenthal, Anna Speicher, Joan W. Scott, Christine Stansell, James Brewer Stewart, and Susan Zaeske. Like many other historians of American

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women, I have benefited greatly from the pathbreaking work of Gerda Lerner, whose writings on the Grimké sisters are foundational to this chapter. 1. For the social, political, and intellectual context in which states repealed laws that used tax money to support one Protestant denomination, see Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 109–90; Forrest Church, ed., The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America’s Founders (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); and Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 2. For the flow of religious culture into American politics after 1840, see Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 3. See Elizabeth B. Clark, ‘‘ ‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,’’ Journal of American History Vol. 82, No. 2 (Sept. 1995), 463–93. 4. ‘‘Resolutions Adopted by the Providence, Rhode Island, Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society,’’ printed as ‘‘Voice of Woman,’’ The Liberator, Nov. 3, 1837, reprinted in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 134. See also Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). 5. Sarah Grimké’s religious quest resumed in 1836, and after 1837 both sisters embraced spiritualism and other forms of radical religion, but in 1835 Sarah did not feel the need to challenge the conventions of Orthodox Quakerism and Angelina did. For more on both sisters’ religious quest, see Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 133–38. Since Sarah was born in February of 1792 and Angelina in November of 1805, Sarah was slightly more than twelve years older. 6. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 74. For more on the Grimké family, see Mark Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders (New York: Viking, 2001). 7. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 60–61, noted that in Philadelphia ‘‘Sarah’s alternately halting and hasty delivery inevitably created a bad impression’’ when she spoke in Quaker religious services, ‘‘which she would overcome in later years by careful preparation.’’ 8. Angelina Grimké (henceforth AG), ‘‘Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,’’ reprinted in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: St. Martin’s Bedford, 2000), 142–45. For the political context of AG’s intervention, see Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Barbara Cutter, Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), 100–25; and Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

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9. Gerda Lerner has compellingly analyzed Sarah Grimké’s feminist thought in The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 10. January 10, 1828, in Charles Wilbanks, ed., Walking by Faith: The Diary of Angelina Grimké, 1828–1835 (University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 2, (hereafter Diary). I am grateful to Barbara DeWolfe, Curator of Manuscripts at the Clements Library, for facilitating my access to the Weld-Grimké Papers and the manuscript and microfilm versions of the diaries, which I relied on to write this chapter, and to Anna M. Speicher for her help in dating and deciphering portions of AG’s diaries prior to the publication of Wilbanks’s helpful printed edition. Like Wilbanks and other scholars, I have modernized Quaker dates. But I have retained Grimké’s punctuation. I have noted where my transcription of the diary differs from that of Wilbanks. Large portions of Grimké’s diary are also printed in Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Women’s Rights (Philadelphia: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 55–93. 11. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 66–86. 12. April 20, 1829, Diary, 14. 13. February 6, 1829, Diary, 23–24. 14. For AG’s relationship with her mother, see Jan. 14, 1829, Diary, 4; for her rejection of slavery see April 23, 1829, Diary, 58. Quotation comes from Jan. 10, 1828, Diary, 2. 15. In contrast to late twentieth-century fundamentalism, religious enthusiasm in the early nineteenth century was optimistic about human perfectibility and social reform. For the emancipatory thrust of the Second Great Awakening, 1830–1860, see Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and Richard Carwardine, ‘‘The Second Great Awakening in Comparative Perspective: Revivals and Culture in the United States and Great Britain,’’ in Edith Blumhofer and Randall Balmer, Eds., Modern Christian Revivals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). Two analyses of women in the Second Great Awakening show the diversity of the Awakening’s effects: Nancy A. Hardesty, Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Revivalism and Feminism in the Age of Finney (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). See also Mark David Hall, ‘‘Beyond Self-Interest: The Political Theory and Practice of Evangelical Women in Antebellum America,’’ Journal of Church and State, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Summer 2002), 477–99. 16. April 23, 1829, Diary, 57. 17. April 27, 1829, Diary, 62. 18. April 27, 1829, Diary, 61. AG’s retreat into herself was encouraged by the Quaker mystical tendency known as Quietism in which believers sought to achieve unmediated access to divine knowledge through stilling all efforts at human direction. See Helen Plant, ‘‘ ‘Subjective Testimonies’: Women Quaker Ministers and Spiritual Authority in England: 1750–1825,’’ Gender and History, Vol. 12 No. 2 (August 2003), 296–318. 19. May 23, 1833, Diary, 205–6. For Luther’s moratorium, see Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther (New York: Norton, 1958). 20. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 109, 111. 21. Nov. 17, 1829, Diary, 135; and Dec. 20, 1829, Diary, 136.

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22. AG to Thomas Grimké [ June 3, 1832], Weld-Grimké Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 91. 23. Dec. 20, 1829, Diary, 136; Nov. 22, 1829, Diary, 135; AG to SG, 19 July 1836, Weld-Grimké Papers. 24. See H. Larry Ingle, Quakers in Conflict: The Hicksite Reformation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986); Thomas D. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); and Robert W. Doherty, The Hicksite Separation: A Sociological Analysis of Religious Schism in Early Nineteenth-Century America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967). 25. Elizabeth Cady Stanton quoting ‘‘a rich young Quaker of bigoted tendencies,’’ in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, I (1881), 423, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 168. 26. See James Walvin, The Quakers: Money and Morals (London: John Murray, 1997); David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991); Seymour Drescher, ‘‘Public Opinion and the Destruction of British Colonial Slavery,’’ in James Walvin, ed., Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); and Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 27. I discuss this point more extensively in ‘‘ ‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,’’ in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. fns. 1–10. For women in the British antislavery movement, see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992); Karen I. Halbersleben, Women’s Participation in the British Antislavery Movement, 1824–1865 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993); and Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992). In 1841 Richard Webb, one of the few remaining British Garrisonians, explained to Maria Chapman why British abolitionists—men and women—had shifted their loyalty from Garrison to the ‘‘New Organization:’’ ‘‘The glory of the Glasgow antislavery [society] melted away at the breath of their priests and New Organization. . . . I suppose they whispered ‘Infidel! Unitarian! Women becoming lords of the creation. . . . Non-resistence —bloodshed and anarchy.’ They need have said no more when presto! all their hearers grew pale, and banished the American Society from their purses and their prayers forever.’’ R. D. Webb to Maria Weston Chapman, Nov. 20, 1841, in Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh, 1974), 157. 28. Elizabeth Pease to Maria Weston Chapman, January 10, 1853, Ms.A.9.2.p.4, Boston Public Library. For the friendships that nevertheless formed between individual British and American women abolitionists, see Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 115–28; and Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 109. But for the inability of Garrisonian women like Pease in Scotland

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and Ireland to form a group to support Garrisonians in the United States see Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 124. 29. Writings on the Chartist movement exemplify this point. See Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 120–51. See also Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘‘Kinship and Friendship: Quaker Women’s Networks and the Women’s Movement,’’ Women’s History Review 14, nos. 3/4 (2005): 365–84. 30. For the ‘‘woman question’’ as a factor in the split of the American antislavery movement, see Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolition: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 39– 77; Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 185–86; and Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 23–28, 93–123. 31. Lydia Maria Child to E. Carpenter, March 20, 1838, in Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817–1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 71–72. 32. Not a delegate to the convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was accompanying her husband, Henry Stanton. For more on Mott and Stanton in London in 1840, see Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 50–55. In 1841 Garrison wrote to his strongest British supporter, Elizabeth Pease, ‘‘My bitterest opponents in England are found in the Society of Friends.’’ Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh, 1974), 152. Not surprisingly, British Garrisonians were concentrated in areas where the sense of alienation from English institutions was deepest—i.e., in Scotland and Ireland. See C. Duncan Rice, The Scots Abolitionists, 1833–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). 33. Frederick B. Tolles, ed., ‘‘Slavery and ‘The Woman Question’: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,’’ Journal of the Friends Historical Society, supplement 23 [1952], quoted in Sklar, ‘‘ ‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation,’ ’’ 314 and 319. 34. May 18, 1833, Diary, 205. My transcription here differs from Wilbanks’s; I see ‘‘feeling drawn to her,’’ where he sees ‘‘feeling demure to her.’’ 35. Anna Speicher’s research on Jane Smith has made this connection with the dissenter so lovingly described by Angelina in 1833. I am grateful to her for sharing this connection with me. See Anna M. Speicher, ‘‘The Diaries and Other Religious and Philosophical Writings of Angelina and Sarah Grimké,’’ forthcoming. 36. July 20, 1830, Diary, 139. 37. May 13, 1833, Diary, 203. The family had multiple reasons for remaining aloof, including Angelina’s own ambivalence toward the marriage. Soon after the courtship began, she had visited Hartford, Connecticut, to explore the possibility of studying at Catharine Beecher’s female seminary, and upon her return squelched the courtship by announcing her intention of going to Hartford. Still ambivalent, she changed her mind and tried to renew the courtship, which was restored only around the time of her suitor’s death. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 96, 103–106.

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38. After the summer of 1833 Grimké wrote only a few diary entries in 1834 and 1835. 39. For Grimké’s conversion to Presbyterianism in Charleston, see Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 24–26. For her conversion to Garrisonianism see Lerner, The Grimké Sisters, 123–130; Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 134–44; Lumkin, Emancipation of Angelina Grimké, 78–93; Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835–1839 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 21–84; and Jonathan Earle, ‘‘The Making of the North’s ‘Stark Mad Abolitionists’: AntiSlavery Conversion in the United States, 1824–54,’’ Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 3 (Dec. 2004): 59–75. For other antislavery southerners, see Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). 40. For the importance of this moment, see Leonard L. Richards, ‘‘Gentlemen of Property and Standing’’: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ‘‘The Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of 1835,’’ Journal of Negro History 50 (October 1963), 227–38. 41. William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, Aug. 22, 1835. Emphasis in original. 42. AG to William Lloyd Garrison, [Shrewsbury, New Jersey], August 30, 1835, published in The Liberator, September 19, 1835, reprinted in Ceplair, The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835–1839 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 24–27. Emphasis in original. 43. Sarah Grimké Diary, Sept. 25, 1835, Manuscript Book, Sept. 16, 1833, to Dec. 31, 1835, p. 101, Weld-Grimké Papers. Quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 128–29. 44. AG to SG, Sept. 27, 1835, Weld-Grimké Papers, quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 127–29. 45. For an analysis of conversion as a reconstruction of identity, see Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Kimberly K. Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1999); and Anna Elisabeth Engle, ‘‘Imagined Evangelical Communities: Conversion Literature and the Construction of Identity in Nineteenth-Century America’’ (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1990). 46. William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (Boston, 1832); reprinted in George M. Fredrickson, ed., William Lloyd Garrison (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968), 33. For the proslavery orientation of most northern churches, see John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 47. For British governmental policy, see William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). For the American equivalent, see John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 48. Sarah Grimké Diary, Aug. 3, 1836, Manuscript Book dated Jan. 1–Aug. 3, 1836, p. 26; and AG to SG, [Shrewsbury, New Jersey], August 14, 1836, Weld-Grimké Papers, both quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 143–45. 49. Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 113–19. For women preachers, see Catherine A. Brekus,

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Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); and Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Maria Stewart was the first American woman to speak to audiences consisting of both men and women, but she did not gain institutional backing from African-Americans and African-American women did not immediately endorse her path. See Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Frances Wright (from Great Britain) had in the late 1820s and early 1830s spoken to mixed audiences on political topics, but she did not generate support for women’s rights and did not remain in the United States. See A. J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of a Temperament (New York: Harper & Bros. 1939). 50. AG to Jane Smith, July 1837, quoted in Ceplair, The Public Years, 140. For Wright see Lewis Perry, Childhood, Marriage, and Reform: Henry Clarke Wright, 1797–1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 51. AG to Jane Smith, New Rowley, Mass., July 25, 1837, Weld-Grimké Papers, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 117. The sisters’ tour was part of a turning point in public antislavery support. In the spring of 1837 the American Anti-Slavery Society claimed over 1,000 auxiliaries and more than 100,000 members; a year later those figures had risen to 1,350 auxiliaries and 250,000 members. Ceplair, The Public Years, 23. 52. Lerner, Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, 16. 53. Wendell Phillips quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 189–90; Robert F. Walcutt, quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 190. For more on AG’s rhetorical skills, see Stephen Howard Browne, Angelina Grimké: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999); and Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002). See also, David W. Blight, ed., Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (New York: New York University Press, 1998; orig. published 1798); and James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). 54. AG to Jane Smith, New York, Dec. 17, 1836, Weld-Grimké Papers, printed in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 89–91. 55. AG to Jane Smith, Danvers, Mass., June 1837, Weld-Grimké Papers, printed in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 115–16. 56. The vast literature on antinomianism is reviewed in Michael P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See also Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims, and Larson, Daughters of Light. 57. ‘‘Pastoral Letter: The General Association of Massachusetts to Churches under Their Care,’’ New England Spectator, July 12, 1837, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 119–21. See also Susan Zaeske, ‘‘The ‘Promiscuous Audience’ Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Women’s Rights Movement,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (May 1995), 191–207.

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58. AG to Jane Smith, [New York, N.Y.], Dec. 17, 1836, Weld-Grimké Papers. 59. AG to Jane Smith, New York, Feb. 4, 1837, Weld-Grimké Papers, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 93–94. 60. Proceedings, Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, New York City, May 9–12, 1837, printed in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 105–06. Sarah Grimké offered a similar resolution that lacked the clarity of Angelina’s and based women’s rights on God’s commandment to ‘‘prove all things and hold fast that which is good.’’ 61. AG to Jane Smith, Boston, May 29, 1837, Weld-Grimké Papers, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 112. Emphasis in original. 62. AG to Jane Smith, May 29, 1837. 63. Maria Chapman, ‘‘To Female Anti-Slavery Societies throughout New England,’’ Boston, June 7, 1837, in Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965; originally published by the American Historical Association 1934), 2 Vols., 1: 395–97, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 112–14. 64. AG to Jane Smith, Danvers, Mass., June 1837. 65. Theodore Weld to AG and SG, New York, August 15, 1837, Weld-Grimké Papers, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 127–28. 66. Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 182. 67. AG to Theodore Weld, Groton, Mass., August 12, 1837, Weld-Grimké Papers, reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 124–27, quote 127. 68. Angelina’s letters were first published in The Liberator, then as Angelina E. Grimké, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (Boston: Knapp, 1838); Sarah’s letters were first published in the New England Spectator, and then as [Sarah M. Grimké], Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, Addressed to Mary S. Parker, President of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Boston: Knapp, 1838). See also Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, ed., Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 69. AG, ‘‘Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,’’ The Liberator, Aug. 2, 1837, printed in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 142–45. 70. AG, ‘‘Human Rights Not Founded on Sex,’’ Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 142– 45. For a penetrating analysis of the importance of the ‘‘universalizing’’ term ‘‘woman’’ in nineteenth-century feminist discourse, see Christine Stansell, ‘‘Woman in NineteenthCentury America,’’ Gender and History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Nov. 1999), 419–32. 71. AG, ‘‘Human Rights Not Founded on Sex’’; Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 144. 72. AG, transcription of speech at Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, May 16, 1838, in Samuel Webb, ed., History of Pennsylvania Hall, Which Was Destroyed by a Mob, on the 17th of May, 1838 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838), 123–26; reprinted in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, 153–56. 73. AG speech, May 16, 1838. 74. Sarah referred to the moral equality of men and women once in her Letter XIV, ‘‘Ministry of Women,’’ Brookline, September 1837, and once in her Letter XV, ‘‘Man Equally Guilty with Woman in the Fall,’’ Uxbridge, October 20, 1837, both published in SG, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, 98 & 122.

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75. For Sarah’s writings in the 1850s, see Lerner, The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké. 76. All the published proceedings of the women’s antislavery conventions and the women’s rights conventions held in the United States, 1837–1869, are available on-line at Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, eds., Women and Social Movements in the U.S., 1600–2000, available at www.Alexanderstreet6.com/WASM. See also Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

12

The Redemption of a Heretic: Harriet Martineau and Anglo-American Abolitionism deborah a. logan

So many false things having been said about my American experiences, in regard to the anti-slavery agitation, during my life, it is probable that there may be more when I am no longer here to contradict them. —Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography 2:8

Harriet Martineau’s long and prolific career was intimately implicated in what she termed America’s ‘‘reign of terror’’ and ‘‘martyr age,’’ its ‘‘Second Revolution’’—in other words, the abolition of slavery. The early decades of nineteenth-century America were marked by accelerating tension as proslavers aimed to protect their economic interests while anti-slavers sought emancipation on humanitarian grounds. Distinguishing between economics and human rights is essential for understanding Martineau’s writing on slavery: as a political economist who was also a positivist, and as a Unitarian liberal committed to social reform, she was less motivated by numbers or theories or by political ideologies than by the progressive moral and ethical evolution of humanity, the necessary prerequisite for which was immediate, universal emancipation.∞ Four primary factors resulted in Harriet Martineau’s lifelong commitment to American abolitionism: her tour of the slave states during her first year in America, where she witnessed slave-based culture firsthand; her alliance with

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Maria Weston Chapman, the Boston abolitionist popularly known as ‘‘Garrison’s lieutenant’’; her veneration for William Lloyd Garrison, the ‘‘mastermind of this great revolution, . . . one of God’s nobility’’;≤ and finally, her public declaration of support for the abolitionists at a Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting during the height of the civil violence in Boston (1835). These influences provide a background for exploring the feminist aspects of Garrisonian abolitionism that dovetailed with Martineau’s evolving social ideology. So attuned was she with the theory and practice of the American ‘‘experiment’’ that she later observed that it was these experiences that ‘‘account for the strange story I have had to tell about myself.’’≥ Indeed, the remainder of her life and career illustrate how her passion for ‘‘my dearly-beloved Americans’’∂ was shaped by this journey—by her exposure to slavery in the South and to civil unrest in the North, by the hostility her politics aroused among the southern aristocracy and the northern Unionists, and by her alliance with the abolitionist movement. Foregoing the conventional European Grand Tour, Martineau chose instead the far more rigorous and demanding journey to America, which she visited from 1834 to 1836. What made America a dangerous choice at that time had relatively little to do with the long (forty-two days) ocean journey or with the hazards and inconveniences of travel through the countryside by riverboat, stagecoach, and horseback or even with the threat of native attacks along the western frontier. The real danger America posed to Martineau was that her arrival in the United States coincided with the vigorous rise of the abolition movement that had been gathering momentum for decades, sparking a violent pro-slavery backlash. Martineau’s reputation as an abolitionist sympathizer preceded her arrival, a reputation based primarily on her Unitarian humanism (seen in her articles for the Monthly Repository throughout the 1820s) and, more famously, on her portrayal of the plights of West Indian slaves in ‘‘Demerara’’ (Illustrations of Political Economy, 1832). Given the national mood in 1834, this reputation opened many doors to her throughout the country, though many others remained emphatically closed. Martineau’s abolitionism, once tested by her empirical observations of American society, dramatically transformed theory into practice and sympathy into activism on a most personal level. In the process of studying American ideology as an objective sociological observer, Harriet Martineau found herself challenged to put her more subjective humanitarianism into practice. Characteristically, she rose to the challenge by—less characteristically—choosing passion over reason when pressured to pronounce publicly on the abolitionist movement. Her actions on that fateful day in Boston generated a storm of criticism that continues to be fueled to this day by what she did—and did not—accomplish as a result.

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Figure 12.1. Harriet Martineau, by American artist Charles Osgood, 1836. Courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts

During her visit, Martineau met virtually all people of note in mid-1830s America, from those who had made history in the Revolutionary era to those who would make history in the Civil War era. Chapman noted that ‘‘What the old over-civilised world would think of it all’’—‘‘it’’ meaning the American experiment in general and the South’s ‘‘peculiar institution’’ in particular—

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‘‘was the natural anxiety on both sides.’’∑ From shipboard gossip about her probable fate upon landing (fearing she might be lynched, the captain tried to dissuade her from going ashore in New York) to the hate mail sent her from America after her return to England two years later, Martineau’s insistence on race, gender, and class equality set the tone for a lifetime of controversy.∏ But it is typical of Harriet Martineau to regard the timing of her arrival in America as particularly fortuitous and not, as the circumstances suggest, especially dangerous. Maria Weston Chapman, whose abolitionist fervor prompted her to depict Martineau’s arrival more optimistically, noted that prior to this visit, ‘‘No English traveller had before visited the country with so brilliant a prestige.’’ There was not a person of note, she asserts, ‘‘who did not . . . pay homage to the extraordinary compass of hers.’’π But many were angered by their failure to convert Martineau to their way of thinking on the slavery issue, whether by persuasion, censorship, or threats. Anticipating the likelihood that her American tour would be marred by attempts to screen or monitor her experiences, Ellis Gray Loring warned: Your tour through the United States is contemplated with great interest by all who know the weight your opinions of us and our institutions will have both in Europe and America. A continual attempt will be made, and is, I know, now made, to prevent your seeing them in any but their most becoming attitude. . . . All that hospitality can do to win the heart and to seduce the judgment will of course be done. . . . Miss Martineau is the world’s property, and as she cannot be crushed, she must, if possible, be blinded.∫

Her aim was to allow each of the various factions a fair hearing, so that the abolitionists—no less than the slaveholders—came under her scrutiny, compelling her to consider carefully rumors of fanaticism and duplicity under the guise of religious and patriotic fervor. Rumors linking the abolitionists—led by the incendiary Garrison—with slave uprisings and the murders of southern whites required her earnest consideration as she attempted to distinguish political agendas from social realism. Further, as her American travel books demonstrate, Martineau made a point of visiting the fullest range of the country’s institutions, from the master’s mansion to the slave’s hut, and from a Harvard University commencement to a Charleston, South Carolina, slave auction. Her purpose was to observe, not to interfere; to learn, not to teach; to assess fairly, not to pass judgment. Chapman posits that Martineau’s deafness sharpened her powers of observation by requiring her to exercise extreme caution in social situations, so as not to be misled by agenda-driven hosts on either side of the North–South divide. Louisa Jeffery, her traveling companion

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and ‘‘extra’’ set of ears, assisted in the communications process between Martineau and her hosts, so as to avert misunderstanding and misrepresentations. One result of Martineau’s careful observations was an affirmation of her primary principles and original beliefs about slavery: I have seen every variety of the poor creatures, from the cheerful, apt houseservant, to the brutish, forlorn, wretched beings that crawl along the furrows of the fields. The result has been a full confirmation of the horror and loathing with which I have ever regarded the institution.Ω

Despite the clarity of her stance in this private letter, a point enhanced by her prophetic insight in this chapter’s opening quote, Harriet Martineau’s commitment to abolitionism was—and still is—questioned by critics who variously charge that she went too far or that she did not go far enough. Martineau’s itinerary, which began in New York and the mid-Atlantic states, and continued throughout the southern states and up the western frontier (then the Mississippi River) through the northern states to New England, had earlier allowed for the return visit to the South that was pressed upon her by her hosts. Throughout, Martineau stayed out of American politics, preferring to record, as objectively as possible, her empirical observations of American society. ‘‘I am heartily glad I came, and quite happy in the conviction that I shall find . . . much that may avail to higher and remoter purposes,’’ Martineau wrote to Ezra Stiles Gannett.∞≠ She interviewed slaveholders and slaves, colonizationists and Free Blacks, politicians and clergy, humanists and philanthropists, feminists and abolitionists—all having distinct opinions on the institution of slavery.∞∞ But events conspired to prevent her anticipated return visit to the South, in the process sealing Martineau’s fate as an abolitionist writer and activist and transforming her initial caution into a political radicalism that increased with age. During the year she toured the South, and prior to her visit to Boston, several key episodes combined to establish the perspective that would lead Martineau to make public her alliance with abolitionism. Consistent with the sociological methodology she had formulated during the long transatlantic journey,∞≤ Martineau believed that her position while in America must be noninterventionist. She viewed herself as a social observer and, although she conversed and even debated with a wide range of people on the slavery question, she rightly understood that taking a public stand on so controversial an issue would compromise her credibility and limit her access to cultural institutions, public and private. An indication of the challenges she would face in her bid to preserve objectivity on the slavery question was provided early in her tour. When asked by her Philadelphia host if she favored interracial marriage,

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Martineau responded that she would not presume to pronounce one way or another upon ‘‘people who are attached or with lovers proposing to marry’’;∞≥ she was promptly labeled an amalgamationist, and the speculative gossip about Martineau’s politics quickly spread. Both amused and piqued by such pettiness, Martineau refused the offers of concerned friends to print a retraction in the newspapers, and she determinedly proceeded south, rejecting the suggestion that her fame as the author of ‘‘Demerara,’’ coupled with her new notoriety as an ‘‘amalgamationist,’’ might endanger her life.∞∂ While in the South, Martineau witnessed various illustrations of the social effects of the region’s ‘‘peculiar institution.’’ In Retrospect of Western Travel, she records the dread with which she anticipated her first sight of slavery; this occurred in Maryland, where she was surprised to learn that the well-dressed, healthy mulatto who waited on her at table was in fact a slave. She was shocked to learn that the bodies of black people were used for anatomy and other medical studies ‘‘because they cannot protest.’’∞∑ In her Washington, D.C., boardinghouse, she met a slave girl with whom she played peek-a-boo from behind her newspaper; but the charm of the moment failed to distract her from the inevitable fate of such a child: ‘‘She was a bright-eyed, merry-hearted child,—confiding, like other children, and dreading no evil, but doomed, hopelessly doomed to ignorance, privation, and moral degradation . . . the dooming to blight a being so helpless, so confiding and so full of promise . . . sickened my very soul.’’∞∏ Further south, Martineau attended a slave auction in Charleston, her account of which juxtaposes the social graces for which southern hospitality is famous against the horrors of slavery that made them possible. In the slave market, she witnessed a sale conducted in a festive atmosphere, complete with lewd and suggestive remarks designed to promote the sale: A woman, with two children, one at the breast, and another holding by her apron, composed the next lot. The restless, jocose zeal of the auctioneer who counted the bids was the most infernal sight I ever beheld. The woman was a mulatto; she was neatly dressed, with a clean apron, and a yellow headhandkerchief. The elder child clung to her. She hung her head low, lower, and still lower on her breast, yet turning her eyes incessantly from side to side, with an intensity of expectation—I should have thought that her agony of shame and dread would have silenced the tongue of every spectator; but it was not so.∞π

Martineau surprised her hosts by leaving the building, unable to endure either the degradation of the slaves on the auction block or the complacency of the whites in the audience. But none of these experiences prepared her for the sight

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of field slaves, particularly the hopeless, demoralized women shuffling slowly behind primitive ploughs, which for her made a sickening contrast with the hardy vitality of the women field laborers she had seen in England. With scenes like these representing democratic ideology, she concluded, the American ‘‘experiment’’ is a dismal failure. Other women of color in the South experienced a different form of degradation, one thinly masked by material luxury. Martineau’s account of New Orleans explores the social custom quaintly termed ‘‘Quadroon connexions,’’ in which wealthy white men take mulatto mistresses with whom they establish a home and have children. The quadroons have been raised, often trained by their own mothers, as stylish, accomplished women to be used for sexual purposes and, usually, abandoned once the man takes a ‘‘legitimate’’ (white) wife. In both her American travel books, Martineau deplores the ‘‘licentiousness of manners’’ in the South, a euphemism for sexual relations between white masters and women of color, noting that the proliferation of mulattoes proves that ‘‘the Licentiousness of the South takes the women of colour for its victims.’’∞∫ She compares southern plantations with Middle Eastern harems, complete with a primary (white) wife, a host of women house servants and field slaves, and—metaphorically, at least—eunuchs, all controlled by one master.∞Ω Writing of the emasculation of black men powerless to intervene on behalf of black women and girls, Martineau hints darkly at the rapes of black females and the lynching of black males who dared to protest against the master’s assertion of sexual privilege, charging that the barbarity and depravity of southern culture was yet another result of slavery.≤≠ In the midst of this rehearsal of the sexual horrors of the ‘‘peculiar institution’’ is her account of Ailsie, a slave girl whom Martineau attempted to adopt. She arranged for Ailsie’s passage to England, her room and clothing, and her vaccinations and education; but the arrangement was cancelled when the child’s original owner reclaimed her.≤∞ Martineau’s understanding of the sexual implications of the case is shrewd: ‘‘In her ripening beauty she was too valuable to be given to me. For what purposes she was detained . . . there is no need to describe.’’≤≤ With such images fresh in her mind, Martineau visited Lexington, Kentucky, as the guest of Congressman Henry Clay, who strove with all his political vigor to convince Martineau ‘‘in favour of slavery.’’≤≥ Clay and Martineau debated the colonization scheme which, according to her assessment of him, was just another example of the ill-conceived compromises for which he was so famous and which ultimately ruined his career. At this point, she received a letter from Maria Weston Chapman—as the first contact between the two women, a remarkable instance of timing. Martineau initially rejected her future biographer as ‘‘rather intrusive, and not a little fanatical,’’ an opinion

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probably fueled by her charismatic host, who dismissed Chapman as ‘‘one of the ‘fanatics.’ ’’ Chapman wrote that she feared Martineau was becoming ‘‘blinded and beguiled by the slave-holders’’ (as Loring had cautioned), arguing it was time for the British writer to give the abolitionists ‘‘a candid hearing.’’ Stung by Chapman’s implication, Martineau claims not to remember her reply, although ‘‘I am sure it was repulsive, cold and hard’’—a response based, she later wrote, on her ignorance of the true state of American affairs: ‘‘I knew nothing of what was before her eyes,—the beginning of the reign of terror in New England on the slave question . . . I was, . . . though an English abolitionist, quite unaware of the conditions of abolitionism in America.’’≤∂ But despite this inauspicious beginning, Chapman proved to be ‘‘one in a thousand’’ for her patience and persistence in winning Martineau as a political ally and a lifelong friend, a relationship cemented by Martineau’s formal alliance with the abolitionist movement soon after her arrival in Boston. Martineau’s contributions to Chapman’s abolitionism were aptly complemented by Chapman’s vigorous defense of her controversial friend, throughout her life and long after her death. Martineau and Chapman collaborated on a variety of abolitionist projects: The Martyr Age of the United States (1839), written by Martineau and based on Chapman’s compilation of Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society annual reports; Chapman’s Memorials (1877), a biographical memoir based on Martineau’s private letters and journals; Martineau’s literary contributions to Chapman’s annual, The Liberty Bell (1838–58); and her needlework, donated to the Society’s antislavery fund-raising bazaars. But the most important collaboration was the unofficial one: Chapman’s regular letters and newspapers proved to be essential to Martineau’s later success as an American affairs expert in Britain’s periodical press. Chapman’s packets from America ‘‘send a stream of fire thro’ my whole soul’’—particularly the news that women abolitionists—Martineau and the Grimké sisters were especially singled out—were being vigorously denounced by the American clergy. Reveling in the notoriety, she defiantly adds, ‘‘It is already clear that the women will carry the day’’ in terms of the ‘‘philosophy and practice of priesthood and womanhood.’’≤∑ Chapman’s abrasive letter further sparked the chain of events begun during the southern tour that culminated in Martineau’s public avowal of her abolitionist sympathies in Boston. Contrary to popular expectations, ‘‘It was not in the south that I saw or heard any thing to remind me of personal danger: nor yet in the west,’’ she asserted;≤∏ rather, it was in the streets of the oldest and most venerated, intellectually cultivated city in America where she first witnessed lynch law in action. Like the summer before, when she first landed in America during the New York City riots, the summer of 1835 was also

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marked by scenes of violent anti-abolitionist protests throughout the country. In October, a Boston mob protested a speech by British abolitionist George Thompson, with whom Martineau’s name was soon linked as a foreign ‘‘incendiary.’’≤π But the turning point for her—the event which tipped the balance in a long accumulation of events—was when William Lloyd Garrison (whom she as yet knew only by reputation) was dragged through the streets with a noose around his neck, a boiling tar kettle awaiting him—acts perpetrated not by low-class thugs, she noted with surprise, but by well-dressed ‘‘gentlemen.’’≤∫ She actually saw the crowd from her coach and was told, ludicrously, that these were gentlemen rushing to collect their mail on foreign-post day; she soon after learned that what she had witnessed was the mob bent on lynching Garrison. For Martineau, it was this culminating event—the abuse of Garrison with impunity, after what she had witnessed in the South, after prevailing against the oratorical onslaughts of political compromisers like Henry Clay, after being quizzed and pressured and lionized throughout the length and breadth of the country—that enabled her to put into perspective Chapman’s urgency in soliciting her alliance with the cause. Perhaps it was not surprising that Garrison had been imprisoned in the South for libel, that his Liberator was banned from southern states, that there were rewards offered for his capture, and that he would surely be lynched as a result. But what was surprising to Martineau was that such persecution existed in the free states as well, a persecution of which she herself would soon be the victim. On October 21, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society met despite these recent events, ‘‘well knowing that it might cost them their lives.’’≤Ω Shocked by the North’s ‘‘subservience to opinion . . . which seemed a sort of mania’’ when measured against ‘‘the negro mother weeping for her children, . . . or the crushed manhood of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen,’’ Martineau found the Boston abolitionists’ bravery and defiance infectious and, when invited to attend the Society’s November 18 meeting, she was quick to accept.≥≠ Martineau’s party arrived amid threatening crowds gathered to harass the abolitionists; that her hosts assured her an escape route had been arranged should the crowds grow more aggressive indicates the real danger posed by this threat.≥∞ During the meeting, asked to offer words of encouragement to those whose recent bravery had so impressed her, Martineau struggled with her conscience, fearing that if she spoke truthfully the many doors open to her in America would be reduced to those of the abolitionists only, a serious limitation to this social observer most anxious to obtain a comprehensive, objective view of American society. Her assessment proved to be accurate, since compatriot George Thompson was virtually hounded out of the country, prompting her to observe that ‘‘the fury against ‘foreign incendiaries’ ran

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high . . . and there was no safety for any one, native or foreign, who did what I was now compelled to do’’ (AB 2:30). When the moment arrived—‘‘I felt that I could never be happy again if I refused what was asked of me’’—Martineau took a definitive stand and, her words dramatically accompanied by the protesters’ shouts as they pelted the windows with dirt and mud, she observed: I will say what I have said through the whole South, in every family where I have been; that I consider Slavery as inconsistent with the law of God, and as incompatible with the course of his Providence. I should certainly say no less at the North than at the South concerning this utter abomination—and I now declare that in your principles I fully agree.≥≤

Despite these carefully chosen words, she had already made clear her position simply by attending this meeting, a conclusion likely to be reached by interested observers from all sides of the question. Now there was no turning back for Martineau: ‘‘The mission of her life to the United States of America had begun,’’ Chapman observed, ‘‘and with her, words are nothing distinct from life. The symphony predicts the coming strain.’’≥≥ Every conversation, every event, and every experience of Martineau’s American tour after—or even before—landing in New York seemed to point to the necessity of her doing precisely that which she had determined not to do, a determination based on her awareness that acting on her private principles as a public person constitutes interference in, rather than observation of, American society. But the situation in 1830s America demanded more than sterile investigative reporting, especially from one whose foremost guiding principle in all her undertakings was absolute fidelity to what she called her ‘‘inward witness.’’≥∂ The process culminating in Martineau’s public ‘‘confession’’ is consistent with the rhetoric of martyrdom typical of early abolitionist writing. As a result of her public avowal, she admits, ‘‘I was unexpectedly and very reluctantly, but necessarily, implicated in the struggle.’’≥∑ Later, her perception is more philosophical: ‘‘Having thus declared on the safe side of the Atlantic [‘Demerara’], I was bound to act up to my declaration on the unsafe side.’’≥∏ Phrased in terms of the religious underpinnings of the abolitionist movement, Martineau must endure baptism by fire—the public confession—before she is worthy of bearing witness to America’s principles, a quite different sort of credibility than that required of an objective reporter. The backlash resulting from her pronouncement, once exploited in the press, earned her social rejection and even death threats. Following the press’s ‘‘declaration of hostilities,’’ she remarked, ‘‘the abuse of me ran through almost every paper in the Union.’’ Newspapers throughout the country carried accounts of her declaration, most of them distorted and some, in Martineau’s

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phrase, just plain ‘‘filthy.’’ Demonstrating critics’ tendency to discredit women’s political activism by attacking their femininity,≥π one writer charged: ‘‘that unwomanly act of hers,—the delivery of a speech at an abolition meeting,’’ is typical of what one might expect of ‘‘this Malthusian lady.’’≥∫ Rather than a return invitation, southern newspapers invited her ‘‘to come and see how they would treat foreign incendiaries. They would hang me: they would cut my tongue out, and cast it on a dunghill.’’≥Ω Some abolitionists were appalled at the notoriety they feared might compromise the movement, while friends were concerned for her safety; socialites, to protect their reputations, shut their doors against her, no longer interested in courting the celebrity ‘‘lion’’ of the season. Unruffled, Martineau advised all concerned to ‘‘trust me to bear the consequences of saying abroad what I had long ago printed at home.’’∂≠ In a letter to Garrison, Ellis Grey Loring lamented the ‘‘storm of abuse’’ Martineau was enduring as a result of her ‘‘independent conduct.’’ Loring noted with some surprise that ‘‘she goes even further than some of us’’ in her insistence on immediate and complete emancipation without compensation to slaveholders. ‘‘Respecting, as I do, Miss M’s pronounced judgment and wide information,’’ concluded Loring, ‘‘I am gratified at her adhering to immediate emancipation as well in an economical as in a moral point of view.’’∂∞ Although as a political economist and social reformist Martineau was typically characterized by her dual attention to both economic and humanitarian concerns, she is here less accommodating, arguing that a social crime of the magnitude of slavery, in which humans are regarded commodities, deserved no concern for slaveholders’ economic well-being. Garrison’s response to the public outcry highlighted the spiritual and political significance of Martineau’s aligning her public practice with her private principles. ‘‘I have just read the scandalous attack upon Miss Martineau, in the Daily Advertiser,’’ he wrote to Samuel May: It will confirm her in the faith, for it is too passionate to convince or alarm a steadfast and enlightened mind like hers. . . . We ought not to be surprised, however, that the attendance of Miss Martineau at the anti-slavery meeting creates a stir among our opponents, for it is as if a thunderbolt had fallen upon their heads. I believe, could they have foreseen this event, to prevent its occurrence they would have permitted even George Thompson to address the ladies without interruption.∂≤

The significance of the event is best indicated by Garrison’s assertion that the influence of the ‘‘little, deaf woman from Norwich’’ far eclipses even the famous George Thompson, despite her being, like all women of the time, ‘‘politically invisible.’’∂≥ Clearly, however, her influence—unofficial though it may

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be—was considerable, judging by the vigor of public response to her rather mild proclamation. The remainder of her stay in America was marked by public infamy, private snubs, and the strong possibility that vigilante ‘‘justice’’ might triumph over her status as a woman, a foreigner, and a celebrity. After hiding her papers and travel journals—as her detailed accounts of this journey, they were to her of more importance than her personal safety—she altered her itinerary upon learning that some who had ‘‘sworn vengeance’’ aimed to arrest and prosecute a trumpet-wielding Englishwoman.∂∂ ‘‘Much worse things were contemplated at the slave-holding city of Louisville,’’ she observes cryptically, but the ambiguity was resolved by Loring’s grave assertion, ‘‘They mean to lynch you’’ (AB 2:48). Outwardly calm ‘‘in the midst of a clamour which left me scarcely any quietness for reflexion,’’ she was in fact quite shaken by ‘‘the hubbub of censure in which I was living,—enough to confound the soberest senses’’ (AB 2:43–44). But she later admits: There were times when I was sorry that I was not the victim of the struggle, instead of Lovejoy, or some other murdered citizen. I was sorry, because my being a British subject would have caused wider and deeper consequences to arise from such a murder than followed the slaughter of native Abolitionists. . . . The murder of an English traveller would have settled the business of American Slavery . . . more speedily than perhaps any other incident.∂∑

Her comments signal an outspokenness that began tentatively, first by committing herself in print; by observing every aspect of ‘‘Society in America’’ she had access to; by debating with pro-slavers, anti-slavers, and colonizationists; by rising to the challenges presented by Garrisonian abolitionism; and by speaking at the Society meeting. Martineau’s articulateness increased proportionately with every instance of social apathy, violence, and censorship she encountered in America, demonstrating an ideological assertiveness that was to characterize the remainder of her life and work. It was not until after the Society meeting that Martineau actually met Garrison, an encounter that she initiated and which took place at the home of Ezra Stiles Gannett, an associate of William Ellery Channing.∂∏ Although she was initially startled by Garrison’s ‘‘excessive agitation,’’∂π her misgivings quickly faded: ‘‘His aspect put to flight in an instant what prejudices his slanderers had raised in me. I was wholly taken by surprise. It was a countenance glowing with health, and wholly expressive of purity, animation, and gentleness’’ (Retrospect 2:218). While she disapproved of the tone and language of his incendiary writing in the Liberator, she warmed to the style and content of his talk, pronouncing it ‘‘as gladsome as his countenance, and as gentle as his

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voice.’’ Their meeting lasted several hours, prompting her claim that Garrison was ‘‘the most bewitching personage’’ she had met in America. Before sailing home to England, she secured his portrait, which hung permanently in a place of honor in her home.∂∫ These events, particularly in view of their sequence and timing, have raised questions about the authenticity and sincerity of Martineau’s abolitionism. That her reputation as an abolitionist sympathizer preceded her journey to America is well established; she had early committed herself to abolitionism in print and was well connected in America—not only in literary circles but among the Unitarians and Quakers, whose ideology advocates practical application of religious principles to social reform and civil liberties. Further, that her physical well-being was threatened as a result of her social politics was also an established fact, before landing in New York and long after returning to England. But, despite her seeming unconcern about personal safety, selfcensorship on the primary question of the era was not an option. Why, then, did she wait so long to take a definitive, public stand? Is her desire to give all sides of the question a fair hearing indicative of genuine sociological objectivity or moral cowardice? Having witnessed slavery in the South, why did she not speak out while there—in defense, for example, of the black woman being sold at auction with her children? Why did she speak out only after witnessing the mob’s pursuit of a middle-class white man? Does her choice in this matter demonstrate that her indoctrination in patriarchal ideology is so thoroughly ingrained that her concerns about inequities of race, class, and gender are always superceded by her concerns with maintaining gender hierarchies? Hardly. Martineau was one of the earliest, and bravest, of those willing to put their lives and reputations on the line by taking a stand against slavery at a time when it was emphatically politically incorrect to do so. As for gender hierarchies, her career was as dedicated to toppling sexual slavery as it was to the eradication of bond slavery. Her desire to produce a truly objective account of American society, and specifically not to repeat what she viewed as the superficiality of existing travel memoirs, accounts for her initial inaction; after careful listening and deep thought on the matter, she set aside that reservation when fidelity to her ‘‘inward witness’’ became the more pressing issue. Martineau biographer R. K. Webb attempts to account for the delay by suggesting that, distinct from the southern states, she ‘‘was at home among the Unitarians and the Abolitionists’’ constituting the ‘‘natural aristocracy’’ of Boston (149). Perhaps: the aristocratic pretensions of southern plantation owners—no less than of Boston Brahmins—to her symbolized the worst social offenses of her own country. Indeed, her Illustrations of Political Economy

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—the work which opened all those doors to her in America—aimed to support and respond to the First Reform Bill (1832), the legislation that initiated England’s move away from aristocratic elitism and toward more democratic, or at least socialist, paradigms. Further, Martineau was antagonistic toward a significant portion of Boston’s avant-garde society—the transcendentalists, whom she felt valued abstract philosophy over concrete human rights issues. Although Emerson was a lifelong friend, his early lack of engagement in the abolitionist movement pained and puzzled her; alternatively, Martineau’s commitment to abolitionism pained and puzzled feminist Margaret Fuller—who, while initially idolizing Martineau as a prototype of the intellectual, literary woman, rejected and condemned her following the publication of ‘‘that abolition book,’’ Society in America.∂Ω Similarly, both the Boston Unitarians and the abolitionists were conflicted about the role of women in social reform: whereas a Garrison or an Adams urged women’s active participation for the sake of gender, as well as racial, equity, a Channing or a James Martineau resisted extending human rights to women of any class or race. Women like Martineau not only had to confront prejudice from those who were antagonistic to women intellectuals, to abolitionists, to social reformists and civil rights activists: they also had to confront prejudice and resistance from within the social reform movements with which they identified.∑≠ Any analysis of these issues must acknowledge that the period’s ‘‘Slave Question’’ was infinitely more complex than black-and-white, master-andslave, male-and-female, American-and-British dichotomies. Clare Midgley’s claim that the differences between English and American women’s activism stem from alternative class and gender hierarchies offers suggestive avenues for further investigation; however, Martineau’s example complicates this assessment in three primary ways. First, although she bemoans the destruction of the family caused by slavery, she extends this idea to both blacks and whites; by incorporating the unexpected—that is, by claiming that white families are also demoralized by slavery—she illustrates whites’ direct culpability for the erosion of domestic ideology. Few were willing to consider the legitimacy of blacks’ claims to nuclear-family domestic ideology: fewer still could admit that slave culture degraded white families as well. Second, as a single woman critical of the gross inequities of nineteenth-century marriage laws, Martineau was less interested in urging oppressed women to marry, thus exchanging one system of oppression for another, than in promoting education, job training, and economic independence for women, regardless of their marital state, their class, or their race. This was for her a universal emphasis, consistent throughout her critiques of the status of slave women, poor Irish

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women, Englishwomen (working class, pauper, and middle class), Indian women, and Middle Eastern women. My third point, concerning the religious component of abolitionism, with its rhetoric of martyrdom and (at best) ambivalent attitudes toward women activists, is complicated by Martineau’s liberal Unitarianism and, later, by her radical agnosticism. Without minimizing the significance of the special concerns of oppressed groups, Martineau also kept the ‘‘big picture’’ in view, positing that any form of social oppression is a form of slavery. Of human rights issues, she wrote: There can be but one true method in the treatment of each human being of either sex, of any color, and under any outward circumstances—to ascertain what are the powers of that being, to cultivate them to the utmost, and then to see what action they will find for themselves. This has probably never been done for men. . . . It has certainly never been done for women.∑∞

Perhaps, in some critics’ views, Martineau waited too long to declare herself to qualify as a legitimate abolitionist. Alternatively, perhaps the challenge of assessing the intersections between gender and race, religion and nationalism, feminism and abolitionism stems from the lack of a framework of interpretation sufficient to comprehend the seemingly infinite variations in Victorian women’s contributions to social reform. While there is perhaps no accounting for the fact that Martineau’s speaking out on behalf of slaves leaves something to be desired—having occurred not in the South, among blacks, but in the North, among whites; not resulting directly from the sufferings of a black woman but prompted by the near lynching of a white man; not in her first year in the United States, but in her second— the fact remains that her life and career were devoted to articulating, analyzing, and attempting to resolve social inequities. For her, the Grimkés and the Clays, the Garrisons and the Emersons all had opinions to voice that she regarded as essential to making an informed assessment about the American Experiment. The inarticulate slaves and ‘‘doomed’’ black children, the compromisers and ‘‘fanatics,’’ the politicians and economists, the clergy and transcendentalists—all these influences and more confirmed her, as Loring phrased it, ‘‘in the faith’’ she had had all along. Although she arrived in New York with preconceived notions regarding slavery, her persistent study of the issues shaped her two-year sojourn in America, a study influenced by antiabolitionist rioters in the north, pro-slavers in the south, colonizationists in the Midwest, covert activists in the plains states, and aggressive abolitionists in that bastion of civility and moral rectitude, Boston. It was the latter with whom she cast the weight of her influence, as the avenue through which, in her view, the spirit of emancipation most promised to be realized. She accom-

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plished what she set out to do—to give all sides of the arguments a fair hearing; what she learned not only confirmed her original abolitionism but fostered a depth of understanding, compassion, and commitment that fueled the remainder of her extraordinarily prolific career as the English spokeswoman for the American Experiment. Writing of her American experiences in the Autobiography twenty years after her tour, Martineau revels in the fact that ‘‘in the South I am still reviled . . . and held up, in the good company of Mrs. Chapman and Mrs. Stowe, to the abhorrence of the South.’’∑≤ Her claim that ‘‘The accident of my arriving in America in the dawning hour of the great conflict accounts for the strange story I have had to tell about myself’’ attests to the profound significance of her American tour, South and North, to her personal and professional development and to the abolitionist and feminist movements—her contributions to which have only just begun to be fairly assessed.∑≥ Martineau’s early alignment with the Garrisonian viewpoint, particularly its synthesis of race and gender issues, strengthened as ‘‘Woman Question’’ debates were employed to discredit the participation of women like herself and Chapman in public discourse. The Garrisonians applauded Martineau’s courage to speak and write with conviction and authority, attributing much of the success of the movement to her. Chapman credits her with ‘‘The ultimate rehabilitation of a race and the redemption of a continent,’’ citing Martineau’s influence as ‘‘one important link in the chain of causes still producing happy effects.’’∑∂ ‘‘The Political Invisibility of Women,’’ an idea introduced in Society in America, finds fuller expression in The Martyr Age of the United States, where Martineau develops the analogy linking the status of women and slaves as it manifests in institutional resistance to women abolitionists’ activism. She cites Garrison’s ‘‘Prospectus’’ to the Liberator, which made clear this dual commitment: ‘‘As our object is Universal Emancipation—to redeem woman as well as man from a servile to an equal condition—we shall go for the Rights of Woman to their fullest extent.’’ But the Garrisonians faced formidable opposition to such radical thinking from two of the most powerful institutions of the era: church and state. Alarmed about the general ‘‘alteration . . . taking place in the female character’’ in the form of self-reliance in political and social matters, the General Association of Massachusetts Clergymen formally censured the women abolitionists. ‘‘It is wonderful,’’ Martineau wrote with profound irony, how many sermons of the period conclude ‘‘with a simile about a vine, a trellis and an elm’’—an ideology ‘‘worthy of the dark ages.’’∑∑ In their aim to intimidate women back into their homes, the clergy contributed to the division within the abolitionist movement that resulted in the formation of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which opposed women’s participation and favored

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abolition through politics, and the American Anti-Slavery Society, the Garrisonian wing promoting universal emancipation through grassroots activism.∑∏ Women’s activism was condemned in political circles as well. Martineau records an exchange between John Quincy Adams and his congressional opponent, a man who rejected as inadmissible political petitions signed by women abolitionists, objecting that such ‘‘discreditable’’ departure ‘‘from their proper sphere’’ is ruinous to the national character.∑π Adams retorted that politicians use ‘‘erroneous, vicious’’ principles to exclude women’s participation in politics and to dismiss the intensifying threat posed by abolitionist debates: ‘‘women are not only justified, but exhibit the most exalted virtue when they do depart from the domestic circle, and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their God. . . . It is a virtue of the highest order’’ (Martyr 78). Jane Tompkins’s observation that abolitionist writing like Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, ‘‘as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory’’ (126), pinpoints the very anxieties demonstrated by the religious and political resistance to social change, in terms of race and gender, outlined in Martineau’s writing about slavery in America.∑∫ In 1855, news of Martineau’s near-fatal illness prompted the Garrisonians to compose an official testimonial of her contributions to their cause: Resolved, That, since the briefest historical retrospect of the last quarter of a century would be imperfect without an expression of feeling in view of one great and holy life which the world has seen so unreservedly and strenuously devoted to the welfare to mankind; and since that whole noble life . . . has peculiar claim on our hearts, we . . . express to Harriet Martineau, . . . our deep, affectionate, and reverential gratitude for the benefit of her labours, the honour of her friendship, and the sublime joy of her example. (Chapman 365–66)

Garrison was as eloquent about his indebtedness to Martineau in this private letter: Twenty years ago, caricatured, reviled, hated, and ostracised as I was universally, . . . words of sympathy and approval were to me as cold water to the thirsty spirit. . . . Those you gave me . . . at the risk of social outlawry, popular contempt and indignation, and pecuniary loss. . . . You thus sublimely took up the cross, ‘‘despising the shame,’’ and have ever since been the unfaltering championess of justice, humanity and freedom, on a world-wide scale.

Garrison rejected her ostracism at the hands of ‘‘a hireling priesthood and a corrupt church’’; he admired her skepticism, her ‘‘conscientious dissent and honest doubt,’’ and concluded: ‘‘Conformity is never a virtue, per se. Heresy is the only thing that will redeem mankind.’’ As one who had been pilloried

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his entire adult life for going against the grain of popular opinion, Garrison keenly understood the wages of passionate commitment to ideals one is compelled to pursue. Having realized his abolitionist ambitions with the help of heretical women like Martineau, Garrison singles out her exemplification of women’s untapped potential: ‘‘by the force of her intellect, the scope of her philanthropy, and the vigor of her writings . . . she . . . vindicated the equality of woman with man by a method as practical as it was conclusive.’’ Demonstrating the strong affinity between himself, Chapman, and Martineau, Garrison observes: ‘‘My appreciation of her [Chapman’s] genius, intuition, farsightedness, moral heroism, and uncompromising philanthropy . . . is equalled only by my profound regard for your own exalted intellectual and moral endowments.’’∑Ω As it turned out, some of Martineau’s best work on American issues was yet to be written at the time of Garrison’s comments, as she was to live and work for another twenty-one years. This final phase of her career, devoted primarily to journalism, focused more on American issues than on any other events, international or national, of the period.∏≠ She wrote about America for London’s Daily News, the Spectator, Once a Week, Household Words, Westminster Review, Edinburgh Review, Macmillan’s Magazine, and the American Liberty Bell, Atlantic Monthly, and National Anti-Slavery Standard. Her format ranged from letters to the editor and editorial leaders to extended, indepth analyses of current issues; her topics included American congressional politics, presidential elections, reconstruction, the economics of the cotton market and alternative cotton sources, boycotting slave-produced goods, and the slave trade. Given her strong identification with her ‘‘dearly-beloved Americans,’’ their ‘‘experiment’’ and their ‘‘peculiar institutions,’’ it is no accident that the greatest flowering of Martineau’s career as a journalist coincided with the intensification of the American conflict. Her assertion that her early exposure to the Americans directly shaped her own history is reflected in her insightful analyses of America’s ‘‘martyr age’’ and its relation to international politics. Daily News editor Sir John Robinson eulogized Martineau as the British reporter who alone ‘‘kept public opinion on the right [pro-North] side’’ throughout this tense period.∏∞ The point is a crucial one since, as the earlier jockeying for her political favor during the American tour demonstrated, the outcome of the Civil War depended in part on British sympathy, and Harriet Martineau—with her public influence, in print, and her private influence, through networks of political and social connections—directly influenced that sympathy. On the occasion of her death in 1876, the New York Independent published this notice:

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Plagued by chronic invalidism, Martineau never returned to America, yet so much of her journalism career was devoted to writing about the American cause that she was regarded an ‘‘American affairs expert’’ in Britain’s periodical press. In 1884, the surviving members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society honored Martineau’s memory by commissioning a statue of her by American sculptor Anne Whitney. During its unveiling the speaker observed, ‘‘Miss Martineau has the great honour of having always seen truth one generation ahead. . . . The first element in Harriet Martineau’s greatness is her rectitude of purpose, by which was born that true instinct which saw through all things.’’∏≤ Never a stranger to controversy, Martineau held nonconformist attitudes that, during an era defined by social upheaval, earned her, too, the martyrdom she attributed only to those active in the front lines of America’s great civil conflict. Clearly, her modest assessment of herself as no more than a popularizer is eclipsed by her foresight as one who, instead, apprehended truth at least ‘‘one generation ahead.’’ Notes 1. This discussion is developed from earlier work published by Northern Illinois University Press: Writings on the American Civil War by Harriet Martineau and The Hour and the Woman. Harriet Martineau’s ‘‘Somewhat Remarkable’’ Life (both copyright 2002). I am grateful to the Press for permission to use portions of that material in this article. 2. Harriet Martineau, The Martyr Age of the United States (Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 1839), p. 7. 3. Harriet Martineau, Autobiography, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1877), vol. 2, p. 61. 4. Martineau (hereafter HM) to unknown recipient, n.d. (National Library of Scotland, ms 7261, f58). 5. Maria Weston Chapman, Memorials (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1877), p. 127. Originally published as volume three of Martineau’s Autobiography. 6. British abolitionist George Thompson (1804–1878) originally intended to sail to America on the same ship as Martineau, but had to reschedule. Thompson lectured for

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the London Anti-Slavery Society and was instrumental in the passage of Britain’s 1833 emancipation bill; he came to America at Garrison’s invitation. The captain’s concern with Martineau’s landing in New York stemmed in part from the July riots and from the rumor that ‘‘if his [Thompson’s] presence was known in New York, he would be a dead man before night’’ (Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 12). Even before Martineau set foot in America, then, she was linked with Thompson as a ‘‘foreign incendiary.’’ It is a singular coincidence that they both spoke in Boston at the height of the mob violence against Garrison; Mrs. Thompson was among those present when Martineau spoke at the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting. 7. Chapman, Memorials, pp. 98 and 105. R. K. Webb (Harriet Martineau. A Radical Victorian) records New York Governor W. L. Marcy’s 1835 letter to historian George Bancroft: ‘‘I regard Miss M. as an exceedingly clever writer whose opinions of us will go far in Europe to give us a character.’’ Webb adds, ‘‘I know of no better indication of the seriousness with which her visit was regarded’’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 148. 8. Chapman, Memorials, p. 129. Ellis Gray Loring was a Unitarian Boston attorney who helped support Garrison’s Liberator. It was Loring who prompted Martineau to speak at the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting; he was dismayed by her resulting public ostracism in the press. Martineau was accompanied by the Lorings for part of her journey north and west. 9. Martineau to Ellis Gray Loring, May 27, 1835, in Chapman, Memorials, pp. 131–32. 10. HM to Ezra Stiles Gannett, Dec. 15, 1834 (Houghton Library, Harvard, ms am 1844.4 [25] item 27). Gannett was a Unitarian preacher. It was in Gannett’s home that Martineau first met Garrison, at her request, although Gannett’s attitude toward Garrison and his radical abolitionism has been described as ‘‘extremely hostile.’’ As is typical of Martineau’s approach to America, it was because she heard ‘‘every species of abuse’’ about Garrison that she was most keen to meet him (Henry Mayer, All on Fire. William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery [New York: St. Martin’s, 1998], p. 208). 11. See Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), for accounts of these conversations. 12. On Martineau’s contributions to the then-fledgling field of sociology, see Seymour Lipset, ‘‘Harriet Martineau’s America,’’ introduction to Harriet Martineau, Society in America (New York: Anchor Books, 1962); Michael Hill, introduction to Harriet Martineau, How to Observe Morals and Manners (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989); and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Harriet Martineau: First Woman Sociologist (Oxford: Berg, 1992). Martineau’s methodology was published as How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838). 13. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 15. 14. The incident in Philadelphia during which Martineau was accused of being an ‘‘amalgamationist’’ resulted from her host’s deliberate manipulation of her deafness, prompting her companion to intensify efforts to ensure accurate communication (Miss Jeffery ‘‘was ever on the watch to supply my want of ears,’’ Autobiography 2:5. See AB2:14–15). 15. In her American journal, Martineau wrote: ‘‘Sight-seeing,—infirmary,—medical

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school. Subjects almost exclusively supplied from the coloured people, because they can’t resist. . . . So these dusky bodies are not contemptible when they are dead[?]’’ (Chapman, Memorials, p. 125). 16. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 1, p. 233. 17. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 84–85. 18. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 82. 19. Martineau’s analogy between southern plantations and Middle Eastern harems dramatizes Clare Midgley’s analogy between abolitionism and British imperialism (see this volume). 20. Martineau defines lynching as mob violence or vigilante ‘‘justice’’ aimed at tarring and feathering, hanging, and/or burning alive. As ‘‘foreign incendiaries,’’ Martineau and George Thompson both received lynch threats; her writings record threats and near lynchings against William Ellery Channing, William Lloyd Garrison, and Amos Dresser as well as the lynchings of newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy and a mulatto named M’Intosh. See also ‘‘Morals of Slavery’’ in Society in America, in which she notes: ‘‘I knew of the death of four men by summary burning alive,’’ during her stay in America. 21. See Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 143–44. 22. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 144. 23. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 22. 24. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 22–23. 25. Elisabeth Arbuckle, Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 9. 26. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 20. 27. See The Liberator (Nov. 7, 1835) and Martineau’s The Martyr Age of the United States for an account of this episode, in which the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society women shielded Thompson from the mob, and Maria Weston Chapman, confronted by the Mayor of Boston, refused to divulge his location. See also The Liberator of Oct. 17, 1835. 28. See her discussion of this episode in Society in America (pp. 112–14) and Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 23–24. 29. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 23. In her description of the democratic inclusiveness of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Martineau notes: ‘‘Upon such a set of women was the responsibility thrown of vindicating the liberty of meeting and of free discussion in Boston; and nobly they sustained it’’ (Martineau, Martyr Age, p. 27). These women met in defiance of a city ordinance prohibiting, ostensibly, any public meeting, but designed specifically to prevent abolitionist meetings. 30. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 39. The date of the meeting was listed in the November 21, 1835, Liberator as November 19. 31. The meeting was held at the home of Boston businessman Francis Jackson, one of Garrison’s patrons. The aims of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Jackson wrote, ‘‘are second to none other in this city’’ (Liberator, Nov. 21, 1835), p. 186. 32. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 30–31. See the Liberator of November 21, 1835 (186–87), for an account of the November 19 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting. 33. Chapman, Memorials, p. 164.

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34. Martineau wrote: ‘‘I felt that I should have no more peace of mind if I did not obey ‘the inward witness’ ’’ (Chapman, Memorials, p. 438). 35. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 25. 36. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 2, p. 163. 37. The New York Courier and Enquirer wrote: ‘‘The continued and obstinate interference of females in concerns so out of their sphere, has become the disgrace and curse of our country. . . . They rush madly into the sphere of action which belongs only to men. . . . There is no fanaticism, however dangerous, absurd, indecent or blasphemous, that does not find disciples among the women of our country. . . . We say to them in the words of old Lear, ‘‘go spin,’’ and leave the men of the United States to attend to the affairs of men’’ (reprinted in The Liberator, Dec. 19, 1835). 38. Review of Society in America, quoted in Chapman, Memorials, p. 172. The writer refers to various tales in the Illustrations of Political Economy notorious for gently hinting that sexual abstinence (including delayed marriage) provides the most logical solution to overpopulation and economic oppression in the working-class, a standard tenet of Malthusian social thought. 39. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 46. 40. Ibid., p. 36. 41. E. G. Loring to W. L. Garrison, Dec. 5, 1835 (Boston Public Library, ms.a.1.2. v5 p76). 42. Garrison to Samuel May, Dec. 5, 1835 (William Lloyd Garrison, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 6, pp. 232–33). Samuel May, a Unitarian clergyman and abolitionist, both praised and condemned Martineau’s brand of abolitionism, ultimately lauding her as one of the two British abolitionists (George Thompson was the other) whose loyalty to American abolitionism never wavered (see Samuel May letters, Boston Public Library, ms.b.1.6v9). In its critique of Martineau’s regrettable ‘‘indiscretion,’’ the Boston Daily Advertiser observed: ‘‘the carolling of her name with that of George Thompson, the most odious foreign renegade who ever visited this country, . . . must shake the faith of many of her friends in the soundness of her judgment’’ (reprinted in The Liberator, Dec. 19, 1835). 43. Lord Chancellor Brougham, affectionately if patronizingly, praised the insightful political economy of the ‘‘little, deaf woman from Norwich.’’ A chapter on the status of American women in Martineau’s Society in America is entitled ‘‘The Political Invisibility of Women’’—in her account, the title says it all. But although Martineau had no official political power (like the franchise), her political influence is indicated by the peers and Parliamentary members frequenting her London home and the intensity with which her political alliance was courted all over America. 44. Martineau became deaf during her teenage years. Her ear trumpet, a hearing-aid device, enabled her to hear when people spoke into it directly. Her enemies and critics discredited her politics and social problem writing by ridiculing her disability. 45. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 48. ibid., vol. 2, pp. 43–44. ibid., vol. 2, p. 56. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a Missouri newspaper editor, was lynched and murdered for publishing pro-abolitionist propaganda. See Martineau’s Martyr Age of the United States for an account of his death. 46. There was little agreement between the conservative Channing and the radical

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Garrison; according to Martineau, their differences rested not with the question of abolition but with the approach to accomplishing that goal (Martyr Age of the United States, p. 44). Channing, a Unitarian divine, resisted women’s participation in the abolitionist movement. In Martineau’s view, his pamphlet Slavery (Boston, 1835), revealed him to be more of a ‘‘fence-sitter’’ than an abolitionist: he condemned the ownership of humans but warned against abolitionist radicals—like Garrison—who demanded unconditional, immediate emancipation. 47. Of The Liberator, R. K. Webb observes that the language of ‘‘this extraordinary paper’’ contributed to Garrison’s reputation as an extreme radical. Martineau was as skeptical of the agendas of Garrison and Chapman as she was of those of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. 48. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 2, p. 218; ibid., vol. 2, p. 219; ibid., vol. 2, p. 220. 49. See Deborah A. Logan, The Hour and the Woman, for a discussion of this relationship. 50. The hesitance and skepticism was not all on Martineau’s side, as indicated in the following letter to Lydia Maria Child: ‘‘Your letter was a welcome sight, & its contents highly gratifying to me. It has always been my persuasion that you & I ought to meet, & were pretty sure of being friends if we did. But I was aware of your disinclination while I was in America, & did not think it quite right to take you by storm, which, however, I was more than once very near doing. . . . I thank you heartily for the openness with which you explain your former feelings towards me. I knew it all before, & longed to tell you that I cannot surrender my convictions to the opinion of the world. I have braved, or rather trusted in that opinion so long that to suppress my convictions would be an evil that I dare not face. What else have I,—what else have any of us to rely upon? & what real evil can the opinions of the world do us?’’(Martineau to Lydia Maria Child, 10 January 18[??]. Autograph file, Simes Collection; Houghton Library, Harvard University). 51. Harriet Martineau, letter to 1851 American women’s rights convention, in Gayle Graham Yates, Harriet Martineau on Women (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1985). 52. Martineau was also linked with the Grimké sisters: ‘‘The female ‘incendiaries,’ who have set the universe on fire, and turned our little world upside down, are Miss Martineau and the two Misses Grimké’’ (The Lynn Record, reprinted in The Liberator [Aug. 4, 1837]). To Fanny Wedgwood, she wrote: ‘‘The clergy have begun a regular warfare against the women . . . and several preaching against the teaching of women—(women teaching) aiming pointedly at the Grimkés and myself’’ (Arbuckle, Harriet Martineau’s Letters, 9). 53. Martineau, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 61. 54. Chapman, Memorials, p. 165. 55. Martineau, Martyr Age of the United States, p. 54. ibid., p. 53. ibid., p. 54. She refers to the gender iconography popular at the time, in which men were imaged as virile supporters (like an elm tree) of weak women, providing a framework (trellis) for women’s vinelike dependence on men. 56. See Constance W. Hassett’s ‘‘Siblings and Antislavery: The Literary and Political Relations of Harriet Martineau, James Martineau, and Maria Weston Chapman’’ (Signs:

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Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21, no. 2 (winter): pp. 374–409) for a discussion of the striking parallels in the relationships between abolitionist Harriet and her clergyman brother, James, and between abolitionist Chapman and her conservative pastor-mentor, William Ellery Channing. Both women were as determined to persist in their antislavery activities as the clergymen were to silence their public activism. Writing to Chapman of her visit to Martineau, Lucretia Mott relayed Harriet’s hope that ‘‘much good will result from your labors against clerical assumptions and priestly power’’ (Boston Public Library, ms.a.9.2 v13 p24). 57. This point is related to the Gag Bill, which prohibited discussion of certain topics, like slavery and abolition, in Congress. Adams devoted much of his congressional career to rescinding this bill. Although the Gag Bill encompassed controversial topics promoted by a variety of special-interest groups, petitions signed by women apparently generated a higher degree of antagonism from pro-slavery Congressmen wishing them to remain politically invisible. 58. Martineau, Martyr Age, p. 78. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs. The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 126. 59. Chapman, Memorials, pp. 365–66. William Lloyd Garrison to HM, Dec. 4, 1855 (University of Birmingham, Special Collections, hm349). 60. HM’s 1,642 Daily News leaders have been catalogued by R. K. Webb in ‘‘Handlist of Contributions to the Daily News by Harriet Martineau’’ (HM papers at University of Birmingham) and by Elisabeth Arbuckle in Harriet Martineau in London’s Daily News. HM also contributed eighteen articles to the Spectator in 1858, most of them addressing American slavery, as well as about seventy letters to the National Anti-Slavery Standard between 1859 and 1861. 61. Elisabeth Arbuckle, Harriet Martineau in London’s ‘‘Daily News’’ (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), p. xii. 62. Boston Inquirer, Jan. 12, 1884 (Harris-Manchester College, Oxford).

13

‘‘Seeking a Larger Liberty’’: Remapping First Wave Feminism nancy a. hewitt

On July 14, 1848, Frederick Douglass printed two announcements on the front page of the North Star. The first called on ‘‘the Friends of Freedom in Western New York’’ to ‘‘commemorate the day which gave freedom to 800,000 human beings in the West Indian Isles, and also tender a tribute of gratitude for the recent French demonstration of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.’ ’’ The second invited readers to attend a woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, five days hence.∞ The two events seemed perfectly paired to North Star subscribers who had spent the previous decade fighting for the abolition of slavery and advocating women’s rights within religious and reform organizations. Many had followed events in Europe closely throughout the year, comparing the revolutionary movements unfolding there with their own government’s campaign to expand slave territories through the defeat of Mexico and the acquisition of Cuba. Historians of antebellum activism in the United States have sometimes noted these international developments, but rarely analyzed them. The origins of American feminism, for instance, have long been located in London, England. Yet few histories have moved beyond that singular moment to explore more fully the international context in which American woman’s rights was born. Bonnie S. Anderson and Karen Offen have broken through this feminist isolationism from the European side, incorporating leading U.S. activists into

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their accounts of nineteenth-century feminism. This chapter extends their analysis to a wider cohort of American women and men, who were represented at Seneca Falls by James and Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia; Frederick Douglass of Rochester; his Quaker neighbors Amy Post, Catherine Fish Stebbins, Sarah Hallowell, and Mary Hallowell; and a dozen other Quaker activists from central and western New York. While most of the chapters in this volume focus on the transatlantic connections among either African American abolitionists or white woman’s rights advocates, this chapter addresses critical interracial efforts among women and men whose labors embraced campaigns against racial, gender, and economic injustice at home and abroad. The activists whose efforts are explored here sustained both collective and personal ties to abolitionists, woman’s rights advocates, and revolutionaries in Great Britain, France, and Germany. They corresponded with, hosted, met at conventions, and/or read the reports of Angelina Grimké, Sarah Forten, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Parker Remond, Ernestine Rose, and numerous others whose efforts are explored in these chapters. This particular network of free black and white Quaker radicals, then, formed one node in a wide-ranging web of relations stretched across the northern United States and the North Atlantic. The developments that brought free black and white Quaker radicals together in western New York, the Philadelphia area, and scattered Midwestern communities have been documented by a number of scholars.≤ Individuals who were linked to but not residents of these communities—William C. Nell, Charles Remond, Mary Ann McClintock, Nathaniel Potter, Jeremiah Burke Sanderson, Betsey Mix Cowles, and Lucy Colman—have received considerably less attention, but they were critical members of the same network. Taken together, these activists demonstrate the deep and abiding concern among many abolitionist-feminists with events and ideas throughout the Atlantic world. Two critical facts differentiated this circle of antebellum reformers from others. First, interracial relationships, Quaker kinship ties, and free black communities were central to their organization. In Rochester, for example, the friendship between Amy Post and Frederick Douglass formed the lynchpin of an activist network that reached out to Quakers in western, central, and downstate New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and the Midwest and to free blacks in Boston, Canada, New York City, Philadelphia, and Michigan. The pair’s presence in Rochester brought Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, William Nell, Charles Remond, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley, William Lloyd Garrison, and dozens of other antislavery and woman’s rights advocates to the city. At the same time, Frederick Douglass, Amy Post, and their coworkers in the

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interracial and mixed-sex Western New York Anti-Slavery Society reached out to activists elsewhere through conventions, fund-raising fairs, lectures, and letters and articles in the radical and reform press. Second, members of this circle believed that ‘‘all these subjects of reform are kindred in their nature.’’ As Lucretia Mott wrote in October 1848, activists ‘‘will not love the slave less, in loving universal humanity more.’’ Although most ranked human bondage as the most brutal wrong and therefore the most important and immediate issue, they did not see the eradication of slavery, much less race prejudice, as possible without a ‘‘thorough re-organization of Society.’’≥ Yet this circle of activists also had close ties with other abolitionists and woman’s rights advocates, including those examined in this section. Like the Grimké sisters, they joined, and most remained staunch supporters of, the American Anti-Slavery Society, sharing William Lloyd Garrison’s demand for immediate emancipation with no compensation and his embrace of both sex and race equality. They read the works of Harriet Martineau, were persuaded by the pathbreaking claims of Angelina Grimké, and applauded the oratory of Ernestine Rose. Like all three women, they were willing to reconsider, time and again, their stance on the social and political issues of the day. Like Grimké and Rose, many in this group traveled a circuitous spiritual path, with some establishing more radical religious beliefs and institutions, such as the Friends of Human Progress; others moving toward a secular radicalism; and a few embracing both. Finally, like Martineau and Rose, they linked local and national events to global questions of domination and liberation. In the years between the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and the gathering at Seneca Falls, the interest in international developments ran especially high. Throughout the early 1840s, Emancipation Day celebrations each August 1 attracted large crowds of African Americans and small groups of white abolitionists in Boston, Philadelphia, Rochester, and Cincinnati as well as in Lowell, Massachusetts, and other northern cities. Parades, speeches, and balls were also organized in honor of Toussaint L’Overture’s victory on St. Domingue and the abolition of the international slave trade in the United States. Speakers recounted events in Great Britain and the West Indies in dramatic detail, keeping alive the history of the international fight against human bondage. Lucretia Mott attended a number of Emancipation Day celebrations, but she expressed her international concerns more forcefully in her correspondence with British reformers such as Elizabeth Pease, Richard Webb, George and Cecilia Combe, and Richard Allen. The members of this transatlantic Quaker reform circle sent papers and pamphlets back and forth between London, Glasgow, Leicester, Darlington, and Philadelphia. Their letters, more-

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over, were not simply private exchanges; activists in the United States and England felt free to circulate personal correspondence among family, friends, and coworkers, and to publish the most revealing letters in the reform press. In a single exchange during summer 1842, portions of which were published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Mott and Richard Allen discussed a recent convention in Paris, Joseph Sturge’s campaign for a seat in Parliament, William Knibb’s London speech on ‘‘the privations & sufferings of the poor Irish emigrants to Jamaica,’’ and George Thompson’s speeches in Glasgow on the ‘‘Affgananistan war.’’∂ Invitations to visit, attend conventions, and give lectures were often included in abolitionists’ transatlantic correspondence. Travelers introduced friends, family, and readers of the antislavery press to important individuals, organizations, and events abroad. Over the course of the 1840s, an increasing number of U.S. activists visited Great Britain, including escaped slaves and free blacks who compared conditions there with those at home. Those abolitionists who did not travel abroad familiarized themselves with international events through letters and the antislavery and reform press or by reading books and pamphlets penned by foreign authors. The correspondence among Amy Post’s extended family illustrates how international influences shaped discussions among those with no direct experience of Great Britain or Europe. In 1844, for instance, Isaac Post wrote his wife, Amy, quoting the writings of Harriet Martineau in response to quarrels between political abolitionists and moral suasionists. Others cited Tom Paine, Charles Dickens, Frederika Bremer, and a host of lesser-known English and European authors on a range of issues. Quaker Sarah Thayer, who lived on the edge of poverty in a small village in central New York, read all she could, including numerous publications from and on Great Britain; and she requested copies of the Liberator to obtain news of events both local and international. Another Quaker coworker, John Hurn, lived in a Fourierist Phalanx in Wisconsin in 1846, residing in what he called ‘‘complete isolation.’’ Nonetheless, he wrote Amy in detail about the various disputes among abolitionists and concluded, ‘‘I should like to see the example of the [British] Anti-Corn Law League followed in all other reforms, which would hasten the ‘good times coming’ considerably.’’∑ Although Amy Post, much like Sarah Forten, rarely traveled far from home, she expanded her network of antislavery coworkers through Frederick Douglass’s connections in Great Britain. Visiting England in 1846, Douglass wrote regularly, declaring in his first letter that the Post family was ‘‘very dear to me, you loved me and treated me like a brother before the world knew me as it does & when my friends were fewer than they now are.’’ In England, he claimed, such relations between blacks and whites were considered normal. ‘‘I

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am treated as a man and an equal brother,’’ and am ‘‘sometimes fearful it will unfit me for the pro-slavery kicks and cuffs at home, but I hope not. [P]erhaps [it] will help as my own experience will assure me that such prejudice and abuse is the result of the system of slavery.’’∏ Through this exchange of letters, Amy not only gained reinforcement for her radical vision of race relations, but also made the acquaintance of Elizabeth Pease, George Thompson, and other British abolitionists. When Douglass returned home and established his antislavery paper, the North Star, in Rochester, Post called on these British friends to help support the venture. The Posts, in turn, provided Douglass with contacts in Canada. Amy’s sister, Sarah Hallowell stayed with cousins Thomas and Phebe Post Willis in Ontario in 1846, and Amy herself made the trip the next year with antislavery coworker Lucy Colman. All three visited free black communities, where Amy was especially well known because her home was a stop on the underground railroad. When Douglass traveled through Canada on a lecture tour in 1849, with English abolitionists Julia Griffiths and her sister Elizabeth, he called on the Posts’ friends and relatives to set up lectures and provide housing and meals.π In 1846, the mix of domestic and international concerns that captured the attention of radical abolitionists was crystallized in the U.S. war against Mexico. The war challenged activists’ antislavery and pacifist positions and made acutely visible the deeply intertwined character of local, national, and global politics. Mexico, having outlawed slavery, was placed next to St. Domingue and England on the roster of civilized nations; and radical abolitionists were certain that the war against it was intended to both expand slavery and impose Anglo-Saxon domination over the Mexican population.∫ Protest meetings held throughout the North linked the Mexican War to earlier attacks on American Indians and to U.S. politicians’ imperial interest in Cuba.Ω British and American women combined forces to push for peace. At the behest of their British sisters, women activists in Philadelphia organized a public meeting to protest the war in June 1846. Lucretia Mott and Sarah Pugh, longtime members of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, led the meeting. The women drafted a memorial in which they lamented ‘‘the false love of glory, the cruel spirit of revenge, the blood-thirsty ambition, the swelling breast of the soldier in the field’’ as well as the danger of extending slave territory. Concerned with the treatment of Mexican women by U.S. soldiers during the war and the consequences for slave families if the conquest of Mexican lands was successful, some called for ‘‘women en masse’’ to petition Congress to withdraw American troops.∞≠

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Radical abolitionists, black and white, organized protest meetings in a number of other communities in the Northeast and Midwest. In Syracuse, New York, they called on laboring men to refuse to serve in Mexico; participants at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, critiqued the ‘‘blind obedience’’ required by patriotism. All of the meetings published protests, sent letters and reports to the antislavery press, or in other ways publicized their efforts more widely. In most cases, women played critical roles, wielding their special place in radical antislavery and peace societies to expand their public and political presence.∞∞ For radical Quaker women, the Mexican War protests brought together not only their interest in abolition and peace, but also their growing concern over woman’s rights. Many of these activists had already left or been disowned from the Society of Friends for their participation in ‘‘worldly affairs.’’ Working alongside like-minded African Americans since the mid-1830s, they infused the more progressive wings of the antislavery and peace movements with their vision of sex equality. The New England Non-Resistant Society, filled with radical Quaker activists, had granted women full participation in its meetings from its founding in 1839. William C. Nell successfully advocated women’s rights in the militant New England Freedom Association, a group that aided fugitive slaves, in 1845. That same year, abolitionist lecturer Jeremiah Burke Sanderson wrote Amy Post from the American Anti-Slavery Society meetings in New York City, extolling the advances made in women’s status. ‘‘Woman is rising up, becoming free, the progress manifest at present of the idea of Woman’s Rights in the public mind is an earnest [indication] of what a few years comparatively, may effect.’’ In December 1846, abolitionist minister Samuel J. May of Syracuse, who had helped organize a Mexican War protest meeting the previous July, sent the Posts fifty copies of his ‘‘Sermon on the Rights of Women’’ to be sold at the Rochester fair ‘‘for the benefit of the [Western New York] Anti-Slavery Society’’ and the North Star.∞≤ Throughout the winter and spring of 1848, antislavery and peace advocates continued to protest the U.S. conquest of Mexico.∞≥ During the same period, radical Quakers made a final effort to transform the Hicksite meeting according to their democratic, abolitionist, and feminist principles. When they failed to do so at the 1848 Genesee Yearly Meeting of Friends, held in Farmington, New York, in early June, the dissenters who had not yet been disowned walked out. They immediately reconvened and invited those who had earlier withdrawn from the Society to join in forming the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends. In the new organization, women and men met together for worship and business, hierarchical structures were abolished, individuals were allowed to participate without sectarian tests of their beliefs, and the ‘‘promotion of righteousness’’ through prayer, meditation, and ‘‘worldly’’

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activism was considered a sign of true faith. The movement quickly spread and like-minded meetings sprang up in eastern Pennsylvania and throughout the Midwest.∞∂ All of these activities gained added significance from the incredible news of revolutions abroad. According to Frederick Douglass, reports of the French revolution hit the United States ‘‘like a bolt of living thunder.’’ In April 1848, he wrote, ‘‘Thanks to steam navigation and electric wires, we can almost hear the words uttered, and see the deeds done as they transpire. A revolution now cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, until it has traversed the globe.’’ While cause for celebration among ‘‘the humble poor, the toil-worn laborer, the oppressed and the plundered,’’ ‘‘the despots of Europe, the Tories of England, and the slaveholders of America are astonished, confused, and terrified.’’ ‘‘Only Negroes and Abolitionists,’’ he declared, can truly rejoice.∞∑ On May 9, a ‘‘Sympathy with France’’ meeting was held in Rochester. Douglass reported that some 6,000 persons ‘‘of both sexes, and all ages’’ assembled to express their support for the revolution abroad. They resolved ‘‘that by decreeing the abolition of Negro slavery, France has covered herself with higher honors than any war could give.’’ They also applauded the ‘‘rights of labor’’ newly recognized in France, and the abolition of capital punishment for political offenses. Over the following months, the North Star provided extensive and detailed coverage of events not only in France, but also in Ireland, England, Denmark, Austria, Sardinia, Silesia, Russia, Spain, Hungary, and the West Indies. Indeed, the ‘‘Foreign News’’ section came to dominate the paper in this period, with rebels in Ireland, Chartists in England, abolitionists in Denmark, and revolutionaries in France, Austria, Sardinia, and elsewhere posed against the repressive actions of Russian troops, British Tories, and other counterrevolutionary forces. It was in this context that radical Quakers rebelled against the sectarian strictures of the Genesee Yearly Meeting and abolitionists gathered in western New York and elsewhere to assess the future. James and Lucretia Mott, who attended the Genesee Yearly Meeting, then traveled to Canada to visit free black communities and to the Cattaragus Reservation, where Seneca Indians were at work on their first written constitution. In that process, Seneca women would be divested of some of their traditional power over tribal decisions, but they would retain the right to vote, something few other American women could even imagine. While building on tribal traditions, Lucretia Mott claimed, the Seneca were also learning ‘‘from the political agitations abroad . . . imitating the movements of France and all Europe and seeking a larger liberty.’’∞∏

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Following this trip, Mott traveled to her sister’s house in Auburn, visited with her friends the McClintocks in Waterloo, and renewed her friendship with Stanton. With the help of McClintock’s neighbor Jane Hunt, they organized the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention. Although no explicit references to international affairs appears in the official record of the convention, many of the participants must have considered the demand for woman’s rights a logical extension of the larger revolutionary agenda. At the end of the Seneca Falls meeting, the participants agreed to meet two weeks later in Rochester. The Rochesterians at Seneca Falls—Douglass and his Quaker coworkers—were already deeply engaged in organizing the massive Emancipation Day celebration for August 1. Speakers invited for the occasion, including Charles Remond and William C. Nell, could now participate in the woman’s rights convention to be held on August 2. In addition, appeals to the laboring classes, made by local supporters of the French revolution, may have convinced the Rochester organizers to consider the ‘‘industrial’’ as well as the ‘‘civil and social’’ rights of women and to invite working women to attend the convention. On August 1, free blacks and white abolitionists from Rochester joined with the Motts, Remond, Nell, and a host of other invited guests to celebrate emancipation in all its variety. Music, parades, speeches, and entertainments organized by African American children and churches, a fund-raising fair, and an evening ball filled the day and the night. The next morning several hundred women and men, many of them no doubt exhausted but exhilarated by the previous day’s events, gathered at the local Unitarian Society to debate woman’s rights. We have only fragments of the speeches and debates from the Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention and an incomplete list of participants. We know that there was a report on ‘‘woman’s place and pay in the world of work’’ and testimony from a local seamstress corroborating the information. A visiting Quaker, Rebecca Sanford, gave an eloquent speech on the history of women from ‘‘Semiramis to Victoria,’’ concluding that women’s rise was foreshadowed in ‘‘the progress [made] within the past few years by escaped slaves resettled in the environs of the North.’’ And the participants collectively declared it ‘‘the duty of woman, whatever her complexion [that is race], to assume, as soon as possible, her true position of equality in the social circle, the Church, and the State.’’∞π The scope of concerns embraced by those in attendance can be traced more fully through their activities in the following months. Amy Post and her friend Sarah C. Owen joined two seamstresses in organizing a local Working Woman’s Protective Union. Douglass and Nell carried the demand for woman’s rights to the National Convention of Colored Freemen, held in Cincinnati,

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Ohio, two weeks later. Antislavery papers continued their detailed coverage of events throughout Europe, and North Star also followed developments in the West Indies, providing story after story on the workings of emancipation in Jamaica and the progress of free blacks in Haiti as well as warnings about U.S. intentions in Cuba. Lucretia Mott wrote her friends in Great Britain about the outpouring of agitation in the United States ‘‘on the Slavery & Peace question —as well as our recent movement for the enlargement of Woman’s sphere. . . . Agitation is in all the churches—ours seems rocked to its center.’’∞∫ Meanwhile, the Congregational Friends reconvened in October to solidify their ranks and attract new members committed to social justice, religious liberty, and universal emancipation. In December, the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society held a grand antislavery fund-raising fair and a rousing anniversary meeting. In preparing for the event, the Society claimed that ‘‘the broad Atlantic forms no barrier to this expansive work of reciprocal righteousness, for we see a noble band of transatlantic women . . . co-operating with us.’’ They resolved to oppose ‘‘the annexation of Cuba, unless it shall be a free territory, and pledged to remain so,’’ and declared ‘‘No Compromise with Slaveholders, either in the beautiful valleys of Mexico or on the banks of the majestic Mississippi.’’∞Ω Douglass, Nell, the Posts, McClintocks, Hallowells, Stebbinses, and Anthonys along with Quakers and free blacks from Buffalo, Auburn, Farmington, and other parts of western and central New York gloried in their collective efforts. Yet as suggested by the references to Cuba and Mexico, radicals in the United States were not unaware of threats to democracy, at home or abroad. In the same letter in which Mott laid out the advances in American reform, she also worried about developments in Europe. ‘‘Even the non-resistant,’’ she wrote in September 1848, ‘‘indulges the secret wish that, if they will fight, the right may prevail, and larger liberty diffuse itself over the world. There seems now, however, a temporary settling down, with far less change than anticipated—especially in revolutionary France.’’ As conditions deteriorated in Europe and as slaveholders continued to expand their political reach at home, the revolutionary dreams of 1848 faded, but the sense of international connections did not. As revolutionaries across Europe were imprisoned, killed, or exiled, the reform press continued its vigil, and radical activists recast the lessons learned from international affairs. On August 1, 1849, Emancipation Day celebrations once again compared events in the United States with those in Europe, but with far more dangerous implications. Commenting on the drive to extend slave territories in the United States, the editor of the Spirit of the Age wrote, ‘‘The tragedies of 1849 will be consummated in a catastrophe more dark and

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dreadful even than the triumphs of absolutism in Europe—by spreading over the once free regions of Mexico the black and bloody shroud of slavery.’’≤≠ In this context, Canada and England remained the safest havens for free blacks, especially former slaves. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, many of the most outspoken spent time there. With Frederick Douglass, William Nell, and Harriet Jacobs all traveling in Great Britain in the early 1850s, the transatlantic network among black and white radicals and British and American activists became more tightly knit. At the same time, for some European radicals, the United States offered the best refuge. German revolutionaries Mathilda and Fritz Anneke settled in the Midwest after fleeing persecution in their homeland and published a progressive German-language paper, in which they advocated the rights of working people and women. Pioneer feminists Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, imprisoned for their part in the French rebellion, sent a letter to the ‘‘Convention of American Women’’ in 1851, applauding the courage of their sisters in the United States, but reminding them that the chains of the throne and the scaffold, the church and the patriarch, the slave, the worker, and the woman must all be broken if ‘‘the kingdom of Equality and Justice shall be realized on Earth.’’≤∞ Even more than national and regional woman’s rights conventions, the Yearly Meetings of Congregational Friends (later the Friends of Human Progress) kept alive the radical universalist vision of social change forged in the 1840s. Participants in the annual June event included the dissenting Quakers who first formed the organization and a range of antislavery, nonresistance, and woman’s rights advocates. Frederick Douglass, William C. Nell, Sojourner Truth, Charles Remond, Lucretia and James Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony frequently joined in the debates and discussions. At the 1850 meeting, participants prepared an address to be read at the Peace Congress planned for Frankfurt, Germany, that August, noting that ‘‘the Creator has established an equality in the human family, perfect and beautiful as it is beneficent, without limitation to sex, or complexion, or national peculiarities.’’ Indeed, the Congregational Friends invited ‘‘the Christian, the Jew, the Mohammaden, or the Hindoo’’ to share what light they had. They advocated the abolition of slavery in all its forms, the end of sectarianism, war, and capital punishment, and pleaded for peace, land reform, and woman’s rights.≤≤ ‘‘An Address to the Women of the State of New York,’’ drafted by the Meeting of Congregational Friends and published in 1850, defined woman’s rights in the broadest terms and drew examples of both degradation and achievement from around the world. The religious, political, economic, social, and psychological limits placed on women were illustrated through examples from the Arabian Kerek, the German bourgeoisie, and the American church.

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The authors denied that race or national origin should affect women’s rights in any way, and demanded that women write, speak, call meetings, and agitate to procure and maintain what was theirs. Ultimately, they declared, ‘‘When we speak of the Rights of Woman, we speak of Human Rights.’’≤≥ This mid-nineteenth century equation of woman’s rights with human rights captures the global vision of the interracial, mixed sex circle of black and white radicals analyzed here. It demonstrates the critical impact of international developments on activists primed to embrace multiple issues and to view racial, sexual, class, and imperial oppressions as intimately intertwined. The Civil War, the struggle over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and the increasing focus of woman’s rights advocates on the single issue of suffrage in the postwar period would circumscribe the influence of radical universalists within social reform circles. Their vision, long lost to history, would have to be reinvented by radical activists, including feminists, at the turn of the twentieth century and in the 1960s. Notes 1. North Star (Rochester, New York), July 14, 1848. 2. On Rochester, see Nancy A. Hewitt, ‘‘Feminist Friends: Agrarian Quakers and the Emergence of Woman’s Rights in America,’’ Feminist Studies 12 (Spring 1986): 27–49, and ‘‘Re-Rooting American Women’s Activism: Global Perspectives on 1848,’’ in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes, and Marilyn Lake, eds., Women’s Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Publishers, 2000). On Philadelphia, see Jean R. Soderlund, ‘‘Priorities and Power: The Philadelphia Female AntiSlavery Society,’’ Emma Jones Lapansky, ‘‘The World the Agitators Made: The Counterculture of Agitation in Urban Philadelphia,’’ and Julie Winch, ‘‘ ‘You Have Talents—Only Cultivate Them’: Philadelphia’s Black Female Literary Societies and the Abolitionist Crusade,’’ all in John C. Van Horne and Jean Fagan Yellin, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 67–88, 91–100, 101–118. On African-American feminist-abolitionists, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850– 1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 3. First two quotes from Lucretia Mott, ‘‘Letter,’’ The Liberator (Boston), October 6, 1848. Last quote from Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, Held at Waterloo, New York, 1849 (Auburn, N.Y.: Oliphant’s Press, 1849), p. 6. 4. Lucretia Mott to Richard Allen, June 25, 1842, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio. She had published his previous letter to her in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. See, Lucretia Mott to Richard Allen, 6. Mo. 25.1842, in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 119–20. 5. Isaac Post to Amy Post, May 5, 1844, Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers (hereafter

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Post Family Papers); Sarah Thayer to Amy Post, February 5, 1843, Post Family Papers; John W. Hurn to Amy Post, October 11, 1846, Post Family Papers. On Frederika Bremer, see for instance, quote by William C. Nell in the ‘‘Report on the Western New York-AntiSlavery Bazaar,’’ in the North Star, January 7, 1848. Similar references to European writers and activists dot the correspondence and reports of this circle. 6. Frederick Douglass to Amy Post, April 28, 1846, Post Family Papers. At this point in his travels, their letters were sent via Elizabeth Pease in Darlington, England. 7. Sarah Hallowell to Amy Post, September 12, 1846, Post Family Papers; Lucy N. Colman, Reminiscences (Buffalo: H. L. Green, 1891), p. 84; and Frederick Douglass to Isaac Post, [ July 15] 1849, and Frederick Douglass to Amy Post, July 17, 1849, Post Family Papers. 8. For an insightful discussion of these concerns among radical abolitionists, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 135–47. 9. See, for instance, in personal correspondence, Joseph and Mary Robbins Post to Isaac and Amy Post, May 29, 1846; Mary Robbins Post to Post Family, [May ] 1847; and Nathaniel Potter to Isaac and Amy Post, September 26, 1847, Post Family Papers. 10. Isenberg, Sex & Citizenship, p. 140, and Pennsylvania Freeman, June 25, 1846, and September 13, 1847. 11. Isenberg, Sex & Citizenship, nn. 173 and 175, p. 252; Pennsylvania Freeman, July 2, 1846, and September 23, 1847; and Anti-Slavery Bugle, September 17, 1847. 12. Jeremiah B. Sanderson to Amy Post, May 8, 1845, and Rev. Samuel J. May to Isaac and Amy Post, December 20, 1846, Post Family Papers. On general movement toward women’s rights agenda in antislavery and peace societies, see Hewitt, ‘‘Re-rooting American Women’s Activism.’’ 13. See, for instance, coverage of these events in the North Star, January 14, February 18, March 10, and June 30, 1848. 14. On these developments, see A. Day Bradley, ‘‘Progressive Friends in Michigan and New York,’’ Quaker History 52 (1963): 95–103; Hewitt, ‘‘Feminist Friends,’’ Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, . . . 1849; and Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, Held at Waterloo, New York, 1850, with an Appendix (Auburn, N.Y.: Henry Oliphant, 1850). Quote from ‘‘Basis of Religious Association,’’ written in June 1848 and printed as an appendix to the 1850 Proceedings. 15. North Star, April 28, 1848. 16. Mott’s report on her travels was published in The Liberator, October 6, 1848. 17. Ibid. 18. On Working Women’s Protective Union, see North Star, September 15, 1848. On Cincinnati Convention, see Benjamin Quarles, ‘‘Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,’’ History 2000 Occasional Papers Series, No. 1-1993 (Baltimore, Md.: Morgan State University Foundation, 1993). On coverage of international events, see North Star, The Liberator, and other progressive papers from 1848–49. Lucretia Mott to George and Cecilia Combe, September 18, 1848, National Library of Scotland. 19. North Star, September 1 and December 29, 1848. 20. Reprint from Spirit of the Age in North Star, August 31, 1849. 21. On Annekes, see Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International

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Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 25– 26, 178, 181; Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, ‘‘Letter to the Convention of American Women,’’ June 15, 1851, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Women Suffrage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881), vol. 1, pp. 234–37. The letter was read to participants at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York, in 1852 and published in The Proceedings of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Syracuse, September 8th, 9th, and 10th, 1852 (Syracuse: J. E. Masters, 1852), pp. 32–35. 22. Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, 1850, esp. pp. 3, 23, and 40. 23. Ibid., pp. 13–18. The quote on human rights is on p. 14.

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Ernestine Rose’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848 ellen carol dubois

Transnational approaches allow for insights into dimensions of history that are elusive in national contexts, either because they are so large or so small that we miss them. Such is the case with the Protestant culture that surrounded antebellum reform, including abolition and women’s rights, including even dissenters and freethinkers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Historians have debated the role of ‘‘religion’’ in the formative years of American women’s rights, too often forgetting that religion meant Anglo-American Protestantism. Attention to the role of Ernestine Rose, the only non-Christian on the antebellum women’s rights platform, can throw into higher relief the character of that culture. For although Rose abandoned the orthodox faith of her Jewish origins, she never converted to Christianity, and her proud devotion to ‘‘free-thought’’ reflected influences of the Polish ghetto world from which she had come. People of Jewish origin were few and far between in the world of antebellum reform but some, like Rose, played major roles, in part because their perspectives were so unique and thus productive of radical insights into the political challenges that reformers undertook.∞ Historians of women have learned to attend to differences—of race, of class, and now, in this volume, of national origins. In the antebellum era of reform, as America was poised to move beyond the Protestant hegemony that had characterized its formative years, Ernestine Rose helps us to add ‘‘religion’’ to the list of

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‘‘differences,’’ attention to which enriches our understanding of women’s history. Her Jewish origins need to be taken account in understanding both the distinctive nature of, and limits to, her contribution to antislavery and to women’s rights, within a reform culture which remained fundamentally Protestant despite its iconoclasm. Ernestine Rose was a formidable and formative member of the first generation of American women’s rights activists. Well before the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, she was the first woman to lobby on behalf of greater property rights for married women. By 1850, when she joined the movement, she was the best-known female lecturer in the United States and certainly the most radical. She combined an acute sense of women’s oppression with a truly universal passion for social reform and individual liberty. According to the History of Woman Suffrage, she was, after her mentor Frances Wright, ‘‘the earliest advocate of women’s enfranchisement in America.’’≤ The History of Woman Suffrage credited her with being ‘‘equally liberal in her religious opinions’’ and with respect to ‘‘the science of government.’’≥ As much as Lucretia Mott, she can be characterized as Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s teacher in the ways of feminism and reform. ‘‘Emancipation’’ was Ernestine Rose’s watchword. ‘‘I go for the recognition of human rights, without distinction of sect, party, sex, or color.’’∂ The term ‘‘emancipation’’ was widely used by the generation of 1848, in both Europe and America, to indicate its distinctive vision of human liberation. The term signified both a romantic aspiration for full human freedom and a specific call for political citizenship and enfranchisement. The term was employed simultaneously in the name of all of humanity and of particular groups clamoring for power. Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, demanded the emancipation of workers as the surest way to universal human liberty. At the first national women’s rights convention, in Massachusetts in 1850, Paulina Wright Davis applied the term similarly with respect to women. ‘‘The reformation we propose . . . is an epochal movement,’’ she declared, ‘‘the emancipation of a class, the redemption of half the world, and a coinciding reorganization of all social, political and industrial interests and institutions.’’∑ In the United States, the term ‘‘emancipation’’ was primarily identified with the radical antislavery movement. In Europe, ‘‘emancipation’’ pointed to the Jews almost as thoroughly. Jewish emancipation was a complex process, running from the late eighteenth century almost a hundred years into the 1870s. The Jewish dimension of the mid-nineteenth-century passion for emancipation is rarely considered with respect to the United States, with its negligible Jewish population. But one of the pioneering proponents of women’s rights in

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the United States, Ernestine Rose, had been born a Jew. Over the years I have often wondered about the irony of my own scholarly immersion, as a Jew, in the virtually all-Protestant world of antebellum American reform. Even so, and although I have known most of the basic details of Rose’s life and career for a very long time, I have paid little attention to her. Instead, I regarded Elizabeth Cady Stanton as my surrogate, entranced by the searing, critical intelligence that she brought to bear on the established Christian churches and on the traditions of female piety. In this chapter, I want to remedy this omission and consider not only the contributions of Ernestine Rose to the early history of women’s rights but the significance of her Jewishness as well. Rose would probably have not characterized herself as a Jew. The closest she came was, at a women’s rights convention in 1852, describing herself as ‘‘daughter of . . . the downtrodden and persecuted people called the Jews, ‘a child of Israel.’ ’’ She decisively rejected the traditional, patriarchal world of her rabbi father in favor of modern, Enlightenment ideas. Yet, unlike the great majority of Jews who abandoned shtetl life in favor of the modern world, she stubbornly refused to convert to Christianity. ‘‘I have not abandoned the trunk,’’ she was quoted as saying, ‘‘to latch onto the branches.’’∏ Nor did she follow the path of Reform Judaism, although she may have been intrigued by it. What she rejected was not merely Judaism but religion altogether. She was a passionate freethinker, indeed a proud atheist. Even so, I believe that her distinctive contributions to the women’s rights movement can be best understood in terms of the distance she maintained from the Protestant assumptions of even the most liberal-minded of other antebellum reformers. The early years of Ernestine Rose’s life seem permanently, frustratingly out of reach. She was born in Pitrkow Trybunalski, a Polish city sixteen miles south of Lodz, population 5,000, of which almost half were Jews. Paula DoressWorters, a dedicated Rose scholar, guesses that her father was Aharon Pieterkowski, son of a rabbi who was a mathematician and Kabbalist, and director of the local yeshiva.π Her education probably took place amid intensifying conflicts between Chassidism and Haskalah (Enlightenment) thought, both of which were growing in strength among the Jews of Poland. Although Jewish girls were not normally educated, she probably benefited from the special devotion of her father and also from state edicts requiring education in Prussian and/or German for Jewish children.∫ The first dramatic episode in the story Rose told of herself was her rebellion against a marriage her father arranged for her when she was sixteen years old. Rebellion against the father, especially over matters of the heart, is a basic trope in the tales of self-emancipation of nineteenth-century Jewish girls. As for Rose, determination to make marriage a personal choice rather than a social or

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religious obligation became a major theme of her adult life. According to the story, Rose tried but failed to convince her fiancé to give up his claims on her, after which she went before a state court and successfully argued to have the marriage contract abrogated. There is a certain feasibility about the story, as petitions were commonly made in these years to the monarch or state officials from Jewish businessmen and community leaders for equal treatment or relief from excessive taxation.Ω She fled to Berlin, the center of modern, enlightened, emancipated Jewish life. She emphasized that she had kept just enough of her mother’s dowry to maintain a dignified independence.∞≠ From Berlin, she traveled about Europe, everywhere in the midst of revolutionary upheaval. By 1830 she was settled in London. The number of Jews there was still quite small. She made her living teaching Hebrew and German. Probably through her acquaintanceship with Quakers, she became aware of a new and growing social movement: Robert Owen’s Association of All Classes and All Nations, founded in 1835. Among the Owenites she finally found a community of belief, and the political attachments she made shaped the rest of her life.∞∞ In addition to their opposition to private property and class inequality, Owenites had strong opinions on two issues which were of great importance to Rose: marriage and religion. The Owenite position on marriage was that it must be based solely on the affections and desires of both participants and be free of economic dependence on the part of the wife. Women activists in the Owenite movement had an impressive record of forming lasting, companionate marriages. In these circles, Ernestine met William Rose, a silversmith a few years younger than her. They wed in a politically correct civil ceremony and remained deeply devoted for the fifty years of their marriage. Religion was also a major target of Owenism. Owenism replaced Christian belief with ‘‘rational religion,’’ a passionate, worshipful belief in human perfectibility that did not acknowledge a divine presence. Environmentalist, materialist, and hostile to any spiritual claims, Owenism provided a home to a wide range of renegades from organized Christianity. Owenites prided themselves in their refusal to attend church, to observe the Christian Sabbath, to respect the clergy, or to grant them authority to preside over their marriages or their funerals. And yet the belief structure of Owenism, by focusing so intently on the immorality of religion, reflected that which it repudiated. The moral intention and transcendent aspiration of Owenism drew on and replaced the Christian convictions of its adherents. Owenism preached the ‘‘religion of the new moral world.’’ As Barbara Taylor has written, the Owenites’ ‘‘proselytizing moral stance [was] often identical in form, if not in content, to that of the evangelical churches.’’∞≤ Although Owenites spoke of the corruptions of ‘‘reli-

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gion,’’ they meant the failures of Protestantism. Given this elision of religion with Christianity and of secularism with religious reform, the position of Rose as a non-Christian had to be precarious. The freethought that Rose learned from the Owenites was the foundation of her belief system for the rest of her life. And yet, as she was to discover later, the superstitious and corrupt side of Christianity could easily be identified with its ancient and barbaric Old Testament origins, thus casting into a high profile the very marker of her Jewish otherness that she thought she had escaped. In 1836, William and Ernestine Rose sailed with a group of Owenites for New York to form an intentional community. The Roses got no further than New York City, where Ernestine and William Rose became active in the small movement of American freethought, which overlapped with Owenite socialism. Committed to the dismantling of ‘‘religious superstition,’’ freethinkers were fighting an enormously uphill battle as evangelical Protestantism ‘‘burned over’’ American society, leaving in its paths the sparks of those very reform movements—antislavery, temperance, and, eventually, women’s rights—to which even they adhered. Lacking the residual ties to Christianity that characterized other freethinkers, Rose called on her co-antireligionists to embrace the calumny of infidelism leveled against them and thus deprive it of its sting.∞≥ Ernestine Rose was soon the most prominent woman in this reform community. There is no indication that her Jewish origins drew any attention. She appeared to have assimilated. At some point in this period, Rose met Frances Wright, who had returned to the United States after several years in Europe. Wright was of course the most important woman in the Owenite movement, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s successor in the world of Anglo-American reform as chief spokeswoman for radicalism and female emancipation. Rose revered Wright and eventually served as the major conduit (along with Lucretia Mott) of Wright’s secularist feminist ideas to Elizabeth Cady Stanton.∞∂ Another leading freethinker was Thomas Hertell, who had been elected to the New York State legislature in 1836 on the Workingmen’s Party ticket.∞∑ Acting on the Owenite idea that wives needed to be relieved of economic dependence on their husbands, Hertell introduced a comprehensive bill into the legislature ‘‘for the protection and preservation of the rights and property of married women.’’∞∏ Within months of arriving in the United States, Rose was going door-to-door to gain signatures on behalf of Hertell’s law, thus becoming the first woman to campaign for married women’s property rights in the United States.∞π Over the next years, Hertell’s bill was taken up by other legislative sponsors, and two other women—health reformer Paulina Wright Davis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton—labored on its behalf.

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By 1848, the political will to begin reforming married women’s economic status in New York State existed, and in April the legislature passed a law enacting a portion of Hertell’s bill. Three months later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott called their convention at Seneca Falls. As Stanton put it in her memoirs, ‘‘The reflection naturally arose that, if the men who make the laws were ready for some onward step, surely the women themselves should express some interest in the legislation.’’∞∫ Rose was retroactively identified with the Seneca Falls Convention. ‘‘In 1848–49 they [the state legislature] gave us the great boon for which we asked; but it was only a beginning, and we went on. In 1848 we had the first Woman’s Rights Convention.’’∞Ω She was not at the Seneca Falls Convention, however, and the question naturally arises: why not? Part of the answer is simple. The Seneca Falls convention was a hastily called and largely local affair, and Rose did not live in the area. In trying to account for her whereabouts during this period, I was intrigued by one of the more curious incidents in her life. Sometime within a year or so of the Seneca Falls convention, Rose was in Columbia, South Carolina.≤≠ Her stated purpose was to recuperate her health, which was indeed frail.≤∞ She had an acrimonious conversation with a young lawyer over slavery, in which she revealed herself to be an abolitionist. The entire episode is odd. South Carolina was a dangerous place to go for health purposes, particularly if one was a notorious abolitionist. But South Carolina may have had other attractions for her. Charleston was home to the first Jewish U.S. congregation to follow the modern, rationalized, Reform order of service pioneered in Germany.≤≤ In 1846, Columbia Jews followed with the establishment of their own congregation.≤≥ The Columbia Jews had links to Philadelphia, where Rose had strong ties with radical Quakers, and I wondered if she could have learned about the South Carolina Reform Jews through them. I remain quite attached to this hypothesis, although I have found no other evidence to support it.≤∂ Whatever the case, two years after Seneca Falls, Rose was in attendance at the first national women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. She was not well known to the participants but her hour-long speech was the most comprehensive overview of women’s condition presented on a women’s rights platform so far.≤∑ From 1850 on, her involvement and identification with the women’s rights movement was total. Its philosophical and political impact on her was as great as that of the Owenite movement a decade and a half before. ‘‘These are not the demands of the moment or of the few,’’ she proudly proclaimed in 1854, ‘‘they are the demands of the age, of the second half of the nineteenth century.’’≤∏ Women’s rights moved to the center of her concerns, and there it remained for the rest of her life. She in turn was quickly taken into the heart of the young movement. Her skill and renown—indeed her notoriety

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—were points of pride. ‘‘I have long esteemed her for her honest, outspoken radicalism, her discerning and discriminating mind, and her enlarged charity,’’ Lucretia Mott wrote of her.≤π ‘‘How safe we all felt while she had the floor,’’ the editors of the History of Woman Suffrage recalled, ‘‘that neither in manner, sentiment, argument, nor repartee would she in any way compromise the dignity of the occasion.’’≤∫ Is there a subtext here of relief that Rose did not compromise the movement? Despite the reverence that Rose inspired, her women’s rights sisters were not unaware of her difference. Many accounts of her women’s rights speeches note her accent, usually misidentified as French. In his incisive history of anti-Semitism, Sander Gilman emphasizes that language, rhetoric, and accent were the most common marker of Jewish difference.≤Ω Rose was also aware of the difference and regularly identified herself as a ‘‘foreigner,’’ as if to apologize for her intrusion into the politics of her adopted country. Currently, the most prominent issue in assessing the antebellum women’s rights movement has to do with the relative influence of secularism versus religious thought. Nancy Isenberg, Kathi Kern, Elizabeth Clark, and Maureen Fitzgerald have each made important contributions in tracing the religious origins and continuing character of nineteenth-century women’s rights thought.≥≠ In this debate, I am charged with exaggerating the importance of the secular, especially with respect to the ideas of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I think there is merit to this contention, and yet I remain convinced that some of the most original and important insights of the antebellum women’s rights movement were crucially shaped by ideas that in nineteenth-century context came from outside the hegemonic Protestant culture. In this context, I find it crucial to give due emphasis to the role of the only non-Christian in the antebellum women’s rights movement, Ernestine Rose.≥∞ Rose’s republican emphasis on the Declaration of Independence as a foundational text, her early attention to the centrality of enfranchisement, her emphasis on what we would call the social construction rather than the sin of inequality, her focus on legal reform rather than moral transformation, and her insistence that marriage was a personal rather than a sacred relationship all had a tremendous impact, And in each case, Rose’s critical distance, rooted in her Jewish origins, from American Protestant culture was crucial. The first major women’s rights debate over the Christian religion occurred at the 1852 Women’s Rights Convention at Syracuse. At home with her children, Elizabeth Stanton sent a letter excoriating the Protestant ministry for its role in cultivating ignorance, superstition, and lack of self-respect among women.≥≤ Antoinette Brown responded with the first effort on a woman’s right platform to construe the Bible in feminist terms: the Bible ‘‘enjoins upon

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[woman] no subjection that is not enjoined upon [man]; . . . and practically recognizes neither male nor female in Christ Jesus.’’≥≥ Stanton may have been ready to take on the contribution of Christianity to women’s oppression as a result of her new role as president of the New York State Women’s Temperance Society, while Brown was on the verge of her career as the first ordained woman minister in the United States. The debate was extremely heated. Rose waded into the controversy with care. ‘‘This is no time to discuss the Bible,’’ she urged. ‘‘We have a political question under discussion; let us . . . argue it with reference to right and wrong.’’ She was a friend and admirer of Brown and understood the importance of abolishing the male monopoly of the ministry. Yet appealing to the Bible to provide authority for the equality of the sexes opened up the possibility that the women’s rights movement would take on a more openly Christian character. The controversy may have indeed drawn attention to her non-Christianity, as references to Jews and to Rose’s Jewishness abounded at this meeting. Rose characterized Brown’s interpretation of the Bible as ‘‘personal opinion’’ that should not go out as ‘‘the doctrine of the Convention.’’ Educated in the Talmudic tradition as a young girl, she regarded the Bible as ‘‘so obscure and indefinite as to admit of different interpretations.’’≥∂ She described the Bible as ‘‘the work of different minds, existing in different ages, possessing different degrees of knowledge and principle.’’≥∑ No one else on the antebellum women’s rights platform came anywhere near such biblical indeterminacy. As an Owenite, Rose called herself a ‘‘materialist,’’ and resisted all esoteric practices and beliefs.≥∏ She was particularly distressed at the spread of spiritualism among antebellum radicals striving to adapt Christian belief to the vocation of social reform. In 1854, Rose was present at a discussion of spiritualism at the Philadelphia home of Lucretia Mott. Anthony, Mott, and Sarah Grimké were unwilling to abandon ‘‘the intuitive feeling that we were not to cease to exist when the body dies.’’ Rose would have none of it. Belief in salvation and the afterlife, so central to Christianity, was never at the core of her Jewish faith and had no pull on her. Two years later, when she returned to England and found that her mentor Robert Owen had taken up spiritualism, she was deeply shaken. One of the few things that his son Robert Dale Owen was able to tell Anthony about Rose years later was that ‘‘she was a skeptic as to any future beyond the grave.’’≥π For Rose, the point was not to discern God’s intentions for mankind, but to identify what human action and which social arrangements were most productive of social justice. She was an insistently republican feminist, for whom the first principle of reform was always the equality of humanity with respect to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She consistently cited the Declara-

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tion of Independence rather than the Bible as her foundational document. This was a republican principle but it also reflected her position as a Jew. Having left behind the separate life of religious Jews in the shtetl, she regarded the difference of gender with as much suspicion as that of religious belief. She was as consistently opposed to valorizing the distinction of sex as anyone else in the antebellum women’s rights movement. ‘‘Humanity recognizes no sex; virtue recognizes no sex; mind recognizes no sex; life and death, pleasure and pain; happiness and misery, recognize no sex,’’ she explained eloquently at the 1851 women’s rights convention in Worcester.≥∫ Rather than essences, she turned to social practices and beliefs to explain the inequality of the sexes. Rose was a strict environmentalist. Despite an acute sense of women’s oppression, she refused to believe either that men were simply villains or that women were wholly victims. ‘‘Both are the victims of error and ignorance and both suffer.’’≥Ω Both were obliged to remedy their own situation, lift themselves out of ignorance, change their circumstances, and act in order to free themselves. This reliance on social explanation distinguished Rose from those Garrisonians who turned to the notion of sin to explain human failure or social injustice. In 1853, William Lloyd Garrison took her gently to task: ‘‘Mrs. Rose . . . told us she did not blame anybody really and did not hold any man to be criminal. For my own part, . . . I believe in sin, therefore in a sinner . . . I know nothing of society. I know the guilt of individuals.’’∂≠ Judaism is a religion of law whereas Christianity is one of creed. In contrast to the Christian tendency to emphasize sin and repentance, Rose stressed law. ‘‘We can hardly have an adequate idea of how all-powerful law is in forming public opinion, in giving character to the mass of society,’’ she claimed in 1851.∂∞ From this conviction flowed her early emphasis on the primacy of suffrage. In 1856, she made the most forthright assertion since Seneca Falls of the primacy of the vote at a women’s rights convention: ‘‘the main power of the woman’s rights movement lies in this . . . it has kept, steadily in view the one cardinal demand for the right of suffrage; in a democracy the symbol and guarantee of all other rights.’’∂≤ One other element of Rose’s role in antebellum women’s rights radicalism bears remarking on: her perspective on women’s subordination in marriage. While others within the women’s rights movement also attacked marital tyranny, she was notable for insisting on the civil nature of the conjugal relationship, for refusing to romanticize it, and for being unwilling to treat it as a holy sacrament. Inasmuch as all efforts to liberalize divorce laws fell afoul of Christian notions of the sacral and therefore the lifelong character of marriage, this approach was distinctive. Throughout the 1850s, the great majority of women’s rights activists were not willing to consider divorce as a remedy for the

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unfreedom of women in marriage. At the 1860 women’s rights convention, Elizabeth Stanton broke through this reluctance by calling for support of divorce law reform.∂≥ Rose supported her. The controversy that followed was the most contentious women’s rights debate since the 1853 Bible issue. Supporting Stanton was Rose; opposing her was Antoinette Brown (now Blackwell). They replayed their 1853 debate over the role of Christianity in the women’s rights movement, now with respect to the issue of divorce. Brown Blackwell insisted that, inasmuch as ‘‘marriage . . . must be from the nature of things as permanent as the life of the parties,’’ all that ‘‘human law’’ can offer the unhappily married is ‘‘legal separation.’’ In undertaking a forceful rebuttal, Rose identified Brown Blackwell’s hostility to divorce with her ministerial vocation and Christian theology. ‘‘The Rev. Mrs. Blackwell . . . treats woman as some ethereal being . . . but I tell you, my friends, it is quite requisite to be a little material also.’’∂∂ In contrast, she offered her own definition of marriage: ‘‘a human institution, called out by the needs of social affectional human nature, for human purposes.’’∂∑ Stanton and Rose lost the debate; the women’s rights movement remained unwilling to fully challenge the Christian notion of indissoluble marriage. It is tricky to parse out Rose’s Judaism from her non-Christianity from her Owenism from her freethought in accounting for the positions she took. But what is easier to establish is the hostility to which Rose was increasingly subjected because of her ineradicable Jewishness. In the 1850s, anti-Semitism, along with other forms of nativism, began to mount in the United States. Rose had always been attacked and ridiculed as a freethinker, but in the 1850s a new, more particular note could be detected in the antagonism she generated. In 1854, Rose’s Jewishness was the target of opposition directed at her for her role in the campaign for additional married women’s property rights in New York State. The Albany Register called her a ‘‘ringleted, glove-handed exotic’’ who was trying ‘‘to obliterate from the world the religion of the Cross.’’ A few months later, during a lecture tour to Washington, D.C., Susan B. Anthony noted that Rose was shut out from venues and newspaper coverage because she was not a Christian.∂∏ Martha Coffin Wright defended her as best she could. Rose had dedicated herself ‘‘to the performance of those duties commonly called Christian,’’ Wright wrote to her sister Lucretia Mott.∂π The very terms of Wright’s defense indicate that Rose’s ultimate offense was her Jewishness. Radical reformers themselves also began to evidence xenophobia and antiSemitism.∂∫ Some took to distinguishing good Christianity, the teachings of Jesus, from the bad, barbaric taint of Old Testament Jewish practices, identifying the former with their own goals and the latter with the evils they opposed.

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St. Paul’s preaching of women’s subordination invited just this kind of religious splitting. ‘‘His is the noblest figure in all history, except that of Christ,’’ declared Wendell Phillips at the 1860 women’s rights convention, ‘‘but he was a Jew and not a Christian, he lived under Jewish civilization and not ours, and was speaking by his own light, and not by inspiration of God.’’∂Ω An ‘‘Appeal to the Women of New York,’’ issued by that same convention, to which Rose signed her name, similarly identified Christianity’s injunction that women must submit to their husbands to ‘‘opinions uttered by a Jewish teacher, which alas! the mass believe to be the will of God.’’∑≠ In a rare confidence in 1854, Rose told Susan B. Anthony of how separate and different she was coming to feel within the reform community. ‘‘No one can tell the hours of anguish I have suffered, as . . . I have been compelled to place one after another [of those I have trusted] on the list of panderers to public favor.’’ She charged Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone with nativism. Rose’s ‘‘anguish was extreme,’’ Anthony wrote in her diary. ‘‘I too wept, . . . to see one so noble, so true (even though I felt I could not comprehend her), so bowed down.’’ In a heartfelt but tellingly inappropriate gesture, Anthony wrote out a verse from a Christian hymn she loved and gave it to ‘‘my dear friend Ernestine Rose.’’ Rose was unsoothed. ‘‘I never expect to be understood while I live,’’ she told Anthony.∑∞ This is a well-known passage. I read it as Rose’s expression of a condition that came to be known as judenschmertz, ‘‘the suffering and pain involved in being a Jew, . . . the feeling of loneliness which assails a man [sic] . . . [who] has left his own people but discovers that he is not welcome among the foreigners he has sought out.’’∑≤ In 1856, in a farewell letter she wrote as she and her husband sailed to Europe, she defended the purity of her motives against charges that she had any ‘‘ulterior end to serve . . . [or] personal interest to gain.’’∑≥ As her women’s rights coadjutors noted, Rose was feeling increasingly beleaguered and betrayed by 1860. That year she resentfully spoke of the heroism of the ‘‘woman who stands up for the right,’’ meaning herself, ‘‘brav[ing] not only the enemy abroad but often that severest of all enemies, your own friends at home.’’∑∂ In this context of mounting anti-Semitism, Rose had to position herself with respect to the religion she had abandoned, and what is interesting is that, instead of repudiating Judaism, she chose to defend it.∑∑ Her most open championship of Judaism came in 1863, significantly in response to another freethinker.∑∏ Horace Seaver, editor of the major freethinking journal and a longtime ally of Rose, wrote a series of editorials repeatedly assailing Jews as ‘‘the worst people of whom we have any account and the poorest guides to follow.’’∑π The particular targets of his attack were ‘‘modern’’ Jews. They adhered

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to barbaric practices, notably circumcision, and despite their appearance of liberalism, remained ‘‘bigoted, narrow, exclusive and totally unfit for a progressive people like the Americans.’’∑∫ Rose challenged Seaver in the pages of his journal. She sought to give an account of these modern Jews, ‘‘little known’’ to other Americans but apparently familiar to her.∑Ω Jews, she insisted, were ‘‘governed by the same laws as human nature in general.’’ They had long been subjected to ‘‘barbaric treatment and deadly persecution,’’ which freethinkers had the obligation to challenge, not perpetuate. Ever the environmentalist, she insisted that ‘‘they progress just as fast as the world they live in will permit them.’’ Throughout her response, Rose held to a delicate position between separation from and identification with Judaism. She and Seaver were ‘‘we,’’ infidels, and ‘‘Jews’’ were ‘‘they.’’ She ‘‘like[d] Judaism not one bit better than’’ any other religion, though ‘‘she might like some other -isms a little less.’’ If comparisons were to be made, however, she gave the Jews the advantage: they did not proselytize and worshiped only one God, not three.∏≠ Moreover, the superstitious beliefs of the Jews were ancient; what was the excuse of modern Christians, such as Unitarians, who had reason to know better?∏∞ But when Seaver charged Rose with ‘‘turning Jew’’ and being ‘‘the Jewish champion,’’ Rose retreated.∏≤ She apparently felt she could not be a Jew and remain a freethinker, whereas Seaver’s identification with Christianity necessitated no such choice. Although she and Seaver mended their friendship, Jewish newspapers followed the exchange and cheered Rose on as their defender.∏≥ Rose’s activities in the last years of the Civil War followed the rising prospects for Union victory and the abolition of slavery. Emancipation, human rights, and universal suffrage were terms that Rose had been using for two decades and now they were moving to the forefront of the nation’s political agenda. She was one of Stanton and Anthony’s most stalwart allies when they created the Woman’s National Loyal League to press for a constitutional amendment to end slavery. After the war, she played a similarly major role in supporting their efforts to bring the demands for black and woman suffrage together in the American Equal Rights Association. The fullness of Rose’s commitment to women’s rights is indicated by the fact that she remained solidly in their camp when, in the face of the Republican Party’s refusal to add woman suffrage to its black suffrage platform, many former allies abandoned their efforts to create a universal suffrage coalition. Despite her long commitment to universal human rights (or maybe because of that commitment) Rose agreed it was time to inaugurate a more autonomous feminist movement. In 1869, it was Rose who called for renaming ‘‘universal suffrage’’ ‘‘woman

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suffrage’’ so as to make explicit the place of women in the cause of political equality. ‘‘Congress does not seem to understand the meaning of the term universal . . . Congress has enacted resolutions for the suffrage of men and brothers. They don’t speak of the women and sisters . . . I propose to call [our movement] Woman Suffrage; then we shall know what we mean.’’∏∂ The evidence as to Rose’s state of mind at this point is contradictory. After more than three decades in the United States, she became a citizen, probably because she thought that women might soon be enfranchised. And yet very soon after, she and her husband departed for Europe, never again to live in this country. Her receding position in reform circles may well have played a role in this decision. The narrower and more exclusively focused on woman suffrage the movement that she had helped to set in motion became, the more politically alienated she was.∏∑ Increasingly its focus was on women not humanity, the nation not the world, and the elite not the mass of citizens. Rose was still listed as an officer at U.S. suffrage conventions and wrote letters to be read publicly through the 1870s. But no other Jewish woman was prominent in the U.S. feminist movement for another thirty years.∏∏ In the 1880s, the movement she had helped to pioneer became much more explicitly Christian through the influence of Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In 1892, Rose died. Her will prohibited anyone to bring her body into a ‘‘church or a chapel.’’∏π The chronicler of British freethought, George Holyoake, said in his eulogy of her, ‘‘She had the fire of Judith in her.’’∏∫ Memory of her historical contribution was maintained by left-wing American Jews.∏Ω The first biography of her was commissioned by Morris Schappes, editor of Jewish Currents, funded by the Emma Lazarus Federation of Women’s Clubs, and written and published in 1954 by Yiddishist writer Yuri Suhl.π≠ Much of Rose’s perspective on women’s rights lived on through that of Elizabeth Stanton. The major themes of Stanton’s feminism—the importance of enfranchisement, the necessity of marital reform, and the identification of religion as a bastion of male supremacy—directly mirror Rose’s concerns.π∞ Nowhere is Stanton’s debt to Rose greater than in her conviction that religion was the major cultural source of woman-hatred. In The Woman’s Bible Stanton called on other suffragists to examine critically the movement’s relation to Christianity. The price she paid for this bold challenge, public repudiation by the movement she had instigated fifty years before, is a measure of the seriousness of that challenge. The irony is that the Woman’s Bible is flagrantly antiSemitic.π≤ In insisting that the misogyny of the Bible was both evidence of Jewish barbarity and at the same time the still flourishing core of modern

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American culture, Stanton was once again enacting the very contradiction within which Rose had been caught. Rose had provided an enormously creative perspective by which to look at the most basic beliefs of antebellum American culture as they affected women, but she had done so from a position which that culture could not tolerate. Without taking into account her Jewishness, neither the magnitude nor the limits of her contributions to the American women’s rights movement can be adequately appreciated. Notes 1. Morris Schappes, ed., Documentary History of the Jews in the United States 1654– 1875 (New York: Citadel Press, 1950). 2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (HWS), v. 3 (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), p. 120. 3. HWS, v. 1 (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1889), p. 52. 4. Morris Schappes, ed., ‘‘Ernestine Rose: Her Address on the Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation,’’ Journal of Negro History, July 1949, pp. 344–55. 5. HWS, v. 1, p. 222. 6. Jenny d’Hericourt, ‘‘Madame Rose,’’ quoted in Carol A. Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 9. One piece of counterevidence: The Jewish Messenger reported in 1869 that ‘‘we believe that she was baptised’’ (May 21, 1869, v. 14, p. 5; thanks to Paula Doress-Worters). 7. Ben Giladi, ed., A Tale of One City: Piotrkow Trybunalski (New York: Shengold Publishers, Inc., 1991), p. 34. 8. Jacob Katz observes that because girls were not obligated to study Torah, they were exposed before boys to secular education (Jewish Emancipation and Self Emancipation [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1986], p. 84). 9. Arthur Eisenbach, The Emancipation of the Jews of Poland (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p 143. Geladi records the story of a Piotrkow Jew who appealed to the tsar for relief from special ghetto taxes in 1821 (Piotrkow Trybunalski, p. 34). 10. She told Jenny d’Hericourt that ‘‘wealth would only embarrass and corrupt me and make me useless!’’ (The Revolution, September 16, 1869, p. 171). 11. Her Owenite comrade George Holyoake remained a lifelong friend and gave the eulogy at her funeral. 12. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 129–30. 13. At the 1845 Infidel Convention; see Kolmerten, p. 55. Lori D. Ginzberg discusses the influence of ‘‘infidelism’’ on women’s rights in ‘‘The Hearts of Your Readers Will Shudder: Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,’’ American Quarterly, v. 46, June 1994, p. 198. In 1837, at a meeting about public education, Rose confronted a clerical opponent for the violence of his ‘‘harangue against a class whom he stigmatized as infidels’’ (HWS, v. 1, p. 97). 14. In 1855, two years after Wright’s death, Rose visited her grave in Cincinnati (Kolmerten, p. 177). In 1869, Anthony asked Rose to write an article on Wright for The

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Revolution but she did not (Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. II, Against an Aristocracy of Sex 1866 to 1873 [New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press], p. 200). 15. Hertell and Rose shared a platform in 1845 (Albert Post, Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1943], p. 164). 16. Peggy Rabin, Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundations of Female Emancipation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 89. 17. ‘‘Who can tell the hardships that then met those who undertook that great work! I went from house to house with a petition for signatures. . . . Why, the very name exposed one to ridicule, if not to worse treatment’’ (HWS, vol. 1, p. 692). Also see letter to Susan B. Anthony, January 9, 1877, reprinted in HWS, v. 1, p. 99. Rose dated the beginning of women’s involvement in the campaign for their rights from her own earlier activism. 18. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More, Reminiscences 1815–1897 (reprint, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), p. 150. 19. HWS, v. 1, p. 693. She was however aware that the 1848 law was quite partial, offering rights only to propertied wives and not to ‘‘the mass of the people [who] commence life with no other capital that the union of heads, hearts and hands’’ (comment delivered at 1852 National Women’s Rights Convention, HWS, v. 1, p. 239). 20. ‘‘Secession of the South from the North,’’ The Liberator, August 19, 1853, p. 1. In this speech she says that she was in South Carolina ‘‘six years ago.’’ 21. Later she told Anthony that ‘‘in 1847 and ’48 I spoke in Charleston and Columbia’’ (HWS, v. 1, p. 99). She also told Jenny d’Hericourt that she had gone to South Carolina (Revolution, September 16, 1869, p. 171). She credited her ill health to the inadequacies of her early education (HWS, v. 1, p. 357). Walt Whitman, who met her in the late 1850s, contrasted her ‘‘head full of brains—the amplitude of a Webster’’ with her body—‘‘a poor sickly thing; a strong breath would blow her away’’ (from Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 7, p. 248, quoted in David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography [New York: Knopf, 1995], p. 220). 22. Morris Schappes, A Documentary History of the Jews in the United States, 1654– 1875 (New York: Citadel Press, 1950), pp. 235–46. 23. Belinda and Richard Gergel, In Pursuit of the Tree of Life: A History of the Early Jews of Columbia South Carolina and the Tree of Life Congregation (Columbia: Tree of Life Congregation, 1996). 24. The young Columbia lawyer seems not to have been a Jew but rather a man named Mr. Thompson. Rose visited him in 1854 in Washington and Susan B. Anthony gives his name in her journal of their trip (cited in Kolmerten, p. 148). 25. In 1871, Paulina Wright Davis still believed that Rose’s 1850 lecture ‘‘has never been surpassed’’ (A History of the National Women’s Right’s Movement for Twenty Years from 1850 to 1870 [New York: Journeymen Printers Cooperative, 1871], p. 19). 26. HWS, v. 1, p. 607. 27. Mott to Anthony, June 6, 1869, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. 28. HWS, v. 1, p. 100. 29. Sander Gilman, Jewish Self Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 30. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: Univer-

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sity of North Carolina Press, 1998). Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Maureen Fitzgerald, introduction, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993). Elizabeth Clark, ‘‘Religion, Rights and Difference in Early Women’s Rights Movement,’’ Wisconsin Women’s Law Review, v. 3, 1987, pp. 29–57. 31. Isenberg’s only extended discussion of Rose focuses on her critique of prostitution (pp. 119–22). 32. HWS, v. 1, p. 850, records that she submitted resolutions that were passed, but I have no record of these. 33. HWS, v. 1, p. 535. 34. HWS, v. 1, pp. 536, 539. 35. Quoted, from more complete proceedings, in Kolmerten, p. 106. 36. See A Defense of Atheism: Being a Lecture Delivered in Mercantile Hall, Boston, April 10, 1861 (Boston: J.P. Mendum, 1889). ‘‘The Universe is one vast chemical laboratory, in constant operation, by her internal forces’’ (p. 17). 37. HWS, v. 1, p. 293. 38. HWS, v. 1, p. 238. 39. Ernestine Rose, An Address on Women’s Rights Delivered Before the People Sunday Meeting in Cochituate Hall, October 19, 1851 (Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1851), p. 19. 40. HWS, v. 1, p. 137. 41. Also see HWS, v. 1, p. 239. 42. HWS, v. 1, p. 632. 43. HWS, v. 1, pp. 716–40. The issue had been made especially timely by a debate in the New York Tribune between Horace Greeley, condemning divorce, and Robert Dale Owen, son of Robert Owen, speaking in its favor. Legislation liberalizing New York divorce law had repeatedly been submitted to the state legislature. 44. Quoted in Kolmerten, p. 219. 45. HWS, v. 1, p. 729. 46. Susan B. Anthony, diary entry, March 24, 1854, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 269; see Kolmerten’s reading of the incident, p. 141. 47. Wright to Mott, March 28, 1855, cited in Kolmerten, p. 173. 48. As reformers whose political passions were deeply rooted in a passionate Christianity, individual abolitionists had recourse to anti-Semitic ideas to explain the taint of Old Testament ‘‘obstinacy’’ and ‘‘moral blight’’ that distinguished established Protestantism from their own dissenting opinions. Garrison provides the most notorious examples, but both Lydia Maria Child and Theodore Parker showed similar tendencies. See Frederick Jaher, A Scapegoat in the New World: The Origin and Rise of Anti-Semitism in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 139, 200–2. Jonathan Sarna stresses the contradictory attitudes of antebellum Christian reformers toward Jews (‘‘The Mythical Jew and the Jew Next Door,’’ in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David Gerber [Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1986], pp. 57–78). 49. HWS, v. 1, p. 705. Phillips was particularly vitriolic in his anti-Semitic rhetoric. For other examples, see ibid., pp. 637, 674, 701, 706.

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50. HWS, v. 1, p. 744. 51. Susan B. Anthony, diary entry, April 9, 1854, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840–1866, ed. Ann D. Gordon (Rutgers University Press, 1997), p. 269. Rose explicitly named Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone. 52. Polul Borkensenius, The Chains Are Broken: The Story of Jewish Emancipation (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), p. 82. 53. Letter quoted in Kolmerten, p. 181. 54. HWS, v. 1, p. 664. 55. As early as 1852, in defending against what she understood as Horace Mann’s slander against the motherhood of Jewish women, she rhetorically conceded that the Jews were ‘‘unmerciful and stick necked,’’ only gleefully to insist that ‘‘a Jewish woman was the mother of his Redeemer’’ [italics mine]; ‘‘Review of Horace Mann’s Two Lectures, . . . 1852,’’ reprinted in Suhl, p. 286. 56. Freethinking was by no means incompatible with anti-Semitism. See Katz, Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation, on Voltaire, p. 98. 57. P. 196, October 28, 1863, quoted in Sandra J. Berkowitz and Amy C. Lewis, ‘‘Debating Anti Semitism: Ernestine Rose vs. Horace Seaver in the Boston Investigator, 1863–64,’’ Communication Quarterly, v. 46, Fall 1998, p. 457. 58. April 6, 1864, as quoted in Kolmerten, p. 315. 59. Quoted in Berkowitz and Lewis, ‘‘Debating Anti Semitism.’’ In 1869, The Hebrew Leader, an American Jewish periodical, wrote knowingly that Ernestine Rose ‘‘blames [those of her race] for denying their native faith’’ (May 21, 1869, provided by Paula Dorress-Worter). 60. February 10, 1864, quoted in Kolmerten, p. 239. 61. Summarized and paraphrased in Kolmerten, p. 239. 62. Quoted and summarized in Kolmerten pp. 240–1. For Rose’s defensiveness on this point—she says that Seaver is accusing her of the equivalent of ‘‘going to the moon or to some other wonderful thing’’—see Kolmerten, p. 241. 63. Suhl, p. 224. 64. HWS, v. 1, pp. 396–97. 65. Stanton did include Rose, now a U.S. citizen, in her list of distinguished women whose citizenship deserved to be acknowledged (‘‘A Few Gentle Taps at Mr. Greeley,’’ New York Golden Age, September 2, 1871, from Selected Papers, v. 2, p. 436). 66. That would be Maud Nathan. 67. ‘‘Last Will and Testament,’’ reprinted in Suhl, pp. 289–90. 68. Quoted in Suhl, p. 274. 69. In 1927, the Forward published an article by Henry Lewis on Rose. Thanks again to the intrepid Paula Dorress-Worters for this citation. 70. Suhl, ‘‘Acknowledgments,’’ pp. 291–92. Note that this precedes the publication of Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1959), but reflects a similar left-wing feminist historical perspective (Ellen DuBois, ‘‘Eleanor Flexner and the History of American Feminism,’’ Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights [New York University Press, 1998], pp. 239–51). Personal communication from Morris Schappes to author, May 5, 1998. On the Emma

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Lazarus Federation, see Joyce Antler, ‘‘Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs and the Promulgation of Women’s History, 1944– 1989,’’ U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, eds. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 267–95. 71. The philosophical capstone of Stanton’s career—‘‘Solitude of Self,’’ written in 1893—eerily echoed Rose’s oratory, forty years earlier, that ‘‘like [man, woman] comes involuntarily into existence; like him she possesses physical, mental and moral powers, on the proper cultivation of which depends her happiness; like him she is subject to all the vicissitudes of life; like him, she has to pay the penalty for disobeying nature’s laws.’’ (An Address on Women’s Rights Delivered Before the People’s Sunday Meeting in Cochituate Hall, October 19, 1851 [Boston: J. P. Mendum, 1851], p. 5). 72. Kern, pp. 168–69.

P A R T

Transcultural Activism Against Slavery by African-American Women

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Writing for True Womanhood: African-American Women’s Writings and the Antislavery Struggle erica armstrong dunbar

The eras of the early republic and antebellum America opened doors for many northern African-Americans. As the new nation grappled with the rhetoric of freedom following the Revolutionary War, and a transforming capitalist economy, the dismantlement of slavery took root in northern urban centers. For Philadelphia, gradual emancipation began in 1780, slowly destroying the ‘‘peculiar institution’’ within the nation’s birthplace. The ‘‘city of brotherly love’’ moved into the antebellum era without the fetters of enslavement attached to its African-American residents. From slave to indentured servant to free wage earner, most men and women of African descent found themselves confronted with a changing urban and rural landscape. As they faced the sunset of slavery with open arms, the majority of African-Americans welcomed the responsibility of freedom. However for members of the small black elite the responsibilities of black freedom were enmeshed in a developing bourgeois culture.∞ Women within the African-American elite saw their families, communities, and themselves in a state of perpetual motion. As wives and mothers, black women juggled the responsibilities of domestic duties within their own households while oftentimes maintaining employment outside of the home. Unlike many white women of the Philadelphia elite, African-American women were forced to earn additional income in an effort to support their families, often

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finding work as teachers, nurses, and caterers.≤ The lives of African-American women were filled not only with work in and outside of the home, but with additional charity work, abolitionist activism, and religious devotion, all of which were activities that would benefit the black community of Philadelphia and simultaneously work to transform the negative stereotypes of African-American women. As these women constructed their personal and public spheres, respectability as well as sentimentality became central within nineteenth-century social circles. The worlds of literacy, friendship, and political reform, namely abolition, collided for elite African-American women. Literary societies were among the first sociopolitical organizations formed by and for African-American women. It was understood that a new free class of African-Americans had to be educated; however, it was as important for the small black elite to improve themselves and to prepare themselves for the public arena. Literary societies allowed elite black women to socialize among themselves and to hone their political prose that would eventually appear in national periodicals. It was within the literary society that friendship and fraternization met with the political. A new generation of politically charged African-American women emerged from the arena of the literary society with emancipation and citizenship at the core of their activism. An additional arena for the mixing of the social and the political was within the pages of the nineteenth-century friendship album. As friendship albums were passed from friend to friend along the East Coast, the display of immaculate penmanship, proper grammar and spelling, along with respectable prose regarding the private and the political, allowed African-Americans to reinforce their respectability within their own social circles. As the albums themselves traveled from Baltimore to Philadelphia and as far north as Boston, educated African-Americans established a protocol regarding discussions pertaining to freedom, womanhood, and respectability. The semipublic arena of the album not only served as a badge of respectability, but it provided black women with an additional platform to reconstruct their image, to push for the abolishment of slavery, and to expand their sentimental relationships. By placing themselves in explicit dialogue with both domestic and international audiences through their public newspaper writings, black women participated in the transatlantic political conversation regarding the abolition of slavery. The private writings of African-American women reflect similar themes, in particular the significance of women’s rights. Both the private and public literary production of African-American female abolitionists served as a print culture debut for black women while strengthening the ties between them and women across the world. African-American women ‘‘wrote for true

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womanhood’’ using the strategies of education and public and private writing to advance the call for equality and citizenship.

The Literary Society The rise of literary societies in Philadelphia and across the Northeast began during the early decades of the nineteenth century. Many of the early societies expressed similar reasons for their organization, all of which hinged upon the stimulation of reading and the ‘‘spreading of useful knowledge.’’ These societies believed that providing black residents with libraries and reading rooms throughout the city would make social improvement much more probable.≥ Literary societies were multifactoral in that they constructed a space for literary improvement and cultivated a generation of public orators and abolitionist politicians. Barred from white literary organizations, a group of free black men came together on March 20, 1828, to organize a society that would initiate the ‘‘mental improvement of the people of color in the neighborhood of Philadelphia.’’∂ Prominent black men of the city gathered that night and listened to an address delivered by wealthy black Pennsylvanian William Whipper, who urged them to take part in the founding of the society. Whipper urged the black men in his presence to not ‘‘sit as idle spectators to the movement being carried on by nations to improve themselves.’’ Whipper added that black men should ‘‘feel bound to open an institution to which they may repair and qualify themselves for future usefulness.’’∑ Whipper’s speech marked the founding of the ‘‘Reading Room Society’’ for young men in Philadelphia. In 1831 African-American women in Philadelphia formed their own literary society. One year after its formal organization the society consisted of approximately twenty members, who congregated every Tuesday night for the purpose of ‘‘mental improvement.’’ William Lloyd Garrison addressed the Female Literary Association of Philadelphia in 1832 and reported in his newspaper that ‘‘if the traducers of the Negro race could be acquainted with the moral worth, just refinement, and large intelligence of this association their mouths would be hereafter dumb.’’∏ As the 1830s ushered in an era of women’s clubs and societies, AfricanAmerican women brought education and social networking together into the arena of the literary society. Throughout the decade, black women formed at least three separate literary societies within the city of Philadelphia. The Minerva Literary Association, founded in October of 1834, had thirty founding members actively involved in organizing a ‘‘school for the promotion of polite

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literature.’’ Programs sponsored by the society featured readings and recitations of original and selected pieces along with ‘‘other appropriate matters.’’π The African-American literary society appeared at a time in which learned social graces and customs were of extreme importance to the black elite. As a majority of the societies’ members were known for their abolitionist work, their inclusion within traditionally white anti-slavery circles was, by the early 1830s, a likely possibility. As the black elite began their social and political networking among white Philadelphians through the politics of abolition, the literary society prepared and reinforced ‘‘the promotion of the polite.’’∫ Between 1828 and 1841 a total of nine literary societies were organized in Philadelphia, three of which were organized exclusively for women. Not only did these societies prepare black women for interracial political and social settings, but they also served as examples for a progressive free black community. In an address given to the American Moral Reform Society in 1837, prominent Philadelphian James Forten expressed his satisfaction and communal pride regarding female literary societies. Forten commented that there were many literary societies conducted by a ‘‘large number of respectable females collected together,’’ with goals of the diffusion of knowledge through reading and writing that would reflect honorably upon the community. The multilayered purpose of the literary society was revealed toward the end of his address as Forten stated, ‘‘the object of the literary societies is to accomplish an intellectual and moral reformation.’’Ω By the 1840s, members of the African-American elite moved beyond single sex literary societies and organized the Gilbert Lyceum for ‘‘literary and scientific purposes.’’ On January 1, 1841, a small group of men and women came together to pursue their educational and political advancement, most of whom were well-known members of the black elite. Robert Douglass Jr., Joseph Cassey, John Bowers, Robert Purvis, Harriet Purvis, and Sarah Mapps Douglass—well known for their ardent abolitionist sentiments—were among those listed as members of the Gilbert Lyceum. By the end of the year there were over forty registered members of the society.∞≠ Although Philadelphia was the first location in which African-American literary clubs were organized, the movement spread throughout the country, finding its way to cities such as New York, Boston, and Baltimore and in rural locations such as Albany and Rochester, New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.∞∞ All of the societies with the exception of the New York African Clarkson Society were founded during the 1830s and 1840s.∞≤ Similar to the Philadelphia societies, the literary associations in cities such as New York and Baltimore encouraged the extension of education, moral reform, and the promotion of the abolition of slavery.

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The Printed Word: Black Women’s Public Writings in Antebellum Philadelphia As the rhetoric of freedom faded with the expansion of the institution of slavery, the antebellum period proved precarious for free African-Americans residing in the North. Although a generation of well-trained black activists continued to push for the immediate emancipation, the middle decades of the nineteenth century ushered in a new era of uncertainty and tension. The racial hostility and violence directed toward free blacks became much more pronounced during the 1830s. As the news of a major slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, reached Philadelphia in August of 1831, white Pennsylvanians feared a change in the demographics of the state. Free blacks in Virginia would most certainly be forced to relocate following the Nat Turner Rebellion, and many white Philadelphians anticipated that they would move north, settling within the city limits. Rumors that as many as five hundred southern freedmen had settled within the city in just two months during 1831 unnerved many white Philadelphians. Free blacks were blamed not only for inciting slave rebellions but also for luring them to the urban cities of the North, elevating crime and poverty within the city streets.∞≥ White Philadelphians began to petition the state legislature to enact restrictive laws. The proposed law of 1831 prohibited the migration of ‘‘ignorant, indolent, and depraved’’ free blacks into the state of Pennsylvania. The bill also attempted to regulate the lives of free backs born in Pennsylvania. Local officials were to take a census of all blacks within their townships, noting the name, sex, age, and complexion of each person. Any African-American man or woman attempting to move from one county to another would be forced to present proof of residency in the state.∞∂ As black abolitionists such as James Forten, Robert Purvis, and William Whipper drew up a memorial to be presented to the state legislature, the bill was lost in committee and never came to a final vote.∞∑ However, the derailment of the bill was of no importance to the African-American community, specifically the elite. The fact that such legislation could even be contemplated was threatening and spoke to the racial hostility of the 1830s. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 presented itself as one of the most troublesome measures passed by Congress, creating a storm of protest and fear for free black northerners. It was perhaps this law above all others that reminded free black northerners of their vulnerability. As the kidnapping of free blacks during the 1830s and 1840s prompted black men and women to live life cautiously, the Fugitive Slave Law heightened all fears, for it placed in even greater peril the lives of free blacks. Four years later Congress passed the

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Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The act opened the Northwest to slave trading and appeared to validate the expansion of slavery. For those who had assumed that slavery would eventually fade away, this act reinforced that the institution of slavery would not simply disappear. Three years later the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, denying citizenship not only to enslaved black men and women but also to all African-Americans across the country.∞∏ For African-American women in Philadelphia, the struggle for abolition and the combating of racial stereotypes reinforced by newspaper articles and vicious cartoons became a more important and time-consuming process.∞π As they continued to work in mutual aid associations, anti-slavery societies, and benevolent organizations, black women also used the printed word as a vehicle toward freedom and respectability. The interracial Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, founded in December of 1833, was not the only mechanism for social change and activism. African-American women began to write for the protection of their womanhood and for freedom. Beginning as early as the 1830s, African-American women used the black press and other public print forums to describe their life experiences and to reconstruct the reputations of African-Americans in Philadelphia. Their opinions regarding motherhood, anti-slavery, and freedom were seen in local and national newspapers across the country, taking private concerns and political debates to the public forum of the printed word. Often marginalized within anti-slavery circles, black women created their own political space outside of the interracial anti-slavery meetings and bazaars within the pages of national publications. As they participated in the movement to abolish slavery, they maintained a commitment to their own free communities in the North, in particular to Philadelphia. The Liberator, the North Star, and the Pennsylvania Freeman were but a few of the newspapers in which black women contributed poetry, short stories, and essays that expressed their feelings about freedom, anti-slavery activity, and the personal experiences of black women. Black women writers found themselves navigating the impediments of race and the conventional views on women’s ‘‘sphere.’’ Challenging the contemporary codes of appropriate behavior for women through the act of public writing, black women often found themselves defending their right to selfexpression. The simple act of writing challenged existing stereotypes regarding women’s supposed intellectual inferiority. From 1830 to 1860, Philadelphia black abolitionists such as Sarah Forten, Margaretta Forten, and Sarah Mapps Douglass wrote for the public in the spirit of protest. Other women such as Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Frances Harper, both of whom had strong ties to the Philadelphia region, also contrib-

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uted to and strengthened a small cadre of black female political writers. Although race prejudice often prevented black women from publishing their work, the anti-slavery arena produced new contacts and avenues by which to have their works published. Prominent white male and female abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child and William Lloyd Garrison assisted black women with the publishing of various collections of poetry and essays through pamphlets and newspapers.∞∫ Perhaps the earliest political writings by women appeared in the form of the petition. Petition writing became a very popular method of political involvement for both white and black women during the antebellum era. Although many considered women’s participation in petition writing campaigns to be inappropriate, it was argued that the influence of women would help to support and purify the nation. Those who supported women’s involvement in letter and petition writing viewed their activities as a continuation of patriotic traditions created during the American Revolution. Anti-slavery societies granted black women the first opportunity to participate in this early form of political writing, and during the early 1830s, the Philadelphia Female AntiSlavery Society sent several petitions to both the state legislature of Pennsylvania and Congress, demanding the termination of slavery.∞Ω However, as black women began to diversify their political writings from group petition writing to individual essays and poems, black women writers represented examples of communal progress. Praised for their eloquent prose and sentimental poetry, black women political writers were often viewed as those who uplifted the race. In William Lloyd Garrison’s preface to Frances Harper’s collection of poetry, he stated that her work stood as an example of progress representing ‘‘intelligence, talent, genius, and piety.’’ According to Garrison, Harper’s representation of free black America would only ‘‘deepen the interest already so extensively felt in the liberation and enfranchisement of the entire colored race.’’≤≠ Among the most well-known black female newspaper contributors was Sarah Louise Forten, daughter of James and Charlotte Forten, well known members of the Philadelphia black elite. Known by her pen names of ‘‘Ada’’ and ‘‘Magawisca,’’ Sarah Forten contributed over a dozen poems and essays to several different newspapers between 1831 and 1837.≤∞ Her poem entitled ‘‘The Grave of the Slave’’ was set to music by black bandleader Frank Johnson and was often sung at anti-slavery meetings. Often appearing in ‘‘the poets corner’’ of anti-slavery newspapers, Forten exposed the hypocrisy of slavery, while exhibiting her own writing talents. Forten demonstrated her sophisticated education through her writings, another way in which to combat the racial hostility and white supremacy of the 1830s.

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One of Forten’s first published essays appeared in the Liberator on March 26, 1831. The title of her essay was ‘‘The Abuse of Liberty,’’ in which she supplied a poignant discussion regarding the evils of slavery and its effect on the African in America: I know no evil under the wide-spread canopy of Heaven, so great as the abuse of man’s liberty; and no where has this vice a more extensive sway, than in the boasted land of Philanthropy, that offers to every white man the right to enjoy life, liberty and happiness. I say every white man, because those who cannot show a fair exterior, (no matter what be the noble qualities of the mind,) are to be robbed of the rights by which they were endowed by an all-wise and merciful Creator, who in his great wisdom, cast a sable hue over some of the ‘‘lords creation.’’≤≤

Forten’s essay focused specifically upon the slave of the South as opposed to addressing the specific problems faced by northern blacks. Denouncing the white slave master, Forten expressed the well-known horrors of slavery beginning with the separation of family: ‘‘It is a lamentable fact that they (slavemasters) can with remorseless hearts rush like fiends into the retirement of a happy unsuspecting family, and with unshaken hand tear the unconscious husband from his tender wife, and the helpless babe from its mothers breast.’’≤≥ Forten concluded her essay with a threat of unrest and rebellion, not merely from the slaves themselves, but more importantly from God, who according to Forten would eventually right the wrongs of slavery: ‘‘He [God] is just, and his anger will not always slumber. He will wipe the tear from Ethiopia’s eye; He will shake the tree of liberty, and its blossoms shall spread over the earth.’’≤∂ One month later, in April of 1831, Forten’s poem ‘‘The Slave’’ appeared in the Liberator. As Julie Winch notes in an earlier chapter, the Liberator found its way across the ocean, allowing Forten to engage in a transatlantic political discussion. Her poem expressed a scathing criticism of the existence of slavery within the United States. Labeling the Revolutionary War a war for freedom, Forten exposed the incompatibility of the war with the enslavement of Africans: Our Sires who once in freedom’s cause, Their boasted freedom sought and won, For deeds of glory gained applause, When patriot feelings led them on. And can their sons now speak with pride, Of rights for which they bled and died, Or while the captive is oppressed, Think of the wrongs they once regressed?≤∑

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Forten continued her political commentary, charging white America with historical amnesia, forgetting that it was liberty and freedom for which the revolutionaries fought and now refused to the slave: Oh, surely they have quite forgot, That bondage once had been their lot; The sweets of freedom now they know, They care not for the captives wo.≤∏

Forten continued her writings in several different newspapers of the 1830s, however the majority of her work appeared in the Liberator. Although women’s writings were often confined to the ‘‘poets corner’’ or under the category of ‘‘letters to the editor,’’ Forten continued to participate in the public platform of newspaper writing through 1840. Several other Philadelphia women engaged in political commentary through public writings, such as black abolitionist and educator Sarah Mapps Douglass, also known as ‘‘Zillah, a young lady of color.’’ Douglass was born in Philadelphia in 1806, the daughter of Robert Douglass and Grace Bustill Douglass. During the early nineteenth century, the Bustill, Mapps, and Douglass families were prominent in Philadelphia circles. Douglass’s maternal grandfather, Cyrus Bustill, who owned a bakery and who was a member of the Society of Friends, also operated a school and was one of the early members of the Free African Society, the first African-American benevolent organization in the country. Douglass’s mother operated a Quaker millinery store next to the family bakery. Douglass’s only brother, Robert, Jr., was a well-trained artist educated at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts.≤π Douglass received a sophisticated education and was privately tutored for several years. She eventually entered the ‘‘colored’’ school established in 1819 by her mother and wealthy African-American shipbuilder James Forten. During the 1820s Douglass established a school for black children, one of ten such schools available in Philadelphia at that time. Although the school was supported by the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass eventually steered the school away from the control of the Society, allowing the school to become supported and maintained by members of the black community. Douglass contributed political essays to the Liberator, addressing such issues as colonization, emancipation, and issues specific to Philadelphia. In June of 1832, Douglass wrote a letter to the Liberator in which she expressed her concern regarding the Pennsylvania legislature’s attempt to prohibit the migration of blacks to the state. In addition to the concern she expressed in her letter, she also connected the legislature’s attempt at restriction to the growing racial hostility and social inequality experienced by all of Pennsylvania’s

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citizens: ‘‘You ask me if I do not despair on account of the Bill now before our Legislature? I am cast down, but not in despair. I am aware that it will be our lot to suffer much persecution, and I have endeavored, for the last year, to fortify my mind against approaching trials.’’≤∫ Similar to other articles and letters submitted to national newspapers, Douglass’s letter expressed unease and anger regarding the heightened racism of the era. However, within her writings were expressions of hope for the future of race relations. Although Douglass explained the difficulties and injustice experienced by black men and women, she noted America’s possibilities: ‘‘I see black and white mingle together in societal intercourse, without a shadow of disgust appearing on the countenance of either; no wailing heard, nor clanking chains, but the voice of peace and love and joy is wafted to my ears.’’≤Ω Not only did Douglass write of an optimistic hope for the future of race relations, but she also illustrated her belief in the greatness of America. In her July 21, 1832, letter to the Liberator, Douglass confronted the very serious debate regarding colonization among free blacks throughout the country. As the debate regarding the relocation of black Americans to Africa and Haiti continued, Douglass expressed a strong resistance to the movement. Her words denounced colonization and reinforced a commitment and a desire on behalf of black Americans to maintain their residency in the United States: ‘‘Believe me my friend, there is no spot in the known world where people are happier than in America. And bethink thee, dearest, it is our home, Think of this for one moment, and memory will call up so many fond and soothing reflections as will make thee loath to leave it.’’≥≠ Douglass’s writings expressed a gratitude for the principles upon which America was founded; however, her concerns regarding the social inequalities faced by enslaved and free black Americans were always central in her public writings. As the first black female newspaper editor, Mary Ann Shadd Cary received a tremendous amount of praise from white abolitionist circles and free black communities for creating a political vehicle for the expression of black male and female voices. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1823 to Harriet and Abraham Shadd, she was the oldest of thirteen children. As part of a close-knit family of political activists Cary grew up within the free black community in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Her father was a delegate to the annual Conventions of Free People of Color and had served as convention president in 1833.≥∞ The Shadd family moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia and settled in West Chester, Pennsylvania, becoming political activists in the Philadelphia region. Cary’s father earned a fairly prosperous income through his boot and shoe

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store, and he was rumored to have served as a station on Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad.≥≤ Having attended grammar school in Wilmington, Cary completed her schooling in a private Quaker school just outside the city. Similar to many other middle-class black abolitionists, Cary began her career as a teacher at the age of sixteen, first in Wilmington, Delaware, and then in Pennsylvania. Throughout the 1840s, Cary moved up and down the northeast corridor from one black school to another, spending a great deal of time in New Jersey and New York. Intermingling with black abolitionist circles from Delaware to New York, Cary began to create a reputation in activism for herself. In 1854 Cary became an editor of the Provincial Freeman, an anti-slavery newspaper circulated in Ontario, Canada. She used the newspaper as a vehicle to explore important issues that often divided black abolitionists of the 1850s.≥≥ Writing some twenty years after Sarah Forten, Cary possessed greater opportunity to address different issues than did her female predecessors. With the women’s suffrage movement under way and a larger acceptance of women as writers and public speakers, Cary was able to write and speak more freely, often condemning the paternalism of white abolitionism as well as assimilationist ideas promoted by many white men and women involved in the antislavery campaign. In a scathing editorial, Cary attacked, ‘‘the disposition to make black appear white,’’ or the desire to force ‘‘white standards’’ upon blacks as the remedy for hostile race relations throughout the country. According to Cary, the adoption or assimilation of these standards stripped ‘‘the miscalled free colored man . . . of all rights.’’≥∂ However, Cary’s bold words and vehement stance regarding the emigration of black men and women to Canada often marginalized her within the black abolitionist community. Although she was respected by many, her abilities and her assertiveness often antagonized potential supporters and colleagues. As she attempted to move beyond the barriers of gender by participating in political forums, men, both black and white, often prohibited her participation. In the fall of 1855, Cary traveled back to Philadelphia to attend the eleventh Colored National Convention, where she hoped to address all those present. No woman had ever been permitted to address the Convention, and according to Frederick Douglass’s newspaper there was a great deal of discussion concerning Cary’s participation: ‘‘There was much opposition manifested to her admission, on the part of some members among them a rough, uncouth, semi-barbarous fellow who wished to know if ‘we would admit Abby Kelley also?’ Although Cary was finally permitted to address the Convention, her words were not well received by all. Her somewhat rigid enthusiasm regarding

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emigration to Canada received little attention, for the majority of convention members were unhappy with a member of ‘‘the unfortunate sex’’ as their spokesperson.≥∑ Similar to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper made a career for herself as a teacher, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1825, Harper was orphaned at an early age and raised by her aunt and uncle. As a free middle-class black in Baltimore, Harper’s uncle was able to provide his family with a formal education and several other privileges associated with class status. Harper attended her uncle’s school until the age of thirteen, at which time she entered the labor market. Unlike the majority of middle-class white families, Harper was forced to begin employment as a domestic in order to contribute to the family income. As a seamstress and nurse for a white family in Baltimore, Harper still found time to cultivate her literary skills. Her employer, a bookseller in the city, permitted her to read from his extensive library during her free time.≥∏ Unlike thousands of other black women in the urban north, Harper’s educational background allowed her to move from domestic servant to respected teacher. At the age of twenty-six Harper took advantage of her middle-class stature and began her career as a schoolteacher in Ohio. As the first female teacher at the small school, Harper faced a great deal of resistance from male faculty members and eventually relocated back to the East Coast. It was on the outskirts of Philadelphia in York, Pennsylvania, that Harper continued in her struggle to uplift her race. Her statement ‘‘the condition of our people, the wants of our children, and the welfare of our race, demand the aid of every helping hand,’’ gave Harper the added incentive and strength needed to continue her teaching.≥π Harper understood that her middle-class status allowed her to make the transition from domestic servant to respected teacher. However, unlike many other black female schoolteachers, Harper openly discussed the difficulties involved with teaching large numbers of uneducated black children with very few supplies. Black women who were given the opportunity to work outside of the realm of domestic service were considered fortunate and were not often given the opportunity to discuss their occupational difficulties. For Harper, teaching became burdensome and an undesirable occupation. Limited because of her race and gender, she had few other opportunities available, and she wrote to her friend William Still to ask for his advice: ‘‘What would you do if you were in my place? Would you give up and go back to work at your trade (dressmaking)? There are no people that need all of the benefits resulting from a well-directed education more than we do. . . . It is a work of time, a

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labor of patience, to become an effective school teacher; and it should be a work of love in which they who engage should not abate heart or hope until it is done.’’≥∫ For many black female teachers it appeared as though their hard work was at times unnoticed. Compared to the backbreaking work of domestic labor, teaching was often considered to be somewhat luxurious. Only a few black women publicly expressed the difficulties of teaching. In July of 1832 Sarah Mapps Douglass wrote an essay to the Liberator in which she not only discussed the arduous work of the schoolteacher, but she also asked black schoolchildren to pay heed to their instructors: ‘‘I hope the children who may read this tale, are very gentle and obedient to their teachers, because a teacher has many difficulties to encounter, and the good or bad conduct of children greatly increases or lessons difficulties.’’≥Ω Douglass ended her essay with the following: ‘‘I think, dear children, from what I have written, that you will understand that you have it in your power always to make the situation of your teachers pleasant. Will you not do so?’’∂≠ Having served as a teacher for many years, Harper realized that a classroom of fifty-three children became too much to handle. Her exposure to a community of free black abolitionists provided an entryway into a new career as an activist. Her transition to full-time anti-slavery agitator and writer allowed Harper to uplift her race in a different way, concluding that ‘‘it may be that God himself has written upon both my heart and brain a commission to use time, talent and energy in the cause of freedom.’’∂∞ For the next few decades, Harper continued in the movement lecturing throughout New England and the middle states on ‘‘Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race,’’ supporting herself through the sales of her poetry and books. Harper lectured on many different topics throughout her anti-slavery tours, although her comments targeted the slave South and in particular the treatment of the enslaved woman and the dismantling of families. However, the North was not spared from Harper’s scathing commentary regarding race relations. In a letter written to a local newspaper, Harper discussed the hazards faced by many black men and women, specifically those in Pennsylvania. Now let me tell you about Pennsylvania. I have been in every New England state, in New York, Canada and Ohio, but of all these places this is about the meanest of all, as far as the treatment of colored people is concerned. . . . On the Carlisle road I was interrupted and insulted several times. Two men came after me in one day. I have met, of course, with kindness among individuals and families; all is not dark in Pennsylvania, but the shadow of slavery, oh, how drearily it hangs.∂≤

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Harper used the platform of the press not only to express the injustice behind the institution of slavery but also to expose the problems of social inequality for black men and women in the North. Throughout the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, Harper, Sarah Forten, Sarah Mapps Douglass, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary all used the vehicle of the press for their activism, adding momentum to the abolitionist movement and paving the way for the next generation of black women abolitionists such as Sarah Parker Remond. According to Willi Coleman’s chapter, Remond shared many similar experiences with her predecessors; however, she took her education, confidence, and anti-slavery crusade across the ocean to England, carrying the crusade for equality and citizenship to a transatlantic audience.

Words Between Friends: Expressions of Female Friendship The exchange of friendship albums and diaries presented an alternative and somewhat more private sphere for the interchange of ideas between members of the African-American elite. In stark contrast to instruments such as public newspapers, the friendship album provided a more personal forum in which ideas could be exchanged. The friendship album was extremely popular among the elite, both African-American and white, and it was particularly favored among women. Nineteenth-century friendship albums included poetry, short stories, personal letters, and watercolors, providing friends with an unrestricted arena in which to express their admiration and affection for their friends as well as politicized points of view.∂≥ Although these albums were the private possessions of their owners, the contents were made public through exchange. As the owner of the friendship album passed her keepsake to a friend, most often allowing her to possess the album for days at a time, previous entries were very likely to have been read by new friends. The friendship album also served as a symbol of sentimentality and popularity for African-American women in Philadelphia and across the urban North. As the content of the album was of sentimental importance to the owner, the reputations of those who penned their well wishes were also of great significance. Amy Matilda Cassey, wife of wealthy businessman and abolitionist Joseph Cassey of Philadelphia, maintained a friendship album dated 1833–1856. Amy Matilda Cassey was herself a well-known member of the African-American elite, working with the Philadelphia Female Antislavery Society as well as literary and debate societies throughout the city. Although Cassey’s friendship album was a private journal, she understood that her album would be read by all of its contributors. Cassey wrote a preface to the album in which she invited her friends and colleagues to enjoy each

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other’s contributions: ‘‘Now reader as you find delight, In scanning o’er what others write, ’Tis hoped in gratitude alone, You’ll add a tribute of your own. And thus with one choice piece at least enrich this mental pic-nic feast.’’∂∂ Cassey’s invitation made clear that although she selected the friends and acquaintances that were to write in her album, it was still a semipublic forum of expression among the black elite of Philadelphia. Many entries recorded in nineteenth-century friendship albums represent the written expression of love between female friends. Writings expressing the appreciation of a friend or a positive depiction of an acquaintance were scattered about its pages and expressed in various styles. In many cases, the sentimental expression appeared in the form of a poem such as the one written in May of 1833 by abolitionist Sarah Louise Forten. The original poem, written in the album of Amy Cassey, could very well have been shared in the public setting of the literary society. Forten contributed frequently to the Liberator, but this specific poem was never printed in one of the nineteenth-century newspapers, yet it was representative of the type of poetry written between female friends and for the public: My prayer for thee dearest, is warm from the heart, Un mingled with flattery-unsullied by art, Tis the first fervent wishes I’ve traced on this page May they ever attend thee, in youth and in age. I pray that thy pathway on earth may be bright With love for thy motto, and Hope for the light, That the sunshine of bliss that now ’luminess the face, Go the sad tear of sorrow may never give place. That the tide of affection, unsullied may flow, Through the heart of thy Husband, in weal and in woe, As when first at the altar, he gave thee his heart, From the love he then pledged, may he never depart.∂∑

As Sarah Forten expressed her well wishes to friend Amy Cassey, she touched upon several common themes present in the writings of most nineteenthcentury women. In addition to wishing happiness to her friend, Forten extended the hope for a healthy and harmonious marriage for Cassey. She wished them well through the good and difficult times; however, she specifically wished Cassey’s husband the ability to endure through the trials of marriage, and that he never ‘‘depart’’ from the love he pledged to his wife. The importance of marriage among nineteenth-century women, in particular black women, reoccurred as a central theme throughout many friendship albums of the era. As the institution of slavery had prohibited or at the very least limited the option of marriage, free African-American women of the antebellum era took very

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seriously their ability and their perceived need to marry. Victorian respectability hinged upon the formation of a nuclear family and the importance of marriage. As Forten’s entry wished Cassey and her husband well, it also served as a reminder of the significance as well as the respectability attached to the institution of marriage. Not only was the friendship album a space in which African-American men and women could engage in personal writings about private matters, but it also served as a forum to discuss the politics and public debates during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Topics such as slavery, moral reform, and the removal of Native Americans from their homeland found their way into the pages of friendship albums. Political commentary from men and women, both world renowned and obscure, demonstrated the vast political and social networks established by both the African-American and white elite of Philadelphia. Within the Cassey album the writings of white women such as Anna Warren Weston articulated the central political debate of the century through an untitled sonnet. Weston’s abolitionist writings made clear her opinion on the injustice associated with slavery: Three million men of God release free In this America of ours are slaves Lives dark with suffering, unremembered graves, Behold the story of their destiny. And yet not merely because such things be Does every noble heart indignant burn And from the sight in? horrour turn[.]∂∏

Weston’s entry demonstrated her abolitionist sentiment, however it also gave her a semipublic forum in which she criticized the policy and social customs of the country. In her sonnet, Weston chastised America as a strong and powerful country which enslaved the ‘‘weak & poor.’’ Weston also charged America with a hypocritical expression of Christianity through its institution of slavery: The bitterer shame and anguish is that we The eighteen millions strong, & rich, & great, Prouse of the memories those from Plymouth date; In Christ’s own Gospel swift are parts to claim, Are yet the enslavers of the weak & poor, Or worse the jailers at the prison door. This is the cause for anguish, this the shame!∂π

Weston’s entry regarding slavery most likely represented the feelings of many of Cassey’s friends and acquaintances who contributed to the pages of

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the album. However, it was William Lloyd Garrison who wrote perhaps one of the longest entries within the entire Cassey friendship album. His original writing, entitled ‘‘The Abolition Cause,’’ elaborated upon many of the similar ideas expressed by Weston. Unlike Weston, the first section of his writing focused much more upon the plight of the abolitionist than upon the plight of the enslaved: If ever there was a cause which established the disinterestedness, integrity and courage of its advocates, it is the cause of abolition in the United States. They who are contending for the immediate abolition of slavery,—the destruction of its friend and ally, The American Colonization Society, and the bestowal of equal rights and privileges upon the whole colored population,—well knew what would be the consequences of their advocacy to themselves. They knew that slander would blacken their characters with infamy; that their rebukes and retreaties would be received with ridicule, anger and reproach; that persecution would assail them on the right hand and on the left; that the dungeon would yawn for their bodies; that the dagger of the assassin would gleam behind them; that the arm of power would be raised to crush them to the earth; that they would be branded as disturbers of the peace, as fanatics, madmen and incendiaries; that the heal of friendship would be lifted against them, and love be turned into hatred, and confidence into suspicion, and respect into devision; that their worldly interests would be jeoparded and the honors and envolvements of office be withheld from their enjoyment. Knowing all this, still they dared all things, in order to save their country, and abolish the bloody system of slavery.∂∫

Garrison’s words targeted those most likely to read and write within the Cassey album—African-American abolitionists. His affiliation and friendship with many of the African-American elite in Philadelphia allowed him entry into the semiprivate and public world of black Philadelphians through the friendship album. Although his writing supported abolition within the political debate, his entry targeted the African-American elite as a group of political and social martyrs, strengthening his ties to friends and colleagues sometimes forgotten within abolitionist circles. Abolition was not the only political commentary to present itself within the sphere of the friendship album. Topics such as women’s rights appeared within the album of Mary Anne Dickerson Jones, a resident of Baltimore with strong ties to Philadelphia. William C. Nell of New York copied a well-known poem entitled ‘‘The Rights of Woman’’ as his entry into the album. As the 1840s provided a developing public forum in which women and men could discuss the social and political inclusion of women, the friendship album reflected the attitudes of African-American men and women upon the subject. Nell did not

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write about the need to grant suffrage or political rights to women, but instead encouraged a traditionally paternalistic viewpoint. Although Nell acknowledged, ‘‘The rights of Woman, merit some attention,’’ he went on discuss the need to protect women, maintaining their dependency: First, In the sexes(?) intermix’d connections, One earned right of Woman is-protection. The tender flower that lifts its head, elate, Helpless, must fall before the blant(?) of fate, Sunk on the earth, defac’d its lovey form, Unless your shelter ward the impending storm.∂Ω

While African-American women of the elite created a space for themselves in political dialogue concerning the issues of slavery and women’s rights, they were still emblematic of an elite understanding of womanhood and motherhood. The semipublic arena of the friendship album allowed for black men and women along the East Coast to share ideas, concerns, and political ideology with one another, extending the social and political networks of black Philadelphia throughout the northern states. Unlike the friendship albums of white women in the antebellum era, sentimental albums and diaries maintained African-American friendships over long distance and time. Rural white women of New England maintained sentimental albums for very different reasons. Although the focus of many albums centered upon the importance and fragility of friendship, as well as upon documentation of sentimental memory, the friendship album served simply as a way to curate memory, not as a method to maintain networks. For white women in rural New England, ‘‘in the countryside, the culture of friendship rarely survived the transition from girlhood to adulthood.’’∑≠ For these women friendship albums were not created for political and/or social commentary but were organized for the purpose of memorabilia. This was not the case for African-American women of the same time period. Friendship albums served as vehicles to draw northeastern communities of elite black women together. These albums assisted in the maintenance of long distance relationships and simultaneously reinforced nineteenth-century notions of womanhood and respectability. From the late 1820s to the eve of the Civil War, African-American women of the North witnessed great transition. As the institution of slavery moved westward with expansion, black abolitionists found themselves fighting for the emancipation of nearly four million southern blacks, and for their own citizenship. As the antebellum era drew to a close, a generation of AfricanAmerican women writers organized literary societies and used public and

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private writings to demand freedom for all, while creating a space for future black women activists. Notes 1. For more on the capitalist transformation of the nineteenth century see Christopher Clark’s The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 2. Shirely Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992). 3. Dorothy Porter, ‘‘The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828–1846,’’ The Journal of Negro Education (5 October 1936): 226–227. 4. Ibid., 558. 5. Freedom’s Journal, New York, 1828. 6. The Liberator, Boston, Garrison and Knapp, 1832, vol. 2, 103. 7. Joseph Wilson, Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia (By a Southerner.) (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1841), 108. 8. Ibid. 9. Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the American Reform Society (Held in Philadelphia . . . 14th to the 19th of August, 1837.) (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1837), 42–43. 10. Porter, 557–558. 11. Ibid. 12. The New York African Clarkson Society was founded in 1829, one year after the founding of the Reading Room Society in Philadelphia. 13. Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Struggle for Autonomy, 1787–1848 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 130–131. 14. The Liberator, April 14, 1832. Also see Memorial to the Honourable the Senate and House Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, in General Assemble Met, the Memorial of the Subscribers, Free People of Colour, Residing in the County of Philadelphia, 11–12. 15. Winch, 130–135. 16. Ibid., 175. 17. Edward Williams Clay (1799–1857) was one of the well-known cartoonists of the early nineteenth century in Philadelphia. His extremely racist sketches, entitled ‘‘Life in Philadelphia,’’ appeared during the late 1820s and early 1830s, mocking black freedom through derogatory commentary regarding speech, dress, and supposed intellectual inferiority. These sketches were published by S. Hart & Son publishers. S. Hart & Son was a partnership between Sarah and Abraham Hart, Jewish owners of a Philadelphia stationery store who began to publish a ‘‘Life in Philadelphia’’ series in 1829. The entire series of fourteen prints was reprinted in 1830 after Abraham entered a partnership with the respected Philadelphia publisher E. L. Carey. This entire set can be found at the Library Company of Philadelphia. 18. Yee, 121.

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19. Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; October 12, 1843. PASP, reel 30. 20. Ibid. Also see Erlene Stetson, ed., Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746–1980 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). 21. Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 121. 22. ‘‘Magawisca,’’ ‘‘The Abuse of Liberty,’’ in The Liberator, March 26, 1831. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. ‘‘Ada,’’ ‘‘The Slave,’’ in The Liberator, April 16, 1831. 26. Ibid. 27. Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America (New York: Random House, 1972). 28. ‘‘Zillah,’’ ‘‘To a Friend,’’ in The Liberator, June 30, 1832. 29. Ibid. 30. ‘‘Zillah,’’ The Liberator, July 21, 1832. 31. Sterling, 164–165. 32. Ibid. 33. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 191. 34. C. Peter Ripley, ed. The Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), vol. 2, 191–193. 35. Sterling, 170–171. 36. Jeffrey, 205–206. Also see Sterling, 159. 37. Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994), 22–24. 38. Sterling, 159. 39. ‘‘Zillah,’’ ‘‘A True Tale For Children,’’ in The Liberator, July 7, 1832. 40. Ibid. 41. Jeffrey, 206. 42. Sterling, 162. 43. See Catherine Kelly’s work, entitled In The New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 80– 95. Although Kelly focuses upon rural white women of New England, she demonstrates the ways in which friendship albums were popular during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. 44. The Friendship Album of Amy Matilda Cassey, 1833–1856, The Library Company of Philadelphia, 3. 45. Ibid., 17. 46. Album of Amy Matilda Cassey, 51. ‘‘Untitled Sonnet,’’ by A. W. W., June 2, 1855. It is probable that the authoress of this sonnet is Anna Warren Weston. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 12; ‘‘The Abolition Cause,’’ by William Lloyd Garrison, April 18, 1833. 49. ‘‘The Rights of Woman,’’ by William C. Nell, in the Friendship Album of Martina Dickerson, The Library Company of Philadelphia, July 16, 1840, 34. 50. Kelly, 91.

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Enacting Emancipation: African American Women Abolitionists at Oberlin College and the Quest for Empowerment, Equality, and Respectability carol lasser

Enrolling at Oberlin College in 1860, after her careful preparation at Myrtilla Miner’s school for African American girls in Washington, D.C., Emma V. Brown expected success; but during a Sunday visit that November to the wife of the college president, she found herself assailed by the president himself. Evangelical preacher Charles Grandison Finney called the young woman into his study and proceeded to attack the abolitionist agitators she embraced: ‘‘He said Theodore Parker was a liar and infidel, John Brown an enthusiast and fool, Wendell Philips and Garrison fanatics.’’ Unshaken, Brown confessed to her friend, ‘‘I dared to argue with him. I never should have commenced such a conversation with the President of the Institution, but as he forced it upon me I would defend those noble men.’’ When the bell rang calling the minister and his flock to evening services, Finney took the reluctant Brown in hand and guided her into the meeting. There, ‘‘he told me to stand up and ask the people to pray for me . . . I told him I would not do it. After a number of prayers had been offered, he requested the folks to pray for a young lady . . . who was in an awful state.’’ Brown reported ‘‘unpleasant feelings,’’ but she was hardly contrite before the great man, and refused to compromise her radical abolitionist sympathies. Instead, unrepentant, she reported, she ‘‘could not restrain my laughter.’’∞ Brown’s spirited response to Finney’s harangue was atypical of the reactions

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of antebellum African American female students at Oberlin College, but her unwavering commitment to radical antislavery was not. Rather, her assertion of a principled position in support of extreme action on behalf of racial equality and her reaction to personal challenge embodied the understanding of emancipation she and sixty-one other women of color manifested during their collegiate studies at Oberlin in the years before the Civil War. By their very presence at an institution of higher education, Brown and her sisters were the living embodiment of the equality that abolitionists proclaimed. Instead of assailing the public sphere with an extensive library of discursive acts, female African American students at antebellum Oberlin shaped their lives themselves as texts that evidenced the capacity and achievements of their race. In their daily participation in the academic and social life of the college, their respectable dress and conduct, and their embrace of the social rituals of the community, these remarkable young women performed the abolition for which others argued. They defined, for themselves and for the larger community both Black and white, an emancipated, empowered, and respectable African American womanhood. While historians have begun to explore the participation of African American women in the antislavery movement, they have generally focused on the speeches and associational activity that grew out of the vibrant East Coast enclaves in which free people of color established dynamic communities.≤ Searching for Black women’s voices, they have brought forward the work of critical leaders including Maria Stewart, Sarah Douglass, the Forten-Purvis women, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and others. Research on women of color organizing in cities along the Atlantic from Salem to Philadelphia, west into the Burned Over District in upstate New York, and even north into Canada, has illuminated how women of color confronted the constraints of racism, racial poverty, and the pervasive ‘‘cult of true womanhood’’ to carve out a particular role for themselves in the struggle to end slavery. From these studies emerges a persuasive view of women of color, empowered by their roles as wives, mothers, and community caretakers, delicately negotiating the boundaries of gender conventions. But for many historians, these women were victims of an ironic ‘‘double bind.’’ As they portray it, African American women who sought public acknowledgement of their capacity as free persons of color confronted the crippling strictures placed upon them by their need to prove a respectability that could only be demonstrated by their achievement of ‘‘virtue’’ in the private sphere where the norms of domesticity ruled. Women’s public activity on behalf of racial and gender equality was, according to these scholars, dangerous and transgressive. Thus, Black women with abolitionist commitments had only two choices: first, in accordance with the aspirations of

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their menfolk, they could retreat from the public sphere to embrace what they conceptualized as white middle-class norms that demonstrated respectability by accepting gendered boundaries; or, alternatively, they could threaten to destabilize of the male-dominated African American abolitionist community by seeking to act publicly on behalf of their race, thus becoming rebels against the limitations of gender. In either case, they were constrained by social norms and gendered values that they challenged only at their peril.≥ While a cascade of recent scholarship has produced new interpretations that have transformed and transcended the concepts of ‘‘domesticity’’ and ‘‘true womanhood’’ with respect to antebellum white gender norms, these historiographic developments are only slowly informing questions about African American women in the period.∂ In this volume, chapters by Jane Rhodes on Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and by Erica Armstrong Dunbar on African American women’s discursive communities, push us to rethink how antebellum women of color found ways to assert respectability and empowerment, making use of their educations, social connections, and family networks to forge identities that both encompassed and transcended their status as wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. As part of this effort to bring new understandings of gender and its implications for women’s activism as it moved beyond public/private distinctions, this chapter, too, seeks to advance beyond the ‘‘constraint theory’’ that has presumed Black women either acceded to domestic enclosure in order to mimic white constructs of ‘‘true womanhood,’’ or, in acts of individual courage, defied the parameters of domestic enclosure, thus separating themselves from both gendered and racialized norms. Instead, this chapter seeks to use new understandings of racialized gender norms to explain the antislavery activism pursued by a cohort of women of color whose lives and careers generally took place outside the better-known Eastern antislavery community. Although grounded in the methodology of community study, this examination of the lives of the African American women who enrolled in advanced studies at Oberlin College before 1865 holds larger implications. These women self-consciously trained for leadership at the only institution of higher education in the United States to offer collegiate-level training to African American women in the antebellum years—an institution that later claimed with pride to have produce more than one-third of all African Americans who received college educations at predominately white institutions during the nineteenth century. Thus, their work in establishing the standards and the ideology for gender and activism has broad significance. Hailing not from the abolitionist communities of the East but instead closely tied to Southern or new ‘‘western’’ locales, collegiate African American women at Oberlin drew strength from autonomous Black networks as well as

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from sympathetic whites—sometimes their biological relatives—in their construction of a vital role for Black women in the work of emancipation. Those who came from Northern homes most often looked for their support from emergent Black communities distant from the Atlantic: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Michigan, or the small black villages that dotted the Ohio countryside, where they had imbibed family values that prized religion, education, and the community work of women. They were not steeped in traditions of metropolitan gentility, and, while gender distinctiveness remained significant for them, ‘‘true womanhood’’ was a more distant concern. In a small Ohio town that struggled to realize its dream of racial egalitarianism in the context of Christian perfectionism, antebellum women of color built a vigorous and viable concept of Black female respectability that contested and renegotiated the boundaries of gendered behavior; they daily demonstrated equality and, in so doing, performed the work of abolition in full view of their local and national communities.∑ This chapter documents how Black women claimed respectability—‘‘virtue’’—at Oberlin, using it as a foundation for a politicized Black female identity characterized by commitment to racial emancipation and uplift. It interrogates the process whereby they used purity and piety in a redefinition of gender and authority appropriate for their racialized and gendered activism. It reads their lives as texts in order analyze their ‘‘performances,’’ first to document the emergence of a gendered racial identity that both claimed female virtue and renegotiated the constraints of ‘‘woman’s sphere’’; and second, to explore how these women deployed this emergent identity as active participants in the struggle for racial equality. Their central role in the creation of a new Black leadership class suggests how, from a reconceived angle of vision, women— and issues of gender—were never absent from the ‘‘public’’ abolitionist record. Instead, it argues that too many historians have failed to see the evidence provided by the lived experiences of these women of color, whose profiles offer ample testimony to the performance of racial equality within and beyond the domestic sphere.∏ Oberlin-trained African American women were uniquely positioned to bring this emergent Black female identity into a broader world. Honing their skills as students, they developed the stamina and self-assertion to ‘‘perform’’ abolition—that is, to enact, embody, and undertake it—in multiple modalities, both at the college and in their years beyond. To understand better the backgrounds and trajectories of the Black women of Oberlin College, this chapter first looks at the origins of the Oberlin commitment to antislavery and racial equality. It then explores how these women became actors—active agents—shaping the drama of uplift and emancipation during their Oberlin years. It concludes by exploring how their Oberlin perfor-

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mance of equality prepared them for the gendered and politically conscious activism they pursued in their later lives. The seed for Oberlin’s version of radical abolitionism was planted at its establishment in 1833 as an evangelical outpost dedicated to training Christian leaders for the expanding West. Embracing the doctrines of the Second Great Awakening, Oberlin’s founders believed that, since sin was a volitional act, salvation was within the reach of all. Prayer created understanding, whereby individuals found their way to God; each human being could and should become a moral agent. Once converted, men and women held responsibility to bring others to religion. And, with the multiplication of conversions, individuals promoted the creation of a more perfect world on earth, paving the way for the Second Coming. The colony’s raison d’être was its institution of higher education, which, significantly, from its very beginning, opened its doors to persons of both sexes. Oberlinites believed that women, too, had souls. Equally important, they foresaw that men ministering to their congregations would labor alongside women who would teach—in homes, schools, and communities—the moral and religious precepts that would pave the way for a Godly republic. So, from its opening, women and men attended the advanced college classes together.π Abolition flowered shortly after the founding, watered by both economic and theological concerns. For, although the college had great hopes, it had little cash. While its principled belief in manual labor as corporeal evidence of the fitness of the soul helped keep college costs down, the institution nonetheless eagerly sought the much-needed support of evangelical donors. In the fall of 1834, while on a fund-raising mission in southern Ohio, founder John Shipherd encountered an insurgent antislavery revival among students and faculty at Cincinnati’s Lane Theological Seminary. Evangelicals studying for the ministry had come to see slavery as a sin, interposing the authority of a master between a slave and that individual’s ability to find divine salvation. Convinced of the religious imperative for emancipation, and learning that Lane’s administration refused to host radical abolitionist ideas in a southern Ohio city riven with dissension over slavery, Shipherd believed that Oberlin could offer a home to the ‘‘Lane Rebels,’’ who would bring with them the support of their influential sponsors in the East. Shipherd was especially eager to enlist the backing of wealthy New York City merchants Lewis and Arthur Tappan, recently converted to Christian abolitionism, and the services of their influential pastor, Charles Grandison Finney.∫ ‘‘Father’’ Shipherd, as he was called, relayed the message back to Oberlin with his enthusiastic endorsement. In February 1835 the Oberlin Board of

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Trustees hotly debated his proposal at a tumultuous meeting. At first reluctant, the board finally sanctioned opposition to the sin of slavery, and with it the work of educating all people irrespective of color as part of its evangelical mission. The Oberlin Collegiate Institute became the first college in the United States to embrace on principle an interracial student body.Ω As explained by the 326 men and women of the community and the college who signed the Constitution of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society in June 1835: ‘‘Our object is the immediate emancipation of the whole colored race within the United States: The emancipation of the slave from the oppression of the master, the emancipation of the free colored man from the oppression of public sentiment, and the elevation of both to an intellectual, moral, and political equality with the whites.’’∞≠ By defining emancipation to include liberation from oppressive public sentiment as well as freedom from chattel bondage, Oberlin’s antislavery advocates committed themselves to a most ambitious undertaking; by embracing the task of creating racial equality, they located themselves at the extreme end of the spectrum of opponents to slavery.∞∞ But what did they mean by their use of the gendered and singular term for humanity in their commitment to battle both legal enslavement and tyrannical opinion? And what implications did this hold for future female African American students? Free women of color were, in fact, a relative rarity in antebellum America. Generally confined to Northern cities, where racial prejudice, lack of skills, and lack of access to education condemned them to manual labor and social invisibility, they survived, usually in poverty, within struggling African American communities. Racialized gender left them particularly vulnerable to the imposition of sexual stereotypes derived from the bondage experienced by the vast majority of Black women before the Civil War. Pro-slavery ideology maintained that enslaved females were sexualized creatures, incapable of the virtue—or sexual restraint—that characterized white womanhood in its distinct domestic sphere. Even antislavery advocates articulated a concern with Black female sexuality when they attacked slavery as a violation of sexual propriety, citing the particular offenses suffered by enslaved women who lacked the personal power to defend against assaults on their virtue. Abolition’s friends as well as its foes tended to read into the lives of free women their respective visions of Black womanhood derived from their understanding of bondwomen. Gendered virtue—or its absence—was a central concern for both. Free women of color might paradoxically seek public recognition of their virtue by emphasizing their withdrawal to private familial situations in which their purity was assured; or they might instead use their voices to contribute publicly to the expansive rhetoric on the plight of their race, thus risking critiques that deplored their participation in a sphere more generally

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gendered as male. While the Oberlin abolitionists who authored the constitution of its antislavery society recognized that the ‘‘colored race in this country are objects of scorn and persecution,’’ they said little specifically about Black females or their particular confrontations with contempt and disrespect. These early white abolitionists instead merely referenced the trope that decried the separation of families under bondage and the consequent exposure of slave women to threats to domestic virtue. But about women of color who existed outside bondage, Oberlinites were silent. By implication, women apparently were among those who, ‘‘impoverished, disenfranchised and trodden into the dust, . . . faint under the inflictions of public sentiment.’’ Even the outspoken abolitionists of Oberlin had, in 1835, limited experience by which to conceptualize the capacity of African American women to enact their own emancipation.∞≤ Yet in the next three decades, the Black female students at Oberlin College forged lives of virtue, respectability, service, and self-actualization, creating a public reality distinct from both the deferential gender norms promoted for white women and the heroic Black masculinity often celebrated by their race. They participated in the construction of a new African American female character, an identity on which many would build throughout their lives. In their gendered activism, they connected public and private to become agents in the work of emancipation. The first Black man to enroll at Oberlin, James Bradley, arrived in 1835 with the Lane Rebels. Two years later, the first woman of color, Harriet Hunter, enrolled. Her family hailed from Cincinnati, but she arrived from Canada, likely as the result of a fugitive flight to one of the free Black settlements close to the American border. Hunter received financial support from the Cincinnati Female Antislavery Society and that city’s African American Bethel Church. She aspired to be a teacher.∞≥ She was followed two years later by Rebecca Morgan, whose studies ended with her marriage to a graduate of the theology department, a union that underscored her religious orientation and assured her a position of community responsibility and respect.∞∂ Oberlin’s antebellum African American female students often enjoyed close ties to the Black clergy, but theirs was a religious piety that embraced freedom and empowerment, contesting both racial and gendered norms of submission. The Gloucester sisters, Adelaide, Eloise, and Emma, were daughters of James N. Gloucester, a Black preacher in Brooklyn who, at a ‘‘Martyr Day’’ observance marking the execution of John Brown on December 2, 1859, endorsed the call to arms issued from Harpers Ferry.∞∑ Less than one month earlier, Gloucester had shared the pulpit at an interdenominational prayer meeting for Brown with A. N. Freeman, father of Ada Freeman, who attended Oberlin

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despite the financial challenge it posed to the family’s ministerial income.∞∏ Sarah Woodson, a student at Oberlin in the mid-1850s, had three bothers, Lewis, Thomas, and John, who served as licensed Methodist Episcopal ministers. The oldest, Thomas, wrote the resolutions of Pennsylvania’s first State Convention of Colored Freeman in 1841. He had already established an African Education and Benefit Society in the family’s adopted hometown of Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1827, and he had co-founded an educational institution for African Americans in Pittsburgh in 1832.∞π Typical of the females of color who attended antebellum Oberlin, Freeman and the Gloucesters imbibed from their families an understanding of the connections between education, religion, and African American empowerment. The quest for emancipation in which they and their fellow female students of color participated was less concerned with the internal politics and controversy of Eastern-oriented abolitionism than with the quest for the actual advancement of their race—what nineteenth-century Oberlinites called ‘‘practical abolition.’’ Their distance from the elite coastal communities was both geographical and ideological. An analysis of the family origins and residential trajectories of the Black women students at Oberlin reveals that none hailed from Boston and only one from Philadelphia, the homes of two key politically potent communities of free Blacks where abolitionist political controversies raged. The Gloucester sisters were rare in arriving from New York, but they traced their roots away from the city, back to a slave grandfather who had purchased his own and his family’s freedom in Tennessee in the early years of the nineteenth century.∞∫ Such contiguity to slave progenitors was not unusual. Belle Lewis’s parents were emancipated slaves. Fanny Jackson Coppin, later a key figure in the development of Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, was born a slave in the District of Columbia. Two girls, the Cage sisters, were sent to Oberlin from Louisiana by their cousin, who had inherited them from his uncle, their father.∞Ω Catherine Younger’s white father left provisions in his will to send her to Oberlin along with her brother Simpson, later famous as one of the first African Americans to play baseball on an organized team.≤≠ And Georgia-born Frances Norris considered herself still a slave, even while pursuing the Oberlin education for which her white father paid.≤∞ Other African American females came from prominent free families of color in the upper South. Nine free women students arrived from North Carolina, many of them having prepared at the school for African American children in New Berne run by John Stuart Stanley, whose own daughter studied with him before excelling at Oberlin.≤≤ In all, nearly half of the Black women at Oberlin —thirty out of sixty-two—claimed Southern roots. Moreover, among the other female students of color, fifteen, or nearly one-quarter of the total,

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resided in Ohio before attending the school, with other Midwestern states accounting for four more students. As elite daughters of the hinterland, many of these students came to abolition as a part of a familial and personal struggle for freedom. Nurtured by the antislavery movement in its Midwestern variety, they came of age in communities where inclusive organizations constructed nonsectarian identities to overcome the challenge of small numbers. Open to both the religious and the political variants of antislavery and generally uniting across lines of race as well as gender in its local societies, Midwestern antislavery relied on sustained community mobilization which, in itself, transcended the divisions between public and private, as women and men found public ways to express their moral commitments. African American women growing up amid this ‘‘silent’’ army learned to perform emancipation even while abstaining from the discursive acts that proclaimed it.≤≥ Their lives spoke for them. Coming to Oberlin, young women of color entered a new stage in their lives and achieved a new level of visibility. While enrollment was itself a public statement, the institute and the community offered a variety of venues in which its Black female students could showcase their achievements and affirm their equality while enhancing their organizational skills, particularly in the wide array of associational activities in which whites and Blacks worked together. In the evangelical community, gender-segregated societies, often religious in orientation, provided possibilities for building participatory experience and for consolidating African American female respectability. Among the most important groups was the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society, dedicated to the promotion of virtue and the elimination of the sexual double standard. At least one of the Gloucester sisters joined, as did Amelia Freeman, the future sister-in-law of Canadian journalist and race leader Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Sarah Margru Kinson, once the youngest of the Amistad captives. African by birth, Kinson attended Oberlin under the sponsorship of Lewis Tappan, who had taken an interest in her during her American incarceration and had stayed in contact after her repatriation arranging to pay for her return to the United States and her Oberlin education.≤∂ Mary Edmondson, too, joined the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society. Fugitives from the illfated schooner Pearl, which sought to leave Washington, D.C., in 1848 with a cargo of runaways, Edmondson and her sister Emily had been captured, reenslaved, and threatened with sale on the New Orleans ‘‘fancy’’ market. Both achieved freedom when Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church ‘‘purchased’’ them. They came to Oberlin for schooling, their fees paid by Beecher’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. For the Edmondsons, membership in the Female Moral

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Reform Society offered an opportunity to consolidate the sexual virtue that their enslavement had directly threatened.≤∑ They were not alone among their race in using the Female Moral Reform Society as a site at which to perform racial equality while demanding the equal accountability of men and women for their sexual behavior. Participation in female moral reform, in fact, served as a location in which to assert both racial and gendered equality. In the academic year 1852–53, the best year for which records exist, at least seven of the student members of the Society were women of color, including over one-quarter of the African American women then enrolled in college-level work at Oberlin. Although white women students outnumbered them in the organization, women of color were almost twice as likely to join, constituting 12 percent of its membership at a time when they represented less than 7 percent of the female student body. The Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society was thus a racially integrated organization. Together, the female students of Oberlin College made use of this avenue for gendered empowerment, renegotiating gender norms and gendered boundaries. For African American women, the Society served as a locus from which to explore the empowerment they might find in female sources of authority.≤∏ Women of color were also well represented in the literary societies in which young females practiced their rhetorical skills in sex-segregated spaces. During the antebellum years, at least sixteen women of color participated actively in the Ladies Literary Society and its rival, the Aeolian Society. Lucy Stanton prepared and presented essays including ‘‘Scenes from the South,’’ ‘‘The Female Missionary,’’ and ‘‘Be Not Unequally Yoked’’ during her undergraduate years. Perhaps even more remarkably, she practiced oratory and declamation, that is, public speaking without full text notes, a mode of presentation usually reserved for men. At Literary Society gatherings, she furnished numerous offerings, including ‘‘Are You Free?’’ to her all-female audience. Stanton’s election to the presidency of the Society in July 1850 reflects the high esteem in which her colleagues held her, underscoring her successful achievement of community respect for both intellect and character. Her participation enacted abolition and demonstrated emancipation.≤π Such demonstrations of capacity and virtue by Oberlin’s African American female students were not merely accommodations to genteel white gender norms. That Oberlin’s African American women actively engaged in the creation of a racialized femininity is best revealed by the transgressions that brought these students before the disciplinary investigations conducted by the Ladies Board of Managers. Headed by the Lady Principal and composed of the wives of Oberlin faculty, these women were officially empowered to determine appropriate conduct for their female charges. While the school had unequivo-

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cally embraced ‘‘the joint education of the sexes,’’ it had never made any pretense of treating men and women the same. Regulations on men’s hours were less restrictive, their residential privileges were greater, and men and women performed different kinds of manual labor for different rates of remuneration; they also paid gender-differentiated tuition. Charged with patrolling the boundaries of gender, the Ladies Board was dominated by the views of an older generation of Eastern-trained women, many schooled in the female seminaries of New England where gender segregation in academies emphasized women’s empowerment within their own distinctive sphere. As Oberlin graduate and white abolitionist sympathizer, the pioneer woman minister Antoinette Brown Blackwell later reminisced, the Ladies Board was composed of ‘‘lovely educated women, much more conservative than their husbands.’’ Immigrants to the ‘‘West,’’ the Board members had not themselves participated in coeducation at the collegiate level, and they struggled to reinterpret gender boundaries and womanly behavior to fit the new circumstances. But the notions of propriety they constructed proved a particularly bad fit for the conduct of their African American charges.≤∫ At a school known nationally for its abolitionist commitment, the Board recorded few overt racial confrontations among its charges. Yet one revealing incident occurred in July 1851, when two white female students and one young white woman from the town confronted two Black female students on the town’s sidewalk built above Oberlin’s muddy streets to protect pedestrians from the ruts and muck below. Without enough room for the groups to pass each other, neither side would give way, and a contretemps ensued. Whether she was pushed or simply lost her footing is unclear, but Caroline Heldman, one of the white students, fell ‘‘two or three feet’’ to the ground below and proceeded to hurl ‘‘vile epithets’’ at the two women of the opposite party. Penelope Lloyd, one of the students of color, subsequently retaliated by enlisting a fellow black student who had not been present, Caroline Wall, to write with her a composition ‘‘said to be quite personal + giving an account of the whole affair’’ before her class. Faced with this situation, the Ladies Board attempted to maintain an even hand, demanding apologies from both Miss Heldman for her verbal utterances and from the Misses Lloyd and Wall for their written words. Yet Wall and Lloyd never backed down from their assertive claims. While little is known about Lloyd, a student in the Preparatory Department from Oberlin, Josephine Darnes, who had been with her on the sidewalk, came from an outspoken abolitionist family; and Caroline Wall was embedded in one of Oberlin’s most prominent Black family networks and would soon marry its most outstanding Black citizen, John Mercer Langston. For these women, creating a self-realizing African American womanhood

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entailed demanding respect from men and women of all colors. They did not shrink from controversy; rather their very ability to argue in self-defense suggests their agency in defining and performing abolition.≤Ω Josephine Darnes appeared repeatedly in the records of the Ladies Board. In one extended controversy, the Board accused Darnes, along with four other women of color, including Penelope Lloyd, of ‘‘general inattention to their studies, great laxness in the observation of the rules of the department, and disrespectful treatment of their teachers.’’ After praying over the alleged wrongdoers, the Ladies Board extracted ‘‘apparent penitence and promises of reform’’ from them.≥≠ But Darnes seemed unable to stay in their good graces. In July 1852, she, along with her sister and three other African American female students, was ‘‘charged with wrongdoing in protracting their vacation two or three days after the close of the regular vacation.’’≥∞ Her sister Mary Ann Darnes came before them again in June 1853 for ‘‘having been out on a pleasure ride and detained beyond the usual study hour at eve.’’≥≤ In addition, once more, in July 1854, Mary Ann Darnes was ‘‘reported to the board as having twice during the vacation week, been out at improper hours, and as having been guilty of falsehood’’; at this point, the Board decided ‘‘that her connection with the school be dissolved,’’ but the incomplete records of their proceedings make it difficult to determine if the sentence was carried out.≥≥ Were these evenhanded attempts by the Board to issue racially blind justice? Did the Board simply seek the same gentility and compliance from African American women that it did from their white counterparts? Not surprisingly, given their numerical dominance at the institution, white students predominate in disciplinary records, but students of color appear disproportionately often relative to their presence in the student body. In the period between 1851 and 1854 for which the records are most complete, women of color made up 42 percent of the students called to disciplinary proceedings; thus, white women, who constituted nearly 95 percent of the female enrollment, made only 58 percent of the appearances.≥∂ Did this seeming epidemic of Black female student misbehavior reflect the presence of one particularly unruly cohort of women of color? Perhaps instead the actions of these women sprang from the uncomfortable fit between the restrictions intended to ensure the respectability of white female students and the aspirations of Black women who, in defining self-determining and virtuous African American womanhood, pushed against the boundaries the Ladies Board sought to promulgate. African American females at Oberlin lived both within and between the worlds of Black abolitionism, Oberlin morality, and a more generally racist white culture. Their lives and experiences framed for them unique challenges to the enactment of both gendered respectability and racial equality. Was

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it possible, perhaps, that their delayed returns from vacation resulted from efforts to avoid confrontations with discriminatory accommodations on the railroads and boats that carried students to Oberlin? Could the women of color have sought each other out as traveling companions to create mutual support in their resistance to threats against their black female respectability on ‘‘public’’ transport, or in ‘‘public’’ accommodations? Could ‘‘disrespect of their teachers’’ have resulted from the constant need to assert their intellectual capacity? And was some of the unconventional visiting behavior a product of habits developed by female students of color as they coped with racial hostility by turning for assistance to their allies of both sexes in their sometimes isolated African American communities? The behavior these women displayed transgressed the norms that the Ladies Board assiduously sought to propagate; but the behavioral codes developed to promulgate white womanhood had a different impact on women of color. For Black women, gendered deference implied racialized subordination. Moreover, the imposition of strict gender segregation on the tiny numbers of African Americans enrolled at antebellum Oberlin could impede the forging of solidarity within the small community of color. Indeed, only within a sexually integrated African American network could both men and women begin to realize the gendered power achieved through the complementarity of their roles. The Ladies Board upheld rules meant to ensure respectability, but they presumed that virtue for women was achieved through their public invisibility. For many of the young women of color enrolled at Oberlin, on the other hand, the quest for emancipation promoted engagement in a civic struggle for equality. Although the misbehaving young women of color may not have articulated their resistance as principled protest against restrictive norms of white authority, their prepolitical actions suggest the incipient consciousness that would propel them to activism in opposing the enslavement of people of color—in legal bondage and social subjugation. They were exploring new patterns of conduct and developing new conventions for deportment.≥∑ Compelling evidence that African American women students engaged in creating their own definitions of the contours of respectable Black female behavior lies in locating their behavior within the context of their family identities. With only one exception, the collegiate women of color brought before the Ladies Board between 1851 and 1854 can be traced to activist families engaged in the Black convention movement, antislavery agitation, community uplift, or some combination of these endeavors. They attended Oberlin to train for leadership roles in the national struggle for racial freedom and equality. But the behavior they practiced rankled the Ladies Board. And, to the chagrin of their would-be protectors, they collectively appeared

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oblivious to efforts to police them. In August 1851, Amelia Freeman and Louisa Peck came before the Ladies Board to defend themselves against the charge that ‘‘their mutual influence over each other was bad.’’ They had ‘‘for some months roomed together’’ and planned to do so again in the coming year, an outcome the Board sought to prevent. The Ladies Board never specified the actions that worried them; nor did these plucky young women seem candidates for misbehavior. As noted above, Freeman, the daughter of a Brooklyn, New York, clergyman was soon to marry into the Shadd family, known for its activism on behalf of Canadian emigration and Black selfdetermination. Peck was the daughter of a founder of Pittsburgh’s Avery College, an institution for students of color at which Peck herself would teach before marrying one of the first African American college professors in the United States.≥∏ Both were part of a tight network of abolitionist women trained at Oberlin. They acted upon their own code of conduct to create an autonomous Black womanhood that was neither racially nor sexually submissive. Their behavior testified to their own understanding of racialized womanhood as their gendered performance of abolition took them onto the stage of a wider world.≥π Among those disciplined by the Ladies Board several times in the 1850s was Caroline Wall, who, in 1854, married John Mercer Langston, a graduate of Oberlin College and a Black leader second perhaps only to Frederick Douglass in the antebellum years. The daughter of a white slave owner and one of his three enslaved concubines, Wall moved with her siblings and half-siblings first to a Quaker settlement in Harveysburg, Ohio, and then to Oberlin, where the parentless family became leaders in town affairs. The girls attended the Oberlin Collegiate Institute while their brother, O. S. B. Wall, became a skilled boot- and shoemaker and a leader in abolitionist activism. Caroline Wall came before the Ladies Board for staying out too late on a ‘‘pleasure ride,’’ and for traveling to Toledo with a ‘‘bridal party.’’≥∫ Yet in 1856, as Mrs. Langston, she became mistress of a new house on East College Street that her husband and brother had built—pointedly in a white section of town. On their trip to their new residence, John Mercer Langston and Caroline Wall Langston were confronted by a ‘‘white man of extremely doubtful Republican feelings and principles,’’ who taunted them: ‘‘are you coming to live among us aristocrats? Do you think you can maintain yourself among us?’’ Caroline Wall Langston was well practiced in facing down assaults on her respectability as a Black woman. She had performed equality as an Oberlin College student using rhetorical skills to challenge the racial epithets hurled at her friend Penelope Lloyd, and she had pushed against the restrictions by which the Ladies Board sought to narrow her realm of action. Now, she performed the work of emancipation in

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her new home, not only by integrating her neighborhood, but also by joining with her husband to support other African American women as they made their way through Oberlin College. Deference, submission to racism, and retreat from the public woman’s sphere were impediments to her enactment of a self-respecting, civically engaged African American femininity.≥Ω While Oberlin’s African American female students departed from many of the gender norms that governed the lives of their white counterparts, they nonetheless maintained a strong sense of gender distinctions and gender proprieties. Consequently they did not undertake actual slave rescues. Oberlin boasted that no fugitive had ever been returned to captivity from within its boundaries, but it was male students and townspeople, Black and white, who participated in dramatic raids, rides, and ruses. Colorful decoy missions involving racial and gender cross-dressing were the province of masculine activism. Only men participated in the town’s best-known confrontation with a ‘‘higher law,’’ the ride from Oberlin to nearby Wellington to rescue John Price from slave catchers in 1858. Only one Oberlin alumna, the white woman Delia Webster, is known to have crossed into the South in an effort to conduct enslaved people North to freedom.∂≠ Black women instead supported emancipation by pursuing their studies at Oberlin, proclaiming their respectability and their equality as a challenge to ‘‘the oppression of public sentiment.’’ This performance of abolition placed them in view of a larger audience, and prepared them for their work on a broader stage. As they moved from students to alumnae, Oberlin’s African American women drew upon their skills of self-presentation honed during their undergraduate years. While most commonly they took their training into venues that might be defined as arenas of civic participation, only a few actually ventured into the realm of political speaking, an activity for which they found themselves well prepared, but, at the same time, also drew them into delicate negotiations of complicated gender boundaries. Lucy Stanton, once the president of the Ladies Literary Society, harnessed her practiced oratorical skills at her debut into a larger world. She gave her graduation address, entitled ‘‘A Plea for the Oppressed,’’ from the platform of the Ladies Commencement exercises in 1850, an occasion which the Ladies Board ruled appropriate for female speech. ‘‘Slavery,’’ expounded Stanton, ‘‘is the combination of all crime.’’ Addressing the women in her audience, she urged them to resist the forces that would tear children from their mothers, and brothers from sisters. But she saved her most militant metaphor for remarks targeted at the men and ‘‘Christians’’ in her audience. ‘‘Does the battle wax warm? Does thou faint with the burden and heat of the day?’’ she asked. ‘‘Truth and right must

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prevail.’’∂∞ Stanton saw irreconcilable conflict in the evangelical confrontation with the sin of slavery, and she issued a call to arms. Yet men, and men alone, would bear the physical weapons, while women would urge them forward in the coming conflagration. Other Oberlin Black alumnae similarly supported men’s militant activities on behalf of racial equality. In 1855, Mary Ann Darnes presented a flag sewn by a local ladies association to a Black militia company raised in Cincinnati in 1855 at the urging of the city’s African American leadership. Invoking ‘‘the glory of your fathers,’’ Darnes declared: ‘‘The time is not distant when the slave must be free; if not by moral and intellectual means, it must be done by the sword. Remember, gentlemen, should duty call, it will be yours to obey, and strike to the last for freedom or the grave.’’∂≤ The next year, Sarah Stanley wrote a lecture on behalf of the Ladies’ Antislavery Society of Delaware, Ohio, presented to the Ohio State Convention of Colored Men, held in Columbus. Addressed to the ‘‘gentlemen’’ assembled, it was read for her by a Mr. Harris in a bow to gender distinctions. Stanley called upon the listening men for ‘‘action . . . let us reject the absurd phantasy of non-intervention; let us leave conservatism behind, and substitute a radical, utilitarian spirit.’’ She continued: ‘‘To you, gentlemen, as representatives of the oppressed thousands of Ohio, we look hopefully.’’ In her closing exhortation, she invoked the Spartan mother’s farewell to her son, ‘‘Bring home your shield or be brought upon it.’’ Stanley understood that men and women would play different roles in the pursuit of the emancipation of the race, but women’s participation remained essential. Were these claims to participation an insistence on a ‘‘public’’ presence? Long accustomed to scrutiny, women like Stanley did not shrink from view, but they appeared in suitably gendered interstices. Several of Oberlin’s Black women—students, graduates, and townswomen—appeared as spectators at the Black conventions held in Ohio in the 1850s. They signed their names to the constitution of the all-Black Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, and, with other women from around the state, they supplied funds to hire halls and print convention proceedings.∂≥ Perhaps most importantly, they embraced their responsibilities for another critical form of radical abolition: they used their Oberlin training to become teachers, especially to students of color, thereby enlisting in the project to make radical racial equality a reality. Among those women of color who attended Oberlin before 1865, nearly half—thirty out of sixty-two—left documented records of their work as educators attaching their efforts to the elevation of free people of color before, during, and after the Civil War, while the actual number was probably far greater. This civic participation often took them, quite literally, into a broader

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world. In the early years of the college, two pursued work in Africa. Mahala McGuire spent four years at Oberlin, preparing for the missionary work to which she had aspired ‘‘for the last 12 or 13 years.’’ In 1853, she sailed for Kaw Mendi in West Africa, where she joined Sarah Margru Kinson, the former Amistad captive who had returned to study at Oberlin in order to increase her usefulness in Christian education.∂∂ Others brought the struggle home to Black schools in the North. Rebecca Elliott labored in Peoria; Ophelia Nesbit taught in segregated schools in her hometown of Cincinnati. Ann Hazle, the third African American woman to earn a literary degree from Oberlin, took her talents to Zanesville. These women understood that performing equality meant cultivating the talents of their race, thereby demonstrating the equality that was the foundation of Oberlin’s antislavery vision.∂∑ With the coming of the Civil War, teaching took on a new significance as the women and men of both races at Oberlin embraced the mission of educating and elevating the newly freed people of the South. Teachers, and especially Black teachers, served on the front lines in a new battle for equality, and Oberlin-trained African American women were in the vanguard. Among the women of color who enrolled in college-level work at Oberlin during the particularly fraught years 1864 to 1865, over half went forth as teachers, the vast majority taking up posts in the South where, under the sponsorship of the Oberlin-dominated American Missionary Association, they taught newly emancipated Blacks. In the face of widespread poverty, illiteracy, and persistent racism—including physical attacks from the defeated white South and chronic discrimination within the ranks of their Northern allies and sponsors —free women of color brought education to the newly emancipated. Their success rested on their stamina and self-assertion, skills they had practiced as students at Oberlin. Their readiness to undertake the exposure and challenges of this public work testified to their understanding of their responsibilities for civic participation in the work of racial emancipation.∂∏ As early as 1863, Blanche Harris took up a post in the experimental school established by the American Missionary Association for the freed people in Norfolk, Virginia. The next year, Mary Alston, a student in the Preparatory Department in the 1850s, sought to join the Norfolk school, articulating her special understanding of and suitability for the work. To the headquarters of the American Missionary Association she explained: ‘‘I feel it is my duty [emphasis original] to do what I can toward educating that portion of Our Fathers Children so long held in ignorance.’’ Sarah Stanley, who had completed her Oberlin education in 1856, was already at work in Norfolk.∂π Clara Duncan wrote the American Missionary Association several times while she was still an Oberlin student, seeking a placement. As she explained, ‘‘I am studying that

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I may be better qualified to assist my people to rise from the depths of darkness in which they have been dragged by slavery.’’∂∫ In 1864, Frances Norris reported from her Freedman’s School in Leavenworth, Kansas, that her students ‘‘seem literally to thirst for knowledge.’’∂Ω Born in Port Gibson, Mississippi, Susan Reid courageously returned to teach in Fayette, Mississippi, in 1866, later taking up a school in Natchez as she sustained her lifelong commitment to the antislavery ideal of racial equality. Engaged in the performance of abolition, these women traveled well beyond the geographic and ideological confines of white authority.∑≠ On arrival in the post-bellum South, Oberlin-trained Black female teachers often found racially discriminatory conditions. Blanche Harris complained from Natchez that ‘‘the distinction between the two classes of teachers, (white and colored) is so marked that it is the topic of conversation.’’∑∞ Sarah Stanley wrote of the insufficient funds appropriated for the maintenance of Black teachers when she arrived at a Louisville, Kentucky, school in 1866.∑≤ Elizabeth Evans wrote from Tougaloo, Mississippi, lamenting that the white missionary teachers assigned to her all the domestic tasks for their families, chores that ‘‘crippled for life’’ the woman of color who had undertaken this assignment before her.∑≥ Jennie Campton left an assignment in Maryland reporting, ‘‘the work was so unpleasant because of the opposition to a colored school,’’ but nonetheless sought a new placement where she could continue teaching. Even in Northern schools, opposition and danger lurked. Sarah Woodson came to her post at Ohio’s all-Black Wilberforce after her predecessor succumbed to a nervous breakdown occasioned by the burning of the school’s buildings by an arsonist.∑∂ Drawing on both the academic skills and the social capacities polished at Oberlin, these women were prepared for the hard work of creating racial equality, for themselves and for their students. They accepted that their visibility in this work put them at risk, but, accustomed to public performance of abolition during their college years, they did not find such scrutiny unfamiliar. For some women, education of the race involved a family commitment. Frances Gee married fellow Oberlin College student John G. Mitchell, and followed him to Mississippi where he served as a professor at Alcorn. Josephine Miner accompanied her brother Lawrence to support him in his work at the Alta Vista, Texas, Agricultural and Mechanical Institute, where he eventually became president. Francis Williams Clark, the wife of antebellum Cincinnati Black leader Peter Humphries Clark, spent twenty years with him in their hometown, where he became principal of Gaines High School, the city’s first Black public high school. She thus fulfilled the commitment she had articulated in the title of her 1853 Oberlin commencement essay, ‘‘The Responsibilities of

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Talent.’’ After her marriage to Jordan Winston Early, a Methodist preacher, Sarah Woodson took up schools wherever his ministerial assignment placed the family, including Memphis and Nashville. For these women, marriage did not mean enclosure within a private domestic sphere. Rather, it changed only the context in which they pursued civic participation.∑∑ Among those whose unions broadened the basis for civic participation was Caroline Wall Langston’s classmate Amanda Thomas. Married in 1856 to Caroline’s brother, O. S. B. Wall, she sought Southern placement in the first stages of Reconstruction as a part of a family undertaking. Her husband had, with his brother-in-law John Mercer Langston, promoted the cause of Black men throughout the war years, serving together as recruiters, first for the Massachusetts 54th and 55th, and later for Ohio’s own Black regiments. In 1865, Captain Wall was posted to Charleston, South Carolina, as an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau.∑∏ Amanda Thomas Wall negotiated her own service with the American Missionary Association (A.M.A.) to become, alongside her longtime friend and classmate Louisa Alexander, among the first African American women to teach at what would become the Avery Institute, Charleston’s preeminent school for students of color. Yet Amanda Thomas Wall and Louisa Alexander also struggled against a prejudice that denigrated the efforts of African American teachers. Although their supervisor, South Carolinian Francis Cardozo, himself the child of a Black woman and her wealthy white companion, claimed to be free of any bias against color, he struck deeply at their sense of mission when he articulated his plans to exclude Southern teachers from the educational efforts he oversaw. As he explained, he believed that, in principle, ‘‘Northern Teachers are more competent than Southern ones.’’ Since few white Southern women would seek to work with freedpeople, Wall and Alexander, Southerners by birth, took his policy as a racial attack. Cardozo would later come to view the two as ‘‘ladies’’ with ‘‘experience and discipline’’ who were successful in his classrooms, thanking the New York officers of the A.M.A. for ‘‘the gentlemanly manner in which you have corrected the error concerning Mrs. Wall and Miss Alexander.’’ Ironically, Cardozo himself faced the close scrutiny of Samuel Hunt, the A.M.A. Superintendent of Schools, who questioned the suitability and moral fitness of most African Americans in the organization. Amanda Thomas Wall was forced to write insistently to Hunt, pointedly asking for the same salary ‘‘as other Northern teachers,’’ explaining that ‘‘I wish to do all the good I can among these [illegible] Freed people but . . . I do not think gratuitous teaching is required of me or to accept less than others get who do precisely the same work.’’ Louisa Alexander also had additional opportunities to insist on the dignity, strength, and capacity of free African American womanhood. When

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leaving Charleston for a visit North in May 1866, she refused to take the shipping line that usually transported Charleston’s missionary teachers, on which she would have been required, as a person of color, to book her passage in steerage. Instead, she traveled on a first-class railroad ticket. For both Wall and Alexander, respect, respectability, and participation in the civic work on behalf of racial uplift were integral components of their Black womanhood.∑π For African American women schooled in Oberlin’s precepts of equality and elevation, performing abolition continued long after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. The emancipation they sought to enact required a definition of Black womanhood that transcended both presumptions of racial difference and confining notions of female subordination. In their efforts to end the oppression of ‘‘public sentiment,’’ these women acted to reformulate new understandings of their appropriate ‘‘sphere’’ of action. They forged their own ideal of propriety, agency, and service. Their activism took them into what historians have often marked as the realm of the ‘‘public.’’ As students, they sought visibility and recognition for their academic achievements; leaving Oberlin, they engaged in a range of efforts in support of racial and educational uplift that continued to place them under public scrutiny. They created new spaces for social engagement, and energetically used them to pursue racial equality. In so doing, they made themselves known to a broader world. Deploying a vision of self-defining Black womanhood that came from their families, their communities, and their alma mater, they stood for equality, respectability, and control over their own lives. Their concept of an engaged African American female was essential to their work in promoting racial equality; by their presence, they challenged racial subordination. And such challenges were most successful when publicly noticed. How better could they participate in the reshaping of public sentiment? This study of Oberlin’s antebellum African American women brings to light their activism and their civic participation; it places them in the forefront of efforts to define norms for free Black women in the nineteenth century. For these women, the practice of emancipation was embedded in their families and their communities, the very social institutions that, at the same time, propelled them into public roles. Oberlin’s antebellum female students of color performed abolition in all aspects of their lives. And, like the leading women of color elsewhere, they acted intentionally on the broadest possible stage. To demonstrate their virtue, they accepted public scrutiny of their private lives; to accomplish the work of emancipation, they participated in civic communities of all kinds—local and national. They employed a variety of modes by which to express themselves and carry on their work: they wrote, spoke, raised money, taught, and lived lives of respectability. As gendered and racialized

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actors, they undertook a ‘‘practical abolitionism’’ that eschewed sectarianism, sexual subordination, and racial injustice. They took their quest for equality into a realm which was at once both public and private, transgressing the constraints of both gender and race in nineteenth-century American society.

Notes I am indebted to the assistance of Marlene D. Merrill for her pioneering work on Oberlin’s early African American students, including her critical work in Ellen N. Lawson and Marlene Merrill, ‘‘The Antebellum ‘Talented Thousandth’: Black College Students at Oberlin Before the Civil War,’’ The Journal of Negro Education 52 (Spring 1983): 142– 55, and Ellen NicKenzie Lawson with Marlene D. Merrill, The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984). I am particularly grateful for her careful reading of the earlier draft of this work. I also thank the staff of the Oberlin College Archives (hereafter OCA), especially Archivist Roland M. Baumann, and including Tammy Martin, Melissa Gottwald, and Ken Grossi. My students in Oberlin College History 266 in Spring 2002 provided special inspiration, and many also deserve thanks for the relevant documents they located. Pam Brooks, my colleague at Oberlin, helped me clarify my thoughts. Gary Kornblith has been a careful and thoughtful reader. I also thank Kathryn Kish Sklar for her invitation to pursue this project and her insightful reading of my draft; without her, these thoughts would have remained simply inchoate. 1. File of Emma V. Brown, Ellen Lawson, and Marlene D. Merrill Papers, OCA, Record Group 30/157; the collection is cited hereafter as LM Papers. The quotation is from photocopy of an undated letter to Emily Howland, in the Howland Papers, Cornell University Libraries, Ithaca, New York. 2. Scholarship placing the work of free women of color within their Northern abolitionist communities includes: Jane Pease and William Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (New York: Atheneum, 1974), and, more recently, James Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Recovery and explorations of their rhetoric include the pioneering work of Gerda Lerner in her pathbreaking Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); Marilyn Richardson, ed., Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). 3. See, for example, James Horton, ‘‘Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks,’’ Feminist Studies 12 (1986): 51–76, for a strong statement on how domesticity ‘‘trapped’’ Black women (p. 64). See also Anne Boylan, ‘‘Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American Women in New York and Boston, 1820–1840’’ in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Shirley Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860

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(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), also highlights constraints, noting, ‘‘women were expected to participate within the confines of women’s ‘sphere’ ’’ (p. 3), and ‘‘adopting many of the values of white society’’ (p. 4), while at the same time recognizing that some Black women activists did take on public roles. Nonetheless, she sees such women as destabilizing the abolitionist community by their implicit, and sometimes explicit, demands for gender equality. 4. This revision began with Kathryn Kish Sklar’s Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), which analyzed the contradictions between Beecher’s own life and the ideology she promoted. Among the more recent works published, I have been much influenced by Mary Kelley, ‘‘Beyond the Boundaries,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 73–78, in my thinking about the ways in which Oberlin African American women both reshaped and transcended notions of ‘‘True Womanhood,’’ first explored by Barbara Welter, ‘‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,’’ American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151–74. 5. I have used here the records for sixty-two women of color who enrolled at Oberlin between 1837 and 1865 either in the Ladies (or Literary) course or in the Baccalaureate program. The names I have traced either appear in the LM Papers, or on the so-called Cowles List, an unofficial record of African American students compiled in 1862 by Professor Henry Cowles. The later source, more formally known as ‘‘Catalogue and Record of Colored Students in Oberlin, 1835 to 1862,’’ is found in Record Group 5/4/3, ‘‘Minority Student Records,’’ OCA, or on the OCA website at http://www.oberlin.edu/ archive/holdings/finding/RG5/SG4/S3/catalogue.html. Some of the materials in the LM Papers have been published in Lawson with Merrill, The Three Sarahs. I also use Former Student Files, OCA, as noted for various individuals. Occasionally, I also refer to the records of some of the ninety-six additional women of color who enrolled in the Preparatory Department but did not continue their education at the collegiate level. Of the sixty-two women who pursued collegiate level study at Oberlin, previous residence and/or family origin could be determined for fifty-five: Family Origins: Southern Tennessee Georgia Kentucky Mississippi North Carolina Virginia Washington, D.C. Subtotal: Family Origins: Non-South Africa Cincinnati Other Ohio Indiana Maine

1 1 7 4 9 5 3 30 1 3 2 1 1

Enacting Emancipation Michigan New York Pennsylvania Subtotal:

3 1 1 13

Family Residence Before Arrival at Oberlin (Earlier Origins Missing) Cincinnati Columbus Chillicothe Zanesville Philadelphia Pittsburgh Other Pennsylvania Subtotal:

6 1 1 1 1 1 1 12

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6. Among the most recent works to note the absence of women in the discourse of emancipation is Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); see especially pp. 6–7 for Rael’s recognition of this omission. 7. I draw here primarily on Robert Samuel Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College: From Its Foundation Through the Civil War, 2 vols. (Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1943), Volume I, Chapters 9–11. See also Frances Hosford, Father Shipherd’s Magna Charta (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1937), and Carol Lasser, ed., Educating Men and Women Together (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). For more on the Great Awakening, see Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1933), especially for the connections between religion and antislavery. Note that, although men and women attended the same advanced courses, women were not welcome to pursue the baccalaureate degree course until 1837. 8. See Fletcher, Volume I, Chapters 12–14. 9. Interestingly, Fletcher, writing in the 1940s, chose to frame the decision to enroll African Americans as an institutional commitment to academic freedom and faculty governance. For a different interpretation, one that instead foregrounds race, see James Horton, ‘‘Black Education at Oberlin: A Controversial Commitment,’’ Journal of Negro Education 54 (Autumn 1985): 477–99. 10. Constitution of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society, OCA, Record Group 16/5/3. 11. On the implications of radical racial equality, see Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 12. Constitution of Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society, emphasis added. 13. File of Harriet Hunter, LM Papers, including transcript of letter from A. L. Barber to ‘‘Brother Burrill,’’ Cincinnati, November 28, 1835. 14. Rebecca Morgan, Former Student File, OCA. Interestingly, neither Morgan nor

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Hunter was identified by Henry Cowles on his list of Black students. As Lawson and Merrill suggest, this may have occurred because both were probably of very light complexion. 15. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 242; Quarles also notes that Frederick Douglass carried with him on his last visit to John Brown just before the raid a letter with $25 enclosed from Mrs. J. N. Gloucester, presumably the girls’ mother. Quarles, 238. 16. Quarles, 241; Sarah Woodson, LM Papers, including transcription of a letter from B. W. Dwight to Oberlin, Brooklyn, January 8, 1856. 17. On Woodson, see also Quarles, 6, 81, 87, 101, 108; Philip Foner and George Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840–1865, Volume I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 106, 108, 110, 112, 116, 117, 121; and Three Sarahs, 150–51. 18. Quarles, 60. See also ‘‘New Historical Marker at Tusculum,’’ http://www.tusculum .edu/pr/releases/2002/02/marker.html (16 November 2002), for more information on John Gloucester. 19. Fletcher, II: 529. 20. Catherine Younger File, LM Papers. 21. Frances Norris File, LM Papers. 22. Sarah Stanley File, LM Papers. See also Three Sarahs, 48. 23. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), provides an important framework for understanding the work of women of both races in the Midwest, and contributes to the understanding of antislavery organization for both men and women. 24. See Marlene D. Merrill, ‘‘Sarah Margru Kinson: An Amistad Captive Comes to Oberlin,’’ lecture before the Oberlin Historical and Improvement Organization, April 8, 1998, available at http://www.oberlin.edu/EOG/Kinson/Kinson.html (16 November 2002). 25. Edmondson File, LM Papers. For their background, see John H. Painter, ‘‘The Fugitives of the Pearl,’’ Journal of Negro History 1 (1916): 243–64. Correspondence by and about the Edmondsons and their Oberlin sojourn is available at ‘‘How Did Oberlin Women Students Draw on Their College Experience to Participate in Antebellum Social Movements, 1831–1861,’’ http://womhist.binghamton.edu/oberlin/doc9.htm (16 November 2002). 26. Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society, Record Book, 1835–1857, OCA Record Group 31/6. I am grateful to Tammy Martin, assistant to the Archivist, OCA, who supplied female enrollment figures for 1852–53. 27. Lucy Stanton File, LM Papers; see also Record Book of the Ladies Literary Society, 1846–1850, Record Group 19/3/4, OCA, entries for August 18, 1847; March 29, 1848; May 24, 1848; September 13, 1848; September 20, 1848; October 3, 1849; May 29, 1850; July 1, 1850 [for her election to the Presidency]; and elsewhere. 28. Marianne Parker Dascomb, the first principal of the Ladies Department and a longtime member of the Ladies Board, studied with Zilpah Grant in Ipswich, as did Alice Welch Cowles, also a principal of the Ladies Department and a member of the Ladies Board; See Fletcher, I: 128. For a perspective on early female academies, see Barbara

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Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 14–21. Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s quotation is taken from p. 66 of the unpublished memoirs of Antoinette Brown Blackwell, compiled by Sarah Gilson into a manuscript available in the Blackwell Collection of the Schlesinger Library; it also appears in Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (Old Westbury: The Feminist Press, 1983), 28. 29. Ladies Board, Record of Proceedings. 1851–1862, Women’s Department, OCA, RG 42, July 21, 1851. Part of these records also appear in ‘‘How Did Oberlin Women Students Draw on Their College Experience to Participate in Antebellum Social Movements, 1831–1861,’’ http://womhist.binghamton.edu/oberlin (15 January 2003); Josephine and Mary Ann’s father, William, was evidently prominent in the Prince Hall Masons in the state of Ohio, serving during the 1850s as a grand master. See ‘‘Lodge History,’’ http:// www.geocities.com/stmarks1852/lodgehistory.html (16 November 2002), and Charles H. Wesley, The History of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of Ohio, 1849–1960 (Wilberforce, OH: Central State College Press, 1961), 31, 38, 40. 30. Ladies Board, August 21, 1851. 31. Ladies Board, July 16, 1852. Note that although all five students were African American, none were so identified in this entry. 32. Ladies Board, June 4, 1853. 33. Ladies Board, July 15, 1854. 34. African American women appeared in thirteen separate cases involving fifteen different students, with twenty-five separate appearances. White women produced twenty cases, involving twenty-one separate students in twenty-five distinct appearances before the Ladies Board. See Ladies Board, entries between July 21, 1851, and July 15, 1854. Not all entries address disciplinary procedures, but all entries addressing student misbehavior were included in this calculation. 35. On prepolitical rebellion, see Eric Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press 1959). The case of Oberlin student Mary Edmonia Lewis offers another example of rebellion that might be interpreted as evidence of incipient racial consciousness. Lewis, a student at Oberlin between 1859 and 1863, was accused of poisoning several white female students, perhaps in response to her perception of their racist behavior toward her. At a trial for her alleged misdeed, Lewis was defended by John Mercer Langston, the prominent Black lawyer. Lewis left Oberlin to become a wellknown sculptor, making her career in Italy. For more on this case, see Geoffrey Blodgett, ‘‘John Mercer Langston and the Case of Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862,’’ Journal of Negro History 52 (July 1968): 201–18. 36. Ladies Board, August 18, 1851. 37. I am arguing here that, in a sense, participation in higher education brought African American women into a world that was neither ‘‘public’’ nor ‘‘private,’’ but in many ways more equivalent to the Habermasian notion of the realm of civic participation that is neither state nor society. I have explored the relevance of the notion of the civic sphere to white female abolitionists in an unpublished paper, ‘‘Abolitionist Appeals to Women: Gender and Rhetoric in the Early Writings of James Thome and Angelina Grimké,’’ presented at Annual Meeting of Society for Historians of the Early American Republic,

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Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, July 17, 1998, as well as in ‘‘Beyond Separate Spheres: The Power of Public Opinion,’’ Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring 2001): 116–23. 38. The background of the Wall family is well documented in William E. Bigglestone, They Stopped in Oberlin (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1981), 207–11. Ladies Board, June 4, 1853, and March 4, 1854. 39. For the story of the Langstons’ arrival, see John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capital (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1894), 156–58. 40. Randolph Runyon, Delia Webster and the Underground Railroad (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). 41. Darnes File, LM Papers; also Three Sarahs, 203–208. 42. Darnes File, LM Papers and Three Sarahs, 284. 43. See Foner and Walker, eds., Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, especially 307, 313–14, 318, 340 and 341. 44. Files of Mahala McGuire and Sarah Kinson, LM Papers; for the context in which they worked, see Clara Merritt DeBoer, Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists in the American Missionary Association, 1839–1861 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994). 45. Files of Rebecca Elliot, Ann Hazle, and Ophelia Nesbit, LM Papers. 46. See Clara Merritt DeBoer, His Truth Is Marching On: African Americans Who Taught the Freedmen for the American Missionary Association, 1861–1877 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995). See also Ronald Butchart, ‘‘Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861–1917,’’ History of Education Quarterly 42 (Summer 2002): 1–17. Interestingly, Butchart argues that involvement in the work of educating freedpeople was a reflection most importantly of the evangelical mission of the two schools he studies. But at Oberlin, as I have noted above, evangelical Christianity and the commitment to racial equality were inseparable in the years before and during the Civil War. 47. Alston File, LM Papers, including copy of letter in AMA collection, Mary Alston to AMA, May 17, 1864. 48. Clara Duncan’s letter has been misfiled in the LM Papers in the file of Clara Freeman, who also taught in the South. The file includes a copy of her letter in the AMA Archives, Clara Duncan to George Whipple, April 1865. 49. Frances Norris File, LM Papers including photocopy of letter in AMA collection, Josephine Norris to H. Cowles, December 18, 1864. 50. Susan Reid File, in LM Papers. 51. Three Sarahs, 235. 52. Three Sarahs, 126. 53. Elizabeth Evans File, LM Papers, including photocopy of letter in AMA collection, E. M. Evans to E. M. Cravath, Tougaloo, Mississippi, December 8, 1873. 54. Three Sarahs, 15. 55. Files of Frances Gee, Josephine Minor, Frances Williams, and Sarah Woodson, LM Papers. On Woodson, see also Three Sarahs, 159–60. 56. Bigglestone, They Stopped in Oberlin, 206–10. 57. On Cardozo, see Joe Richardson, ‘‘Francis L. Cardozo: Black Educator During

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Reconstruction,’’ Journal of Negro Education 48 (Winter 1979): 73–83. Richardson believes Hunt showed an overall ‘‘lack of respect for Blacks.’’ See esp. p. 76 and note 19. For the controversy caused by Cardozo’s ambiguous attitude toward African American Southern women teachers, see ‘‘Letters concerning Louisa Alexander’s Pursuit of a Teaching Position,’’ in ‘‘How Did Oberlin Women Students Draw on Their College Experience to Participate in Antebellum Social Movements, 1831–1861,’’ http://womhist.bingham ton.edu/oberlin/doc12.htm (16 November 2002). Cardozo’s quotation appears in this collection in the letter Reverend Francis L. Cardozo to Samuel Hunt, 1865. See also the Amanda Wall File, LM Papers, for a photocopy from the AMA Archives of her letter to Samuel Hunt, January 5, 1866. Information about the problems with Alexander’s travel appears in Clara Merritt DeBoer, ‘‘The Role of Afro-Americans in the Origin and Work of the American Missionary Association: 1839–1877.’’ Ph.D. Dissertation, Rutgers University, 1973, II: 478.

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At the Boundaries of Abolitionism, Feminism, and Black Nationalism: The Activism of Mary Ann Shadd Cary jane rhodes

The nineteenth-century African American journalist, lawyer, educator, and reformer Mary Ann Shadd Cary offers a complex model of female radicalism that constantly transgressed the boundaries between race, gender, class, and national identity. She played an active role in the intersecting movements to abolish slavery, elevate the status of women, and build an incipient black nationalism. But her social and political labors did not follow a simple trajectory. It is impossible to know precisely what structured Shadd Cary’s engagement with these political projects, as she left few records that offer insight into her interior life. But it is not difficult to surmise that the quest for black liberation—freedom from slavery and its debilitating legacy—dominated every fabric of her political and personal being. She was powerfully ambitious, extremely capable, and driven by a vision of a world in which persons of African descent could live and prosper. As a bright, strong-willed individual who made enormous personal sacrifices for this cause, she also felt confident that she should be a direct, active, and visible participant in these movements. It was this aspiration that placed Shadd Cary at odds with the people she most loved. Instead of finding support and endorsement of her efforts, at times she was criticized and sanctioned for her selfless devotion to social change. For Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s antislavery activism laid bare the delicate fractures in free African American communities: the tensions over patriarchy, class posi-

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tion, color, and status. At the height of her activism in Canada West, she was demonized by black and white male abolitionists who were both threatened and angered by her unwillingness to conform to gendered expectations. The more political influence she attained, the more she was constructed as deviant and wicked. As she gained experience and maturity, Shadd Cary became more strategic, allowing her male counterparts to believe she had no desire to usurp their fragile power. This training in the heart of black abolitionism provided a fertile ground for her emergence as a feminist. Unlike Charlotte Forten, for example, Shadd Cary would wait until after the Civil War to directly channel her energies into the struggle for women’s rights. Activism was Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s birthright. She was born in 1823 in Wilmington, Delaware, to a family of freeborn African Americans. Her father, Abraham Shadd, was the descendant of a free black woman and a German soldier who started a family of entrepreneurs on the eve of the American Revolution. He benefited from having a skilled trade and modest property, as well as fair skin, in a slave state that severely restricted the lives of free blacks. In 1837, one black abolitionist described whites in Delaware as harboring ‘‘an extensive and moral fear of the free colored people,’’ which translated into harsh black codes and other sanctions. Mary Ann’s father was deeply involved in the black convention movement of the 1830s and 1840s and was a leader in the opposition to the American Colonization Society and their agenda to repatriate free blacks back to Africa. When Mary Ann was ten, the family moved across the Mason-Dixon line to West Chester, Pennsylvania, where there were better educational opportunities for black children and some modest relief from racial repression and discrimination.∞ Pennsylvania was a center of antislavery activism, and Abraham Shadd frequently represented West Chester at abolitionist meetings and conventions. The Shadd home harbored escaped slaves as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and black and white abolitionists met there frequently. Mary Ann, the eldest of twelve children, was educated by Quakers and socialized in a household that placed public service and the abolition of slavery in the forefront of family life. The Shadds’ proximity to Philadelphia also gave Mary Ann access to the institutions of that city’s black elite, including churches, benevolent associations, and learned societies. We know little about Mary Ann’s mother, Harriet Parnell Shadd, or about the day-to-day activities of the Shadd household. But Mary Ann’s early fervent commitment to better the conditions of black people suggests she was profoundly influenced and inspired by her father’s political work.≤ At the same time, Mary Ann was exposed to the contradictory assumptions and ideals about gender roles. Free black women of the antebellum era were

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encouraged to serve the antislavery movement, and to devote their energies to racial improvement. But they were also expected to conform to Victorian ideals of womanhood and the notion that women’s most important job was to establish high morals and virtue through domestic activities, particularly childrearing. As one scholar notes, ‘‘Rather than achieving fulfillment in public life African American women, like their white counterparts, were expected to find compensation in the important familial tasks entrusted to them.’’ Black women entered the public sphere for paid employment as well as community service, but an underlying presumption was that they not usurp black male authority and privilege. Black leaders like David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet linked black liberation to an assertion of black masculinity. Promoting the notion of black women as the ‘‘weaker sex’’ and limiting their sphere of opportunity were common strategies for men who endured the daily assaults of racial discrimination while living in a patriarchal society. These tenets proved to be intractable for a young African American woman who had aspirations of serving—and leading—her people.≥ In her late teens, Mary Ann embarked on a career as an educator—one of the only acceptable professional activities for antebellum women. She was seventeen or eighteen years old when she returned to Wilmington, Delaware, to open a school for black children, undoubtedly motivated by her family’s struggle to educate their children in a state where such opportunities were scant, particularly for girls. The decision to become a traveling teacher also relieved her from the responsibilities of caring for her eleven younger siblings. Throughout the 1840s, she taught black children in often impoverished circumstances, in Wilmington; Norristown, Pennsylvania; Trenton, New Jersey; and later in New York City. Free blacks in the North relied on churches, self-help groups, and white philanthropists to sustain the small network of segregated schools. Teachers were in short supply, their salaries meager, and the facilities in which they worked primitive. Many communities resorted to nearly heroic efforts to establish schools that offered at least a rudimentary education; for many free blacks, schooling occurred at home or in infrequent gatherings. Thus, Mary Ann Shadd was part of the ranks of intrepid educators who made a crucial difference in the life chances of African American children. We know little about her activities during these years, but by the end of the decade she had developed into a seasoned teacher with considerable experience in free black communities along the northeastern corridor. During this time, she established clear opinions about the best strategies for racial progress and she was poised to make these public.∂ In January 1849 Mary Ann Shadd inserted her voice into the wide-ranging conversation on the best ways to address black subjugation and to promote

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self-improvement. Her views appeared in a letter to Frederick Douglass’s newspaper the North Star, in which she outlined solutions to the ‘‘wretched conditions’’ of the free blacks among whom she worked. Her ideas blended black nationalist and abolitionist ideologies that sought to define a political framework. On the one hand, she argued, black Americans needed to lessen their economic dependency on whites and to forge independent businesses and farms. On the other hand, she privileged Western education and knowledge as essential to racial progress: ‘‘What intellectually we most need, and the absence of which we most feel, is the knowledge of the white man,’’ she maintained. In this early treatise, Shadd articulated a classic racial uplift argument, which placed the burden of African Americans’ improvement on their own shoulders. African Americans would never gain the rights of citizenship until they possessed the knowledge and skills of the dominant culture and behaved according to Victorian mores, she believed.∑ The most controversial aspect of this letter came in her powerful critique of black religious leaders, whom she considered to be the main obstacle to such progress. They were ‘‘a corrupt clergy among us, sapping our every means, inculcating ignorance as duty, superstition as true religion.’’ Shadd was equally critical of African Americans’ intense involvement in denominations that encouraged a doctrine of submission, and that focused on the trappings of organized religion. In her view, such churches obscured clear thinking and diminished blacks’ aspirations. Shadd embraced Christian spirituality, but opposed churches that also functioned as educational institutions, particularly those run by uneducated folk ministers. She was, perhaps unwittingly, launching a class-based critique in which she argued that the masses of poor and uneducated blacks needed to look to the educated black elite as examples. These positions, while not uncommon among black writers, nevertheless placed her in opposition to an established black leadership that was deeply entrenched in the church.∏ Mary Ann Shadd was not satisfied with sending a letter to the North Star, however. A month or so later, she expanded her theories in a twelve-page pamphlet titled Hints to the Colored People of the North. With this first venture into publishing, she joined in the practice of using print culture to disseminate political ideologies and to build an imagined community of black intellectuals and activists. David Walker’s pamphlet Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles (1829) is often recognized as a paradigmatic black nationalist tract that called for people of color to rise up and destroy their oppressors. Similarly, the nation’s first black-owned newspaper, Freedom’s Journal (1827– 1830), was founded as a platform against slavery and as a crucial institution for the sustenance of black communities. In the newspaper’s inaugural issue,

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editors Samuel Cornish and John Russworm declared, ‘‘Too long have others spoken for us,’’ as they asserted the importance of print communication for black American autonomy and self-sufficiency. An independent pamphlet meant that Shadd could issue her ideas freely without the interference of a newspaper editor or other gatekeeper, if anyone cared to read it. Unfortunately, no extant copy of the pamphlet exists, so we must rely on excerpts published in the North Star with the knowledge that its overall texture may not have been adequately represented. The sections reproduced in the newspaper revealed a strong-willed—what some considered brash— overview of the status of northern blacks. This was Shadd’s first public proclamation of her identity as an activist: ‘‘My destiny is that of my people, it is a duty to myself, setting aside the much-ridiculed maxim that ‘charity begins at home,’ to expose every weakness, to exclaim against every custom that helps prolong our day of depression,’’ she wrote. This austere manifesto picked up where her letter to the editor left off—criticizing the leisure activities and cultural expressions in which many blacks found relief from grinding oppression. ‘‘Negroes and Indians set more value on the outside of their heads than on what the inside needs,’’ she preached, denouncing the ‘‘processions, expensive entertainments, excursions, public dinners and suppers, a display of costly apparel, and churches on churches, to minister to our vanity.’’ This was a classic racial uplift position; that ostentatious behavior played into the hands of those looking for reasons to ridicule blacks and denigrate their character. In this text, she began to develop a self-help ideology that would become refined over the years. For all of her strong language, Mary Ann Shadd was no militant separatist; rather she believed that African Americans’ assimilation into white American society was the only solution to the crisis of race.π In each of these texts, Shadd presented herself as an authority on the black condition based on her ten years of observation and public service. She also included herself in the community of activists who failed to materially improve the lives of African Americans despite years of conventions and discussion. ‘‘We should do more and talk less,’’ she suggested. However, her unsympathetic appraisal and continued criticism of black clergy were not likely to attract a supportive following. Indeed, the pamphlet was ignored by its intended audience, the black elite. A friend of Shadd’s, writing to the North Star, noted that only a handful of the pamphlets had been sold, guessing that it contained ‘‘too much truth.’’ Although the document had been widely circulated in Philadelphia and environs, the city’s ‘‘able and distinguished writers’’ had not taken notice. Three years later, Martin Delany wrote that he had read Hints to the Colored People of the North, calling it ‘‘an excellent introduction to a great subject, fraught with so much interest.’’ Mary Ann may have re-

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ceived individual praise and criticism from this effort, but her pamphlet failed to bring her notice in the black public sphere. It is also likely that few deemed it important to pay attention to an unknown woman’s opinions. Indeed, the act of publishing one’s writing was both a physical and symbolic act—one that asserted a woman’s desire to leave the private sphere and to ‘‘meddle in the public affairs of men.’’ To publish a political pamphlet rather than sentimental fiction or poetry was a particularly bold step.∫ Other nineteenth-century black women writers had to negotiate such gender conventions as well. In the 1830s, Maria Stewart, who was mentored by David Walker, began speaking to black audiences, presenting a militant argument against slavery and white supremacy. She urged black men to exert their manhood as a strategy for black liberation, and, like Mary Ann Shadd, she was not afraid to identify black Americans’ faults. ‘‘But where is the man that distinguished himself in these modern days by acting wholly in the defense of African rights and liberty?’’ she asked. Although Stewart tacitly supported Victorian gender ideals, she also advocated for the right of women to take on a leadership role in reform movements. In another speech she declared, ‘‘Ye Daughters of Africa, awake! Arise! Distinguish yourselves. Show forth to the world that ye are endowed with noble and exalted faculties.’’ The fact that she articulated a public challenge to black men attracted considerable scorn; eventually she was forced to leave her home in Boston under a cloud of controversy and outrage.Ω In the antebellum era, few black women were willing to take such risks. Perhaps the best-known author and antislavery lecturer was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who began her lecturing career in the early 1850s. Harper wrote poetry and essays that presented a powerful critique of slavery within the confines of a genteel, womanly exterior. Most important, Harper took pains not to step on the toes of male contemporaries at the same time that she labored to have a public voice. Others, like Nancy Prince, who published her autobiography in 1850, expressed her political engagement through her domestic identities as wife and widow rather than through calls to action. Thus, Shadd was singular in her quest to engage in African American politics through a discourse that both asserted her authority and demanded change in the established leadership.∞≠ By the 1850s Shadd was teaching in New York City and making the rounds of abolitionist meetings. She decided to attend a meeting billed as a ‘‘Great North American Anti-Slavery Convention’’ in Toronto to be held in 1851, where the organizers, Henry Bibb and James Theodore Holly, hoped to promote the idea of black emigration to Canada as a legitimate strategy for black survival. This decision changed the course of her political and personal life for

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the next decade. African Americans had debated the merits of relocation in Canada since the early black conventions. At the first of these gatherings in Philadelphia in 1830, black leaders discussed the plight of two thousand blacks who fled rampant racism in Cincinnati to resettle in Canada West, now Ontario Province. The group concluded that the formation of black settlements in the British province was a reasonable alternative for free blacks facing violence and discrimination. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in September 1850, however, was the catalyst for a revitalized movement that advocated emigration as an abolitionist strategy and pragmatic solution for free black Americans.∞∞ The Fugitive Slave Law placed both escaped slaves and free blacks at risk of arrest and enslavement, with the full power of the government behind it. For many black Americans, the measure, part of the Compromise of 1850, signaled the extent to which proslavery forces influenced public policy and the national economy. A growing legion of blacks living in the North argued that life in the United States had grown intolerable, and that emigration to Canada, Africa, or the Caribbean was a logical step toward ameliorating their condition. Fugitive slaves had fled to Canada throughout the early nineteenth century, but now they were being joined by groups from Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and other northern locales as a northward exodus intensified. There is considerable debate over the exact numbers of blacks in Canada prior to the Civil War. Estimates suggest there were somewhere between five and ten thousand black American expatriates in Canada by 1850, and that number would swell to twenty thousand or more by the end of the decade.∞≤ It is likely that Mary Ann Shadd heard accounts of this migration at abolitionist meetings, from personal interactions, and through the pages of the abolitionist press. Abolitionists used the fugitive settlements in Canada as an example of the capacity of blacks to live as independent, productive citizens. For example, a representative of the American Missionary Association wrote a series of letters to abolitionist newspapers celebrating the success of the scattered black communities: ‘‘They are destined, in the country to which they have fled, to become . . . a wealthy, learned, influential, and highly civilized community,’’ he proclaimed. Such dispatches from Canada were effective propaganda to use against proslavery forces who argued that black Americans lacked the moral, intellectual, and spiritual character to function autonomously. Abolitionists presented life in these black enclaves as a material and symbolic act of resistance and encouraged black and white ministers, philanthropists, and educators to assist in this project. Such appeals proved irresistible to Shadd, whose own writing linked education and moral improvement to racial progress.∞≥

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Mary Ann and her father, Abraham, crossed the border to attend the convention on September 11, 1851, in St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto. Among the fifty-three delegates were blacks already settled in Canada, and others like Martin Delany, who was exploring radical ideas in the search for a black nationality. The president of the Convention, Henry Bibb, was a former slave and itinerate minister who fled with his wife to Canada, where they worked among the fugitive population. The meeting proclamations encouraged slaves and free blacks to emigrate to Canada, where there was available land and a government anxious to attract settlers in a nation where slavery was outlawed. After the convention, father and daughter attended a meeting across Lake Erie at Buffalo’s African Methodist Church, where the topic of Canadian emigration was again promoted. Mary Ann was elected secretary of the meeting, and her minutes were published in several antislavery newspapers. It is impossible to know of Shadd’s thoughts during this transformation—how long she had thought about such transnational politics, or how she entertained the possibility of relocating. Somehow, even though her father would return to Pennsylvania, she threw her lot in with the Canadian emigrationists, believing this was a viable solution to the seeming intractability of slavery in the United States.∞∂ This was a drastic and dramatic choice for an unmarried black women; at the age of twenty-eight she would be traveling far from home and living in an unknown community without the support or protection of her family. It was also a political risk. The emigrationists were on the fringe of the mainstream abolitionist movement. Many African American leaders denounced the idea of relocation—they considered it an abandonment of the cause. To willfully leave the United States capitulated to pro-slavery interests by giving up black Americans’ rightful claim of citizenship. In the forefront of this position was Frederick Douglass, who argued against emigration in the pages of his newspaper. ‘‘It is idle—worse than idle, ever to think of our expatriation, or removal. We are here, and here we are likely to be . . . this is our country,’’ he declared. Nevertheless, Mary Ann rationalized that she was working in the service of abolitionism by aiding the fugitive escaping slavery. It is also clear that she was enthusiastic about her personal prospects in this new venture.∞∑ Just a few days after the Toronto Convention, she enthusiastically wrote her younger brother Isaac, encouraging him to join her. ‘‘I have been here more than a week, and like Canada,’’ she said. ‘‘Do not feel prejudice and repeat if you were to come here or go west of this where shoemaking pays well and work at it and buy lands as fast as you made any money, you would do well.’’ A significant influence in her decision was Henry Bibb, who told her there was a desperate need for teachers to instruct the growing population of blacks.

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Although she had been offered a teaching position in Toronto, she chose instead to travel to the western edge of Canada West on the shores of the Detroit River, where there were several settlements of black expatriates. By late September she arrived in the town of Windsor, where the local residents beseeched her to open a school.∞∏ Windsor, just a stone’s throw across the border of the United States, was a popular stopping point for fugitive slaves. There were several hundred blacks living in crude conditions in this frontier community, with many existing in decaying barracks built during the War of 1812. Shadd likely arrived with great ambitions but meager resources and thus needed to find a way to support herself as quickly as possible. She announced that she was opening a school for black and white children if parents could pay one shilling a week. Although she discovered that most could not afford her fee, the Windsor school opened in one of the drafty barracks, and she began the search for funding while she lived on charitable contributions and money sent from home. She eventually won cautious support from the American Missionary Association (A.M.A), the largest organization ministering to the needs of fugitive slaves in Canada. She told the A.M.A.’s corresponding secretary, George Whipple, that Windsor was ‘‘the most destitute community of colored people’’ in Canada West, and suggested this was a locale where their support was badly needed. Shadd put to use her numerous antislavery contacts in the states, as well as the support of a local Wesleyan minister, and after months of negotiation the A.M.A. agreed to pay her $125 a year to maintain the school in Windsor, making her the Association’s only black missionary in Canada. This was a significant victory for Mary Ann, but her success in this regard generated considerable jealousies in this small, close-knit world.∞π Her correspondence with the American Missionary Association during this period offers rich insight into Shadd’s school and life in Canada’s black expatriate communities. Her school was ‘‘a very cold, open apartment, unfurnished and objectionable in every way,’’ she reported. But her students, ranging in age from four to thirty-three years old, were bright and anxious to learn. She clearly derived great satisfaction from instructing her students in reading, geography, and arithmetic, fulfilling her goal of preparing blacks to be fully functioning members of society. But her letters also revealed her sense of distress that some in the community begrudged Shadd her success.∞∫ In addition to running the Windsor school, Shadd became an active participant in local politics, taking increasingly controversial positions. In particular, she emerged as a vocal critic of the Refugee Home Society, an antislavery group that planned to build another black settlement on land near Windsor. The society launched an extensive fund-raising campaign to fund the settle-

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ment and various services to assist fugitive slaves, but its tactics came under scrutiny. In particular, some, including Shadd, disliked the manner in which whites in the United States were urged to contribute clothing, supplies, and money based on images of impoverished, desperate refugees unable to help themselves. This technique, derisively called a ‘‘begging system,’’ was effective but cast the black settlers in Canada as dependent on white help. Shadd, on the other hand, sought to encourage blacks to develop the skills for self-sufficiency and autonomy, rather than being clients of a welfare economy. She felt these representations of blacks in Canada were not only inaccurate, but also contradicted the efforts to make black life in Canada appear progressive and prosperous. These distinctions were discussed at meetings across Canada West and in the pages of the abolitionist press. Shadd’s position put her on the opposing side of her former mentor, Henry Bibb, who was a local representative of the Refugee Home Society. The discord between Shadd and Bibb was not only the result of the debate over begging; Shadd also believed that the Refugee Home Society endorsed racial separatism by establishing isolated settlements rather than encouraging newly arrived blacks to integrate themselves in the local fabric. Henry Bibb argued that ‘‘strangers in a foreign land, no matter of what country or color they may be, experience a greater degree of happiness in being associated with those who have come from the same region as themselves.’’ Bibb’s associate, James Theodore Holly, agreed, noting that while the goal of racial integration was desirable, ‘‘this will be done by the colored man himself, when in a state of freedom, after he becomes thoroughly educated,’’ and has lost all connections to slavery. This position ran counter to Shadd’s beliefs that blacks must participate in and benefit from the dominant culture if they were to become respected parts of society. And she made her opinions known publicly.∞Ω Shadd also suspected that Bibb and his wife were envious of her appointment by the A.M.A. since they, too, were struggling to maintain a school in nearby Sandwich with meager resources. By the spring of 1852, Henry Bibb and other abolitionist figures were clearly disturbed by Shadd’s independence and her refusal to yield to the more established male leadership. But she faced a formidable opponent because Bibb was also the publisher of the Voice of the Fugitive, Canada’s only black-controlled newspaper. The Voice, started in January 1851, was the only print medium for blacks in Canada, and it was read widely on both sides of the border. Articles and meeting reports from the Voice were regularly reprinted in The Liberator, North Star, and other influential abolitionist newspapers in the States. As the primary forum for discussion of antislavery politics, emigration, and black community life from a Canadian perspective, the publication easily controlled how people and issues

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would be framed. When Shadd first arrived in Windsor, the newspaper fashioned her in complimentary terms, referring to her on varying occasions as ‘‘a lady of high literary attainments,’’ an ‘‘accomplished and talented authoress,’’ and ‘‘a worthy colored lady.’’ But, this trend shifted as the enmity toward her accelerated.≤≠ Undaunted, she once again took on the challenge of creating her own vehicle for public expression. Lacking access to the Voice of the Fugitive, she committed yet another act of defiance by writing and publishing a pamphlet on black emigration. The forty-four-page tract, published in June 1852, bore an ambitious title: A Plea for Emigration Or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect, with Suggestions Respecting Mexico, W. Indies and Vancouver’s Island, for the Information of Colored Emigrants. It was a comprehensive overview of the economic, political, and social dimensions about life in Canada West, with the goal of recruiting African Americans to the emigration project. Notes of Canada West functioned as both propaganda and guidebook, political treatise and journalism. Shadd combined an exhaustive inventory of data about climate, agriculture, land distribution, and other facts with her positions on race relations in Canada and the preferred strategies for black community building.≤∞ Notes of Canada West was, foremost, a recruitment tool designed to appeal to black Americans contemplating an escape from the exigencies of their lives in the United States. For example, Shadd reported that ‘‘land is cheap, business increasing, with the steady increase of population, no lack of employment at fair prices, and no complexional or other qualifications in existence.’’ She maintained that Canada’s climate was hospitable and healthy and that being a subject of Britain was preferable to American disfranchisement, and that African Americans could build an autonomous and prosperous community unimaginable in the States. Shadd was also intent on arguing that racism was rare or nonexistent in her adopted homeland. This was a clear exaggeration based largely on her observations of integrated institutions in Toronto and other urban areas, as well as on her own experiences interacting with benevolent whites. In fact, in the less-developed western region of Canada, blacks and whites often existed in segregated enclaves and attended separate schools and churches, with integrated contact limited to commerce and politics. But, in her view, this environment was far superior to the legally sanctioned racism endured by blacks in the northern United States, and this contrast underscored Shadd’s message. Through this text, she positioned herself as an interpreter of the black experience in Canada; she was a tourist and explorer, reporting on her findings in the pseudoscientific language of the nineteenth-century adventurer. Simultaneously, Mary Ann Shadd was also a settler; in the nine months

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since she arrived in Canada West she had become an established member of the community from which she spoke.≤≤ This dual positioning allowed Shadd to use Notes of Canada West as a vehicle through which to advance her own political stances, addressing the larger transnational network of abolitionists, as well as those living and working in Canada. To the former audience, she articulated an emigrationist ideology that called for African Americans to reconceptualize themselves as a mobile, race-based entity seeking a national identity. Emigrationists could be active agents in their liberation, literally using their feet to remove themselves from oppression. But black emigrationists were not to think of themselves as exiles, but rather as citizens within a new nation; the formula for their success required that they embraced a new identity as British subjects. This denunciation was both pragmatic and political; in doing so, Shadd repudiated the U.S. government, which kept her brethren in bondage, while recommending a viable solution to those few black Americans who could escape. She also hoped to demonstrate how a determined, well-organized abolitionism launched from Canada could be an effective tool in the struggle against slavery. Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass who opposed emigration and clung to their claim on the United States were naively waiting for ‘‘a powerful miracle for the overthrow of slavery.’’≤≥ For the Canadian audience, Shadd used the pamphlet to insert her voice into the continuing debate on the Refugee Home Society and the efficacy of segregated settlements for new arrivals from the United States. Part of her commentary included a criticism that the Refugee Home Society offered land only to former slaves, not to free black emigrants, revealing one source of the discord between Shadd and Bibb. The proponents of the Refugee Home Society argued that those escaping slavery had the greatest need, but in Notes of Canada West Shadd maintained that free blacks might also need philanthropic assistance. She strove to construct a unified racial identity among former slaves and free blacks, and at the same time may have been commenting on a class distinction that affected her personally. She sent copies of Notes of Canada West to the American Missionary Association, and to prominent antislavery organizations and periodicals in the states, but it received little attention. Only the Pennsylvania Freeman gave notice of her pamphlet, praising her efforts but not her advocacy of emigration.≤∂ Not surprisingly, Bibb did not respond kindly to the publication. He acknowledged Shadd’s work for the emigrationist cause in the Voice of the Fugitive, but made increasingly personal attacks against her in a series of articles. In editorials in the Voice Shadd was called ‘‘an insignificant scribbler’’ and the pamphlet was deemed an irrelevant publication that would have

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limited circulation and ‘‘could not effect much injury.’’ The attacks took on an even nastier tone as it was clear that Shadd had stepped beyond acceptable gender boundaries: ‘‘Miss Shadd has said and written many things which we think will add nothing to her credit as a lady,’’ said one editorial. Bibb claimed that Shadd was misleading Windsor’s residents by not disclosing her appointment by the A.M.A., and he insisted that her behavior suggested a failure of character. One of her supporters in Windsor decried the efforts to silence Shadd: ‘‘She has been very much abused here in public meetings and the columns of the ‘Voice of the Fugitive’ by the senior Editor of that paper,’’ wrote Rev. Alexander McArthur to the A.M.A. ‘‘He has frequently impeached her honesty and what is worse, questioned her virtue publicly.’’ This was a particularly odious punishment, as it hit at the core of antebellum black women’s vulnerability—public perceptions of their sexuality and morality. Shadd presented a contestable profile—she was unmarried, she frequented mixed gender or ‘‘promiscuous’’ gatherings, and she had the temerity to demand recognition for her opinions. Free black women were expected to exhibit the highest moral standards as a defense against mythologies of black promiscuity and the realities of rape, sexual harassment, and exploitation. Visible, activist black women had to be vigilant about the outward appearances of their work lest they attract scrutiny both inside and outside of their communities. For antebellum black women’s organizations, protecting themselves from allusions of impropriety became a part of their political culture.≤∑ These were hard lessons for the impetuous Shadd. In particular, she was gaining a deepening appreciation of the power of the press, and the influence of the Voice of the Fugitive. ‘‘What a vast amount of mischief a man like H. Bibb can do with an organ of his own to nod, insinuate and ‘fling’ away the reputations of others,’’ she complained. ‘‘I have not a paper of my own and must leave the result with God.’’ After months of recriminations and debates, Shadd lost the battle; Bibb and his supporters in the Refugee Home Society were able to convince the American Missionary Association to revoke her appointment. Without this financial support, she was forced to close the Windsor School. But, Shadd’s public activism on behalf of Windsor’s black community helped her build alliances with like-minded individuals. Among them was a black Congregational minister named Samuel Ringgold Ward, a fugitive slave who joined the exodus to Canada and was subsequently hired by the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. While touring Windsor, he attended the local meetings on the Refugee Home Society and agreed with Shadd that selfimposed segregation among blacks was not in their best interest.≤∏ Meanwhile, Shadd devised more sophisticated tactics for acquiring a public voice. She evolved an elaborate masking strategy in which she would organize

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a meeting, write the resolutions to be presented, and serve as secretary, but she would have a male associate serve as chair. In this way she was able to push ahead her political agenda without appearing to possess too much power, or to appropriate male authority. She used these methods to carry out her longterm goal—to start her own newspaper. Behind the scenes, Shadd and Ward began collaborating on the idea. They raised the necessary funds, found a printer, and published a prototype issue of the Provincial Freeman on March 24, 1853, the day after she closed her school. Finally, Shadd had a medium at her disposal; Ward was listed as editor and other male associates were named as the publication committee. Ward’s name lent credibility and influence to the fledgling newspaper, and Shadd hoped it would lure financial backing. Only one sentence under the masthead indicated her involvement: ‘‘Letters must be addressed, postpaid, to Mary A. Shadd, Windsor, Canada West.’’ She had learned a critical lesson about black women’s visibility; that to assume a title and take a position of prominence might undermine one’s activist work. Nevertheless, the job of writing, editing, and producing the newspaper were in Shadd’s hands, as Ward and most of the others associated with the paper lived hundreds of miles away. But Shadd had no money to continue publishing the Provincial Freeman, her dream of an integrated school in Windsor was dashed, and she was worn down by the internecine fighting in which she had played an active role. She spent the summer of 1853 back in the United States, resting, raising funds for the newspaper, and embarking on an ambitious lecture tour. She returned to the familiar environs of Philadelphia, where she gave a series of talks to antislavery audiences advocating black emigration to Canada. Shadd transformed the contents of Notes of Canada West into oratory, presenting her descriptions of black life across the 49th parallel in presentations that were both didactic and persuasive. These talks also provided an opportunity to sell subscriptions and gain support for her newspaper. She met and shared the stage with some of the region’s foremost black abolitionists, including William Still, Robert Purvis, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Perhaps the highlight of this tour was in August, when she joined her father, Abraham, to speak at a gathering to oppose African colonization in her hometown of West Chester. A reporter for the Pennsylvania Freeman offered a rare description and highlighted Shadd’s skill as a speaker: ‘‘She appears quite young, but has a fine spirit, a noble independence; and expresses herself with astonishing facility.’’ By the time she returned to Canada in the fall, she had acquired funds to get the Provincial Freeman under way, and newfound confidence in her ability to commandeer a place in the black public sphere.≤π Upon her return to Canada West, Shadd opted to move to Toronto, which

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offered a larger, more established black community, a prosperous business environment, and the headquarters of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society. Here she believed she would find the financial and personal resources to get the Provincial Freeman off the ground. Her success in raising money, soliciting subscribers, and establishing community support was facilitated, in part, by the sudden collapse of her rival’s newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive, which went out of business in early 1854. That March, the Freeman was being issued on a weekly basis. Initially, little changed in the public representations of the paper’s leadership, although she now held the title of Publishing Agent. Shadd never signed her editorials, although the writing style was clearly hers. Samuel Ringgold Ward, the Freeman’s nominal editor, was in England on an antislavery tour, and Rev. Alexander McArthur, the corresponding editor, had also left Canada for a post in Scotland earlier that year. This charade allowed Shadd to have a regular forum for her views on abolitionism, black emigration, and the social and economic status of Canada’s black population, temperance, and other reform issues without suffering the insults of those who felt women should not fill the editor’s chair. But Shadd’s false sense of security could not last forever. Despite her best efforts, the strategy of using Ward’s name as editor eventually unraveled. He had written little for the paper, and sent even less in monetary support. Everyone in Toronto’s small abolitionist community knew that Shadd was really at the paper’s helm. She abandoned her efforts at invisibility a month later when a letter to the editor praised the Freeman and the fact that ‘‘a colored man publishes such a paper.’’ She responded with a brief notice, stating that ‘‘we do not like the Mr. And Esq., by which we are so often addressed.’’ After that she began signing all of her letters and editorials with her full name. She also revealed a penchant for harsh, and occasionally callous, editorial criticism. In one issue, she told letter writers not to waste her time with ‘‘crabbed writing and higgledy-piggledy character of arrangement.’’ The financial status of the paper was precarious, at best, prompting Shadd to travel widely across Canada West to promote the Freeman. She spent much of the summer of 1854 making her way through the cities, towns, and hamlets where there were receptive audiences, exhorting them to buy subscriptions or advertisements, and to become investors. On many of these occasions, she traveled alone.≤∫ During this period, Mary Ann Shadd used the Freeman to gradually present arguments in favor of women’s rights. This became a hallmark of the paper’s identity. She rarely addressed the issue directly; rather, she published the work of other influential women writers including Frances E. W. Harper, Jane Grey Swisshelm, and Fanny Fern. The Freeman regularly carried reports of women’s rights conventions, and articles that advocated the importance of wom-

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en’s education and participation in business and politics. She was cautious not to personally identify herself with these views, but it was apparent to many readers that Shadd was the embodiment of these ideals—running her own business, circulating in public arenas, and promoting her own political ideology in the fashion of men like Frederick Douglass and Henry Bibb. The contrast between the Freeman and other African American newspapers was stark. Scholars have suggested that the antebellum black press was nearly uniform in its adherence to the Victorian cult of domesticity, creating an oppressive environment for black women’s expression. Others suggest this was a defensive stance taken by black male editors in an effort to improve the image of black women. Regardless of the motivation, the antebellum black press was a malecentered institution firmly entrenched in the doctrine of separate spheres. The content of Mary Ann Shadd’s newspaper was a radical departure from this tradition, by generating a discourse on the possibilities for women beyond domesticity.≤Ω The public revelation of Shadd’s identity prompted the kind of backlash that she feared. In the summer of 1854 she organized the Provincial Union, which was to promote abolitionist activities in Toronto and raise money for the Provincial Freeman. William P. Newsman, an influential black Baptist minister, was appointed to head the organization, while Shadd took on the task of organizing a women’s auxiliary. On its face, such action suggests that Shadd was careful to acknowledge publicly the expected gender divisions. She urged Toronto’s black women to hold teas, bazaars, and other fund-raising activities to benefit the paper. But the combination of Shadd’s often abrasive personality, and the radical departure from gender norms that she represented, meant that some of these women were not receptive to her overtures. In an editorial in the Freeman, she bitterly condemned them for hiding behind the cloak of propriety that allowed them to avoid the kinds of public responsibilities that Shadd so actively sought. If there is any one thing that tends to intensify one’s contempt for the muslin multitude, it is the nothingness the delicate creatures display when invited to aid in a work for the general good. You would be surprised at the pains they take to impress you with their ‘‘feebleness.’’ They ‘‘would’’ probably do something, but would not for the world ‘‘join with others.’’ Why? You ask. ‘‘Would have to associate with the circle. Goodness!’’ Must not think of helping without getting Mr. ———’s consent.≥≠

This painful diatribe revealed Shadd’s sense of isolation and frustration. She felt she did not have a community of women who shared with her a sense of urgency and purpose about engaging in the black public sphere. At least one of

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her sisters, Amelia Shadd, assisted with many of the day-to-day publishing responsibilities, but none of her writing from this period revealed close friendships or alliances with other women. Pushing the boundaries of gender conventions was a lonely enterprise. After more than a year of publishing the Provincial Freeman in Toronto, the results were mixed. Mary Ann Shadd had acquired the public medium that she craved. But the newspaper was in debt, she was exhausted by the endless travel to find new subscribers, and while she had supporters, many in Toronto’s black community were critical of her efforts. It became too difficult to maintain a public front of control while she perceived herself to be the object of disapproval. In early June 1855 Shadd announced she was giving up the editorship, which she assumed would be welcome news to her detractors. She wrote that ‘‘The ladies will be pleased’’ with her decision and she hoped they would work on behalf of a male editor ‘‘which they will not do while a colored female has the ugly duty to perform.’’ She installed Rev. Newman of the Provincial Union to the position of editor, although she clearly had no intention of relinquishing her control of the newspaper.≥∞ Shadd was also painfully aware of gender inequality and deeply resented that the actions she took on behalf of black people were judged inappropriate or unseemly. Why were men like Frederick Douglass and Samuel Ringgold Ward allowed to produce ‘‘a most necessary amount of puff’’ to promote their careers while she was required to remain in the shadows? The fundamental unfairness and irrationality of gender distinctions infuriated her, but perhaps also energized her for continued battles. She was acutely aware of her place in history, and believed she had taken the righteous path regardless of public opinion. Although she continued to condemn women’s complacency, she also hoped she had opened new doors of opportunity. ‘‘To colored women, we have a word—we have ‘broken the Editorial ice,’ whether willingly or not, for your class in America,’’ she said in a final editorial. Much of this farewell was dramatic hyperbole, however. Within a month, Shadd moved to Chatham, returning to the western region of Canada West where many in her family, including her parents and brother Isaac, settled. With the help of her brother, the Provincial Freeman was back in business by August 1855, and it continued until 1860, making it one of the longest running African American newspapers before the Civil War. After moving to Chatham, Shadd married a political ally, Thomas Cary, and bore two children before his untimely death.≥≤ Throughout her time in Canada, Mary Ann Shadd maintained a high profile, holding forth at Emigration Conventions, fighting abolitionists whom she found paternalistic or greedy, and always demanding that her black compatriots better themselves through education and industry. But, despite her

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public boosterism, Shadd’s relationship to her new homeland was always ambivalent. Racism and discrimination in Canada West worsened as the black population grew larger and more visible, making life in the northern haven increasingly intolerable. Shadd, like many of her contemporaries, even flirted with the possibility of emigrating to Africa. Although the Shadd family had established themselves as part of Canada’s pioneering black community, Mary Ann continued to harbor a desire to help shape black American politics. At the outbreak of the Civil War, she was unwilling to observe this transformative event from afar and she returned to the States to recruit troops for the Union Army. In the early days of Reconstruction, she chafed under the repressive environment she found in Canada and yearned to reap the benefits of her hard fought struggles in the United States. Eventually she settled in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a schoolteacher and principal, and earned a law degree from Howard University. During these years she attended meetings of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association, championed women’s voting rights and temperance, and attempted to organize the Colored Women’s Professional Franchise Association. But, it was her tenure as editor and publisher of the Provincial Freeman that accorded her the greatest chances for selfrepresentation.≥≥ Nevertheless, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, Mary Ann Shadd Cary looked back on her remarkable life with a combination of nostalgia and bitterness. She was proud of the role she played in the African American freedom struggles since the 1840s, and she sought to promote recognition and remembrance for herself and for the hard work of the antebellum years. But she was also deeply saddened by the events of the post-Reconstruction period, during which she witnessed the erosion of black civil rights and an increase in racially motivated violence. After decades of hard-won progress, she bemoaned, black Americans were ‘‘regarded as out of the national concern, not as a component part of the nation.’’ She was also deeply critical of the post–Civil War generation of black politicians, journalists, and entrepreneurs, who constituted a group of ‘‘innumerable muscular, lazy, ambitious unskilled young people.’’ To Shadd Cary, they lacked a sense of unity and purpose and seemed unable to combat the political and social barriers erected in their path. She complained, ‘‘The Negro alone of all American natives rejects unification as a social or other basis.’’ An even greater transgression was that they failed to learn from the examples of the past. She thought that ‘‘the young colored people disregard and ignore the presence and counsel of the old people,’’ including herself. Despite her illustrious past, Shadd Cary felt ignored by Afro-America and the annals of history. Her colleague and compatriot Frederick Douglass spent the last third

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of his life exhorting the nation not to forget the era of slavery and the trauma of the Civil War. In 1884, he said, ‘‘It is not well to forget the past. Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is . . . the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future, and by which we may make them more symmetrical.’’ Similarly, Shadd Cary sought remembrance, not only to establish her legacy, but for the future of black people. The mistakes and victories of abolitionism had to be understood before an effective civil rights movement could take hold at the close of the nineteenth century.≥∂ Although at the end of her life she complained about lack of recognition, her accomplishments did not go entirely unnoticed. Frederick Douglass praised her in 1856, noting, ‘‘We do not know her equal among the colored ladies of the United States,’’ and in the next century W. E. B. Du Bois celebrated her as a heroine in the cause of black liberation. But, such commentary would never satisfy Shadd’s desire to leave a more tangible legacy.≥∑ Notes 1. William Yates, ‘‘Slavery and Colored People in Delaware,’’ The Emancipator, 5 August 1837, reprinted in Delaware History 14 (April 1971): 205–216. 2. For a more extensive discussion on Shadd family history and Abraham Shadd’s activism, see Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 1–24. 3. Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 150–1; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, ‘‘Violence, Protest, and Identity: Black Manhood in Antebellum American,’’ in Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993), 93–5; also see discussion in Linda Perkins, ‘‘Black Women and Racial ‘Uplift’ Prior to Emancipation,’’ in Filomina Chioma Steady, ed., The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenckman Publishing, 1981). 4. The classic study on antebellum black education is Carter G. Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (1919; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968); also see Linda Perkins, ‘‘The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women,’’ Journal of Social Issues 39 (1983): 17–28. 5. North Star, 5 January 1849. 6. Ibid. 7. North Star, 23 March 1849. 8. North Star, 8 June 1849; Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 131; Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 125; also see James Oliver Horton, ‘‘Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks,’’ Feminist Studies 12 (Spring 1986): 481–92.

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9. Maria Stewart, ‘‘Address of the African Masonic Hall, Boston, February 27, 1833,’’ in Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, Presented to the First African Baptist Church and Society, of the City of Boston (Boston: Friends of Freedom and Virtue, 1835); Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1984), xii–xiv. 10. On Harper, see Shirley Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 112–3; and Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press, 1990); on Nancy Prince, see Sandra Gunning, ‘‘Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification,’’ American Quarterly 53 (March 2001): 32–69. 11. ‘‘The First Colored Convention,’’ Anglo-African Magazine, October 1859; Howard H. Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830–1861 (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 13–14. 12. Robin Winks discusses the problem of finding an accurate count of blacks in Canada West, in The Blacks in Canada (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 233– 40; Michael Wayne has provided a more contemporary analysis of census data, in ‘‘The Myth of the Fugitive Slave: The Black Population of Canada West on the Eve of the American Civil War: A Reassessment Based on the Manuscript Census of 1861,’’ Histoire Sociale/Social History 56 (November 1995): 465–85. 13. North Star, 23 February 1849. 14. On the convention, see Floyd J. Miller, The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787–1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 111–12; Shadd’s minutes appeared in The Christian Herald, September 1851, and in the Voice of the Fugitive, 29 January 1852. 15. North Star, 16 November 1849. 16. Mary Ann Shadd to Isaac Shadd, 16 September 1851, Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, Ontario Provincial Archives, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. 17. Mary Ann Shadd to George Whipple, 27 October 1851, American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans; on the A.M.A. see Clara Merritt DeBoer, Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists in the American Missionary Association, 1839–1861 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994). 18. Mary Ann Shadd to George Whipple, 27 November 1851 and 3 April 1852, American Missionary Association Archives. 19. Bibb quote from Voice of the Fugitive, 26 February 1852; Holly quote from The Liberator, 4 March 1853. 20. Voice of the Fugitive, 19 November 1851, 29 January, 17 June 1852. 21. Mary Ann Shadd Cary, A Plea for Emigration Or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect, with Suggestions Respecting Mexico, W. Indies and Vancouver’s Island, for the Information of Colored Emigrants (Detroit: George W. Pattison Printer, 1852), Mary Ann Shadd Cary Papers, National Archives of Canada, Ottawa. 22. Ibid.; for additional discussion on Shadd’s role as a ‘‘colored tourist,’’ see Carla L. Peterson, Doers of the Word: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88–118.

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23. For further discussion see Jane Rhodes, ‘‘The Contestation over National Identity: Nineteenth-Century Black Americans in Canada,’’ Canadian Review of American Studies 30(2): 173–84. 24. Voice of the Fugitive, 15 July, 12 August 1852; The Pennsylvania Freeman, 3 June 1852. 25. Voice of the Fugitive, 15 July, 12 August 1852; Alexander McArthur to George Whipple, 22 December 1852, American Missionary Association Archives; Horton, ‘‘Freedom’s Yoke,’’ 58–9; Anne M. Boylan, ‘‘Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American Women in New York and Boston, 1820–1840,’’ in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 132–3. 26. Mary Ann Shadd to George Whipple, 21 July 1852, American Missionary Association Archives; Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro His AntiSlavery Words and Labors in the United States, Canada and England (1855; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 205–6; Samuel Ringgold Ward to George Whipple, 13 and 24 October 1851, American Missionary Association Archives. 27. Reports of Shadd’s lectures appeared in the Pennsylvania Freeman, 26 May and 8 September 1853. 28. Shadd quote in Provincial Freeman, 26 August 1854 and 17 June 1854. 29. Horton, ‘‘Freedom’s Yoke,’’ 74; Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, 150–1; Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press in America, 1827– 1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993), 75–7. 30. Provincial Freeman, 21 October 1854. Emphasis in original. 31. Provincial Freeman, 9 June 1855. 32. Provincial Freeman, 30 June 1855. 33. Provincial Freeman, 9 June 1855. 34. Douglass quoted in David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 223. 35. Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 4 July 1856; W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), ch. 7.

Contributors

Bonnie S. Anderson is Professor of History Emerita at the City University of New York. Erica Armstrong Dunbar is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Delaware. Willi Coleman is Professor of History at the University of Vermont. David Brion Davis is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center and Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. Seymour Drescher is University Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. Ellen Carol DuBois is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Nancy A. Hewitt is Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. Carol Lasser is Professor of History at Oberlin College. Deborah A. Logan is Professor of English at Western Kentucky University. Clare Midgley is Research Professor in History at Sheffield Hallam University. Karen Offen is Senior Scholar at the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Carla L. Peterson is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland. Judith Resnik is Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School.

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Jane Rhodes is Dean for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and Professor of American Studies at Macalester College. Kathryn Kish Sklar is Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton. James Brewer Stewart is the James Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. Julie Winch is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Jean Fagan Yellin is Distinguished Professor of English Emerita at Pace University.

Index

Abdy, Edward S., 152 abolition movement and women’s rights: in Britain, 92, 99–100, 109–12, 114– 15, 128–30; in Europe generally, 72; in France, 59–61, 70–71, 91–93, 102, 108, 117n14; in Germany, 84, 89; historiography of, 122–24, 130–31; in the United States, xii, xvii, xx, 5, 11, 13, 14, 114, 125, 130, 229–33, 243. See also Grimké, Angelina; World’s Anti-Slavery Convention Adams, John Quincy, 258, 265n57 African Education and Benefit Society, 326 Alexander, Louisa, 337–38 Allen, Richard, 268–69 Allen, Stafford, 170 Alsop, Robert, 170 Alston, Mary, 335 American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 220, 257 American Anti-Slavery Society: founding

of, 10, 225; Hicksite Quakers affiliate with, 219; promotes universal emancipation, 258, 268; Sarah Parker Remond and, 177, 179; split in, 200; sponsors lecture tour of Grimké sisters, 214, 226–29; understanding of slavery as gendered, 213. See also Garrisonian abolitionism American Colonization Society, 151, 347 American Convention of Antislavery Societies, 146 American Equal Rights Association, 290 American Missionary Association: and black settlements in Canada, 352, 354–55, 357–58; and Oberlin College graduates, 335, 337 American Moral Reform Society, 302 Amis des Noirs. See Société des Amis des Noirs An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (Grimké), 149 Anderson, Bonnie, 59, 123, 266

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Index

Anglo-African Magazine, 190–91, 205 Anneke, Fritz, 275 Anneke, Mathilde, 87, 89, 275 anti-Semitism, 35, 285, 288–90 antislavery movement. See abolition movement and women’s rights; British abolitionist movement; British abolitionist women; French abolition movement; French abolitionist women; Garrisonian abolitionism; U.S. abolitionist movement; U.S. abolitionist women antislavery newspapers: Anglo-African Magazine, 190–91, 205; Anti-Slavery Reporter, 169; Colored American, 191; Freed-Man, 169; Freedman, 169; The Freedom Fighter, 87; Freedom’s Journal, 7, 146; The Liberator, 147– 49, 180, 222, 231, 250, 253, 304, 306–8, 313; The Liberty Bell, 249, 259; Mirror of Liberty, 191; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 191, 259, 269; The North Star, 163, 266, 270, 272, 304; The Pennsylvania Freeman, 304, 357, 359–60; Provincial Freeman, 359–63; The Rights of All, 161 Anti-Slavery Reporter (London), 169 Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, 358, 360 Aphra Behn (Mühlbach), 85 Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World (Walker), 7, 161. See also Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles Artamène (Scudéry), 62 Association of All Classes and All Nations, 282 Astell, Mary, 5, 60–61, 75n10 Aston, Louise (Luise), 12, 85–87, 89 Avery College, 332 Avery Institute, 337 Barre, François Poullain de la, 60, 63 Beckles, Hilary, 136 Beecher, Catharine, 200, 237n37 Beecher, Henry Ward, 327 Behn, Aphra, 75n10, 122 Bibb, Henry, 351, 353, 355, 357

Billington, Louis and Rosamund, 122 black convention movement: in Canada, 352–53; in Ohio, 273–74, 334; in Pennsylvania, 326; in the United States, 151, 191–92, 308–9, 331, 347 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown, 329 Bolt, Christine, 130 Bonaparte, Napoleon: amends Divorce Law, 69; Civil Code of, 69; and exile of abolitionists, 109; reestablishes slavery, 69, 103–4 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 166, 230, 243, 249–51, 260, 262n27, 262n29 Boston Female Moral Reform Society, 229 Bourbon monarchy, 60, 104 boycotts: of black schools by free blacks, 174; of nationalized clergy in France, 103; of slave-grown sugar in Britain, 11, 99–101. See also India cotton Bradley, James, 325 Bricker Amendment, 33 Brissot, J. P., 103 British abolitionist movement: Christianity and, 128–29, 132; Garrisonians within, 167, 236n27, 236–37n28, 237n32, 253, 257; men dominate, 105, 110–13; men recruit women, 105; narrow focus of, 14–15, 101; petitions and, 41n6, 100–2, 105–6, 111–12; political conservatism of members of, 125–29, 135, 218–19; Quakers within, 69–70, 152, 170, 218–20, 230, 236n27, 282; rejection of women’s rights, 110–11, 114–15, 129–30; seeks to prevent British recognition of Confederacy, 167, 181, 259; U.S. abolitionists influence, 128, 145, 181. See also boycotts; British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society; Buxton, Thomas Fowell; Clarkson, Thomas; Cropper, James; O’Connell, Daniel; Stephen, James; Wilberforce, William British abolitionist women: abolitionist

Index men oppose, 105; Christianity and, 128–29; Enlightenment and, 129; fund-raising of, 109; historiography of, 122–24; and petitions, 41n6, 105–7, 110–12; political conservatism of, 114–15, 132–33, 220; recruited by abolitionist men, 105; and separation from British women’s rights discourse, 129, 219; small number of compared to abolitionist men, 105, 113; social status of, 128–29, 135; use of motto ‘‘Am I not a woman and a sister,’’ 134; views of domesticity, 132; and women’s rights, 92, 99–100, 109–12, 114–15, 128–30. See also Knight, Anne; Martineau, Harriet; Pease, Elizabeth British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 109, 220 British feminists: and campaign against Contagious Diseases Act, 122; and campaign against sati, 124, 128–29, 132; link women’s status to that of slaves, 4, 126, 129; and support of missionary education movement, 129, 132; free love and, 86–87; nationbuilding and, 111; and petitions to end slavery, 115; and suffrage, 124; and sugar boycott, 99–100. See also Aston, Louise; Wheeler, Anna Doyle British Foreign and Anti-Slavery Society: refusal of to seat women delegates to World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, 14– 15, 22, 109, 220 Brown, Antoinette, 285–86, 288 Brown, Emma V., 319 Brown, John, 192, 319, 325 Brown, William Wells, 185n12 Burned-Over District, 283, 320 Burton, Antoinette, 124 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 14 Cahier de doléances, 102 Campton, Jennie, 336 Canada: antislavery activists and, 267,

371

270, 272; black emigration to, 309– 19, 351–53; Mary Ann Shadd Cary and, xxii, 154, 351–57; Sarah Parker Remond and, 177 Cardozo, Francis, 337 Cary, Alice, 195–97 Cary, Mary Ann Shadd: advocates’ emigration to Canada, 353; antislavery activism of, 309, 346, 353; career as educator, 309, 348, 363; criticized by Henry Bibb, 358; criticizes black clergy, 349–50; education of, 309, 363; family background of, 308, 347; marriage of, 362; public speaking of, 359; publishes Provincial Freeman, 309, 359–63; supports woman suffrage movement, 363; writings of, 349–51, 356, 361 Cary, Thomas, 362 Cassey, Amy Matilda, 312 Cassey, Joseph, 302, 312 Castelnau, Henriette de, 63 Chace, Lucy Buffum, 184, 187n51 Chapman, Maria Weston: assists Harriet Jacobs, 166; and Boston Female AntiSlavery Society, 166, 236n27; correspondence with Elizabeth Pease, 219; friendship with Harriet Martineau, xx, 243, 245, 248–51, 257; Garrison’s opinion of, 259; supports Grimké sisters, 230 Chappell, Carolyn Lougee, 60 Chartists, 126–27 Chase, Elizabeth Buffum, 184 Chesson, Amelia, 166 Cheves, Langdon, 13 Child, Lydia Maria, 191, 304 Circle Social. See Société des Amis des Noirs Civil Code of 1804 (France), 69–70 Civil Rights Remedy (of 1994 Violence Against Women Act), 30, 34, 37, 49n58 Civil War: African American refugees during, 167, 181, 187n39; African

372

Index

Civil War (continued) American soldiers in, 336; British opinion and, 167, 259 Clark, Elizabeth, 285 Clark, Frances Williams, 336 Clark, Peter Humphries, 336 Clarkson, Thomas: interactions with free blacks in the United States, 145–46; petition campaign of, 100–1; radical politics of, 132; single focus of, 14; visits antislavery activists in Paris, 102 Clay, Edward Williams, 317n17 Clélie (Scudéry), 62 clergy: denounces feminists in Germany, 87; denounces women abolitionists, 227–28, 230, 232, 249, 258, 264n52, 265n56; Elizabeth Cady Stanton critiques, 285–86. See also Pastoral Letter; The Woman’s Bible Cobbett, William, 111 Code Noir, 61 Coignet, Clarisse, 109, 118–19n36 Colley, Linda, 111 Colman, Lucy, 267, 270 colonization movement, 145, 151, 308. See also American Colonization Society Colored American, 191 Colored Conventions. See black convention movement Colored Women’s Professional Franchise Association, 363 Combe, Cecilia, 268 Combe, George, 268 Comité des Droits de la Femme, 107–8 Commission on the Status of Women (of the UN), 25 Compromise of 1850, 352 Condorcet, 59, 82 Congregational Friends. See Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends Congress of Vienna, 104 Contagious Diseases Act, 122 Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, 28

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 20, 24, 26, 29, 39; U.S. refusal to ratify, 28, 36 Coppin, Fanny Jackson, 326 Cornish, Samuel, 161, 191, 350 Council of 500, 69 Cowles, Betsey Mix, 267 Craft, Ellen, 123, 158, 164, 178, 187n38 Craft, William, 181 Crawfurd, John, 181 Cropper, James, 14 Cuba, 270, 274 Cuffe, Paul, 145–46 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 65–66 Darnes, Josephine, 329–30 Darnes, Mary Ann, 330, 334 Davidoff, Lenore, 127 Davis, David Brion, 62 Davis, Paulina Wright, 280, 283 De l’égalité des deux sexes (de la Barre), 63 Declaration of Independence, 6–11, 285–87 Declaration of Sentiments, 4, 11–12 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 7, 66– 67 Declaration of the Rights of Woman (de Gouges), 7, 67 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, 29 Delany, Martin, 198, 350, 353 Démar, Claire, 90–92 ‘‘Demerara’’ (Martineau), 243, 247, 251 Deroin, Jeanne, 59, 90, 93–94, 275 Desan, Suzanne, 69 d’Héricourt, Jenny P., 94 Dittmar, Louise, 3, 4, 72, 87–89 divorce: attempts to reform laws in France, 57, 61, 68–71, 79n43, 91; attempts to reform laws in United States, xxi, 287–88, 294n43; British feminists and, 86; German feminists and, 87

Index Divorce Law of 1792 (France), 68–69 Douglass, Frederick: advertises Seneca Falls Convention in North Star, 266; antislavery activism of in Britain, 178, 181, 275; attends Seneca Falls Convention, 14, 267; exhorts nation to remember slavery, 364; friendship with Amy Post, 163–64, 267, 269–70; opposes emigration, 357; organizes Emancipation Day celebrations, 273; publishes writings of African American women, 349; reports on French Revolution, 272; reports on West Indies, 274 Douglass, Robert, Jr., 151, 302 Douglass, Sarah Mapps, 191–92, 302, 304, 307–8, 311 Duncan, Clara, 335 Dupin, Madame, 65, 213 Early, Jordan Winston, 337 Early, Sarah. See Woodson, Sarah Edmonson, Emily, 327 Edmonson, Mary, 327 Elliott, Rebecca, 325 emancipation: association with sexual freedom, 83–87; Communist Manifesto advocates for workers, 280; concept applied to European Jews, 82, 84, 102; and European Jews, 280–81; French Revolution expands concept of, 82; and human rights, 290; linked to socialism, 90; from sin, 14; of slaves by Britain, 10, 13, 103–4, 106, 109, 126, 163, 168, 170, 192, 225, 261, 274; of slaves in Brazil, 119n48; of slaves in French colonies, 12, 57, 103, 106–8; of slaves in United States, 6, 10, 109, 316. See also gradual emancipation; immediate emancipation; women’s emancipation Emancipation Act of 1833 (Britain), 106, 125, 225, 261n6 Emancipation Day celebrations, 163, 168, 266, 268, 273–74

373

emigration: of free blacks from United States, xxii, 192, 198, 204, 309–10, 332, 352–63; of white women from U.S. South, 13, 215. See also Cary, Mary Ann Shadd; Delany, Martin; Garnet, Henry Highland; Grimké, Angelina; Remond, Sarah Parker; Whitfield, James Emma Lazarus Federation of Women’s Clubs, 291 Enlightenment, Age of, 7, 8, 72, 281 Equity Club, 23 L’Esprit des lois (Montesquieu), 59, 61, 65 The Essence of Marriage, Along with Some Essays About Women’s Social Reform (Dittmar), 88 Evans, Elizabeth, 336 federalism, 21, 32, 33, 34, 38, 50n64. See also jurisdiction; sovereignty; states’ rights Female Literary Association (Philadelphia), 151, 301 female moral reform: Boston Female Moral Society, 229; Female Moral Reform Society (at Oberlin College), 327–28 La Femme Libre, 89 Femmes illustres (Scudéry), 62 Ferguson, Moira, 122, 129 Fern, Fanny, 360 Fifteenth Amendment, 15, 31, 276 Finney, Charles Grandison, 319, 323 First Reform Bill. See Reform Act (Britain): 1832 Fitzgerald, Maureen, 285 Forten, Charlotte Vandine, 144–46 Forten, James, 144–46, 151, 302–3 Forten, Margaretta, 304 Forten, Sarah Louisa: antislavery activism of, 149; connections to antislavery networks of, 146–47, 150–52; education of, 145–46; family background of, 144; marriage of, 153–54; resigns

374

Index

Forten, Sarah Louisa (continued) from Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society, 154; uses pen name ‘‘Magawisca,’’ 148–49, 155n21, 305; writings of, 147–48, 304–7, 313 Fourteenth Amendment, 15, 31–32, 49n57, 276 Free African Society (Philadelphia), 307 free blacks: antislavery networks of, 145– 48, 158, 173–74, 176, 190, 267, 273, 304, 311, 324, 334–36, 346–48; assisted by abolitionists, 109, 169–70, 269–71; in Canada, 315–57; Civil War service of, 337; and colonization movement, 145, 151, 308, 347; communities of, 249, 269–72, 274–75, 320, 325– 26; and friendship albums, 300; impact on antislavery thought, 128, 130, 133, 136, 171, 206; lecture in Britain, 128, 178–80, 185n12; participate in literary societies, 300–2; successful businesses of, 145, 308, 332; in U.S. North, 145– 46, 167–68, 174–76, 190–91, 303, 310, 347–48; in U.S. South, 159, 161, 167–70, 303, 326–27, 335–38; waged employment of, 174–75, 299–300, 308–10, 347–48; writings of in antislavery press, 165–70, 182–83, 189– 90, 194, 201, 304–6, 308–12, 314, 349–50, 359–63. See also American Missionary Association; black convention movement; Cary, Mary Ann Shadd; Douglass, Frederick; Forten, Sarah Louisa; Fugitive Slave Act; Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins; Jacobs, Harriet; Oberlin College students; Remond, Sarah Parker free love, 12, 83, 86–87, 89 Freed-Man (London), 169 Freedman (New York), 169 Freedman, Ada, 325 freedman’s aid movement, 113 Freedman’s Aid Society, 109, 168–69 Freedman’s School (Leavenworth, Kansas), 336

Freedmen’s Bureau, 337 The Freedom Fighter, 87 Freedom’s Journal, 7, 146, 349 Freeman, A. N., 325 Freeman, Amelia, 327, 332 freethought: in Germany, 87; in United States, 279, 281, 283, 288–91, 295n56 French abolition movement: abolition law, 69, 103; and end of slavery in French colonies, 57, 69, 108, 272; and freedman’s aid, 109; petitions and, 102–3, 106–8; Revolution of 1848 and, 107; weakness of, 70, 102, 104; and women’s rights, 107–8. See also French Society for the Abolition of Slavery; Société des Amis des Noirs French abolitionist women: militancy of, 102, 114–15; and petitions, 102–3, 106–7 French feminists: and British antislavery movement, 70–72; and changes in divorce law, 68–69; critique arranged marriages, 61–62; critique marriage contracts, 64–65; and French Revolution, 68; and fund-raising to support former slaves, 109; influence German feminists, 71; link women’s status to that of slaves, 57–61, 65; and married women’s property rights, 65; petitions of, 102; silenced in wake of Revolution of 1848, 92, 94; and socialism, 89– 91. See also Démar, Claire; Gouges, Olympe de; Deroin, Jeanne; D’Héricourt, Jenny P.; New Women; Sand, George; Scudéry, Madeleine de; SaintSimonians; Tristan, Flora French Revolution: and concepts of freedom, 3, 7; Frederick Douglass reports on, 272; influences women’s antislavery thought, 11; negative impact of on women’s rights advocacy, 103–4, 127 French Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 104 French West India Company: founding of, 61–62

Index Frick, Ida, 85 Friends of Human Progress, 268, 275 friendship albums, 300, 312–13 Fugitive Slave Act, 275, 303, 352 fugitive slaves: and antislavery movement, 134, 158, 163, 168, 269; in Canada, 352–55; during Civil War, 167– 68; New England Freedom Association aids, 271; in North Carolina, 159; Oberlin College protects, 326–27, 333; from the Pearl, 327; relief word of, 159; in Rochester, New York, xx. See also Brown, William Wells; Cary, Mary Ann Shadd; Craft, Ellen; Craft, William; Fugitive Slave Act; Jacobs, Harriet; Martin, Rev. J. Sella; New England Freedom Association; S., John; Voice of the Fugitive; Ward, Samuel Ringgold fund-raising to aid freedpeople, 109, 113, 115, 169–70 Gag Bill, 265n57 Gannett, Ezra Stiles, 253, 261n10 Garnet, Henry Highland, 198, 348 Garrison, William Lloyd: addresses Female Literary Society of Philadelphia, 301; British Quakers break with, 236n27, 237n32; disagreement with John Humphrey Noyes, 14; friendship with Forten family, 150, 152; mob violence against, 222, 250; protests exclusion of women delegates at World’s Antislavery Convention, 176–77, 220; publishes women’s writing, 147, 149, 305; radicalism of, 224; supports Harriet Martineau, 252, 258–59 Garrisonian abolitionism: in Britain, 167, 236n27, 236–37n28, 237n32, 253, 257; broad reform agenda of, 14–15, 125–27; and Maria Weston Chapman, 166, 243; commitment of Oberlin College students to, 287–88, 319–20; and concept of sin, 287; Angelina Grimké

375

and, 214, 217–20, 222–29, 233; and Hicksite Quakers, 219; internationalism of, 158; interracialism of, 158; Harriet Martineau and, 243, 253; mob violence against, 222; Orthodox Quakers reject, 218; radicalism of, 224–25, 257–58; in Rochester, 268; women assert personal power within, 125, 129, 135; and women’s rights, xx, 70, 129, 135, 228. See also American Anti-Slavery Society; Child, Lydia Maria; Grimké, Angelina Gazette des femmes, 91 Gee, Frances, 336 gender mainstreaming in public policy, 20, 38–39, 40n1, 54n95 General Association of Massachusetts Clergymen. See Pastoral Letter Genesee Yearly Meeting of Friends, 271– 72 Genius of Universal Emancipation (Lundy), 146 German feminism: and concept of emancipation, 84; impact of French Revolutions on, 83–85, 87, 89; and linkage of women’s status to that of slaves, 84, 88–89; and women’s journals, 87. See also Anneke, Mathilde; Dittmar, Louise; Mülhbach, Luise; Otto, Louise Gilbert Lyceum, 302 Gilman, Sander, 285 Glasgow Emancipation Society, 151 Gloucester, Adelaide, 325 Gloucester, Eloise, 325 Gloucester, Emma, 325 Gouges, Olympe de, 7, 59, 67 gradual emancipation of slaves: Britain and, 104–5; fails in U.S. South, 16; in U.S. North, xiv, 6, 10, 299 Great North American Anti-Slavery Convention, 351, 353 Griffiths, Eliza, 163–64, 270 Griffiths, Julia, 163–64, 270 Grimké, Angelina: conflict of with Philadelphia Quakers, 217–18, 220–22,

376

Index

Grimké, Angelina (continued) 230, 232–33; corresponds with Sarah Forten, 152; friendship with Jane Smith, 221, 226–30; impact of Garrisonian abolitionism on, 214, 217, 222, 224; interior life as source of personal authority of, 215–17, 222, 227, 233, 235n18; public speaking of, 211, 213–14, 226–30, 232, 239n51; rejects slave society, 215; religion and, 213– 16, 220–21, 224–25, 227, 229–31; romantic life of, 221–22, 237n37; and women’s rights, 211, 229–30, 233; writings of, 231 Grimké, Henry, 215 Grimké, Sarah: conflict of with Philadelphia Quakers, 217–18, 220–21; conversion to Garrisonian abolitionism, 225; and Orthodox Quakerism, 224; public speaking of, 226, 229, 239n51; writings of, 231 Grimké, Thomas, 218 Gurney, John Joseph, 152 Hahn-Hahn, Ida, 86 Haiti: freedmen fight French colonizers in, 103; North Star reports about, 274; and recolonization movement, 192, 308; revolution in, 12; writings about in black press, 205–6 Halbersleben, Karen, 122 Hale, Sarah, 200 Hall, Catherine, 127 Hallowell, Mary, 267 Hallowell, Sarah, 267, 270 Hamilton, William, 191 Hanley, Sarah, 60 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins: antislavery activism of, 311; critiques marriage, 199–200; discusses male hostility to female antislavery lecturers, 199; discusses maroonage, 190, 193, 197, 201– 3; family background of, 310; marriage of, 190; public speaking of, 190, 351, 359; racial uplift work of, 193; rejects

emigration, 204; teaches free blacks, 310; uses pen name of ‘‘Jane Rustic,’’ 189–90, 192, 194–95, 198; writings of, 189–91, 304, 312, 360 Harpers Ferry, 325 Harris, Blanche, 335–36 Hazle, Ann, 325 Heldman, Caroline, 329 Heritage Foundation, 33–34, 36 Hertell, Thomas, 283 Hints to the Colored People of the North (Cary), 349–50 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von, 82–83 Histoire d’une grecque moderne (Prevost), 64 Historie Générale des Antilles habitées par les François (Tertre), 64 Holly, James Theodore, 351, 355 Howitt, Mary, 84 Howitt, William, 84 human rights: Angelina Grimké and, 212–14, 229, 231; Harriet Martineau and, 242, 255–56; roots in antislavery movement, 21, 105, 170, 206; Ernestine Rose and, 280, 290; U.N. initiatives and, 20, 26; and U.S. government policies, 20–21, 28, 32–33 (see also Bricker Amendment; federalism); and women’s rights, 29, 39, 72– 73, 276. See also Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; International Court for the Former Territories of Yugoslavia; International Criminal Court; natural rights; Universal Declaration of Human Rights Hunt, James, 181 Hunt, Jane, 273 Hunt, Samuel, 337 Hunter, Harriet, 325 Hutcheson, Francis, 8 Hutchinson, Anne, 227 Illustrations of Political Economy (Martineau), 254, 263n38

Index immediate emancipation: connection to emancipation of women, xv; danger of advocating in United States, xiv; first call for in United States, 41n6; French Republic and, 107–9; Garrisonians call for, 219, 224–25, 233, 268, 303, 315; Grimké sisters call for, 222, 230; Harriet Martineau calls for, 242, 252, 264n46; Oberlin students and, 324; petitions for, 106 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs): influence in Britain, 167; Jacobs’s efforts to publish, 164–67; mentioned, 158–59 India cotton, 101, 180 International Association of Women Judges, 23 International Bar Association (IBA), 22– 23 International Court for the Former Territories of Yugoslavia (ICTY), 23–25, 28, 42n12, 43n14 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 38 International Criminal Court (ICC), 24, 26–27, 34, 43n13 Isenberg, Nancy, 285 Jacobin Society, 100 Jacobins Clubs, 103 Jacobs, Harriet: antislavery activism of, 158, 163, 165–69, 267; fund-raising work of, 169–70; relationship with Amy Post, 164; and relief work for fugitive slaves and freedpeople, 159, 167–70; seeks assistance from Harriet Beecher Stowe, 164–65; travels to Britain, 161, 163, 166–67, 169–70, 275; writes antislavery letters to newspapers, 165–70. See also Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Jamaica, 181–82, 192, 274 ‘‘Jane Rustic,’’ 189–90, 192, 194–95, 198. See also Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins

377

Jean, Joan de, 60, 63 Jefferson, Thomas, 6–10 Jeffrey, Julie Roy, 1, 123 Jeffrey, Louisa, 245 Jodin, Marie-Madeleine, 67 Johnson, Samuel, 6 Jones, Mary Ann Dickerson, 316 Judah, Harriet, 150 jurisdiction, 21, 38; and Violence Against Women Act, 30–32. See also federalism; sovereignty; states’ rights Kansas-Nebraska Act, 303 Kelley, Abby, 11, 267 Kern, Kathi, 285 Kinson, Sarah Margru, 327, 335 Knight, Anne, 70–71, 92–93, 220 Ku Klux Klan, 170 Ladies’ Antislavery Society (Delaware, Ohio), 334 Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society (Providence, Rhode Island), 213 Ladies Board of Managers (at Oberlin College), 328–32 Ladies’ London Emancipation Society, 180, 187n38 Lane Rebels, 323, 325 Lane Theological Seminary, 323 Langston, Caroline. See Wall, Caroline Langston, John Mercer, 332, 337 Lerner, Gerda, 3, 215, 217, 226 Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (Sarah Grimké), 231 Letters to Catharine Beecher . . . on Slavery and Abolitionism (Angelina Grimké), 231 Les Lettres persanes (Montesquieu), 59 Lewald, Fanny 86 Lewis, Belle, 326 Lewis, Edmonia, 184, 187n52 The Liberator: banned in the South, 250; Harriet Martineau critiques, 253; publishes letters of Grimké sisters, 222, 231; publishes writings of free black

378

Index

The Liberator (continued) women, 147–49, 304, 306–8, 313; Sarah Parker Remond supports, 180; reprints articles from Voice of the Fugitive, 355 The Liberty Bell, 249, 259 Lincoln, Abraham, 16 Lipp, Carola, 84 literary societies, 300–2 The Lively World (Mühlbach), 85 Lloyd, Penelope, 329–30, 332 London Anti-Slavery Society, 261n6 London Emancipation Committee, 166– 67, 170 London Freedman’s Aid Society, 168 Loring, Ellis Gray, 245, 252–53, 256, 261n8 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 168–69, 204–5. See also slave rebellions Lovejoy, Elijah P., 263n45 Lundy, Benjamin, 146 Macaulay, Catherine, 129 ‘‘Magawisca.’’ See Forten, Sarah Louisa Maier, Pauline, 7 Mann Act, 34–35, 51n71, 51n74 Mannheim Monday Club, 87 Mapps, Grace, 192 maroon communities: in Brazil, 190, 193, 197, 201–3; in the New World, 159, 196–97 marriage: arranged, 61–63, 281–82; British feminists critique, 5, 86, 255; compared to slavery, xvi, 59, 61–63, 65–73, 99, 121; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and, 45n25; French feminists critique, 57, 64–73, 99; German feminists critique, 88; importance of in African-American community, 153–54, 313–14, 337; interracial, 31–32, 246–47; Owenites and, 282; Saint-Simonian socialism and, 83, 90; U.S. feminists critique, 12, 199, 285, 287–88; women’s property rights and, 65, 280, 283–84, 288

Martin, Rev. J. Sella, 168 Martineau, Harriet: argues that slavery degrades white families, 255; attends slave auction, 245, 247–48; commitment of to human rights, 255–56; deafness of, 245, 261n14, 263n44; discusses sexual violence against slave women, 248; feminism of, 255–56; friendship with Maria Weston Chapman, 248–49; hostility toward in United States, 243, 251–52, 257; influence of William Lloyd Garrison on, 243, 253–54; influence on antislavery activists, 269; sociological methodology of, 246, 241, 261n12; supports Garrisonian abolition, 251–54, 257– 58; tours United States, 242–54; Unitarianism of, 242–43, 255–56; visits Forten family, 152; witnesses proslavery mob violence, 249–50, 262n20; writings of, 243, 249, 259 (see also ‘‘Demerara’’; Illustrations of Political Economy; The Martyr Age of the United States; Retrospect of Western Travel; Society in America) Martineau, James, 255 The Martyr Age of the United States (Martineau), 257 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 176 McArthur, Alexander, 360 McClintock, Mary Ann, 267, 273 McCord, Susanna, 13–14 McGuire, Mahala, 335 Mémoires de Madame la comtesse de M*** (Castelnau), 63 men’s suffrage: in Britain, 219–20; in France, 57, 107–8; in United States, 220, 276, 291. See also Bonaparte, Napoleon; Reform Act (Britain): 1832 Mexico, 266, 270–71, 274–75 Midgley, Clare, 99, 105, 255 Mill, John Stuart, 70, 72, 129 Miner, Josephine, 336 Miner, Lawrence, 336 Minerva Literary Association, 301

Index Mirror of Liberty, 191 Missouri Compromise, 303 Mitchell, John G., 336 Mitford, Mary Russell, 195–97 Möhrmann, Renate, 84 Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poqueline de, 63, 77n23 Montesquieu, 59, 61, 64 More, Hannah, 133, 146 Morgan, Rebecca, 325 Moses, Claire, 94 Mott, James, 267, 272–73 Mott, Lucretia, 267, 274; advocates universal human rights, 268; attends World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, 22, 220; Garrisonian views of, 219; influence of French feminist thought on, 72; internationalism of, 268–69; learns about Seneca women’s rights, 272; organizes Seneca Falls Convention, 273 Mühlbach, Luise, 85, 95–96n11 My Emancipation, Proscription, and Justification (Aston), 86 My Law of the Future (Démar), 91 National Anti-Slavery Standard, 191, 259, 269 National Association of Women Judges, 23 National Association of Women Lawyers, 23 National Conference of Women’s Bar Associations, 23 National Convention of Colored Freemen, 273–74 National Emigration Convention, 198. See also colonization movement National Freedmen’s Aid Union of Great Britain and Ireland, 170 National Woman’s Suffrage Association, 363 National Women’s Loyal League, 290 natural rights, 6–7, 10. See also human rights

379

Nell, William C., 166, 267, 271, 273, 275, 315–16 New England Freedom Association, 271 New England Non-Resistant Society, 271 New Women, 90–92. See also SaintSimonians New York African Clarkson Society, 302 New York African Society for Mutual Relief, 191 New York State Women’s Temperance Society, 286 Newsman, William P., 361 Norris, Frances, 326, 335 The North Star, 163, 266, 270, 272, 304, 349–50 Notes of Canada West. See A Plea for Emigration Or Notes of Canada West Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 7 Noyes, John Humphrey, 14 Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society, 324 Oberlin College students: antislavery activism of, 319, 323–26, 333–34; careers of, 335–38; conflicts with Ladies Board of Managers, 328–32; family origins of, 326, 340–41n5; and female moral reform movement, 327– 28. See also American Missionary Association O’Connell, Daniel, 150–51 Offen, Karen, 3, 99, 266 Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society, 334 On Improving the Status of Women (Hippel), 82 Otto, Louise, 84–85, 87–89, 213 Owen, Robert, 282, 286 Owen, Robert Dale, 286 Owen, Sarah C., 273 Owenites, 282–84, 286 Parker, Theodore, 319 Pastoral Letter (of General Association of Massachusetts Clergy), 227–28, 230, 232, 257–58

380

Index

Pateman, Carole, 63 Patterson, Orlando, 5 Peace Congress (Frankfurt 1850), 275 Pease, Elizabeth, 219–20, 268, 270 Peck, Louisa, 332 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 146 The Pennsylvania Freeman, 309, 357, 359–60 Peters, Richard Jr., 146 petitions: to boycott sugar in Britain, 100–1; to end slavery in British colonies, 100–2, 105–6, 111–12; to end slavery in French colonies, 102–3, 106–8; to end slavery in the United States, 41n6, 106, 149, 179, 258, 265n57, 283; of free blacks against unequal treatment, 174; for married women’s property rights, 283–84; to restrict immigrants, 303; for women’s rights in France, 91, 102; for women’s suffrage in Britain, 115 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 149–52, 154, 222, 270, 305, 307, 312 Phillips, Wendell, 226, 289, 319 Pintor, Lazario, 184 A Plea for Emigration Or Notes of Canada West (Cary), 356–57, 359 Plymouth Church, 327 Post, Amy: assists Harriet Jacobs, 164– 65; corresponds with Jeremiah Burke Sanderson, 271; friendship with Frederick Douglass, 267, 269–70; organizes Working Woman’s Protective Union Potter, Nathaniel, 267 La Prétieuse (Pure), 62–63 Prevost, Abbé, 64 Price, John, 333 Prince, Mary, 133, 178 Prince, Nancy, 351 Proudhon, P. J., 93–94 Provincial Freeman, 359–63 Provincial Union, 361–62 Pugh, Sarah, 270 Pure, Michel de, 62

Purvis, Harriet, 154, 302 Purvis, Joseph, 153 Purvis, Robert, 150–51, 302–3, 359 Purvis, William, 150 Quakers: and British abolitionist movement, 69–70, 152, 170, 218–20, 230, 236n27, 282; divisions among in United States, 214, 271; Angelina Grimké rejects, 217–25, 230; Hicksite, 218–19; mentioned, 307, 309; and U.S. abolitionist movement, ix, xx, 163, 170, 214, 221, 254, 272–73, 275, 284, 307, 332, 347. See also Friends of Human Progress; Genesee Yearly Meeting of Friends; Grimké, Angelina; Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends Reading Room Society, 301 Reconstruction, 157, 167, 169, 171, 183, 259, 337, 363 Reform Act (Britain): 1832, 126, 219, 255; 1867, 126 Refugee Home Society, 354–55, 357–58 Reid, Susan, 336 Remond, Charles, 176, 178, 267, 273 Remond, John, 174 Remond, Nancy Lenox, 174–75 Remond, Sarah Parker: antislavery activism of, 128, 132, 158, 176, 178–80; assists refugees during Civil War, 181; education of, 180, 183; files lawsuits to protest segregation, 177; fund-raising of, 179–80; marriage of, 184; petition work of, 179; public speaking of, 177, 179–80; settles in Italy, 182–84; social and family background of, 173–75; writes letters to antislavery newspapers, 182–83 Rendall, Jane, 122 Retrospect of Western Travel (Martineau), 247 The Rights of All, 161 Robson, William, 184

Index Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, 164 Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention, 273. See also women’s rights conventions Roland, Pauline, 92, 94, 275 Ronge, Johannes, 87 Rose, Ernestine: advocates human rights, 280; advocates secular marriage, 285, 287; anti-Semitism toward, 288–90; early adult life in Europe of, 282; family background of, 281; and freethought, 279, 281, 283, 288–91, 295n56; influences women’s rights activists, 285; lobbies for married women’s property rights, 280, 283, 288; marriage of, 282; and Owenites, 282–84, 286; petition work of, 283; rejects arranged marriage, 281–82; relocates in New York, 283; renames ‘‘universal suffrage’’ ‘‘woman suffrage,’’ 290–91; secularism of, 281, 284, 287; speaks at women’s rights conventions, 284, 286–87; and temperance movement, 291 Rose, William, 282 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 14, 61, 65–66 Ruggles, David, 191 Rush, Benjamin, 146 Russworm, John, 350 S., John (Harriet Jacobs’s brother), 163, 166–67 Saint-Simonians: collapse of, 91; and feminism, 69–70; and free love, 12, 83; link women’s status to that of slaves, 89, 94. See also New Women Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 123, 125 Sand, George, 12, 83, 92 Sanderson, Jeremiah Burke, 267, 271 Sanford, Rebecca, 273 Saunders, Prince, 145–46 Schoelcher, Victor, 107–8 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 62, 64, 73 Seaver, Horace, 289

381

Second Great Awakening, 216, 233, 235n15, 323 secularism, 285–86 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 148 The Selling of Joseph (Sewall), 5 Seneca Falls Convention (1848), 22, 220, 233, 266, 273. See also women’s rights conventions Sewall, Samuel, 5 sexual slavery: international agreements and, 20, 24–29; and Mann Act, 34– 35; white slave trade and, 50n69. See also Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; International Court for the Former Territories of Yugoslavia; International Criminal Court; Trafficking Victims Protection Act; Violence Against Women Act Shadd, Abraham, 308, 347, 353, 359 Shadd, Amelia, 362 Shadd, Harriet Parnell, 347 Shadd, Isaac, 353 Shadd, Mary Ann. See Cary, Mary Ann Shadd Sharp, Granville, 146 Shipherd, John, 323 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, 22, 125–27 slave rebellions: abolitionists linked to, 198, 245, 306; in Aphra Behn, 85; in Jamaica, 181–82; in Morant Bay, 115; in St. Domingue, 100–1, 103, 268; Nat Turner and, 192, 205, 303 slave rescues, 327, 333 Smith, James McCune, 151 Smith, Jane, 221, 226–30 The Social Contract (Rousseau), 61, 66 Social Reform, 87–88 socialism, 12–13, 90, 93–94. See also Owenites; Saint-Simonians Société de la morale chrétienne, 70 Société des Amis des Noirs, 59, 67, 102– 3, 107 Society for the Emancipation of Women, 93

382

Index

Society in America (Martineau), 255 Society of Friends. See Quakers Some Reflections on Marriage (Astell), 5 Southey, Robert, 202–4 sovereignty, 21, 34, 36–37. See also federalism; jurisdiction; states’ rights Spanish antislavery movement, 113 spiritualism, 234n5, 286 St. Domingue, 100, 103, 268, 270 Stanley, John Stuart, 326 Stanley, Sarah, 334–35 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady: advocates divorce law reform, 288; attends World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, 22, 122, 220, 237n32; attends Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, 275; criticizes clergy, 285–86; ethnic and racial prejudice of, 15; forms Women’s Loyal League, 290; friendship with Lucretia Mott, 273; influenced by Ernestine Rose, 280–81, 283, 291, 296n71; influenced by French feminist thought, 72; organizes Seneca Falls Convention, 233, 284; writes The Woman’s Bible, 291 Stanton, Lucy, 328, 333–34 State Convention of Colored Freemen (Pennsylvania), 326 State Convention of Colored Men (Ohio), 334 states’ rights, 32–33. See also federalism; jurisdiction; sovereignty Stebbins, Catherine Fish, 267 Stephen, James, 14 Stern, Otto. See Otto, Louise Stewart, Maria, 128, 163, 239n49, 351 Still, William, 359 Stone, Lucy, 289 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 109, 164–65, 327 Strictures on the Modern System of Education (More), 146 Sturge, Joseph, 152 Stuurman, Siep, 60 Suslova, Nadezhda, 94 Swisshelm, Jane Grey, 360

Tabouillet, Mathilde Franziska von. See Anneke, Mathilde Tappan, Arthur, 323 Tappan, Lewis, 323, 327 Taylor, Barbara, 282 Taylor, Clare, 123 Taylor, Clementia Doughty, 170 Taylor, Harriet, 129, 213 temperance movement: Mary Ann Shadd Cary and, 259, 363; impact on U.S. women’s rights movement, 211, 233; Ernestine Rose and, 283, 291; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and, 283; in women’s fiction, 191 Tertre, Jean-Baptiste du, 64 Thomas, Amanda, 337–38 Thompson, George: influences Angelina Grimké, 22; influences Sarah Forten, 152; lecture tour in Scotland, 269; lecture tour in United States, 250, 252, 260n6, 262n27 Thompson, William, 69, 72 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 7, 112, 114 Tompkins, Jane, 258 trafficking in persons, 20, 35–36, 46– 47n41. See also Mann Act; sexual slavery Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), 28, 35–37 transcendentalists, 255–56 Tristan, Flora, 91–93 Truth, Sojourner, 267 Turner, Nat, 192, 205, 303. See also slave rebellions Tyler, Julia G., 165 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 164, 258 Underground Railroad, 309, 347 Unitarianism: and antislavery movement, 170, 254–55, 261n8, 261n10, 263n42, 264n46; of Harriet Martineau, 242–43, 254–56; Ernestine Rose rejects, 290; unpopularity of in Britain, 236n27; and women’s rights, 264n46, 273

Index United Nations, 20, 23–25, 33–34. See also Bricker Amendment; Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women; federalism; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; Universal Declaration of Human Rights Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 25, 33 universal rights: Thomas Jefferson and, 8; Lucretia Mott and, 268; rejected by slave-owning women, 13; Ernestine Rose and, 290–91; United Nations and, 25; U.S. feminist ideology and, 16, 132. See also human rights U.S. abolitionist movement: Christian religion and, 213–16, 220–21, 224– 25, 227, 229–31, 256, 279, 283, 286, 323, 334; Garrisonians within, xx, 14– 15, 70, 125–27, 129, 135, 158, 166, 214, 217–20, 222–29, 233, 243, 253, 257–58, 287; influences Britain to support the North in the Civil War, 167, 181, 259; networks within, 267–71, 273, 275; Quakers within, ix, xx, 163, 170, 214, 221, 254, 272–73, 275, 284, 307, 332, 347; racial prejudice within, 15, 152–53, 183–84, 294n48, 309; radicalism of, 126–27, 145, 224, 245, 250, 270–71, 275, 319, 323; splits over women’s rights, 220; violence against supporters of, 127, 222, 243, 249–50, 256, 262n20, 264n45. See also antislavery newspapers; Douglass, Frederick; Garrison, William Lloyd; Western New York Anti-Slavery Society; women’s antislavery conventions; women’s rights conventions U.S. abolitionist women: AfricanAmerican women’s contributions to, xiv, 132; censured by clergy, 227–28,

383

230, 232, 257–58; historiography about, 123; male hostility toward, 347; at Oberlin College, 323–25, 331–32; radicalism of, 125, 127, 129, 135; and violence against enslaved women, xiii– xiv, 65, 131–32, 179–80, 248, 324; white privilege shapes discourse of, 130–31, 133. See also Cary, Mary Ann Shadd; Chapman, Maria Weston; Forten, Sarah Louisa; Grimké, Angelina; Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins; Jacobs, Harriet; Mott, Lucretia; Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society; Remond, Sarah Parker; Rose, Ernestine U.S. feminists: and growth of civil society, xii, 23, 212, 222; roots of in abolition movement, 13–15, 125–30, 229–33, 243. See also Grimké, Angelina; Grimké, Sarah; Kelley, Abby; Mott, Lucretia; Rose, Ernestine; Seneca Falls Convention; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; women’s antislavery conventions; women’s emancipation; women’s rights conventions; women’s suffrage; World’s Anti-Slavery Conference Véret, Désirée, 90 Vesey, Denmark, 204–5. See also slave rebellions Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 127 violence against women: during slavery, xiii–xiv, 65, 131–32, 180, 248, 324; UN agreements and, 20–40. See also sexual slavery Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), 29, 32, 34, 37–38. See also Civil Rights Remedy Voice of the Fugitive, 355–56, 358, 360 Voilquin, Suzanne, 94 La Voix des Femmes, 57, 69–70, 73 von Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb, 3 Vues legislatives (Jodin), 67

384

Index

Walker, David, 7, 14, 161, 348–49, 351 Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles, 349. See also Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World Walkowitz, Judith, 122 Wall, Amanda. See Thomas, Amanda Wall, Caroline, 329, 332 Wall, O. S. B., 332, 337 Walters, Ronald G., 15 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 358–60 Ware, Vron, 122 Watkins, Frances Ellen. See Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Webb, Richard Davis, 167, 236n27, 268 Webster, Delia, 333 Weld, Theodore, 226, 230 West Indies: British slavery in, 13; emancipation of, 163, 168; emigration to, 352; French missionaries’ writings about, 64; and Haitian Revolution, 12; literary treatment of slave uprisings in, 85; Harriet Martineau portrays plight of slaves of, 243, 247; uprising in Jamaica, 181–82; uprising in St. Domingue, 85, 100–1, 103, 268; writings about in black press, 192, 205–6. See also Haiti; Jamaica; St. Domingue Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, 268, 271, 274 Weston, Anna Warren, 314–15 Wheatley, Phillis, 147 Wheeler, Anna Doyle, 70, 72 Whipper, William, 301, 303 Whipple, George, 354 white slave trade. See sexual slavery Whitfield, James, 198, 204 Whitney, Anne, 184 Wilberforce, William, 14, 19, 99, 132, 145 Wild Roses (Aston), 86 Willis, Cornelia Grinnell, 164–65 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 161–62 Willis, Phebe Post, 270 Willis, Thomas, 270 Wills, Garry, 8, 9, 10, 16

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 15, 82, 127, 129, 133, 213 Woman in Conflict with Social Circumstances (Anneke), 87 The Woman’s Bible (Stanton), 291 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 291 Woman’s National Loyal League, 290 women antislavery activists: fund-raising of, 149, 170, 176, 179; letters to newspapers of, 165–70, 182–83, 222–23; national conventions of in United States, 229; and petitions, 41n6, 149, 179; protest Mexican-American War, 270–71; public speaking of, 125, 168, 173, 177, 190, 211–14, 226–28, 239n49, 239n51 (see also Pastoral Letter); and sewing circles, 176 women’s antislavery conventions, 41n5, 149, 229, 232 women’s emancipation: British feminists advocate, 125, 128–29; and Declaration of Women’s Sentiments, 12; French feminists advocate, 70, 72, 80n52, 82–84, 90–94, 102; German feminists advocate, 84–89; marriage and, 59, 61, 66, 68; and slave emancipation, xxiii, 3, 5, 111, 115, 124–25, 133; U.S. feminists advocate, 213, 257–58, 280, 283, 322–39. See also British abolitionist women; French abolitionist women; U.S. abolitionist women; women’s rights conventions women’s journals: La Femme Libre, 89; The Freedom Fighter, 87; Gazette des femmes, 91; Social Reform, 87–88; La Voix des Femmes, 57, 69–70, 73; Women’s Mirror, 87; Women’s Newspaper, 87–88 Women’s Mirror, 87 Women’s Newspaper (Anneke), 87 Women’s Newspaper (Otto), 87–88 women’s rights conventions: and divorce law, 288; in Massachusetts, 280, 284, 287; rejected by proslavery women,

Index 13; religious thought and, 241n76, 289; reported about in The Freeman, 360; in Rochester, New York, 273; in Seneca Falls, New York, 11, 14, 22, 220, 266, 273, 280, 284; for suffrage, 291; in Syracuse, New York, 275, 278n21, 285. See also women’s antislavery conventions Women’s Slavery and Freedom (Frick), 85 women’s status linked to that of slaves: by British abolitionists, 4, 126, 129; by French feminists, 89–94; during French Revolution, 4, 57–61, 66–68; by German feminists, 3, 84–89; by U.S. feminists, 11 women’s suffrage: in France, 83, 93, 108, 119n36; in Germany, 85, 93; in the United States, 122, 124, 276, 280, 290–91, 309, 316, 363 women’s writings in antislavery newspapers: of Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 304–6, 349–50, 359–63; of Sarah Louise Forten, 304–6; of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, 222, 231; of Harriet Jacobs, 165–70; of Sarah Parker Remond, 182–83; of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 189–206, 308–12 Woodson, John, 326

385

Woodson, Lewis, 326 Woodson, Sarah, 326, 336–37 Woodson, Thomas, 326 The Workers’ Union (Tristan), 92 Working Woman’s Protective Union, 273 Workingmen’s Party, 283 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention (London, 1840): British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society refuses to seat U.S. women delegates at, 14–15, 114, 219; and importance of transatlantic networking, 22, 122; U.S. male antislavery activists protest exclusion of women delegates at, 176–77; William and Mary Howitt protest treatment of U.S. women delegates at, 84 Wright, Frances, 15, 283 Wright, Henry Clark, 226, 230, 232 Wright, Martha Coffin, 288 Yearly Meeting of Congregational Friends, 271–72, 274–75. See also Friends of Human Progress Yee, Shirley, 123 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 123 Younger, Catherine, 326 ‘‘Zombi’’ (Zumbi), 190, 193, 201–5