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

In Signatures of Citizenship Susan Zaeske combines new primary source evidence with rhetorical analysis to provide a compelling portrait of the antislavery petition campaigns of the nineteenth century and their impact on women's political identities. Zaeske convincingly demonstrates that women's participation in the petition drives both contributed to the success of abolition and transformed women's political identity from one rooted in localities and religious duty to one of national citizenship and natural rights.

Petitions historically have provided a voice for those who were denied full political participation, and women in the antebellum era were able to use this tradition to insert their voice into the petition campaign of 1831-36. Women did not view their petitions as political in this phase, Zaeske argues, because they used supplicatory language and justified their petitioning on the basis of women's moral authority. If women signed a standard petition form, they would often scratch out the word "citizen" and replace it with "women" or "ladies." The passage of a series of gag rules intended to stop the influx of antislavery petitions marked a turning point for women, however. Outraged by this violation of free speech, women took the unprecedented step of meeting in convention. Here antislavery women planned a systematic petition campaign designed to flood Congress with antislavery petitions. Zaeske notes that historians have overlooked the fact that women organized their petitioning in this phase before the men of the American Antislavery Society.

In their efforts to garner as many signatures as possible in a coordinated effort across the North, women used short petitions that dropped expressions of humility and supplication. Many of these petitions now asserted that women were citizens who possessed a constitutional right to petition. Hundreds of thousands of Northern women signed these petitions, and Zaeske argues that this was the key moment in the development of women's political identities. It indicated that women were beginning to think of themselves as public actors who thought apart from their male guardians. This fact was not lost on defenders of traditional gender roles, whose attacks on women's petitioning led abolitionist women to a more forceful argument regarding women's rights as citizens. Indeed, the influx of petitions created discussion in Congress over the political rights of women, the first such debate in the federal legislature. Zaeske points out that in these debates John Quincy Adams defended women as citizens with political rights and articulated a position far in advance of many women's rights advocates of the time.

Congress's continued refusal to consider antislavery petitions contributed to the collapse of moral suasion as the sustaining ideology of the abolition movement, however. Men within the movement increasingly turned to political action in the 1840s and lost interest in petitioning. Female petitioning decreased during this period, but Zaeske shows that women who continued to petition Congress took a clearly political stance, identified themselves as national citizens, and justified their actions on the basis of natural rights. Their petitions now addressed specific federal legislation, such as the annexation of Texas, and used bold republican language.

The final phase in the transformation of women's political identities was the 1860s petition campaigns in support of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. This campaign was dominated by women, produced even more petitions than the 1830s campaigns (more than 400,000 names), and was one of the first successful mass campaigns that used public opinion to pressure Congress into action. The rhetoric in these petitions indicated that women conceived of themselves as national citizens.

Signatures of Citizenship builds on the work of historians Gerda Lerner, Lori Ginzberg, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Readers of their work will not be surprised by Zaeske's findings. The picture she presents of women's contributions to the abolition movement and the interaction between events in the antislavery campaign and the emergence of women's political identities is familiar. However, Zaeske uses myriad new sources...