Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (review)

In recent years, calls for transnational history, or for internationalizing U.S. history, have encouraged new research on how U.S. social and intellectual history crosses national boundaries; how identities have been shaped by people's relationships to national borders; and how institutions, cultures, and movements have interacted with their counterparts in other lands. Few fields have found as fertile an area for exploring these ties as the study of reform movements. While obviously not a new endeavor (Charles I. Foster wrote about an "evangelical united front" of benevolent reformers in 1961, in An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1836 [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press]; and Clare Taylor's British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974] has long been an essential resource), recent work has invested it with new energy and new urgency.

Historians of woman's rights in the United States have long noted the movement's origins in the antislavery cause. From the Sarah and Angelina Grimké's early defense of their right as women to speak out against slavery to the 1840 World Antislavery Convention in London's exclusion of female delegates to the gathering of some three hundred abolitionists at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 to discuss the civil and political rights of women, the antislavery movement supplied the inspiration, the personnel, and much of the rhetoric for nineteenth-century demands for woman's rights.

This book, which stems from a 2002 Gilder Lehrman Center Conference, joins these two areas by exploring the translatlantic nature of the connection between antislavery and woman's rights. In their own articles, Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart point out, women activists on both sides of the Atlantic frequently "came to view their own emancipation in terms that drew on their understanding of slavery as a gendered institution." and, relatedly, "women's rights-seeking activity [was] associated with efforts to end human bondage" (xiii, xv). They have drawn together seventeen essays, divided into five sections, that, sometimes implicitly, address these questions: one introduces different contexts in which claims for antislavery and women's rights arose; a second deals with French, German, and British contexts; a third examines the transatlantic ties in the activist work of several African American women; another explores the American connections between antislavery and woman's rights; and, finally, the book returns to what the editors call "transcultural" activism by African American women.

Like any collection of essays, these vary in quality and significance, and every reader will have favorites. As a historian of U.S. women, I liked most the ones I knew least about and that provoked me to think in new ways. Karen Offen's discussion of the emergence of the marriage-slavery analogy in the seventeenth century, well before the question of African slavery had become politically salient, was especially thought-provoking; Seymour Drescher's argument that such Eurocentric critiques of marriage did not extend to African slaves is similarly intriguing. Kathryn Sklar and Clare Midgley examine the differences in British and American women's willingness to incorporate a feminist analysis into their antislavery activism: "Equating the position of women and black people had less political salience in Britain than in the United States," Midgley asserts, a difference that Sklar locates in the more conservative religious culture of British abolitionists (126). Biographical accounts of Harriet Martineau, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Forten, Sarah Parker Remond, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Frances Harper, and Ernestine Rose offer important understandings of how an individual woman's relationship to a nation helped shape her own ideas about slavery and freedom. Others—about African American women's anti-slavery writings, for instance, or early black graduates' experiences at Oberlin College—although they fit into the book's overarching questions less well, are nevertheless valuable additions to the literature.

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