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

One of the most famous images of abolitionist iconography is of an enslaved black woman, shackled and on bended knee, arms extended in woeful supplication. This image in many ways exemplified not only the status of enslaved black women across the Diaspora, but, to some extent, their white sisters caught in the unrelenting chains of male domination in both Europe and the United States. For while black women sought emancipation from the peculiar institution of slavery, white women in the United States and Europe struggled against what some would call a sort of de facto slavery of marriage, motherhood, and a whole host of other patriarchal institutions designed to subjugate women. This connection is not one rooted in hindsight. Indeed, black and white women from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century recognized their commonalities and actively learned from one another. In some cases, the analogy of slavery to marriage was the extent of the connections, while in other instances women formed interracial activist and intellectual communities to fight injustice. Many of these women used this comparison between their situations to champion for the causes of abolition, antislavery, and women’s rights.

It is this history that scholars emphasized when they came together at the “Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women’s Rights” conference in October of 2001 sponsored by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation is the conference’s brainchild and likewise probes the connections between the transatlantic antislavery and women’s rights movements from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century. While the text is firmly rooted in the discipline of history, it will undoubtedly prove useful to those interested in African-American studies, law, literary studies, and gender studies. Focusing on free African-American and white women, the volume addresses the connections between two movements that are often discussed separately or, at the very least, with little compelling connection. The book is comprised of five sections that each investigate various historical features of the fight for gender equality with abolitionism, and then is further divided into individual chapters. Overall, the volume is very well-organized, with each chapter explicitly referencing the material from previous chapters and building upon it or self-consciously looking forward to chapters that intend to build on that work.

In their introduction, editors Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart describe the volume as a call to action to scholars, especially historians, to think more transnationally about both women’s rights and antislavery, asserting that the benefits of interdisciplinary and/or comparative research outweigh the difficulties of transcending traditional boundaries. While they acknowledge the recent proliferation of scholarship about women’s roles in transnational and civic reform, they envision this volume as challenging how we conceptualize connections between women in these roles. The text asks us to reconsider free women’s various responses to slavery and how they utilized emancipatory discourse to fight inequality. Sklar and Stewart admit that much of “slavery’s high toll in human lives throughout the Atlantic world remains offstage in much of this book” (xiv). In some ways, this focus on free women blunts some of the text’s assertions about the overarching connections between women, since so much of the volume is about how free women thought about slavery, rather than how enslaved women spoke their own truth. While some readers will find this direction refreshing, others will undoubtedly chafe at the omission. One chapter does focus on a formerly enslaved black woman. Jean Fagin Yellin continues her fine work on Harriet Jacobs, the author of 1861’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, persuasively illustrating how Jacobs’s travels were instrumental in shaping her extensive feminist activities which spanned several decades in the nineteenth century.

The seventeen contributors approach the subject matter from a multiplicity of perspectives; however, their common...