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Reviewed by:
  • Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865 edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey
  • George E. Boulukos (bio)
Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865, edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey ; pp. x + 214. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, £63.00, $110.00.

This collection shows how much the history of abolitionism, women’s history, and histories of dissenting Protestantism have matured in the past two decades, and how seamlessly they have come together as transatlantic cultural history. In the 1990s, books such as Clare Midgley’s Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (1992) and Moira Ferguson’s Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (1992) were revelatory simply for demonstrating that women, despite the separate spheres, took shaping roles in the politics and discourse of slavery; and even in the early aughts, scholars such as Nicholas Hudson and Christopher Brown opened eyes with an [End Page 506] unapologetic insistence on the importance of mainstream Christians—including Anglicans—and conservative evangelicals to early abolitionist organization in Britain, not to mention the radical impact of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and Bernard Bailyn’s Atlantic History (2005).

Scholars have long known that Quakers were a motive force behind and the first organizers of the abolition movement, but at the height of the cultural turn the role of religion in British abolition was either minimized or ignored. It is clear that women were key to abolitionist organization on both sides of the anglophone Atlantic, and that they were often inspired by, and certainly claimed authority for this political work through, their Christian beliefs. The importance of Christian beliefs to American abolitionism has never been in doubt, and now there is a clearer equivalence between the deeply interconnected American and British movements. Because these broad parameters are now so well established, the contributors to this collection can tease out particular stories, details, and relationships. Hence such matters as controversies about abolitionism and about the freedom of women to speak their minds within specific sects, and the tendency of given sects to attract or to lose abolitionist members, are scrutinized. Indeed, half of the essays are as fine-grained as is possible: they focus on specific women with careers that intertwine dissent, slavery, and print culture. Only one—Harriet Beecher Stowe—is familiar, but the others are all remarkable.

Immediately salutary, too, is the close attention in several of the essays to dissenting rejection of the marketplace in the nineteenth-century United States. A compelling instance is the struggle of some abolitionists with the success of their own anti-slavery fairs, and their distress about selling the donations of luxury goods provided by their British allies. Taken together, several of these essays imply that British abolitionists (even dissenters) accepted and even appropriated the logic of capitalism earlier and more thoroughly than their sisters in the United States. One particularly absorbing example is Elizabeth Heyrick’s immediatism in the 1820s—covered in detail by Midgley and astutely analyzed by Carol Lasser—which was wedded to a revival of the 1790s sugar boycotts. Heyrick was influential in the United States, but her reception was premised on a redefinition of her advocacy of the boycott. Heyrick meant to apply direct economic pressure to planters, and to teach them the economic rationality of emancipation. American immediatists like William Lloyd Garrison, however, ignored this economic orientation, and instead saw the boycott as a moral stance premised on personal spiritual purity.

Such detailed pictures are satisfyingly complex and convincing. But they also raise problems about interpretive possibilities. Clearly, dissent did not lead to abolition, given the many accounts here of conflicts within sects over the issue of slavery, and of individuals’ movements from one sect to another based on anti-slavery commitment. In other words, as Julie Roy Jeffrey remarks, despite the belief of some female dissenting abolitionists that “their activism was not optional,” many found that their ministers and congregations were far from agreeing with them (136). Elizabeth J. Clapp concludes the introduction by noting that the dissenting “custom of challenging established religion...

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