Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830-1865

3. Seditious Histories: The Abolitionist Mother-Historian

The women could talk freely within their all-female organizations; they were not allowed to address a mixed audience. This objection to women as public speakers (“public” referring to a mixture of male and female listeners) persisted—indeed increased. . . . For a woman to fight slavery in the pages of a periodical, then was daring for these times. —Mary Patricia Jones 26 n March 1845, Godey’s Lady’s Book published “Maternal Instruction” (Figure 3), an engraving that encapsulated the nineteenth century’s conviction in a mother’s responsibility for her children’s education. Patricia Okker suggests that this engraving limits the woman to the maternal role and to a small, domestic space, but it also associates her with reading and education, intellectual activities that transcend the domestic sphere (119–20). What is this woman reading to her daughters? Contemporary viewers may have assumed that this ideal mother transmitted sentimental, patriotic, or morally correct information.1 However , what if that assumption proves false? The engraving does not reveal titles of spellers, grammars, or sentimental novels. What if “Maternal Instruction,” actually depicts an abolitionist mother reading seditious political works to her daughters ? The question poses a real possibility. Domestic abolitionists embraced the ambiguity inherent in Godey’s “Maternal Instruction.” Many authors, like Kate Barclay, Matilda Thompson, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Eliza Follen, Jane Elizabeth Jones, S.C.C., and Harriet Butts, created juvenile, abolitionist historical fiction and a new protagonist: the abolitionist mother-historian.2 Rather than 79 3 Seditious Histories The Abolitionist Mother-Historian I employ the victim’s perspective intrinsic to sentimental juvenile pseudo slave narratives (see chapter 2), this maternal voice educates her children about abolitionist politics by narrating histories that otherwise “found few historians” (qtd. in Dudley 207). Situating this mother-historian in the safety of the nursery or schoolroom and having her do legitimate work allowed authors to support gen80 Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature 1830–1865 FIGURE 3. “Maternal Instruction” from Godey’s Lady’s Book (March 1845) (from the copy in the Rare Book Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). der paradigms and to placate the stigma against women’s public dissention. However, this figure’s revisionist histories employ everything from sentimental rhetoric to an increasingly radical, legalistic, and quasi-seditious rhetoric. Thus, domestic abolitionists cleverly empowered women’s voices in the act of documenting a threatened and preferably forgotten history. Contemporary nineteenth-century audiences often saw women as transmitters of knowledge to American children. In The Mother at Home; or, the Principles of Maternal Duty (1834), John S. C. Abbott argues that God endowed mothers, not educational institutions, with the power to serve as educators who could reform America’s ills before the millennium. He states: O mothers! reflect upon the power your Maker has placed in your hands. There is no earthly influence to be compared with yours. There is no combination of causes so powerful, in promoting the happiness in the misery of our race, as the instructions of home. (167) Furthermore, he aligns women’s superior moral status to America’s political climate : “When our land is filled with virtuous and patriotic mothers, then will it be filled with virtuous and patriotic men” (166). Like Abbott, Reverends Daniel Wise and Theodore Cuyler affirmed the beneficial power of a mother’s influence (Douglas 97, 99). Not surprisingly, contemporary women also supported the mother-educator. For example, in Letters to Mothers, Lydia Sigourney espoused “the omnipotent quality of maternal influence” (Douglas 74) and Lydia Maria Child dedicated The Mother’s Book “[t]o American [m]others on whose intelligence and discretion the safety and prosperity of our republic must depend” (v). Finally, in Woman in America: Her Work and Her Behavior (1850), Maria Jane McIntosh suggests that women, to whom “important work has been committed” (29), could facilitate America’s reformation from their private spheres.3 She states: But while all the outward machinery of government, the body, the thews and sinews of society, are man’s, woman, if true to her own not less important or less sacred mission, controls the vital principle. Unseen herself, working, like nature, in secret, she regulates its pulsations, and sends forth from its heart, in pure and temperate flow, the life-giving current. It is hers to warm into life the earliest germs of thought and feeling in the infant mind, to watch the first dawning of light upon the awakening soul...