Race and Time: American Women's Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity

3. “Skins May Differ”: Women’s Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism

The abolitionist movement as it took form during the 1830s and the female public culture that thrived in print from about 1820 to 1870 had in common that they both drew much of their critical passion from Christian millennialism, a force that helped to form the eighteenthcentury revolutionary spirit but that the nation’s founders had resisted in framing political issues through rationalism and the concept of natural rights. Both abolitionism and female republicanism conceived experience in terms of salvation and damnation and viewed the nation’s destiny in terms of its Christian fulfillment of history. For both, human affiliations had priority over individual rights; affective bonds between people shaped individual subjectivity, gave rise to historical agency, and dramatized ideological stress. Human relationships extended beyond the temporal, providing an incentive for individuals to attend to the condition of communities of souls, not just their own: death healed all breaches of affiliation, carrying the soul to a spiritual utopia where loved ones divided in life could become reunited. Such reunions, however, were reserved for the innocent and those who had been extricated from sin. The perception of wrong, too, was affective , felt as grief in sympathy with the victim; to weep for others was to express a saving self-transcendence.1 These tenets of religious sentimentality provided an alternative framework for civic practice for both abolitionism and female public culture.2 Breaks in their congruence, however, surrounded women’s roles in public media in relationship to gender norms and the politics of nationhood. In the 1830s, whether and how women might participate in public life was a question that absorbed both sides of the sectional debate over slavery. White women as idealized cultural objects were central to the justification of slavery; yet as subjects both restricted and enabled by gender prescrip- “Skins May Differ” Women’s Republicanism and the Poetics of Abolitionism 3 tions, women also participated effectively in the movement to end slavery. With women’s increasing activism, an emphasis on representing women and children as sufferers of slavery’s wrongs developed early in radical abolitionist rhetoric. The imagery of victimization that accompanied this emphasis , by presenting opportunities to experience sympathy toward suffering bodies, framed slavery as an occasion for the spiritual growth of those who would oppose it. This abolitionist imagery, as Jean Fagan Yellin points out, also enhanced female republicanism by functioning as its reverse image , differentiating between the slaves’ helplessness and republican women ’s agency, between speechlessness and command of language, between the slaves’ dependency on an oppressor and republican womanhood’s supposed interdependent complementarity with male political practice. By mobilizing the language of sentiment as an effective social force, abolitionist discourse provided a balance to—and thus, paradoxically, a justification for—women’s continuing exclusion from the occupational and political roles that constituted the male public sphere.3 Debates about the appropriate sphere for women heightened conflicts between women’s abolitionism and the more conservative forms of female republican practice. Glenna Matthews notes that masculine “virtue,” a driving principle of classical republicanism, had a split definition: goodness or morality and virility or power. Female republicanism generally appropriated the former definition while distancing itself from the latter.4 As national tensions over slavery heightened, radical women abolitionists increasingly transgressed the boundary between morality and politics. The divisions between women’s abolitionism and the wider female public culture are evident in the career of Sarah Josepha Hale, whose forty years as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book (1837–1877) placed her among the most in- fluential American women of the century. Hale took the view that women must address moral issues but must not engage in partisan politics or warmaking ; practiced in this way, Hale believed, female public culture could heal sectional rivalry by melding a common sense of place through writing .5 Her opposition to women’s political agency extended to oratory: though her support for women writers was second to none, she firmly opposed women’s public speaking.6 In 1829 Hale wrote that women could appropriately publish on the morality of slavery, and as late as 1852 she wrote in support of the coloniza64 Antebellum tion movement, which promoted African American emigration to Liberia. She described her position as religious rather than political.7 Procolonization was not, however, a clear antislavery position. Black abolitionists had persuaded William Lloyd Garrison to withdraw his support...