Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (review)

The struggles against the slave trade and slavery were the world's first broadly based peaceful reform movements to achieve their goals. Their successes led veteran participants and newcomers to use similar techniques toward other reform goals. As is well known, the early move-ment for women's emancipation in the United States owed a great deal to the experience women had gained as participants in the struggle for black emancipation. There were also connections with the labor movement, illustrated by the declaration of support for working-class Chartism by Frederick Douglass, the African American supporter of abolitionism and women's rights, while on a tour of Britain. Even the animal rights cause has direct connections to abolitionism.

In her well-researched study Women against Slavery: The British Cam-paigns, 1780-1870, first published in hardback in 1992, Clare Midgley examines the important roles women played in the British abolitionist movements and shows how their links to American abolitionists helped foster links to the women's rights struggle in Britain as well.

Midgley's primary research is on the hitherto neglected roles that women's organizations played in British abolitionism. She notes that most British anti-slavery organizations were single-sex; because men's organizations played the more public roles, such as petitioning Parliament and speaking in public, British women's groups have been largely ignored. Yet she documents the importance of women's financial support of abolitionist campaigns and their disproportionate roles as door-to-door canvassers for abolitionist causes. She shows how creative British women were in finding important roles within the discriminatorily gendered roles society defined for them. They used their position in the domestic sphere to assume an active role in the campaign begun in 1791 to abstain from using slave-grown sugar. Women abolitionists also claimed as their rightful task the plight of enslaved women, using the double standard to focus attention on sexual exploitation.

British women's activity grew during the campaigns for slave emancipation and the end of apprenticeship during the 1820s and 1830s. Midgley painstakingly documents the existence of at least seventy-three "ladies' associations" between 1825 and 1833. Many of these served as auxiliaries to the more numerous men's associations, but others, notably the influential Female Society of Birmingham, functioned as independent societies. In the early 1830s British women added national petitions to their activities, at first addressing a woman-to-woman petition to the queen and then organizing the national female petition of 1833, "the largest single anti-slavery petition ever to be presented to Parliament" (p. 67).

Midgley disputes David Brion Davis's and Kenneth Corfield's contentions that British women abolitionists had little influence on the changes in national policy, arguing that women's mobilization of public opinion and their financial support were important in shaping the final outcomes.

One of the great merits of Midgley's approach is that she is as concerned with defining the limits of vision and effectiveness women im-posed on themselves as she is with focusing attention on British women's contributions to the abolitionist struggle. She points out the middle- and upper-class biases of the "ladies' associations" and em-phasizes that although there were working-class female abolitionists, too, the elite groups' narrow championing of the rights of enslaved blacks sometimes led to disruptions of their meetings by working-class Owenite and Chartist women demanding emancipation of the "white slaves" of the English factories. She further shows the discomfort many elite women abolitionists felt in dealing with black women like Mary Prince, whom they were more eager to welcome as victims than as fellow activists.

Midgley's study is of interest to world historians primarily because she devotes the latter part of the work to placing these local and na-tional activities in a broader context. She shows that although British men...