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Reviewed by:
  • Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865, and: Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children’s Abolitionist Literature
  • Paula T. Connolly (bio)
Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865. By Deborah C. De Rosa . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children’s Abolitionist Literature. Edited by Deborah C. De Rosa . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.

In Domestic Abolitionism and Juvenile Literature, 1830–1865,Deborah C. De Rosa examines, as she points out, "the convergence of discourses about women, children, and slavery in juvenile literature" (1) during the antebellum years. In her Introduction, she reviews the scholarship on nineteenth-century women's authorship and culture in the U.S., citing the work of, among others, Nina Baym, Nancy Cott, Mary Kelley, Jane Tompkins, and Jean Fagan Yellin. To scholars and students of American culture and literary history, those names are familiar ones, their studies—of how women negotiated the gendered separation of spheres, of the struggle for female authorship, of the reevaluation of sentiment's political power, and of narrative strategies used by women novelists who commented on issues in the public sphere—have become foundation points for nearly all later studies examining female authorship of the nineteenth century. Such is the case with this study, which adds to the canon of women's writing in its focus on antebellum children's literature by women.

Extrapolating from the paradigms of these earlier critics, De Rosa argues that "[w]riting for children was safe (or at least safer) work for domestic abolitionists . . . because this audience situated women in the domestic realm, their appropriate sphere" (7). "Furthermore, writing abolitionist literature for children may also have seemed harmless because it cast these domestic abolitionists as 'mothers' given the responsibility for American children's moral and civic education" (8). Abolitionist agitation was, of course, anything but harmless in antebellum discourse, but De Rosa sets up her argument well by retrieving texts often only found in rare book collections and providing careful close readings of the works under discussion.

De Rosa's study is divided into four chapters, which are each then further sub-divided. In her first chapter, for example, De Rosa provides an introduction of the influence of British abolitionist texts, then moves to a study of "The American Sunday School Union," "The American Anti-Slavery Society," "Commercial Publishers," and "The American Reform Tract and Book Society," each subtitle neatly directing readers to its subject, and each providing succinct and incisive historical context which then becomes the founding point for her literary analysis. For example, in her study of "The American Anti-Slavery Society," De Rosa details how the society and William Lloyd Garrison's decision to include a children's column in their [End Page 440] newspaper, the Liberator, "created domestic and appropriately 'female' spaces for women's abolitionist sentiments" (18). Although one could argue that the Liberator, as a radical abolitionist venue, left little opportunity for "safe" authorship, De Rosa does acknowledge the circumspection to which female authors had to resort. Their frequent use of initials and pseudonyms, for example, "reflects the hazardous tightrope women walked" (19).

The following three chapters each focus on central images that intersect issues of female authorship, domestic roles, and the rhetoric of fiction and social reform. In the second chapter, subtitled "Sentimentalized Victims and Abolitionist Tears," De Rosa principally examines the figure of the victimized slave child in developing reader empathy. In the following chapter, the role of the abolitionist-mother is explored in cultural terms as a sign of "women's domestic power" (83) and in literary terms through such authors as Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, whose poem "What is a Slave, Mother?" (1831), establishes the mother "as educator and revolutionary" (96).The final chapter focuses on the often conflicted views of white children engaged in the abolitionist cause, then discusses the role of the fictional child abolitionist, moving from Stowe's well-known Little Eva to the otherwise unknown Gertrude Lee, the protagonist in a novel of the same name by a "lady" author only known by the initials "M.A.F."

Throughout, a concise cultural overview of gendered issues is followed...

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