The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (review)

BOOK REVIEWS79 primitive individuals with an occasional driver with ability enough to be trusted with the storehouse key. A "new beginning" occurred among historians who wrote about slavery in the 1950's, especially Stampp and Elkins, and more recendy Blassingame, Feldstein and odiers. The other sources on this topic had varied opinions. Planters justified slavery and indicated that drivers were usually former playmates of the owners. Travelers from the North and abroad viewed the drivers as sharing a common bond with otiier slaves and desiring freedom. The twentieth-century narratives and black autobiographies have had a mixed reception from scholars and laymen but all of these accounts show the intelligence, integrity, and compassion of die drivers. Complete widi an "appendix" on sources, this book should receive much attention in courses on the ante-bellum South. Although it leaves some questions unanswered, it breaks new ground on this vital topic. Charles Vincent Southern University, Baton Rouge The Shvery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America. By Blanche Glassman Hersh. (Urbana, Chicago, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Pp. xi, 280.) The Shvery of Sex is an inflammatory title for a calm and affectionate book. The phrase, however, suited the propaganda purposes of the nineteenth-century feminists who used it. And, although at war with Blanche Hersh's moderate tone, it serves her equally well by symbolizing the connection betweenantislavery andthewomen's rights movement. Professor Hersh felt that connection, long recognized by historians, deserved closer examination and she attempted to provide it. The task is less straightforward than it might seem. Ante-bellum feminism was a matter of consciousness and personal agitation rather than a movement widi a well-defined institutional structure, a fact which complicated narrative and research strategies. Even the time span is elusive. The women's rights crusade may have begun in die 1830's, witii female participation in antislavery, but it separated from, and out-lived, abolitionism. To end with the death of slavery would be to abandon die story when it was unfinished. To carry on to the triumph of woman suffrage in the twentieth century would be to go beyond the closest ties between abolitionism and feminism. Professor Hersh's solution is to avoid a precise terminal date and to concentrate on individuals, in lieu of institutions. After a pair of chapters designed to set the stage, she gives capsule biographies of Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, representatives of the first generation to make women's rights, not antislavery, the primary cause. Professor Hersh then moves to a study offifty-one early feminists, including an assessment of their husbands and marriages. The latter rate 80CIVIL WAR HISTORY attention, Hersh maintains, because nineteenth-century feminism advocated a reformed version of home and family. Accordingly, these marriages were both experiments and models of the way women's rights advocates thought things ought to be. Organizing a book around biographies and social profiles presents problems. It leads Professor Hersh, for instance, to withhold a chapter on feminist ideology—a basic connection between antislavery and women's rights—until she is three-quarters done. Yet Professor Hersh's approach permits her to pay tribute, usually thoroughly deserved, to the individuals she treats. Stanton is rarely anything other than "brilliant"; lesser lights, although not without faults, appear as rational, interesting, and sympathetic figures. Even the husbands, with some exceptions, come out well in The Shvery of Sex. As Professor Hersh shows, they supported dieir wives' careers with time, money, understanding, good grace, and love—rare help in any century. On this and most matters Hersh's instincts are often stronger than her mode of argument or her use ofsources. On p. 176, for example, she tries to document the sexual ignorance of educated women by citing Abby Kelly Foster's remark that "If I am not mistaken in physiological facts, I never can be a mother while I work so hard in the cause." Rather than ignorance, the quote may reflect Foster's absences from her husband. Similarly, Professor Hersh buttresses an important point about the historiography of temperance (p. 167) with a reference to an article by Herbert Gutman. Significant as Gutman's piece is, it...