Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (review)

BOOK REVIEWS325 that he stood "on the hearts of widows and orphans and childless mothers to be, and the voice of their wailing goes up to God this day" ( 1 55). On the eve of the presidential election of 1 864, when Lincoln worried about his chances against the Democratic nominee, the popular Gen. George McClellan, a citizen reassured "Uncle Abe" that he was not to worry: "The frauds and conspiracies of Copperheadism will avail not" (135). Lincoln, of course, saw very few of the thousands of letters that came his way, but the man for the ages left them for history. That would make Lincoln smile. Bruce Clayton Allegheny College Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society . By Debra Gold Hansen. (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Pp. xi, 231. $30.00.) The first major study ofany local antislavery society, this analysis ofthe Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society presents a profile of the group's members and attributes divisions in the group to class differences. Hansen is not the first to see socioeconomic differences dividing abolitionists. But in contrast to Nancy Hewitt (Women's Activism and Social Change), who found that such differences caused women to form rival antislavery societies reflective of members' homogeneous religion, social and economic background, Hansen's one organization of Boston women initially included not just white elites and middle-class women but also working-class whites and African Americans. Because of this diversity, Hansen argues, the group soon split, with the group led by elites arguing that women as well as men had the right to speak and act publicly. By contract, leaders of the middle-class faction were careful to present their reforms as the special responsibility offemales, whom they believed gained "status and influence through the faithful fulfillment of domestic and nurturing roles" (155). Some other reasons for conflict appear simple: elite women could easily ignore the economic realities that made middle-class women wary of equality. Having needed male protection themselves, middle-class women presented their antislavery argument as a female defense ofunprotected Christian sisters, children, and families. Because elite women rarely suffered from their dependent status, Hansen argues, they quickly turned from strictly antislavery arguments to promoting equal rights for women. By contrast, middle-class women more frequently assumed and argued for legal protection of dependent slaves and other economically vulnerable women. Hansen's comparison of these arguments for female activism suggests that scholars should be cautious in assuming that abolitionists who sided with church leaders and against abolitionist promoters of "the woman question" were inherently more conservative. Both elite and middle-class reformers were conservative in their unthinking 326civil war history acceptance of the economic and social order. Only on the question of race and slavery did these reformers differ from their contemporaries. Hansen sees elite and middle-class white women as comprising the core of the two groups remaining after 1 839, when the original society splintered. But the book also provides intriguing, if brief, glimpses of more obscure women— many Baptist, working class, and both black and white—who also supported the activities of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society even after the schism. Hansen has done well to gather and identify many of the hundreds who joined the Boston group, overcoming the obvious problems in establishing chronologies and even activities without official or manuscript minutes of the group surviving . Mining numerous references to the group in the private correspondence of members and tracing activities through the mentions in newspapers and reports of other reform organizations, Hansen has produced a nuanced analysis of tensions among Boston's antislavery women. Hansen's analysis leaves several questions open for future historians. Given the presence of blacks and working women in this Boston group, we should be alert for the presence of these less articulate groups in other studies of grassroots reformers. Black abolitionists, Hansen shows, were reluctant to take sides between the elite and middle-class women and at times intervened to minimize conflict (26). This mediation by black members of the Boston Female AntiSlavery Society suggests that historians, despite the desire for clear groupings and analysis, should also acknowledge that creating such...