Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (review)

Stacey Robertson has constructed a meticulously researched, lucidly written, and carefully argued study of antebellum abolitionist women in the five states carved out of the Northwest Territory. Within this region, she moves from the conservative streets of Cincinnati to the radical countryside near Salem, Ohio, and beyond.

Challenging the persistent notion that the Old Northwest was little more than an empty stage upon which eastern dramas were played out, Robertson asserts that abolitionist women developed a peculiarly western brand of activism rooted in cooperation and pragmatism. They shunned the ideological schisms that rent abolitionists in the East by favoring "prudence and patience over zealousness and rigidity" (13). Throughout the antebellum period, the region's political abolitionists, church abolitionists, and Garrisonians worked side by side, seeking harmony with fellow travelers.

Robertson is somewhat more interested in the radicals, a group that tended to be disproportionally white. Though Liberty Party advocate Mary Davis Brown, Quaker Elizabeth Chandler, and a handful of others receive attention, the Garrisonians—namely Betsy Mix Cowles, Sarah Otis Ernst, Lizzie Hitchcock, and Josephine Griffing—dominate her study. These women, Robertson shows, were forced to reconcile a moderate landscape with their own desires to receive the emotional and financial backing of their counterparts back East, most of whom had uncompromising notions about how to build the abolitionist movement. In response, they devised a third way, one that allowed them to remain faithful to their come-outer and disunionist views while appealing to a broader spectrum of abolitionists.

They did so, in large measure, by embracing a wide array of organizing tactics. Robertson is intensely concerned with describing these mechanisms of solidarity and sisterhood. Western abolitionist women, she shows, made clothes, food, and much else to aid fugitive slaves and to sell at antislavery fairs, boycotted slave-made goods, established free produce stores, edited newspapers, hosted conventions, denounced the region's Black Laws, attended political rallies, wrote letters, signed petitions, raised money, and, occasionally, took to the podium. By focusing their energies on "pragmatic campaigns that spoke to regional issues," abolitionist women of the Old Northwest fashioned a durable—and distinctive—movement (36).

The cooperative and pragmatic nature of western abolitionist women was further demonstrated by their willingness to participate in mixed-sex organizations, something eastern activists were far less likely to do. Robertson presents a sanguine portrait of the relationship between male and female abolitionists in the West, one she describes as a "partnership" that was "politically expedient," but also "collaborative," and characterized by "mutual respect" (20, 69, 25).

With few exceptions, Robertson argues, western abolitionist women did not challenge traditional gender roles. Instead, they glorified "women's sacrifice as normal and natural" and "reified gender norms" (79). Most of their methods built on older forms of social activism that did not undermine assumptions about the proper role of women. When they did embrace women's rights, they employed the "tactics that served them so well in antislavery" by constructing a moderate mixed-sex movement that focused on practical matters like education and dress reform (184).

Robertson's claims are judicious. If anything, her research suggests an even bolder argument than she makes. Robertson aims to prove that western abolitionist women differed from their eastern counterparts, but her evidence implies they may have been more influential as well. Although she repeatedly highlights the inclusive nature of their activism, Robertson shies away from asserting that western abolitionist women played a vital role in popularizing the movement with average Americans precisely because they rejected fanaticism. Proving influence, of course, is no easy task. But the necessary raw materials seem to be scattered throughout Robertson's study, as when she explains that Ohio's female antislavery societies were both larger and more numerous than those elsewhere in the nation, or when she quotes Frederick Douglass as describing a series of broad-based and harmonious annual gatherings in Cincinnati as "the...