Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women's Antebellum Antislavery Fiction by Holly M. Kent (review)

Holly M. Kent's Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women's Antebellum Antislavery Fiction blurs the line between socially accepted gender roles and the potential influence of private writing. In the early years of the nineteenth century, middle-class white women found themselves forced into certain aspects of their public and private worlds and an adherence to the Cult of Domesticity and the pillars of piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Within their world, Kent argues that these women were in a uniquely powerful position to use these social rules to help erase the sins, specifically slavery, created by the male lead world. At a time when women were barely allowed to speak in public, the world of fiction writing was becoming more and more popular and women authors were finding a niche in writing socially, morally, and ethically driven works.

The characters in the novels that emerge from this time period continue the trends of gender-driven social roles with women—both enslaved African American women and white women—serving as the moral compass of the story while the men's roles vary from aggressor to someone simply questioning the end goal of emancipation. Kent also exposes the changing views of middle-class white women, specifically the authors themselves, on their enslaved African American counterparts. Kent traces the changes in these views, from authors believing that enslaved women were passive bystanders with lessons to learn from their white sisters to their understood complacency in their situation—and eventually that they, too, could serve as a moral compass guiding men toward a belief in abolition.

In these works, women authors are able to create a world that is both literally and figuratively black and white—creating scenes and stories that moved their political agenda forward outside of the accepted political arena. A trend emerges that these women authors were solely in the right about the horrors of slavery but often unsure of how to fight for abolition while only slightly pushing the boundaries of their defined social role, or perhaps not pushing the boundaries at all. These literary works served as another piece of the abolition fight, a piece that was created and consumed by middle-class white women in a setting that they could relatively control by themselves. The influence of these works, though, had a much further reach.

In her introduction, Kent's argument finds one of its most important thoughts: "These stories indicated that gender was a more significant category than race in American Society" (2). The idea that gender could influence the outcome of racial slavery is one that echoes throughout the book. Kent's point that these women authors were writing well within their pillar of piety is seen throughout a number of literary works, highlighting characters as moral and religious heroes ridding the world of evil. The significance of gender over race pushes against the tenets of True Womanhood and the Cult of Domesticity, especially in the political foundation of these novels, stories, and other pieces of fiction.

Kent's work digs deep into a number of unknown authors and literary works in addition to the more well-known pieces like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. This is where Kent's work shines. Previous ventures into the authors in this antislavery genre seemed focused on only a handful of women, but Kent has found a significant number of additional authors and works to create a well-rounded and more complete, albeit somehow still concise, picture of the history and influence of this type of fiction.

The breadth of her research spans academic gender, slavery, and literary studies, era speeches and newspaper articles, and a wide variety of the fiction works that form...