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The -Slave Analogy:

Rhetorical Foundations in American Culture, 1830-1900

Ana Lucette Stevenson

BComm (dist.), BA (HonsI)

A thesis submitted for the degree of at

The University of in 2014

School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics

I Abstract

During the 1830s, Grimké, the abolitionist and women’s rights reformer from , stated: “It was when my soul was deeply moved at the wrongs of the slave that I first perceived distinctly the subject condition of women.” This rhetorical comparison between women and slaves – the woman-slave analogy – emerged in Europe during the seventeenth century, but gained peculiar significance in the during the nineteenth century. This rhetoric was inspired by the Revolutionary Era language of liberty versus tyranny, and discourses of gained prominence in the reform culture that was dominated by the American antislavery movement and shared among the sisterhood of reforms. The woman-slave analogy functioned on the idea that the position of women was no better – nor any freer – than slaves. It was used to critique the exclusion of women from a national body politic based on the concept that “all men are created equal.” From the 1830s onwards, this analogy came to permeate the rhetorical practices of social reformers, especially those involved in the antislavery, women’s rights, dress reform, and labour movements. Sarah’s sister, Angelina, asked: “Can you not see that women could do, and would do a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?” My thesis explores manifestations of the woman-slave analogy through the themes of , fashion, , labour, and sex. The white reformers who employed this prominent rhetorical device often privileged the position of white women over their enslaved African American counterparts. As a result, the woman-slave analogy has been derided by twentieth- century scholars, leading to a lack of historical examination regarding its nineteenth-century cultural significance. My thesis fills this critical omission through a historical and cultural examination of this rhetoric: examining the broader cultural context reveals the woman-slave analogy was much more than racist rhetoric. Yet this oversight is based on the assumption that the use of such rhetoric was limited to white women. My thesis proves that this was not the case by demonstrating that a variety of nineteenth-century Americans relied on discourses of slavery to describe women’s , from proslavery ideologues to African American reformers, for both reform and conservative purposes. However, unlike white reformers, African American reformers emphasised the plight of the slave and the experiences of black women over those of white women. This thesis therefore suggests that it is more useful to consider the woman-slave analogy as a nineteenth-century attempt toward understanding interdependent forms of oppression – . During the antebellum era in particular, when comparisons were predominantly based on a direct analogy between women and chattel slavery, many reformers and cultural commentators demonstrated a profound awareness of how different forms of oppression could

II intersect. However, following the and the Reconstruction amendments that privileged the passage of manhood suffrage, white women reformers became increasingly focused on white women’s rights. This was expressed through a transformation to comparisons based on sex and race, rather than women and slaves. Overall, the woman-slave analogy could and was mobilised in racist, nativist, and even sexist ways, but its mobilisation generally demonstrated a growing desire to understand of the intersections between different forms of oppression. By the turn of the twentieth century, the prominent women reformers of the nineteenth century were remembered, alongside the “Great Emancipator” President Lincoln, as “Lady Emancipators,” thus demonstrating the cultural centrality this rhetoric gained throughout the century. It is important, therefore, to consider the ways in which discourses of slavery worked alongside that of women’s rights throughout the nineteenth century. The woman-slave analogy was a rhetorical device that enabled a discussion of the multiple sites of oppression that existed during the nineteenth century, and was often used in a concerted attempt to describe how this affected women – all women.

III Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the General Award Rules of The University of Queensland, immediately made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 .

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis.

IV Publications during candidature

Peer reviewed journal article: Stevenson, Ana, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’: The Rhetoric of Dress Reform in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture,” Lilith: A Journal (2014): 5-20. Stevenson, Ana, “The Novel of Purpose and the Power of the Page: Breaking the Chains That Bind in Fettered for Life ,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics 6, no. 2 (2013): 104-14. Stevenson, Ana, “Making Gender Divisive: ‘Post-,’ and Media Representations of Julia Gillard,” Burgmann Journal: Research, Debate, Opinion no. II (2013): 53-66.

Conference proceedings: Stevenson, Ana, “‘The Abolitionists of Slavery among Women’: Transatlantic Foundations of the Woman-Slave Analogy,” in Marcus K. Harmes, Lindsay Henderson, Barbara Harmes and Amy Antonio, eds., The British World: Religion, Memory, Society, Culture: Proceedings of the Conference (Toowoomba, University of Southern Queensland, 2012), 159-169.

Editorials: Piper, Alana Jayne and Ana Stevenson, “Editorial – Dirty Words, Dirty History,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal (2014): 2-4. Stevenson, Ana and Alana Jayne Piper, “Guest Editorial: Perspectives on Power,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics 6, no. 2 (2013): 3-5.

Peer reviewed book reviews: Stevenson, Ana, “ Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (2011), by Serena Mayeri,” Visions and Revisions: New Scholars and New Interpretations (2014). Stevenson, Ana, “ Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (2011), by Carol Faulkner,” Melbourne Historical Journal , no. 41 (2013).

V Publications included in this thesis

Incorporated into Chapter One: Stevenson, Ana, “‘The Abolitionists of Slavery among Women’: Transatlantic Foundations of the Woman-Slave Analogy,” in Marcus K. Harmes, Lindsay Henderson, Barbara Harmes and Amy Antonio, eds., The British World: Religion, Memory, Society, Culture: Proceedings of the Conference (Toowoomba, University of Southern Queensland, 2012), 159-169.

Incorporated into Chapter Three: Stevenson, Ana, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’: The Rhetoric of Dress Reform in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal (2014): 5-20.

Contributions by others to the thesis

N/A

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree

N/A

VI Acknowledgements

Over the course of my candidature, I have benefited from the support of many individuals and institutions. I would like to acknowledge the ongoing support and assistance I have received from the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at The University of Queensland. Thanks especially to my supervisors, Associate Professor Chris Dixon and Professor Clive Moore, as well as the extended supervisory team who I have worked with over the course of my studies, Dr. Sarah Pinto and Dr. Hilary Emmett. More recently, thank you to Dr. Lisa Featherstone for being a wonderful mentor as part of the AHA/CAL Bursary program.

The members of my “pod” in the Michie Building have been endlessly inspiring and supportive. My postgraduate experience would not have been the same without Dr. Kate Ariotti, Dr. Alana Jayne Piper, Dr. Jon Piccini, and Gemmia Burden. This is not to forget the extended office, including Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien, Hollie Thomas, Dr. Daniel Brandl-Beck, Chris Mesiku, Samantha Bedggood, Romain Fathi, Kyle van Beurden, Dominic Hennessy, Dr. Irena Larking, and Bryan Mukandi. Thanks also to my friends Amanda Acutt, Katherine Curry, Faraker, Jo Palmes, Rory Dexter, and Kieran Wynn, as well as my swathe of housemates. I appreciate the support of St John’s College, and Rev. Cannon Professor John Morgan. Finally, thank you to my friend and mentor, Rev. Dr. Howard Munro.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have undertaken a research trip to the United States, enabled by the assistance of HPRC and the generosity of the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. Most of all, I appreciate the assistance of my , Janet and Colin Stevenson, Ruth Stevenson, and Noreen Rossall. I would like to thank Dr. Conrad Wright and Kate Viens at the Historical Society for their encouragement, as well as the knowledgeable and cheerful librarians and archivists at the , , the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the , Smith College. Some amazing people made my overseas jaunt all the more special, particularly Dr. Kristin Allukian, Dr. Katherine Harper, Dr. Allison Lange, Shannon Luders-Manuel, and the very welcoming Mavrogiannidis family.

Thinking back, I would like to thank to Keith Stevenson, my Year 10 history teacher at Glenmore State High School, for answering thoughtfully when I asked, “Why did you say ‘mankind’ and not ‘humankind’?” Also to my undergraduate thesis adviser, Dr. John Fitzsimmons at Central Queensland University, for gently asking why I wasn’t a feminist. To all the women who have taught and inspired me, including Ann Slade, Anne Johns, Sandy Shaw, Dr. Tanya Nittins, Dr. Wendy O’Brien, Mary McLeod, and most of all my and grandmother.

My extracurricular activities are food for the soul, and I would be lost without The Johnian Duo and Canticum Chamber Choir. My wooden spoon soccer team, Seeker Better Keeper, is not to be forgotten, either. Recently, I have enjoyed working with the Lilith Collective of the Australian Women’s History Network and learned so much from this wonderful group of young scholars. In addition, I appreciate the faith the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh has placed in me, for accepting me as a Visiting Scholar.

I am endlessly appreciative to my dedicated proofreading team. Sheilagh has given me an amazing amount of assistance and encouragement, as has Alana. My mother has read this thesis multiple times and surely deserves an honorary doctorate as a result.

Finally, thank you for the ongoing encouragement and reassurance of my family, Janet, Colin, and Luca Stevenson, Noreen and Ian Rossall, Ruth and Jan Stevenson, and all the others who have given me confidence along the way. Especial thanks to Hilton Bristow, for being my cheerleader, support, and inspiration since 2010.

VII Keywords

American history, women’s history, social movements, feminism, intersectionality

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code: 210312 North American History, 80% ANZSRC code: 200506 North , 20%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification

FoR code: 2103 Historical Studies, 80% FoR code: 2005 Literary Studies, 20%

VIII

Women and negroes, in marriage and singleness, in slavery, and in nominal freedom, stand on the same platform and hold the same position in the laws, customs, and conduct of business in the freest government on earth!

PAULINA WRIGHT DAVIS , “P ECUNIARY INDEPENDENCE OF WOMAN ,” THE UNA , DECEMBER 1853

IX Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ...... II

DECLARATION BY AUTHOR ...... IV

PUBLICATIONS DURING CANDIDATURE ...... V

PUBLICATIONS INCLUDED IN THIS THESIS ...... VI

CONTRIBUTIONS BY OTHERS TO THE THESIS ...... VI

STATEMENT OF PARTS OF THE THESIS SUBMITTED TO QUALIFY FOR THE AWARD OF ANOTHER

DEGREE ...... VI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... VII

KEYWORDS ...... VIII

AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND STANDARD RESEARCH CLASSIFICATIONS (ANZSRC) .. VIII

FIELDS OF RESEARCH (F OR) CLASSIFICATION ...... VIII

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... X

LIST OF FIGURES ...... XII

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... XIII

INTRODUCTION : “T HE ABOLITIONISTS OF SLAVERY AMONG WOMEN ” ...... 1 Intersectional Politics ...... 2 Rhetoric, Metaphor and Language ...... 5 Literature Review ...... 8 Chapters ...... 17 Conclusion ...... 18

CHAPTER ONE : FOUNDATIONS : “A LL WOMEN ARE BORN SLAVES ” ...... 19 The Enlightenment and its Classical Influences ...... 21 Women and the Law...... 24 European Foundations ...... 26 American Foundations ...... 36 Transatlantic Connections ...... 46 Conclusion ...... 50

CHAPTER TWO : MARRIAGE : “B OUGHT AND SOLD LIKE A NEGRO SLAVE ” ...... 52 Legal Foundations ...... 53 and Marriage ...... 55 Reform ...... 57 Sex and Slavery ...... 64 Inscribing Hierarchy ...... 67 Southern Strategies ...... 71 Philosophical Considerations ...... 77 Fugitive ...... 80 Conclusion ...... 87

X CHAPTER THREE : FASHION : “T YRANT CHAINS ” ...... 88 Interpreting Fashion ...... 89 Trend Transgressors ...... 92 Satire and Sketches ...... 98 Rhetorical Persistence ...... 103 Civil War Overtures ...... 106 A Broad ...... 112 Fashion’s Slaves ...... 117 Conclusion ...... 121

CHAPTER FOUR : SUFFRAGE : “P OLITICAL SLAVERY ” ...... 122 Revolutionary Beginnings ...... 123 Suffrage Ambivalence ...... 129 Rhetorical Contention...... 131 “The Negro’s Hour” ...... 135 Racial Limits?...... 139 New Departures ...... 144 Competing Strategies ...... 149 Conclusion ...... 157

CHAPTER FIVE : LABOUR : “T HE UNCOMPLAINING DRUDGE ” ...... 158 Antebellum Free Labour ...... 159 Female Operatives ...... 162 Hidden Labours ...... 168 Labouring for Reform ...... 174 Deeper Intersections ...... 177 Writing Labour ...... 179 Working Women ...... 184 Conclusion ...... 190

CHAPTER SIX : SEX : “S LAVERY REDIVIVUS ” ...... 192 A Sexual Economy ...... 194 Antebellum Markets ...... 196 Marriage Markets ...... 198 in Flux...... 200 Remembering Slavery ...... 203 Remembering Rhetoric...... 209 Remembering Reform ...... 213 Conclusion ...... 214

CONCLUSION : “L ADY EMANCIPATORS ” ...... 216 A Return to Intersectional Politics ...... 216 The Woman-Slave Analogy ...... 219 Conclusion ...... 221

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 223

XI List of Figures

Figure 1. “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” Antislavery Token ...... 13 Figure 2. William Blake, “Europe Supported by and America” (1796) ...... 31 Figure 3. “Eliza Crosses the Ohio on the Floating Ice.” ...... 81 Figure 4. “The Death of .” ...... 82 Figure 5. “Bloomers.” ...... 96 Figure 6. A Crinoline Cage? ...... 100 Figure 7. “Bloomerism – An American Custom” (1851) ...... 101 Figure 8. “Woman’s Emancipation” (1851) ...... 102 Figure 9. Emancipation Suits...... 111 Figure 10. “‘Good Sense’ Corset Waists” (1886) ...... 113 Figure 11. “Hygienic Under Garments.” ...... 115 Figure 12. Harper’s Weekly proof etching by Thomas Nast, potentially unpublished...... 120 Figure 13. Lou Rogers, “Tearing off the Bonds” (1912)...... 156 Figure 14. “Domestic Sewing Machine” (c.1882)...... 172 Figure 15. White slavery literature...... 209

XII List of Abbreviations

AASS American Anti-Slavery Society AAW Association for the Advancement of Women AERA American Equal Rights Association AFASS American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society AWSA American Woman Suffrage Association BFASS British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society FLRA Female Labour Reform Association NAWSA National American Woman Suffrage Association NDRA National Dress Reform Association NEWC New England Women’s Club NWSA National Woman Suffrage Association WWA Working Women’s Association

XIII INTRODUCTION :

“T HE ABOLITIONISTS OF SLAVERY AMONG WOMEN ”

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body. 1

HEBREWS 13:13, THE BIBLE

It was when my soul was deeply moved at wrongs of the slave that I first perceived distinctly the subject condition of women. … It requires but little thought to see that the condition of women and that of slaves are in many respects parallel. 2

SARAH M. GRIMKÉ , “C ONDITION OF WOMAN ” (N.D.)

During the nineteenth century, the rhetorical comparison between women and slaves inspired American social reformers such as Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and women’s rights reformer from South Carolina. The woman-slave analogy emerged in Europe from at least the seventeenth century, but gained peculiar significance in the United States during the nineteenth century. The Revolutionary era rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny meant slavery gradually gained prominence as a referent, especially in the antebellum reform culture dominated by the antislavery movement. The woman-slave analogy was based on the idea that the position of women was no better – nor any freer – than slaves. From the 1830s, this rhetoric became important among social reformers, but also had wider cultural impact for cultural commentators, novelists, and even southern proslavery ideologues. This thesis will explore the emergence of the woman-slave analogy through the themes of marriage, fashion, politics, labour, and sex. The ideological underpinnings of the woman-slave analogy were incongruous. Most obviously, the habitual exploitation and dehumanisation of chattel slavery made the comparison tenuous and problematic. The comparative cultural power with which white women were imbued meant the analogy was overwhelmingly imbalanced. Yet this rhetoric also existed alongside, and often in conflict with, cultural ideals that venerated womanhood whilst confining women to very specific ideals. Since nineteenth-century political ideology sought to determine what constituted citizenship and who could be a full citizen, there was also a coherent thought framework behind the comparison. When white reformers employed this prominent rhetorical device, they often privileged the position of white women over their enslaved African American counterparts. As the woman-slave analogy has therefore received much derision from twentieth-century scholars, there has been little examination of its nineteenth-century cultural significance. Moreover, this historiographical

1 The Bible (New Revised Critical Edition). 2 Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition (Chapel Hill: The University of Press, 1967, 2004), 130.

1 oversight is based on the assumption that this rhetoric was limited to white women reformers. This thesis addresses this critical omission through a historical and cultural examination of this rhetoric. Simultaneously, it disproves the assumption that this rhetoric was only mobilised by white women, and demonstrates that the woman-slave analogy was used for both reform and conservative proslavery purposes. However, , unlike their white counterparts, emphasised the plight of the slave and the experiences of black women over those of white women. It is necessary to look toward the methodology of women’s history and the contemporary academic feminist framework to inform this perspective.

Intersectional Politics Since the 1970s, intermittent considerations of the comparison between women and slaves have taken place in the fields of history, literature, studies of gender and race, legal history and political science. Although this rhetoric has largely been condemned across these fields, William H. Chafe drew attention to its significance in 1977: “Probably no analogy has been used more frequently by both scholars and women’s rights advocates than that between sex and race.” 3 Much of this critique was in response to the mobilisation of similar rhetorical strategies during the twentieth century, especially amongst feminists.4 In response, the women’s history methodology that developed during the 1970s condemned the contemporary use of analogy – whether between women and slaves, or sex and race. Of the little scholarly literature that actually investigates the significance of the woman-slave analogy, discussion is largely limited to isolated or fragmentary commentary. It is therefore important to recognise that the woman-slave analogy has long existed as a rhetorical device. The institution of modern slavery, based on the of transported Africans, developed throughout the seventeenth century and was predicated on the denial of rights to particular human subjects. As the concept of rights gained prominence during the enlightenment, this provided the ideological foundations of and feminism in a way that encouraged comparisons between women and slaves. The woman-slave analogy was prevalent among European women writers, reformers and other intellectuals from the seventeenth century onwards. 5 The importance of chattel slavery in the United States provided the framework for the emergence of this rhetoric among women reformers. Although the northern states abolished chattel slavery at the end of the eighteenth century, its continued presence in the southern states remained controversial

3 William H. Chafe, “Sex and Race: The Analogy of Social Control,” The Massachusetts Review 18, no. 1 (1977): 147. 4 See: Lisa Maria Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University of Press, 1998), Chapter Six: “The Sex/Race Analogy”; Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Judith Resnick, “Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Antislavery Work and Women’s Rights Movements in the United States During the Twentieth Century,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007). 5 See: Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, eds. Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007).

2 and became central to antebellum public debate. The issue of antebellum chattel slavery existed alongside wider issues surrounding the transformation of the home, family and work, as well as changing gender roles. The cult of true womanhood – an ideology wherein mother, , and children were gathered in the private household to maintain cultural and social stability and promote the pursuit of happiness – confined women’s roles within the domestic sphere and men’s to the public sphere. Together with a rapidly growing and industrialising economy, this resulted in a greater gender demarcation between home and work. 6 Although this demarcation was an ideal more than a reality, it still affected liminal arenas – such as social reform – where the public and private could coalesce.7 In addition, religion played an equally important role in shaping women’s lives and creating gendered spheres and Protestantism was particularly influential following the First and Second Great Awakenings. 8 Religion will provide background context but will not be a focus of this thesis because many historians have considered this aspect of nineteenth-century American culture.9 The way in which these social forces created and maintained gender and racial hierarchy provided the context for comparisons between women and slaves. The woman-slave analogy became most influential and contentious during the antebellum era. In 1853, Paulina Wright Davis, editor of the women’s rights periodical The Una , stated: “[T]he analogy that exists between the conditions of women, and of the negro race in the United States, is so close, that slavery and apply to the one as well as to the other.” 10 The antislavery and women’s rights movements themselves became foundational to expressions of the woman-slave analogy. For Davis, women’s rights reformers were “the abolitionists of slavery among women,” but just as radical abolitionists refuted the American Colonisation Society’s repatriation of freed slaves to Africa, she positioned women’s rights as too important for compromise and so demanded “emancipation on the soil, not colonisation on the clouds.” 11 The woman-slave analogy enabled a broader critique of women’s oppression in an increasingly interconnected world, but interpretations

6 See: Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labour and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (1996): 183-206. 7 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand & Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5. 8 See: Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (Yale University Press, 2007). 9 See: Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New : , 1994); Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000); Jennifer Rycenga, “A Greater Awakening: Women’s Intellect as a Factor in Early Abolitionist Movements, 1824-1834,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 2 (2005): 31-59; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘The Throne of My Heart’: Religion, Oratory, and Transatlantic Community in Angelina Grimké’s Launching of Women’s Rights, 1828-1838,” in Women’s Rights ; Emily R. Mace, “Feminist Forerunners and a Usable Past: A of ’s The Woman’s Bible ,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 2 (2009): 5-23. 10 Paulina Wright Davis, “Pecuniary Independence of Woman,” Una , December 1853. 11 Paulina Wright Davis, “The Moral Character of Woman,” Una , June 1853.

3 differed between nations, specifically in regards to the actual presence, distance from or complete absence of chattel slavery. The woman-slave analogy was mobilised and circulated in many ways throughout the nineteenth century. From reform and mainstream novels and newspapers to the minutes of antislavery and women’s rights conventions and congressional arguments, the woman-slave analogy emerged in diverse contexts. This rhetoric was therefore ubiquitous and at the heart of nearly all comparisons between free and enslaved women. Herein, free women were usually, but not always, white; indeed, dialogues also centred on the degrees of freedom experienced by mixed- race women. The concept of slavery was overwhelmingly related to chattel slavery in the American South or European colonies and so inherently related to the racial slavery of Africans and those of African descent, but some references were founded on orientalised impressions of gender relations in Eastern cultures. Often, but not always, the use of this rhetoric implied that white women’s oppression was contemptible and therefore more unjust than that of the enslaved. Both explicitly and implicitly, this rhetoric appeared as the unequivocal comparisons of women and slaves as well as in more indirect references facilitated through language associated with chattel slavery and unfreedom. In spite of the prominence of this rhetoric, scholars have largely concluded that it was an expression of and focused only on the experience of white women. These claims are not without merit, but have led scholars to dismiss any further examination of the woman-slave analogy and its cultural significance during the nineteenth century. As a result, the full complexity of this issue has not yet been explored. This rhetoric was frequently invoked alongside racist, nativist and elitist sentiments, but its existence also reflected a growing awareness of connections between gender, race and class. An awareness of these connections occurred long before there was the terminology to effectively explain such concepts. During the 1990s, Kimberlé Crenshaw condemned the way African American women were overlooked in the “single-axis framework” of feminism, which instead tended to focus on the experience of white women and black men. This critique led to the development of the concept of “intersectionality,” which has since become a central methodological concept within contemporary feminist scholarship. 12 Since its development, intersectionality has enabled more productive discussions regarding the existence of interdependent in a manner not possible prior to its conception. These insights have facilitated a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender, race and class oppression, but has also enabled

12 See: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, , and Antiracist Politics, Legal Forum 139 (1989): 139-167; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and of Colour,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241-1299.

4 greater awareness of the intersections beyond these categories. Nira Yuval-Davis considers ongoing interrelationships between gender, class, race, and ethnicity, as well as other social divisions, and how they interact in a contemporary framework. 13 Therefore, an intersectional framework demonstrates how the woman-slave analogy helped draw attention to gender, as part of an emerging awareness of interdependent oppressions, during the nineteenth century. Although this rhetoric focused on gender, its mobilisation within so many discrete groups indicates that it was more prevalent than scholars have previously suggested. Beyond the development of gender consciousness among white women, the concept of slavery facilitated an analysis of interdependent oppressions in nineteenth-century American political discourse. Therefore, the woman-slave analogy emphasised the need for women’s rights. It was not only ubiquitous, but often acknowledged and included more than just white women in its discussion of various forms of oppression. Yet this was not a static process, because a rhetorical and substantive emphasis to understand and address the interconnections between gender, race and class was more evident in the antebellum era than in the postbellum era. Moreover, this rhetoric was used to draw attention to the existence of gender oppression in both reform and proslavery conservative contexts. Overall, an awareness of what can retrospectively be understood as intersectionality was more prolific amongst antebellum reformers, whereas it largely remained a focus for African American reformers during the postbellum era. The degree to which reformers and commentators used the woman-slave analogy to engage with the exploitation experienced by the enslaved, rather than just that of white women, usually demonstrated their intersectional awareness.

Rhetoric, Metaphor and Language This thesis examines the rhetorical foundations of the woman-slave analogy in the United States during the nineteenth century. The interrelations between social movements, at both the individual and organisational level, meant this rhetoric emerged across many reforms. These included the antebellum antislavery, women’s rights, dress reform, health reform, and labour movements, as well as the postbellum women’s suffrage and anti-vice movements. Even so, the political and cultural significance of slavery meant that other groups – such as journalists, novelists, and proslavery ideologues – also espoused this rhetoric. Over the course of the nineteenth century, inscriptions of the woman-slave analogy changed from comparisons between women and slaves to categorisation based on sex and race. Although greater intersectional awareness characterised this rhetoric during the antebellum era, the changes that resulted from the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation

13 Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13, no. 3 (2006): 194.

5 (1863) and Reconstruction provide context for an increased focus on white women by the end of the nineteenth century. It is important to consider the way “analogy” and “metaphor” has been understood from a scholarly perspective. “A metaphor,” according to Nancy Leys Stepan, “is a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object that is different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable.” 14 As related figures of speech, analogy and metaphor are often used interchangeably. Max Black suggests that “every metaphor may be said to mediate an analogy or structural correspondence.” 15 Carla L. Peterson views the nineteenth-century reliance on analogy, which “imitates the similarity between two unlike entities,” as instructive: [I]t allows the speaker to select the term with which to compare the chosen object or idea and, in the process, to emphasise one particular feature over all others. It functions … as a form of explanation by suggesting that the same cause has given rise to the similarity of features. Finally, … analogy often seeks to suppress what does not fit; and yet, since similarity never means exact sameness, difference always remains. 16 In conjunction with the scholarly critique of the woman-slave analogy, scholars have demonstrated that metaphor and analogy proved equally dubious in many other historical frameworks: convictism or indentured labour being described as slavery; the Holocaust as a metaphor; rhetorical comparisons between abortion and slavery; the Vietnam War as a metaphor for any subsequent failed military ; Hitler as a historical metaphor for other dictators; legal analogies between race and sex; and the analogy between and . 17 In this thesis, analogy will be used to describe the rhetorical comparisons between women and slaves. The language underpinning the woman-slave analogy related to the way oppression and hierarchy were described in the United States. Since the rhetoric of “slavery” and “tyranny” informed the late-eighteenth-century desire for colonial sovereignty, there was context for the use of

14 Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis 77, no. 2 (1986): footnote 261. 15 Max Black, “More About Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought , ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 31. See also: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 1980). 16 Carla L. Peterson, “‘And We Claim Our Rights’: The Rights Rhetoric of Black and White Women Activists before the Civil War,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work , ed. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 139. 17 See: Clive Moore, Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay (Port Moresby: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and University of Papua New Guinea Press, 1985); David Neal, “Free Society, Penal Colony, Slave Society, Prison?” Australian Historical Studies 22, no. 98 (1987): 497-518; Yael Zerubavel, “The Death of Memory and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors,” Representations 45 (1994): 72-100; Debora Threedy, “Slavery Rhetoric and the Abortion Debate,” Michigan Journal of Gender & Law 2 (1994): 3-26; Roland Paris, “Kosovo and the Metaphor War,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2002): 423-50; Markus Kornprobst, “Comparing Apples and Oranges? Leading and Misleading Uses of Historical Analogies,” Millennium – Journal of International Studies 36, no. 29 (2007): 29-49; Serena Mayeri, “Reconstructing the Race-Sex Analogy,” William and Mary Law Review 49 (2007): 1789-1857; Janet R. Jakobsen, “Queers Are Like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” in Theory and the Jewish Question , ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Press, 2013).

6 such language.18 Historically, “servant” was considered an insult to personal liberty in the North, and was therefore superseded by “help,” but in the South it became a euphemism for slavery and, as such, not considered applicable to white labour. 19 The cultural importance of religion meant that biblical injunctions also provided context for the rhetorical employment of slavery as a metaphor. 20 While reformers found inspiration in Acts and Hebrews, among others, proslavery southerners were influenced by Galatians and Peter. More generally, Romans and Corinthians used slavery metaphors to discuss concepts such as slavery to sin and being enslaved to God. 21 Moreover, “freedom” and “emancipation” constituted the ideal towards which critics of oppression strove; this shaped how the “generation of 1848” discussed ideals of human freedom and equality alongside specific calls for citizenship and enfranchisement.22 Yet this language proved just as problematic as “slavery” because of the competing purposes to which these nebulous concepts could be applied. The prominence of chattel slavery, together with the ongoing impact of revolutionary rhetoric, biblical metaphor, and changing interpretations of labour and freedom, enabled “slavery” to became a euphemism for varying sites of oppression, including women’s oppression. Overall, the woman- slave analogy was invoked through vocabulary deemed synonymous with many sites of “slavery.” This thesis seeks to develop appropriate terminology to describe comparisons between women and slaves. Historians have used myriad phrases to describe this rhetorical phenomenon: the “slave comparison”; the “situation of women and blacks”; the “analogy between race and gender”; the “analogy between race and sex”; and the “woman as slave analogy.” 23 Beyond a focus on gender, it is necessary to think about how analogy and metaphor interacted with the language of

18 See: Gordon S. Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the ,” The William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 1 (1966): 3-32; Peter A. Dorsey, “To ‘Corroborate Our Own Claims’: Public Positioning and the Slavery Metaphor in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2003): 353-386; François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1295-1330. 19 Eric Foner, “Free Labour and Nineteenth-Century Political Ideology,” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 , ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (The University Press of , 1996), 102. 20 See: John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early and Pauline Christianity: A Tradito-Historical Exegetical Examination (Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); John Byron, “Paul and the Background of Slavery: The Status Quaestionis in New Testament Scholarship,” Currents in Biblical Research 3, no. 1 (2004): 116-39; Chris L. de Wet, “Sin as Slavery and/or Slavery as Sin? On the Relationship between Slavery and Christian Hamartiology in Late Ancient Christianity,” Religion & Theology 17, no. 1/2 (2010): 26–39. 21 The Bible (New Revised Critical Edition). Reform examples: Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 123:1-3; Proverbs 19:10; Romans 6:16; Galatians 3:28, 4:1-8 and 5:1; and Hebrews 13:13. Proslavery examples: Galatians 4:24; Peter 2:18. 22 Ellen Carol DuBois, “’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848,” in Women’s Rights , 280. 23 Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 352; Joan Wallach Scott, “French Feminists and the Rights of ‘Man’: ’s Declarations,” History Workshop 28 (1989): 9-10; Stepan, “The Role of Analogy in Science,” 263; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women Compared at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 467; Tracy A. Thomas, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Notion of a Legal Class of Gender,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law , ed. Tracey Jean Boisseau and Tracy A Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 141; Teresa C. Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 120.

7 slavery during the nineteenth century. The contention surrounding the use of “slave” and “enslaved” informs historiographical interpretations of the language of slavery. Where “slave” has the potential to emphasise the legality and oppressiveness of the institution but also to become synonymous with “victim,” “enslaved” instead draws attention to the process of enslavement but emphasises the dignity and humanity of enslaved beings. 24 Since the prevalence of chattel slavery meant the slavery paradigm had great significance in nineteenth-century America, this rhetoric became more than simply a slavery analogy. Therefore, this thesis argues that “discourses of slavery” shaped nineteenth-century conceptions of the woman-slave analogy in the United States. Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring’s The Discourse of Slavery: From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (1994) provided the framework for this terminology.25 As “slavery” itself became a discourse through which oppression and the imbalance of power were described, it is useful consider the influence of “discourses of slavery” in the context of the United States. Two distinct discourses of slavery will be identified throughout this thesis: abstract and direct. Abstract discourses of slavery refer to rhetoric that references slavery without specific reference to race, such as through allusions to the American Revolution. In contrast, direct discourses of slavery relate to direct references to the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery, especially to focus on its racial dimensions.26 The significance of these categories is that a greater sense of intersectional understanding often accompanied the use of direct discourses of slavery, especially during the antebellum era, whereas abstract discourses of slavery did not often engender such awareness. Moreover, the woman-slave analogy will be used to describe the many ways in which this rhetorical phenomenon has previously been identified.

Literature Review This literature review will consider scholarly attitudes toward comparisons between women and slaves from the 1970s to the present. Initially, the woman-slave analogy was reproduced in twentieth-century scholarship, especially by biographers, but methodological discussions of women’s history led to the outright condemnation of this rhetoric. By considering the broader cultural forces of nineteenth-century America, more recent scholars have found some redeeming factors surrounding this rhetoric. It has been a general historiographical and methodological trend to discuss the existence of the woman-slave analogy as part of a larger work, meaning that this topic only ever constitutes a peripheral analysis. Intersectionality has not been applied as a

24 Margaret Abruzzo, Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 14-15. 25 See: Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, “Introduction,” in Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, eds. The Discourse of Slavery: From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (Oxon: Routledge, 1994). 26 See: Kenneth M. Stampp, : Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopt, 1956).

8 methodological paradigm, nor have the breadth of groups that mobilised this rhetoric been considered collectively. The lack of consensus on terminology has made it challenging to collate pertinent scholarship, but important historiographical and methodological developments can still be identified. The emergence of African American and women’s history during the 1970s made both groups more visible. Lemuel A. Johnson and George M. Frederickson acknowledged the significance of racial metaphors and in Western society following slavery and colonisation.27 This lay the groundwork for scholarly attention toward issues surrounding race and metaphor. Barbara Welter and Nancy F. Cott wrote seminal texts that shaped discussions of American women’s history and scholarship on the public and private spheres. 28 The focus on ideologies surrounding race and gender, together with the significance of metaphor, encouraged scholars to think about the connections and differences between these social categories. It is a contradiction that many scholars have appropriated rhetoric reminiscent of the woman- slave analogy. Wil A. Linkugel’s 1963 article, “The Woman Suffrage Argument of ,” stated that nineteenth-century women “deserted the upholstered cage” and “arose to throw off the shackles of male subjugation,” while Andrew Sinclair’s The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (1965) framed women’s history in terms of emancipatory progress. 29 This historiographical interpretation often used variations on the woman-slave analogy as a seemingly clever pun. Although Ellen Carol DuBois’ later scholarship emphasised the organisational skills and common cause espoused by antislavery and women’s rights reform women, her 1970 article on the Grimké sisters, published in Women: A Journal of Liberation , used an 1837 quote – “Some few females have Emancipated themselves” – to frame its methodological approach. 30 These scholars let their own rhetoric merge with that of their historical sources, which meant they blatantly reproduced the nineteenth-century reform perspective that envisaged the experience of women within a paradigm of slavery versus freedom. Many biographers of nineteenth-century reform women perpetuated this problem, but some have demonstrated other possibilities. Katharine du Pre Lumpkin’s The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (1974) emphasised how Angelina experienced “a deep, compelling need to strip away those

27 See: Lemuel A. Johnson, The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon: The Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature (Port Washington: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1969, 1971); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1971). 28 See: Welter, Dimity Convictions ; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). 29 Wil A. Linkugel, “The Woman Suffrage Argument of Anna Howard Shaw,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 49, no. 2 (1963): 165; Andrew Sinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965). 30 Sarah C. Rugg to Anne Warren Weston, August 21, 1837, in Ellen Carol DuBois, “Struggling into Existence: The Feminism of Sarah and Angelina Grimké,” Women: A Journal of Liberation 1, no. 2 (1970).

9 crippling bonds laid on her sex so that she could fully realise the powers that lay within her.” 31 Mary Kelley’s 1978 examination of indicated that Calvin Stowe’s sexual needs threatened her autonomy, while her “commitment to wifehood and motherhood made her captive to an ideal that in many respects she was unable to realise in her own life.” 32 Thomas Gossett’s discussion of ’s Cabin (1852) suggested that Stowe’s sympathy for slaves developed “because she was, in a real sense, a slave herself – a slave to family cares, household chores, and ill health.” 33 Even more recent biographers have remained enmeshed in such rhetoric. Valarie H. Ziegler framed the life of Julia Howe through this dichotomy, claiming that Howe “despaired that the demands of marriage and motherhood had stripped her of her true self,” as “she struggled mightily to break the shackles that bound her to the private world of the home[.]” 34 In contrast, Gerda Lerner’s 1967 biography of the Grimké sisters demonstrated that scholars did not have to accede to comparisons between women and slaves. Lerner made a distinction between Sarah Grimké’s antislavery awareness and feminist consciousness that other biographers failed to appreciate. The “important experiences” of Sarah’s childhood, “were not so much concerned with slavery as with her frustration as a in a world dominated by men,” and only later would Grimké’s “specific feminist discontent” merge with dissatisfaction toward the institution of slavery. 35 When the woman-slave analogy was appropriated within biography, historians did not gain the critical distance needed to consider the significance of this rhetorical device for nineteenth- century women reformers. The biographical prominence of this rhetoric existed alongside the growing disdain of scholars. The earliest methodological discussions in women’s history considered the prominence of analogy. From a theoretical perspective, Lerner argued that approaches to women’s history prior to the 1970s focused on the way women’s historical experience was defined by their inferiority and oppression. Acknowledging this as a limiting framework for women’s history, she emphasised the way it assumed women to have been passive to the restraints of patriarchal society and overlooked the “positive and essential” ways women operated in history. Lerner therefore asserted that the examination of women as “victims of oppression” should be an aspect – but not “the central aspect” – of women’s history. Importantly, the “slave comparison” was viewed a “rhetorical device rather

31 Katherine du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 24. 32 Mary Kelley, “At War with Herself: Harriet Beecher Stowe as Woman in Conflict within the Home,” American Studies 19, no. 2 (1978): 31 and 37. 33 Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 52. 34 Valarie H. Ziegler, Diva Julia: The Public and Private Agony of (Harrisburg: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 2. 35 Lerner, Grimké Sisters , 16.

10 than a factual statement,” but this also extended to comparisons between women and minority groups. The comparison disregarded “the real plight of the slave”: All analogies – class, minority group, caste – approximate the position of women, but fail to define it adequately. Women are a category unto themselves: an adequate analysis of their position in society demands new conceptual tools. 36 Chafe extended this perspective, noting that the problems surrounding the definition of women as a group had led scholars to compare “women to ethnic minorities.” 37 Although not all historians and biographers followed the injunction to desist from using such comparisons, consideration of these methodological issues led to the scholarly critique of the nineteenth-century presence of the woman-slave analogy. This condemnatory interpretation influenced the history of antebellum reform movements that emerged during the 1970s. Robert L. Allen and Pamela P. Allen evaluated the racism inherent in white women’s use of the woman-slave analogy. In spite of the solidarity between white and African American abolitionists, Allen and Allen viewed white women’s “tendency to equate the status of white women with that of the slave” as factually flawed because “enslaved black women faced a totally different situation from that of the white women reformers.” The reasoning provided in refutation of the comparison – physical violence; sexual coercion, violence and ; the inability to protect one’s peers; reproductive freedom; lack of – were all reasons reformers saw as equally problematic for married women. More importantly, however, Allen and Allen drew attention to white women’s “different reality” and the resulting chasm between the experience of white middle-class women and enslaved African American women. 38 For DuBois, the development of an antebellum feminist consciousness was a result of forces greater than just women’s involvement in antislavery. However, this analysis barely acknowledged the existence of the woman-slave analogy. 39 Blanche Glassman Hersh’s investigation of the antislavery and women’s rights movements emphasised the rhetorical framework of the “slavery of sex.” She posited that antislavery arguments “merged easily and logically” with white women’s resistance so as to generate “an ideology espousing equality for all women.” 40 Although Hersh recognised the prominence of the woman-slave analogy, she was not particularly critical of its ideological

36 Lerner, Majority , 147-148, 7-8, 39 and 42. See also: Gerda Lerner, “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” Feminist Studies 3, no. 1/2 (1975): 5-14. 37 William H. Chafe, Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 4. 38 Robert L. Allen and Pamela P. Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States (Washington: Howard University Press, 1974), 133 and 136-138. 39 Ellen DuBois, “Women’s Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists , ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman ( State University Press, 1979). 40 Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Press, 1978), 21. See also: Blanche Glassman Hersh, “‘Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?’ Abolitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism,” in Antislavery Reconsidered .

11 foundations. Overall, historians had a tendency to be either too critical or too dismissive of this rhetoric. The feminist methodological debates that continued during the 1980s and early 1990s expanded upon Lerner’s early methodology. While differences emerged in the perspectives of black and white women, there was a general tendency to conflate nineteenth- and twentieth-century expressions of this rhetoric. African American scholars closely interrogated why the woman-slave analogy was inherently exploitative by highlighting how it engendered a focus on white women and disregard for black women – the actual enslaved women of colonial and antebellum America. According to bell hooks, African American women were “conscious of the fact that true freedom entailed not just liberation from a sexist social order that systematically denied all women full human rights.” Hazel V. Carby and others critiqued the way scholars tended to focus on black men and white women . As this obfuscated the experience of black women, the “sisterhood” proclaimed through common “victimhood” did not challenge women to “examine their sexist attitudes towards women unlike themselves” or explore how race and class privilege impacted their relationships. 41 Although identification with the oppression of slaves could act as “a valuable reference in white feminist consciousness,” Nancie Carraway determined that it led to the violation of interracial gender-based solidarity. 42 These scholars rightly emphasised the inadequacy of an approach based on comparisons between women and slaves during the late twentieth century and beyond, thus inscribing a scholarly appreciation for the difference between racial and gender oppression. The growing recognition of the problematic existence of this rhetoric elided the nineteenth-century historical context in which many such pronouncements were made. These scholars viewed the power relations imbued in the woman-slave analogy as intrinsically imbalanced. Sandra G. Harding discussed the way “victimologies” created the erroneous impression that “women have only been victims,” which led to the problematic assumption that they “cannot be effective social agents on behalf of themselves or others.” Similarly, Joan Kelly-Gadol acknowledged the inefficiency of minority group analogies when applied to women as “explanatory concepts.” 43 However, some scholars looked further toward other comparative paradigms. Kathleen M. Brown observed how the early women’s history

41 bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (: South End Press, 1981), 2 and 7; bell hooks, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women,” Feminist Review , no. 23 (1986): 128. See: Hazel V. Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain , ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1982); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (The Women’s Press Ltd.: London, 1981), 32-33. 42 Nancie Caraway, Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 134-135. 43 Sandra G. Harding, “Introduction,” and Joan Kelly-Gadol, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” in Sandra G. Harding, ed., Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1987), 5, 11 and 19.

12 imperative to compare women with slaves made it more difficult to “create analytical space for slave and working-class women.” 44 These scholars appreciated the problematic foundations of such comparisons with slaves, but neither accounted for the degree to which the woman-slave analogy influenced the development of feminist thought, nor its rhetorical importance during the nineteenth century.

Figure 1. “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” Antislavery Token.45

These methodological developments similarly influenced the historiography of antebellum women reformers. Acknowledgement of the relationship between rhetoric and imagery provided an important point of departure. Jean Fagan Yellin’s critical assessment of the antislavery token, “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?” (see Figure 1), suggested that this imagery inspired white women’s antislavery activism while encouraging them to “examine the condition of slaves in relation to their own situation.” Since these images relied on a contrast between the relative safeties enjoyed by white women when compared with the vulnerability of slave women, it was implied that white women had the power to aid the black woman supplicant. Therefore, when white women recreated themselves as “liberated Women and Sisters,” an emphasis on gender identity reinscribed racial hierarchy so as to undermine any awareness of the crucial differences that emanated from slavery, race and class.46 Shirley J. Yee also criticised how the woman-slave analogy belied the self-interest of white women reformers in spite of the interracial “sisterhood” they proclaimed. This rhetoric demonstrated that “white women, as a group, could not always be trusted to evaluate their own

44 Kathleen M. Brown, “Brave New Worlds: Women’s and Gender History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1993): 317. 45 The Slave’s Friend: HistoryWiz , 2005, accessed November 15, 2012, http://www.historywiz.com/galleries/slavesfriend.htm; Lesson: EL Civics for ESL Students , 2007, accessed November 15, 2012, http://www.elcivics.com/sojourner-truth-lesson.html; Alan Scott Fischer: Collection of Hard Times Tokens , 2006, accessed November 15, 2012, http://www.hardtimestokens. com/AmINotAWomen.aspx. 46 Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 24, 3 and 77.

13 complicity in racism or even to understand black women’s concerns.” 47 Together, these scholars present a highly critical view of the woman-slave analogy that did not account for its ubiquity. Alongside the emergence of intersectionality during the 1990s, an interdisciplinary framework enabled scholars to appreciate the efficacy of the woman-slave analogy whilst still acknowledging its problematic foundations. Karen Sanchez-Eppler observed how the “metaphoric linking of women and slaves” examined their “shared position as bodies to be bought, owned, and designated as a grounds of resistance,” but emphasised that it still obliterated “the particularity of black and female experience, making their distinct exploitations appear identical.” 48 This limited but nuanced examination of the way white reformers used this rhetoric sought to account for the conditional differences between women and slaves but still explain the structural similarities that inspired the comparison. A tendency to look beyond outright critique also emerged in legal history. Sandra L. Rierson outlined the commonalities between the nineteenth-century legal of women and slaves. Since the United States did not abolish chattel slavery alongside the rest of the Atlantic world, temporal and ideological connections emerged between the lack of self- attributed to women and the enslaved, which in turn justified the exclusion of these groups from democratic processes.49 So too did a literary approach enable a broader view. Kari J. Winter drew connections between women’s Gothic novels and the , where “imprisonment and slavery” constituted the “central paradigms of women’s condition in patriarchal society.” 50 The historical reconsideration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century divisions between slave and free, black and white, were equally important.51 In addition, Elizabeth V. Spelman drew philosophical attention to comparisons between women and slaves in the context of suffering. 52 This interdisciplinary approach also spoke to the rhetorical ubiquity of the woman-slave analogy, which appeared in diverse literary and historical sources that had both a limited and wide circulation base. Overall, interdisciplinary scholarship proved less disparaging because it focused on the cultural forces that shaped the woman-slave analogy, but such transitory analysis has not accounted for the ubiquity of this nineteenth-century rhetorical phenomenon.

47 Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 136. See also: Margot N. Melia, “The Role of Black Garrisonian Women in Antislavery and Other Reforms in the Antebellum North, 1830-1865” (PhD thesis, The University of Western , 1991). 48 Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 20. See also: Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” Representations 24, no. Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (1988): 28-59. 49 Sandra L. Rierson, “Race and Gender : A Historical Case for Equal Treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 1 (1994): 89-117. 50 Kari J. Winter, Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 2. 51 Carol Wilson and Calvin D. Wilson, “White Slavery: An American Paradox,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 19, no. 1 (1998): 1-23. 52 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997).

14 The ongoing developments in race and have impelled twenty-first century historians to more comprehensively account for the way these ideologies shaped the worldview of reformers, and how this affected their rhetoric. Carla L. Peterson indicated that the prominence of the slavery metaphor among antebellum white women indicated “increasing tensions and ambivalences,” but also suggested that African American women only invoked slavery as “a historical reality that directly affected black women’s lives.” 53 Yet black and white women alike used the woman-slave analogy as a rhetorical device, in a way that reflected Eric Foner’s assertion that a “common language of politics” existed during the nineteenth century. This was shaped by the universal rhetoric of independence, citizenship and freedom, but still disguised contradictory impulses because these concepts underwent constant challenge, change and redefinition. 54 Julie recognised that white women appropriated antislavery narratives “to advance their own interests, sometimes at the expense of black women,” but concluded that economic changes between the 1830s and 1850s “caused unprecedented intrusions of the marketplace into family life for all Northerners of all classes and for slave in the South, promoting a very real sense of common cause among white and black women.” 55 Theresa Zackodnik also argued that African American women reformers moved beyond “the woman question” to consider “linked or interdependent oppressions.” As reformers challenged “dominant conceptions of democratic citizenship,” black women – rather than white women – were central to the reform project of African Americans. 56 These perspectives provide context for the possibility that while hegemonic attitudes toward slavery, race, class and gender dominated throughout the nineteenth century, the woman-slave analogy could be used to come to terms with points of intersection. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart’s edited compendium, Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (2007), which remains the most comprehensive investigation of this rhetoric. By tracing the foundations of social reform movements to Europe, this discussion considered the antislavery struggles that emerged from the late eighteenth century and the women’s rights impetus that followed. From the seventeenth century onwards, women came to view their experience in a way that was shaped by a gendered understanding of the institution of slavery. 57 This volume acknowledged how the presence of American chattel slavery affected epistemological understandings of slavery, in contrast to the geographic isolation of slavery throughout the rest of the Atlantic world. Karen Offen, Claire Midgely and Bonnie S. Anderson considered the emergence of the woman-slave analogy in ,

53 Peterson, “‘And We Claim’,” 139 and 131. 54 Eric Foner, “Free Labour,” 100. 55 Julie Husband, Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. 56 Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit , xxix-xxxv. 57 Sklar and Stewart, “Introduction,” in Women’s Rights , xxi and xv.

15 Britain, and Germany, but there is not a discrete chapter on the development of this rhetoric in the United States.58 Elsewhere, Asunción Lavrin observed the emergence of this rhetorical phenomenon in Latin America. 59 These scholars took the initial steps toward complicating the existence of this rhetoric and further examining the cultural forces that influenced its construction. The critique of comparisons between women and slaves that emerged during the 1970s provided a fundamental departure for the study of gender and race. Subsequently, scholars demonstrated the inherent in the construction of the woman-slave analogy. However, the tendency to critique this comparison without further seeking to understand its significance dominated scholarship until the end of the twentieth century. The critical departure of early twenty- first century scholars will therefore provide the inspiration for this thesis. This thesis challenges the consensus that the woman-slave analogy was a white women’s rhetorical device by complicating the notion that it was employed in a habitually racist and exploitative manner. Instead, this thesis suggests that the existence of the woman-slave analogy represented a failed attempt toward intersectionality. The process through which discourses of slavery permeated interpretations of gender oppression in myriad reform movements, political ideologies and regions has not previously been considered. It is important to acknowledge that many competing groups employed this rhetoric, for both reform and conservative proslavery purposes alike. In the United States, women and men, white and black, individuals from differing and often competing groups, employed the woman-slave analogy. Although northern reformers predictably dominated, they emanated from diverse backgrounds – antislavery and women’s rights, but also dress and health reform, labour reform and free love. Proslavery ideologues, mistresses, and southern novelists engaged with this rhetoric for conservative rather than reform purposes, while less political permutations appeared in diaries and love letters, and amongst journalist and cultural commentators. It is most incongruous to observe how this rhetoric informed the slave narratives, speeches and unpublished writings of ex-slaves and other African Americans. A certain rhetorical commonality suggests that discourses of slavery informed the way many individuals understood and discussed different forms of oppression. Therefore, these competing groups reveal how the woman-slave analogy constituted an attempt toward what can now be understood as intersectionality – the existence of interdependent oppressions. During the antebellum era, a direct comparison between women and slaves dominated. This enabled an appreciation for the plight of the enslaved and an acknowledgement of the cruelty of

58 See: Karen Offen, “How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640-1848”; Clare Midgley, “British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective”; Bonnie S. Anderson, “ Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists,” in Women’s Rights . 59 See: Asunción Lavrin, “Women, Labour and the Left: Argentina and Chile, 1890-1925,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 2 (1989): 88-116.

16 chattel slavery. However, following the Civil War, the rhetorical focus changed from an analogy between women and slaves to a more emphatic comparison based on sex and race. This rhetorical shift was inspired by an erroneous assumption that racial equality had been realised during Reconstruction, and gradually enabled a focus on white women that did not account for, or even try to understand, the continued existence of racial oppression in the United States. A vacillating understanding of the exploitation of chattel slavery and the existence of racial oppression emerged alongside an unequivocal desire to condemn gender oppression. This thesis will trace how the woman-slave analogy encompassed a comparative egalitarianism during the antebellum era and a more exclusionary vision following the Civil War.

Chapters This thesis will consider the emergence of the woman-slave analogy as a rhetorical device. It will begin by considering the European foundations of this rhetoric, and then focus on the thematic manifestations of the woman-slave analogy in the United States. This will be considered through the themes of marriage, fashion, politics, labour, and sex. Chapter One will consider the classical and enlightenment foundation of the comparison between women and slaves, followed by the rhetorical developments in Europe and colonial America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This transatlantic analysis contextualises the development of the woman-slave analogy in nineteenth-century America. By considering the legal antecedents surrounding marriage, Chapter Two will demonstrate the emergence of the idea that marriage constituted the slavery of women. Antislavery and women’s rights reformers emphasised this comparison, as did proslavery ideologues, novelists and, to some extent, African American ex-slaves. Chapter Three will reflect on the way fashion critique encompassed discourses of slavery, from the dress reform and women’s rights movements to novels and popular cultural commentary. As competing attitudes emerged, fashion was alternately perceived as the symptom or the cause of gender oppression. The interaction between women’s suffrage and changing attitudes toward citizenship and enfranchisement will take place in Chapter Four. The women’s suffrage and manhood suffrage were considered in tandem during the antebellum era anticipated divisive debates of the and beyond. Chapter Five will consider the way labour, broadly defined, and the market economy were imagined through discourses of slavery. The discussion will encompass labour reform alongside women’s work in and beyond the home. In conclusion, Chapter Six will bring these themes together by considering the ideological connection between the marriage market and the sexual economy of prostitution. As the rhetoric of white slavery demonstrated the complete transformation of the woman-slave analogy, from a dialogue that sought to understand interdependent oppressions to a validation of white women’s rights.

17 A number of sources, including historical, literary and legal documents, will together demonstrate the thematic construction of the woman slave analogy. This rhetoric was often employed within discrete sections of individual works, meaning that it is important to consider myriad documents of both an historical and literary nature to gain a comprehensive historical overview. The themes of religion and education could also be specifically addressed, but have been largely excluded due to the limitations of space. As nineteenth-century attitudes toward religion and education informed marriage, fashion, suffrage, labour and sex, these ideas will be addressed throughout.

Conclusion The woman-slave analogy was an important and pervasive rhetorical device in nineteenth-century America. This rhetoric was mobilised to draw attention to the oppression of white women, but also to, and by, women of racial minorities. The woman-slave analogy was often employed in racist and nativist ways, and could be used in a way that overlooked the experience of the enslaved, but this thesis seeks to move beyond such reductive and sometimes historically anachronistic conclusions. An examination of this rhetoric enables a complex picture of a developing awareness of the existence of interdependent oppressions to emerge. This awareness coursed through a variety of reform movements, political ideologies and regions, and was expressed by women and men of different racial backgrounds. This rhetoric focused on the construction of gender as a social category, yet its prominence in so many differing and competing contexts demonstrated a growing awareness of the way women – all women – experienced the complexities that resulted from this reality. As a result, an analysis of the woman-slave analogy reveals an early desire to comprehend the interrelations between gender, race and class oppression, long before the enunciation of intersectionality as a theory. This thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of the way in which discourses of slavery were mobilised to elucidate gender oppression during the nineteenth century.

18 CHAPTER ONE :

FOUNDATIONS : “A LL WOMEN ARE BORN SLAVES ”

Many are the causes that, in the present corrupt state of society, contribute to enslave women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their senses. 1

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT , A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN (1792)

The slave may be freed and woman be where she is, but women cannot be freed and the slave remain where he is. 2

ANGELINA E. GRIMKÉ TO THEODORE DWIGHT WELD , OCTOBER 1837

In both Europe and the United States, prominent women intellectuals demonstrated an understanding of the way women’s oppression interacted with other forms of social domination and coercion, including that experienced by the enslaved. Eighteenth-century British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft and nineteenth-century American reformer Angelina Grimké drew this comparison to demonstrate the interdependency of different forms of oppression, thus referring to intersectionality without the benefit of the 1990s framework. Grimké even emphasised that the distinctive oppression of chattel slavery was worse than that experienced by women. Yet the rhetorical strategy of aligning the exploitation of women with that of other groups developed centuries before the influence of Wollstonecraft or Grimké. The woman-slave analogy had a profound and prolonged influence across Europe and the United States, where nineteenth-century reformers came to valorise its rhetorical import. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the enslavement of African peoples and those of African descent generated contentious political debates which culminated in the gradual abolition of the and the institution of chattel slavery. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart observe how, in the process, women “created and encountered unprecedented opportunities for self-discovery, intellectual exploration, and political engagement on behalf of the enslaved, and on their own behalf as well.” 3 This encouraged reformers to use the woman-slave analogy, a distinctive rhetorical device which had foundations in classical thought. Eighteenth-century enlightenment philosophers expanded these ideas in a way that brought this rhetoric into wider public debate. In 1700, Mary Astell asked: “ If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves? ”4 Hereafter, the woman-slave analogy influenced the antislavery and women’s rights movements across Europe and in the United States.

1 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Project Gutenberg, 1792, 2010), e-book, 29. 2 G.H. Barnes and D.L. Dumond, eds. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844 , Vol.I (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965), 453-454. 3 Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, “Introduction,” in Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, eds. Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007), xii. 4 Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (London: Printed for W. Wilkin, 1700, 1706), 14, e-book.

19 The woman-slave analogy distorted and overlooked certain realities, yet its use across time was not completely unfounded because of the degree to which gendered subordination characterised women’s historical experience. For Wollstonecraft, women represented “the oppressed half of mankind.” 5 Since intellectual women lacked the “cultural prodding” and “vital social spaces” that would mature a burgeoning feminist consciousness, they were forced to develop social networks in which their ideas could find resonance.6 Pioneer feminists, in spite of their disparate time periods and locations, were connected by “a common body of international literature” that provided both “news and confirmation of a shared outlook and sensibility.” 7 In 1860, Ernestine Rose, the Polish immigrant of Jewish heritage and American women’s rights reformer, emphasised the importance of “enlightening the mind of woman as to the injustice that oppresses her”: Our movement is cosmopolitan. It claims the rights of woman wherever woman exists[.] … In England, great efforts have been made of late years, and great accessions have been made to the rights and liberties of women. The same thing is taking place in France and Germany, and, in fact, everywhere. 8 This transatlantic exchange impelled individuals on both sides of the Atlantic to create and contribute to a broadly conceived dialogue that challenged women’s oppression. As this rhetoric shaped connections between women, especially women reformers, the woman-slave analogy emerged as perhaps the most enduring method through which the social, legal, political and cultural restrictions experienced by women were interpreted. This chapter explores the development of the woman-slave analogy, from its classical and enlightenment foundations to its expression in Europe and colonial America. Scholars have paid attention to the mobilisation of this rhetoric in some transatlantic locales, but this chapter brings together what have previously been treated as more or less disparate rhetorical trends. In classical and enlightenment thought alike, the exclusion of women and slaves from the public sphere was justified because of physical and mental differences which were thought to influence personal autonomy. When the slavery analogy initially emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, it was used to critique marriage and the private sphere in a way that demonstrated an awareness of women’s oppression. But with the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade, a growing awareness of colonial slavery rendered the concept of slavery less abstract. Gradually, chattel slavery gained racial connotations. This is not to say that Europeans did not see racial differences among themselves, but that enslaved Africans constituted a clearly differentiated racial other against the hegemonic

5 Wollstonecraft, Vindication , 204. 6 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12. 7 Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 100. 8 Ernestine L. Rose, “Speech at the Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention,” May 10, 1860, in Paula Doress- Worters, ed. of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 2007), 260 and 262.

20 invisibility of whiteness. Where initially abstract references to slavery worked to draw awareness to women’s oppression alone, the emergence of direct references to colonial slavery became more problematic. It is important to consider how geographic proximity to actual institutions of slavery shaped the expression of this rhetoric. Chattel slavery remained at a distance for the majority of Europeans, but its presence and expansion in the United States resulted in greater awareness not only of the institution, but also of racial difference. The constant oscillation between abstract references to slavery and more concrete allusions to actual institutions of chattel slavery had implications for the degree to which the enslaved became marginalised in the process. Transatlantic connections were central to the development of the woman-slave analogy, but it gained new significance and meaning in the United States – a country that prided itself on being a “land of the free” where “all men are created equal.” 9

The Enlightenment and its Classical Influences Enlightenment attitudes toward the role of women and slaves influenced the emergence of the woman-slave analogy. Yet it is necessary to first examine the foundational ideas upon which enlightenment philosophers drew. The social divisions that emerged in ancient societies were based on hierarchical social structures that enabled comparisons between women and slaves. The power relations of master/slave, husband/ and /child created ideological dualisms which, in turn, inscribed gendered attributes of active/passive, soul/body and strong/weak. 10 These hierarchies became equally important during the enlightenment. The construction of difference informed the perspectives of classical philosophers just as the classics would later prove foundational for enlightenment ideology. Early divisions of labour were often inscribed along gender lines, and this resulted in the dispersion of gender roles. 11 David Christian concludes that the institutionalisation of social hierarchy and the market economy influenced developing concepts – including the state, class, taxation, and slavery – in a way that contributed to the inscription of women’s subordination. This resulted in greater disparities based on class, occupation, and, more specifically, gender. 12 According to Gerda Lerner, the emergence of patrilineal marital exchange and resulted in the of female sexuality and reproductive capacity, rendering women “a group

9 Sections of this chapter are based on: Ana Stevenson, “‘The Abolitionists of Slavery among Women’: Transatlantic Foundations of the Woman-Slave Analogy,” in The British World: Religion, Memory, Society, Culture: Proceedings of the Conference , ed. Marcus K. Harmes, Lindsay Henderson, Barbara Harmes and Amy Antonio (Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland, 2012). 10 Sandra Fredman, Women and the Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 4. 11 Barbara Diane Miller, ed. Sex and Gender Hierarchies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16. 12 David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 257 and 263. See: Stephanie Coontz and Peta Henderson, Women’s Work, Men’s : The Origins of Gender and Class (London: Verso, 1986), 155; Stevenson, “‘Abolitionists’,” 160-161.

21 with less autonomy than men.” 13 When women were conveyed between groups, male dominance was reinforced because female-female relationships were undermined, increasing women’s vulnerability. 14 The institution of slavery evolved alongside inscriptions of power and gendered subordination, primarily from the sexual exploitation of female war captives; women’s oppression therefore antedated slavery and made it possible because women were viewed “as inferior beings like slaves.” 15 Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman acknowledge that women constituted the “archetypical slave,” and David Brion Davis argues that Aristotelian theories meant women were treated as “domesticated or pet-like animals” so as to “ensure their dependency and appearance of inferiority.” 16 As gendered difference was central to the development of slavery and powerlessness, the substantive devaluation of women became of rhetorical import. Since classical thought provided an important foundation for enlightenment thinkers, the exclusion of women and slaves anticipated the development of the woman-slave analogy. The mind/body dichotomy of classical philosophy meant the capacity for rationality became gendered, and women were habitually relegated to the latter category. 17 Socrates alone expressed the more nuanced idea that men and women should be assigned jobs based on individual merit rather than solely on sex. Although Socrates influenced Plato’s conclusion that physical difference did not influence political or civic responsibility, Plato’s interpretation of marriage and , especially the idea of “private wives,” meant he could not fully view women as equal citizens. 18 Plato and Aristotle, as teacher and student, shared comparable views on the position of slaves, barbarians, children, and artisans, but their philosophy regarding women was divergent and incompatible. 19 For Aristotle, slavery was part of the natural order and biological difference was fundamental. The apparent emotional susceptibility of women implied a lack of sovereignty and the need for male rule, while the idea that females were undeveloped males was reiterated in ancient Greek medical texts.20 These perspectives enabled empirical observation to be transformed into

13 Gerda Lerner, The Creation of (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 77-78 (see more: 76-100). 14 These hypotheses were predicated on observations of the great apes and other ancestral hominids. Barbara Smuts, “The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy,” Human Nature 6, no. 1 (1995): 12-13 and 19. 15 Lerner, Creation of Patriarchy , 100. 16 Seymour Drescher and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. A Historical Guide to World Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xii; David Brion Davis, “Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery,” in Women’s Rights , 4-5. See also: David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), Chapter One: “What the Abolitionists were Up Against.” 17 Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 109- 131. 18 Susan Moller Okin, “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family,” in The Family in Political Thought , ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982), 40-42 and 45. 19 Nicholas D. Smith, “Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 21, no. 4 (1983): 475-476. 20 Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11-15. See: Mary R. Lefkowitz, and Maureen B. Fant, “Women’s Life in Greece & Rome: Medicine and Anatomy,” Diotima: Materials for the Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World , n.d., accessed April 22, 2014, http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/wlgr/wlgr-medicine355.shtml.

22 normalised gender hierarchy, so women’s exclusion from political and civic participation could be justified. Although such beliefs continued to be of interest throughout the middle ages and early modern period, they gained new prominence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Importantly, Aristotelian interpretations dominated enlightenment political theory and were used to justify rationalisations for sexual difference and proslavery thought. The enlightenment saw a flowering of debate about freedom and equality for all people, and therefore inspired the earliest women’s rights thinkers. Where the enlightenment emphasised individualism, autonomy and equality, its focus on the classical mind/body dichotomy continued to engender exclusion. Prior to the enlightenment, unpropertied and unprivileged classes of men had been thought to lack rationality – a perspective which endured in nineteenth-century transnational debates toward . More important to this discussion is the way women’s supposed lack of rationality excluded them from enlightenment ideals. 21 Jean Jacques Rousseau – who declared, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” – believed that women, endowed only with modesty, lacked the rationality needed for self-government. 22 Indeed, rationality was central to the enlightenment inscription of the public and private realms. For , the private realm was structured by “a master of a family with all the subordinate relations of wife, children, servants, and slaves, united under the domestic rule of a family[.]”23 The hierarchy of domestic rule was seen to create a justifiable private inequality, because political authority was viewed as artificial but domestic authority was natural. For Montesquieu, “the slavery of women is perfectly conformable to the genius of a despotic government”; as this institution required “tranquillity” it was “absolutely necessary to shut up the women.” 24 In spite of such blatant proclamations, historians of natural rights often overlook the way active and passive language shaped the gendered universalism of political theory. According to Joan Wallach Scott, “the addition of Woman also implies the need to think differently about the whole question of rights.”25 Enlightenment ideals were largely restricted to radical political circles during the seventeenth century, but political theory ensured white men were largely the beneficiaries of these developments. The rhetoric of slavery versus freedom became prominent, but the enlightenment emphasis on gradual social change, private property, and ongoing social progress did not

21 See: Carol McMillan, Women, Reason and Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1984, 1993). 22 Jean Jacques Rousseau, : Or Principles of Political Right (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1762, 2002), e-book. 23 John Locke, Section 86, “Second Treatise of Civil Government,” Marxists.org , 1690, accessed March 21, 2013, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/politics/locke/ch07.htm. See also: Locke, Section 82, “Second Treatise of Civil Government.” 24 Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1762, 2002), e-book. 25 Joan Wallach Scott, “French Feminists and the Rights of ‘Man’: Olympe De Gouges’s Declarations,” History Workshop 28 (1989): 5 and 11.

23 automatically lead to abolitionism. 26 Indeed, the expansion of the Atlantic Slave Trade throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generated contradictions. The transportation of enslaved Africans to the English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonies throughout the Caribbean and the Americas rendered Montesquieu’s conclusion – “as all men are born equal, slavery must be accounted unnatural” – an exception.27 The influential treatises of Locke, Algernon Sidney and John Milton rhetorically contrasted slavery against freedom, but chattel slavery came to be justified through a hierarchy of racial difference.28 For Locke, a master should have “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.” 29 Innate connections therefore developed between gendered hierarchy, especially in Britain, and the way white women rhetorically displaced their own anxieties about a “sense of subjection to a cross-class patriarchal order” on the enslaved. 30 As chattel slavery came to be understood as a racialised institution, the way women, and men, employed the slavery analogy was transformed. The foundations provided by classical philosophy meant gender became inscribed in a way that directly related to slavery during the enlightenment. Rhetorically, women and slaves were excluded from the public sphere based on perceptions of physical and mental difference. Yet this comparison gained greater cultural significance because of the way gendered hierarchy shaped women’s legal presence.

Women and the Law Enlightenment political theory became an important influence on the development of the law, especially in Britain. From the sixteenth century onwards, this had restrictive implications for the legal presence of women. Importantly, the expansion of European colonies meant the gender distinctions that became increasingly obvious in English shared fundamental similarities throughout the Western world. When specific gender-based legislation expanded during the sixteenth century, it took on “a very specific role in the oppression of women” and facilitated exclusion from civil society through increasingly elaborate inscriptions of “the legal disabilities of Woman.” 31 , most clearly

26 James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Antislavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 13. 27 Montesquieu, Spirit ; David Brion Davis, : The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 104-106. 28 François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1297. See: David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 14-15; Duncan J. MacLeod, “Toward Caste,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution , ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983). 29 John Locke, “Constitution for Carolina” (1669), in Junius P. Rodriguez, ed. Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia , Vol.II (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2007), 532. 30 Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 18. 31 , Law, Crime and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 164 and 194.

24 described in Sir ’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), ensured the permanent legal minority of married women because had near absolute control of their property and person. 32 Wives could not sue or be sued without husbands being party to the suit, make valid wills unless husbands consented to provisions (which could be withdrawn at any time prior to probate), or enter contracts (except the marriage contract). Husbands could physically “correct” wives, yet if a wife murdered her husband it was understood as petit treason because the husband was his wife’s sovereign. 33 According to Nancy F. Cott, domestic hierarchy was characterised by the “relative privileges and duties” of husbands and wives so as to render marriage “a form of governance.” Marriage qualified men to be participating members of state, so political order was understood to begin with the household. This influenced private and public governance and representation.34 The ideological collapse between authority and governance within politics and the family meant the “family analogy” dominated political discourse. 35 Marital hierarchy had latent associations with the way other subordinates, including slaves and servants, could be chastised to engender obedience. Not only did Blackstone’s legal proclamations echo Aristotle and Locke, but his discussion of marriage was interspersed between two other chapters: “Of Master and Servant”; “Of Husband and Wife”; and “Of Parent and Child.” 36 The legal and social dependence of all women was shaped by marital hierarchy, but the rhetorical and substantive distinction between women and unfree subordinates collapsed in popular cultural practices. This was epitomised through “,” an English ritual described by Alan Macfarlane. A woman could be “taken to a public place, perhaps with a halter round her neck,” and “auctioned” to the highest bidder (usually prearranged), who would “buy” her and thereby become her husband. A response to stringent marriage laws, this informal and legally ambiguous practice became a popular way to obtain . Despite the humiliation suffered by women, it was widely accepted as it ensured divorce and through a single act that maintained patriarchal authority. 37 Wife selling was not simply rhetoric, but represented the actual enactment of the subjection of women. The expansion of women’s legal disabilities and gendered social hierarchies together shaped cultural attitudes towards women. In response, the woman-slave analogy was used to critique the way marital control reached all aspects of a married woman’s legal existence, a process that will be

32 See: Janet Rifkin, “Toward a Theory of Patriarchy,” Harvard Women’s Law Journal 3 (1980): 83-95; Anne B. Brown, “The Evolving Definition of Marriage,” Suffolk University Law Review 31 (1998): 917-944. 33 Fredman, Women and the Law , 40-41. 34 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 6- 7. 35 Elshtain, “Preface: Political Theory Rediscovers the Family,” in Family in Political Thought , 4. 36 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England , Vol.I (Project Gutenberg, 1765, 2012). 37 Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 226-227. For a United States example, see: “Treatment of Women,” Lily , January 1851.

25 further considered in Chapter Two. A growing awareness of these sites of oppression made it possible for women to question their situation in a way that was informed by these legal and cultural inscriptions.

European Foundations The woman-slave analogy emerged in response to the way women, like slaves, were marginalised by enlightenment philosophy and law. From the seventeenth century onwards, European women increasingly saw “their own emancipation in terms that drew on their understanding of slavery as a gendered institution.” 38 Initially, however, slavery emerged as an analogy that critiqued marriage as part of a growing feminist consciousness. These allusions to slavery were constructed through language associated with unfreedom rather than specific systems of enslaved labour. As such, this early rhetoric was largely devoid of any specific reference to the contemporaneous colonial institutions of racialised chattel slavery. Karen Offen explores the way seventeenth-century French novelists, later labelled Les Précieuses , viewed women’s experience of marriage as analogous to slavery. In the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry, marriage was positioned as “a trap that would provide a woman only with a master, rather than a lover or partner; she herself remained single.” These early references to the slavery analogy therefore remained abstract because they did not allude to actual institutions of chattel slavery or actually enslaved individuals of any race. Some de Scudéry’s novels were set amongst ancient slaveholding cultures, but the connection between rhetorical slavery and historical bondage was not emphasised. 39 Another novelist, the abbé Michel de Pure, similarly denounced marriage: “Is there a tyranny in the world more cruel, more severe, more insupportable than that of these chains which endure to the tomb?” 40 These writers used the slavery analogy to condemn women’s powerlessness in selecting romantic partners and the consequent subjection they experienced in marriage, but did not engage in the references to chattel slavery, enslaved individuals or racial hierarchy that would emerge elsewhere. Some seventeenth-century British women writers presented similar rhetorical visions of marriage at the same time as using the slavery analogy to promote women’s education. A nascent feminist consciousness emerged among prominent women during the English Civil War (1642- 1651), when power, liberty, and slavery became subjects of public debate. 41 Playwright Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, claimed that men were “made for Liberty , and Women for

38 Sklar and Stewart, “Introduction,” in Women’s Rights , xii-xiii. 39 Karen Offen, “How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640-1848,” in Women’s Rights , 59-73. 40 Michel de Pure, La Prétieuse, ou le mystère des ruelles [The Prétieuse, or The Mystery of the Streets ] (1656-58), in Offen, “How (and Why),” 62 and 64. 41 Nadelhaft, “The Englishwoman’s Sexual Civil War: Feminist Attitudes towards Men, Women, and Marriage 1650-1740,” Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no. 4 (1982): 558 (see further 567, 575 and 578).

26 slavery ”; men “usurped a supremacy to themselves” which they maintained through a “tyrannical government” that rendered women “more and more enslaved.” 42 Other English plays, such as Frances Boothby’s Marcelia (1670) and John Dryden’s Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr (1670) and Aureng-Zebe (1675), invoked the slavery analogy to explore themes of love, sex and valour. 43 Later, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) contemplated how women could manipulatively use to gain power during , a comedic representation which suggested an appearance of submissiveness could conceal a cunning and devious mind. 44 Mary Astell and Catherine Macaulay also employ the slavery analogy to discuss women’s education. 45 Yet this rhetorical strategy enabled Astell in particular to engender a broader critique of women’s oppression. Astell questioned why women should be “born in Slavery,” only to receive an “ill Education and unequal Marriage” that meant they became “yok’d for Life” to the “Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master” in her Reflections (1700).46 Although Astell accepted Locke’s division between the family and the state, her political philosophy argued that tyranny should be undesirable in both contexts. 47 Overall, the abstract slavery analogy was used to critique the oppression and dependence that resulted from marriage or a lack of education, or conversely to explain feelings of love, but it remained distinct from the more direct associations that would be made with colonial slavery. Increasingly, the interaction between Europe and its colonies influenced rhetorical allusions to slavery. The slavery analogy became less abstract when European writers could make reference to chattel slavery, an institution based around the concept of a racial other. Early references were alternately structured by allusions to indigenous populations in the colonies or the “poor African,” and later to Eastern , but were not necessarily buttressed by descriptions of the specific aspects of chattel slavery as an institution. For example, French explorers and commentators on the West Indies employed the slavery analogy to describe the gender relations among indigenous peoples ( les sauvages ). An 1667 report by Dominican father Jean-Baptiste du Terte maintained that “the wives of the savages are rather the slaves than the partners of their husbands[.]” 48 This direct slavery analogy soon emerged beyond the European colonies and in Europe itself, thus influencing the process whereby the woman-slave analogy gained racial overtones throughout Europe.

42 Margaret Cavendish, Orations of Divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers Places , 2 nd edn. (London: A. Maxwell, 1662, 1668), e-book; Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The World’s Olio (1653), in Nancy Weitz, Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 53-54. 43 Ferguson, Subject , 23. 44 Note: This idea was first suggested to me by Sheilagh Ilona O’Brien, email correspondence, May 13, 2013. 45 Clare Midgley, “British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective,” Women’s Rights , 129. 46 Astell, Reflections , 3-4. See: Sarah Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 47 Nadelhaft, “Sexual Civil War,” 573-574. 48 Jean-Baptiste du Terte, Histoire Générale des Antilles habitées par les François [General History of the Caribbean Inhabited by the French ] (1667), in Offen, “How (and Why),” 64.

27 As the slavery analogy was increasingly appropriated for feminist purposes, the definition of slavery broadened so as to give the word new meanings. Yet slavery already had multiple meanings – indeed, it was widely understood as a euphemism for oppression. So, this process really clarified the meanings attributed to slavery. From about 1670, British women increasingly looked toward the slaves in European colonies to secure “political self-” through a form of antislavery rhetoric Moira Ferguson describes as “Anglo-Africanism.” A popular dialogue surrounding slavery and race, Anglo-Africanism was “a colonialist discourse about slavery that unwittingly intensified negative attitudes toward Africans in general and slaves in particular.” As British women mediated an “unconscious sense of social invalidation, through representations of the colonial other,” the enslaved became objectified, marginalised, silenced, pitied and controlled. 49 This antislavery rhetoric critiqued colonial slavery, but it more clearly expressed women’s dissatisfaction in a patriarchal society. By 1790, therefore, the meaning of “slavery” encompassed “the recognition, implied or explicit, of connexions between colonial slavery and constant sexual .” 50 Forthwith, allusions to the “poor African” proliferated, but this rhetorical shift was not absolute. The slavery analogy continued to be employed in abstract ways as well as with direct reference to racialised institutions of chattel slavery. Mary Wollstonecraft made important contributions to the transformation of this rhetoric. An early novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788) articulated the prevailing and comparatively abstract interpretation of marriage, where “marriage was a form of slavery; wives were slaves to husbands.” 51 Her posthumous publication, Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, A Fragment (1798), returned to these themes: “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” 52 In the interim, however, Wollstonecraft came to see greater possibilities and wider rhetorical foundations for the slavery analogy. It could be used to interrogate more than just women’s experience of matrimony. Against the background of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), closely followed by A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). These writings emphasised Wollstonecraft’s endorsement of the “ principle of universal rights,” even though such rights were not yet universally available to men or women.53 Wollstonecraft challenged women’s purported lack of rationality by articulating that reason should dominate all aspects of life, thus demonstrating her “rejection of oppression in general, regardless of its specific

49 Ferguson, Subject , 4-6; Moira Ferguson, “: Birth of a Paradigm,” New Literary History 23, no. 2 (1992): 340. 50 Moira Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,” Feminist Review 42, (1992): 86. 51 Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” 83. 52 Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, a Fragment (Project Gutenberg, 1798, 2010), e-book. 53 Jane Moore, “Sex, Slavery and Rights in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications ,” in Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring, eds. The Discourse of Slavery: From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison (Oxon: Routledge, 1994), 18.

28 form.” 54 The slavery analogy was central to Wollstonecraft’s rhetorical rejection of oppression. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman posited that women “may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.” Wollstonecraft largely framed the political and social aspects of women’s oppression through the abstract slavery analogy. “Many are the causes,” she continued, that contributed to women’s oppression, from love and marriage, to education, dependence, fashion, and politics; she used the slavery analogy to critique each theme. Yet direct comparisons with colonial slavery, as well as a focus on the Eastern , also transpired. Wollstonecraft spoke of the “husband who lords it in his little harem,” and asked: “Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them[?]” 55 Wollstonecraft condones neither site of oppression, but nor does she claim that white women’s oppression is worse than enslavement or confinement to the harem. The process of using “harem-based slavery in conjunction with denotations of colonial slavery” to frame a rhetoric of women’s rights meant she became “a political pioneer, fundamentally altering the definition of rights and paving the way for a much wider cultural dialogue.” 56 At the same time, Wollstonecraft presented a nascent, if flawed, expression intersectionality. Colonial slavery became an increasingly prevalent analogy for women’s oppression, but it was often framed in a way that discouraged white women’s self-identification with the enslaved. The travel diary of Anna Maria Falconbridge proves an exception, likely because her actual opportunity to interact with Africans. Her Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone (1794), which discussed the slave trade at length, described how Falconbridge navigated her experience of being an Englishwoman in an African colony. 57 Unlike other late eighteenth-century travel writing, Falconbridge’s Narrative belied a desire to measure racial and sexual difference with an overarching emphasis on class. 58 Following Wollstonecraft, this impulse to understand the symbiotic connections between gender, race and class represented a very brief glimpse of intersectionality, even though this impulse was tempered by other forces. Indeed, Falconbridge, like other women travel writers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, acted as an arbiter of colonialism in a way that impeded interracial gender identification. 59 Overall, however,

54 Moira Gatens, “‘The Oppressed State of My Sex’: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality,” in Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory , ed. Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 113 and 115. 55 Wollstonecraft, Vindication , 13, 29 and 152. See: love, 98; marriage, 162; education (including and sensibility), 17, 119 and 132; dependence, 175; fashion, 24 and 62; and politics, 175. 56 Ferguson, “Mary Wollstonecraft,” 82 and 98. 57 Anna Maria Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791-1792-1793 , ed. Christopher Fyfe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1794, 2000). 58 Deirdre Coleman, “Sierra Leone, Slavery, and : Anna Maria Falconbridge and the ‘Swarthy Daughter’ of Late 18th Century Abolitionism,” Women’s Writing 2, no. 1 (1995): 3-23. 59 Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), 39.

29 the geographical remoteness of colonial slavery largely negated direct self-identification with the enslaved subject, as few British women had the opportunity for colonial encounters. A parallel rhetorical focus on abstract and direct colonial invocations of slavery continued in the late-eighteenth century. When French women challenged the “ Liberté, égalité, fraternité ” rhetoric which characterised the French Revolution, they largely returned to the abstract references which sometimes hinged on allusions to colonial slavery. In response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Male Citizen (1789), Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791) challenged the notion of “ fraternité ” by using “the imagery of breaking chains – and equal rights.” 60 Although de Gouges sought to extend the rights of man to women, she also sought to instigate a separate discussion to address the rights of women. 61 “What advantage have you received from the Revolution?” de Gouges’ Declaration asked: Woman, wake up; … discover your rights. … Enslaved man has multiplied his strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he has become unjust to his companion. 62 Without any direct reference to colonial slavery, de Gouges simply used the language associated with slavery. Yet Scott argues that such rhetoric demonstrated how de Gouges’ saw the “situation of women and blacks” as more than an “analogy between two groups deprived of liberty” because of the way physical difference was used to justify political exclusion. 63 An antislavery reading can be justified, because de Gouge’s Declaration followed the publication of her antislavery play, L’Esclavage des Noirs [The Slavery of the Blacks ] (1792). Her abolitionism and women’s rights philosophy seemingly informed each other. Gregory S. Brown illustrates how de Gouges’ writings constituted more than a coherent feminist-abolitionist worldview: they exemplified the complexities of cultural production in the heightened atmosphere of the late-ancien régime . From its initial 1784 conceptualisation for the Comedie française stage as Zamore et Mirza, ou l’Heureux naufrage [Zamore and Mizra, or the Happy Shipwreck ] to its 1792 final (second draft) version, the play transformed from a subdued narrative of “oriental” slaves to an outright antislavery narrative recounting the escape of “negro” slaves. This process was not purely opportunistic “abolitionism,” but instead represented de Gouges’ “deliberate self-fashionings” prior to the French Revolution. 64 The rhetoric in de Gouges’ Declaration de Gouge followed that of her French literary predecessors by emphasising how women experienced “perpetual male tyranny,” concluding that “Marriage is the tomb of trust and

60 Offen, “How (and Why),” 66. 61 Scott, “French Feminists,” 9-10. 62 Olympe de Gouges, “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman” (1791), in Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789- 1795: Selected Documents , ed. Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson (The University of Illinois, 1979), 92. 63 Scott, “French Feminists,” 14. 64 Gregory S. Brown, “The Self-Fashionings of Olympe De Gouges, 1784-1789,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 383-401.

30 love.” 65 Like Wollstonecraft, de Gouges’ oeuvre revealed how the abstract slavery analogy could culturally coexist with an antislavery ethos and awareness of the exploitations of colonial slavery.

Figure 2. William Blake, “Europe Supported by Africa and America” (1796).66

Andrew McInnes cites Wollstonecraft’s death moment of “feminism in crisis” at the end of the eighteenth century, but this did not result in the disappearance of the rhetorical processes she and her contemporaries championed.67 If anything, the woman-slave analogy arose in more varying contexts throughout the eighteenth century. The visual even interacted with those rhetorical moments of intersectionality, thus presenting a collective acknowledgement of women’s oppression. William Blake’s , “Europe Supported by Africa and America” (1796), showed how racial and gender oppression could be placed side by side to equally acknowledge both sites of exploitation (see Figure 2). Saree Makdisi observes how Blake presented all continents and all peoples as “equally subject to the same forces of oppression,” together awaiting freedom and deliverance. 68 Rhetoric which specifically hinged on an awareness of colonial slavery gained further prominence amongst moral reformers. A 1799 pamphlet against prostitution considered the

65 Gouges, “Declaration,” 90 and 94. 66 Wikimedia , 2014, accessed April 25, 2014, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Blake- Europe_ Supported_By_Africa_and_America_1796.png. 67 See: Andrew McInnes, “Wollstonecraft’s Legion: Feminism in Crisis, 1799,” Women’s Writing 20, no. 4 (2013): 479- 495. 68 Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 251-259.

31 “sorrows of the enslaved negro” to question if the “bosom of the unhappy girl” were any “less tender than that of the swarthy savage?” 69 A growing emphasis on colonial slavery developed alongside the emergence of the British antislavery movement. The British antislavery movement largely accepted the contribution of women as uncontroversial because the suffering of enslaved women helped justify their involvement. 70 However, Claire Midgley proposes that the lack of contention surrounding women’s participation may have in fact impeded the transatlantic development of a feminist consciousness. One of the ways women’s contribution was undermined was by the rhetorical devaluation of their reform work. At an 1834 antislavery celebration, which combined a men’s reception for the first anniversary of (August 1, following British abolition in 1833) and a , a male abolitionist toasted that reformer Priscilla Buxton “might long rejoice in the fetters put on that day as well as over those which she had assisted to break.” 71 The comparisons British abolitionists made between marriage and slavery illustrated how anxieties surrounding gender, slavery and race could, following slave emancipation, encouraged a focus on the experience of white women. The analogy between women and slaves continued alongside comparisons between British wage labour and slavery. 72 Thomas Hood’s landmark poem, “The Song of the Shirt” (1843), published anonymously in Punch , gendered the discussion of labour in its exposure of the exploitation experienced by seamstresses. Earlier that year, the Pictorial Times considered similar content. “Slaves of the Needle” (May 1843) maintained that London had “fifteenth thousand and young women doomed to daily slavery” and the “milliner slave feels her bonds the heaviest,” and was soon followed by images depicting “The Horrors of Negro Slavery” (June 1843). 73 When the “Song” appeared in December, a conceptual framework existed wherein slavery could be used as a euphemism for women’s labour exploitation as well as a distant system of slavery: With fingers weary and worn, “Work! work! work! With eyelids heavy and red, While the cock is crowing aloof! A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, And work – work – work, Plying her needle and thread – Till the stars shine through the roof! Stich! stitch! stitch! It’s Oh! to be a slave In poverty, hunger, and dirt, Along with the barbarous Turk, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch Where woman has never a soul to save She sang the “Song of the Shirt.” If this is Christian work![”] 74

69 Thoughts on Means of Alleviating the Miseries Attendant Upon Common Prostitution (T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1799, 2014), 27, e-book. 70 Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 , 96. 71 Anna Gurney and Sarah Buxton’s “Journal,” 1834, Buxton Papers, in Ibid., 102. 72 Eric Foner, “Free Labour and Nineteenth-Century Political Ideology,” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 , ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (The University Press of Virginia, 1996), 104-105. 73 “Slaves of the Needle,” Pictorial Times , May 20, 1843; “The Horrors of Negro Slavery,” Pictorial Times , June 17, 1843, in The Abolition Project , 2009, accessed August 14, 2012, http://abolition.e2bn.org/source_12.html. 74 Thomas Hood, “The Song of the Shirt,” Punch , December 16, 1843, in The Victorian Web , 2004, accessed August 5, 2012, http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hood/shirt.html.

32 According to Lori Merish, the “Song” cast the monotonous labour of seamstresses as “both imprisonment and enslavement.” 75 It also inspired myriad artworks, imagery and literature, such as George W.M. Reynolds, The Seamstress; or, the White Slave of England (1853).76 Yet the poem deployed the slavery analogy not with reference to colonial slavery, but to a different racial “other.” An orientalist essentialisation of the racial other often accompanied use of the woman-slave analogy. The framework that Edward Said describes as orientalism developed alongside the expansion of European empires throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since nineteenth-century representations of sexual identity relied on cultural and racial differences to construct “sex” and “race” as categories, structural connections were based on power relations of domination and subordination.77 These discourses shaped the Eastern encounters of European women, which, due to geographic proximity, were more frequent than colonial travel. When Englishwomen visited Egyptian harems, their interpretation the “” of Eastern women provoked anxieties about their own position in English society. 78 An oriental vision of the woman- slave analogy also found literary expression in novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).79 This meant that British reformers did not just rely on “a univocal white woman-black male slave analogy,” but rather “a ‘triple discourse’ of slavery.” Comparisons could sometimes refer to African slaves in British colonies (including North America), at other times to “women enslaved in the ‘despotic’ ‘oriental’ harem,” and still otherwise to the “ill-treatment of women in ‘savage’ societies.” 80 In making allusions toward many sites of subjugation, European women sometimes engaged with a certain appreciation for different forms of oppression. The way Harriet Martineau, an English reformer and travel writer, brought a transnational perspective to her reform endeavours helped shaped such awareness. In an 1847 letter, later published in the American antislavery fundraising booklet The Liberty Bell , Martineau expressed her belief that she had “seen the last I

75 Lori Merish, “Representing the ‘Deserving Poor’: The ‘Sentimental Seamstress’ and the Feminisation of Poverty in Antebellum America,” in Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women , ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), 62. 76 T.J. Edelstein, “They Sang ‘The Song of the Shirt’: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress,” Victorian Studies 23, no. 2 (1980): 184; Susan P. Casteras, “‘Weary Stitches’: Illustrations and Paintings for Thomas Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ and Other Poems,” in Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century , ed. Beth Harris (Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 13-40. See: George W.M. Reynolds, The Seamstress; or, the White Slave of England (London: John Dicks, 1853, 2001), e-book. 77 Joanna de Groot, “‘Sex’ and ‘Race’: The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century,” in Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century ed. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London: Routledge, 1989), 89-91. See: Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1978, 1995). 78 Jill Matus, “The ‘Eastern-Woman Question’: Martineau and Nightingale Visit the Harem,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21, no. 1 (1999): 69-70 and 65. 79 Joyce Zonana, “The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of ‘Jane Eyre’,” Signs 18, no. 3 (1993): 592-617; Carl Plasa, “‘Silent Revolt’: Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre ,” in Discourse ; Sue Thomas, “Christianity and the State of Slavery in Jane Eyre ,” Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007): 57-79. 80 Midgley, “British Abolition,” 129.

33 should ever see of Slavery” upon leaving the United States, but was surprised when she “next saw Slavery in a hareem at Cairo.” Martineau recognised the difference between chattel slavery and the Egyptian harem – indeed, she viewed the latter as “more favourable” – but classified “much of the Slavery of the East [a]s owing to the institution of .” 81 In her delineation of different forms of slavery, or what can be better understood as different forms of oppression, Martineau courted intersectionality to conclude that many sites of oppression indeed existed. For Falconbridge and Martineau, the ability to travel and observe the hierarchical social structures which exploited the enslaved enabled a glimpse of intersectional awareness. With the gradual abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery, however, the issue of chattel slavery became less divisive and a rhetorical return to the abstract slavery analogy transpired. The Slavery Abolition Act (1833) meant colonial slavery became less contentious in Britain, but the continued exploitation of ex-slaves under the system was less contentious.82 Another issue, women’s suffrage, concurrently became more controversial. Alongside the many transnational “emancipatory initiatives” of 1848, the revolutionary ferment in Europe initiated political discussions that encouraged reconsiderations of women’s suffrage.83 “There are no slaves in France” – an assertion upon which the country prided itself – underwent challenge because women were excluded from universal suffrage. 84 German women also explored the concept of “frauenemancipation .” Following the 1848 March Revolution, Louise Otto printed a “ Call to German Women and Girls for the Establishment of a True Female Emancipation” (1849). 85 The rhetoric of the American Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 will be considered in Chapter Four. The transatlantic abolition of slavery enabled the slavery analogy to be to formulate a critique of women’s oppression, but largely without reference to colonial slavery or race. Later British reformers similarly used the slavery analogy without explicit reference to earlier institutions of colonial slavery. ’s The Subjection of Women (1869) extended the principles of liberalism to women by critiquing the way political and social structures denied them rationality and autonomy. 86 As the “subjection of women to men” was a “universal custom,” Mill contended, any transformation of women’s social status appeared anachronistic. Mill concluded that the “master and slave” or “master and servant” relationship between husband and wife rendered

81 Harriet Martineau, “Letter: From Harriet Martineau, London, July 9, 1847,” in Friends of Freedom, The Liberty Bell (1849), in The Making of the Modern World , 2012, accessed August 13, 2012, http://find.galegroup.com.eqp- prod1.hul.harvard.edu/. 82 See: Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labour Versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 83 See: Karen Offen, “Women and the Question of ‘Universal’ Suffrage in 1848: A Transatlantic Comparison of Suffragist Rhetoric,” NWSA Journal 11, no. 1 (1999): 155. 84 Offen, “How (and Why),” 57. 85 Bonnie S. Anderson, “ Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists,” in Women’s Rights , 82-96; Anderson, Joyous Greetings , 99. 86 Susan Hekman, “John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women : The Foundations of ,” History of European Ideas 15, no. 4-6 (1992): 681.

34 women “willing” rather than “forced” slaves. 87 Not only was this interpretation of marriage evident in Mill’s other writings, including his speech for the Reform Bill of 1867, but it shared striking similarities with philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s description of the master-slave relationship in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807). 88 Other British commentators used the slavery analogy to critique marriage even as they rejected other women’s rights imperatives. Journalist and anti-suffragist Eliza Lynn Linton supported reform, concluding that “the revolt of women against the undue power of their husbands, against the virtual slavery of marriage, has not been without cause.” 89 Satirical comment on women’s lack of autonomy also invoked many of the aforementioned themes: How wretched is a Woman’s Fate, No happy Change her Fortune knows; Subject to Man in every State, How can she then be free from Woes? In Youth a Father’s stern Commands, And jealous Eyes control her Will; A Lordly Brother watchful stands To keep her closer Captive still. The Tyrant Husband next appears, With awful and contracted Brow; No more a Lover’s Form he wears, Her Slave’s become her Sov’reign now. If from this fatal Bondage free. And not by Marriage Chains confin’d, She, blest with single Life, can see A Parent fond, a Brother kind. … O, cruel Powers, since you’ve design’d That Man, vain Man, shou’d bear the sway, To a Slave’s Fetters add a slavish Mind, That I may cheerfully your Will obey. 90 Prior to the expansion of colonial slavery, the abstract slavery analogy was used to critique women’s oppression, particularly in marriage. But following the gradual emancipation of slaves throughout the Western world, the ongoing use of this abstract rhetoric was not so straightforward. Increasingly, the abstract slavery analogy worked solely to draw attention to white women’s oppression, and less so to that of chattel slaves and other marginalised racial groups. In Europe, enlightenment political theory created the ideological space for the slavery analogy to be employed to critique women’s experience of love and marriage, as well as their lack of

87 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 1869, 1997), 2, 12, 14 and 27. 88 Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marital Slavery and : John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women ,” Political Theory 9, no. 2 (1981): 230-231 and 237. 89 Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Modern Revolt,” MacMillan’s Magazine , December 1870, 23. See: Andrea L. Broomfield, “Much More Than an Antifeminist: Eliza Lynn Linton’s Contribution to the Rise of Victorian Popular Journalism,” Victorian Literature and Culture 29, no. 2 (2001): 273-274. 90 Song XLVII, in The Cupid: A Collection of Love Songs (Derby: The Moray Press, 1891), 25-26, e-book.

35 education. As colonial slavery became more culturally dominant, writers engaged with direct colonial comparisons to give weight to this rhetoric. This impetus extended as white women experienced direct engagement with colonised or racially diverse groups, and these were the interactions that were most likely to result in the fledgling expression of intersectionality. But the voices of the enslaved were overwhelmingly conspicuous due to their absence. Even so, this rhetoric was not monolithic: sometimes writers referred solely to white women while others drew attention to the oppression of all women and, indeed, other oppressed groups. Yet the colonial endeavour meant that Europe was defined by an absence of chattel slavery in its midst. The situation was vastly different in the Americas.

American Foundations The colonies of North America were effectively outposts of British political and cultural values, so legal, religious and family structures largely maintained continuity. The doctrine of coverture remained central to women’s experience, and racial hierarchy was gradually inscribed as chattel slavery expanded throughout the eighteenth century. As a result, the cultural heritage of European settlers, along with the presence of chattel slavery, meant a more insistent rhetorical comparison between women and slaves emerged in the American colonies. The persistence of social and marital hierarchy was based on a Christian interpretation of matrimonial headship. The husband was seen as the head of the wife as Christ was head of the church. 91 “In every lawful thing she submits her Will and Sense to his … she acts as if there were but one Mind in Two Bodies,” Cotton Mather’s widely read treatise Ornaments to the Daughters of Zion (1692) instructed. 92 These principles extended beyond marriage. Massachusetts Puritan minister John Cotton in 1663 further demonstrated that while “Male and Female Bond and Free” were welcomed into the church, “Women and Servants” were “not reckoned” to be “capable of Voting in the choice of Magistrates[.]” 93 As New England Puritans inscribed patriarchal authority through religious tenets and patterns, women’s public and political presence was both limited and discouraged. 94 Still, the dearth of in early America can be attributed to the relatively greater opportunities afforded colonial women, the lack of , and, comparatively, the European “cultural maturity” which produced a burgeoning feminist consciousness. 95

91 Cott, Public Vows , 11. 92 Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion; or, the Character and Happiness of a Virtuous Woman (Boston: Samuel Phillips, 1691), e-book. 93 John Cotton, A Discourse about Civil Government in a New Plantation Whose Design Is Religion (Cambridge: Green and Johnson, 1663), 6 (Google books). 94 Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman’s Power and Woman’s Place in the United States, 1630-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 15. 95 Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 23.

36 Some colonial women offered a fledgling critique of chattel slavery that emanated from an awareness of gendered oppression. , an African ex-slave, was one of the only eighteenth-century enslaved women to have her writings published. Not only did the relationship between slavery and gender shape Wheatley’s poetry, but it also shaped her own experience. 96 Her writings gained significance in colonial America and beyond. In 1773, Wheatley wrote a poem to the British Earl of Dartmouth: Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song, Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung, … I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate, Was snatched from Afric’s fancied happy seat: … Such, such my case. And Can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway? 97 This awareness of the intersection between chattel slavery, freedom and gender was rare and exceptional during the 1770s. As an ex-slave woman, Wheatley’s expression of her own experience anticipated the nineteenth-century significance of this rhetorical framework in the United States. The American Revolution brought about radical democratic changes in a way that realised some enlightenment ideals. If, as recent historians argue, this conflict was neither homogenous nor universally supported, the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny remained as important to the patriots as it did to the later cultural memory of the Revolution.98 For nineteenth-century historian Coit Tyler, the Revolution was based “not against tyranny inflicted, but only against tyranny anticipated.” 99 One response to revolutionary ideals was the gradual abolition of chattel slavery in the northern states during the late eighteenth century, while a broader abolitionist commitment emerged in the transatlantic antislavery connections of . 100 Although the Declaration of

Independence (1776) – “THE FOUNDING DOCUMENT” – became the “American Enlightenment’s equivalent to sacred scripture,” it was later criticised by antebellum antislavery and women’s rights reformers because it sanctioned chattel slavery and systematically excluded women. 101 As social and political hierarchy continued when the United States became an independent nation, revolutionary rhetoric provided the foundations for an abstract slavery analogy to slowly

96 See: Jennifer Thorn, “‘All Beautiful in Woe’: Gender, Nation, and Phillis Wheatley’s ‘Niobe’,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 37 (2008): 233-258. 97 Phillis Wheatley, “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North-America (1773),” in Transatlantic , 147-148. 98 See: Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, eds. Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). 99 Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (San Francisco: Internet Archive: American Libraries, 1897, 2001), 8-9, e-book. 100 See: Roger Bruns, ed. Am I Not a Man and a Brother: The Antislavery Crusade of Revolutionary America, 1688- 1788 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1977); Joanne Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 101 Davis, “Declaring Equality,” 7-8; Carol Lasser and Stacey Robertson, Antebellum Women: Private, Public, Partisan (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010), 1-2.

37 emerge in critique of women’s oppression. This abstract rhetoric did not reference chattel slavery, but appropriated revolutionary rhetoric and the language of despotism and unfreedom to describe women’s oppression. The discourse of “republican motherhood” only encouraged women’s indirect political participation through the cultivation of patriotic children, even as it promoted women’s education. 102 In this framework, prominent women such as and Hannah Lee Corbin employed the slavery analogy to discuss women’s (sometimes qualified) suffrage in correspondence with their political kin, John Adams and Richard Henry Lee. 103 In 1790, Judith Sargent Murray asserted that “woman’s form” should not denote a “weak, a servile, an inferior soul;” with “soul unfetter’d” and education “to no sex confined,” women could have the same intellectual potential as the “lordly sex” because “nature with equality imparts / And noble passions , swell e’en female hearts .” 104 The ongoing influence of revolutionary rhetoric meant these American allusions to slavery did not yet dwell upon references to chattel slavery. In 1795, the Philadelphia Minerva published a poem: GOD save each Female’s Think of the cruel chain, A voice re-echoing round, right, Endure no more the pain With joyful accents found, Show to her ravish’d fight of slavery: – “Woman is Free; Woman is Free; Why should a tyrant bid; Assert the noble claim, Let Freedom’s voice prevail, Her providence assign’d All selfish arts disdain;” And draw aside the vale [sic], Her soul to be confin’d, Hark how the note Supreme Indulgence hail. Is not her gentile mind proclaim, Sweet liberty. ... By virtue led? ... “Woman is Free!” 105 From the beginning of American nationhood, dissenting women’s voices critiqued the marginalisation of women in a paradigm of slavery versus freedom. But the presence of chattel slavery in the United States complicated even such abstract references, and increasingly shaped the nineteenth-century development of the woman-slave analogy. By the early nineteenth century, the growing resonance of the slavery analogy can be attributed to the cultural prominence of antebellum debates surrounding slavery and antislavery. Its prevalence hereafter it is more useful to understand this rhetoric not in terms of a slavery analogy, but as discourses of slavery. According to Eric Foner, the idea of slavery gained especial significance in the United States due to the “immediate reality” of chattel slavery and an emerging

102 Linda Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 187-205. For education, see: Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand & Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 103 Robert J. Dinkin, Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), 13-15. 104 Judith Sargent Murray, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” in The Massachusetts Magazine, or, Monthly Museum Concerning the Literature, History, Politics, Arts, Manners, Amusements of the Age , Vol.II (Boston: I. Thomas and E.T. Andrews, 1790, 2013), e-book. 105 By a Lady, “Tune – God Save America ,” Philadelphia Minerva , Vol.I, No. 37, October 17, 1795, in Danny O. Crew, Suffragist Sheet Music: An Illustrated Catalogue of Published Music Associated with the Women’s Rights and Suffrage Movement in America, 1795-1921 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002), 8-9.

38 awareness that wage earners, among others, were “somehow less than fully free.” 106 Historians have come to appreciate the shades of freedom that existed in early America, and demonstrate how dependence was conceptualised as specific to women and racial minorities. 107 Carol Wilson and Calvin D. Wilson propose that “the line between black and white, slave and free, was not as well defined as we have assumed.” 108 While this analysis has been extended to , labour, and sexual exploitation, it has not impelled a reconsideration of the rhetorical development of the woman-slave analogy. Beyond the situation of chattel slaves, the antebellum era witnessed a growing realisation that different forms of oppression and exploitation existed – and often intersected. As many nineteenth-century Americans viewed women’s experience as one such site of oppression, this framework constitutes a methodological departure for consideration of the woman-slave analogy. As the woman-slave analogy became more rhetorically pervasive in the United States, an increasing reliance on comparisons with chattel slavery transpired. Enlightenment philosophy constituted a prelude to transatlantic antislavery and women’s rights movements, and while the antislavery movement also played an important role in shaping an American feminist consciousness, it is necessary to acknowledge that women’s rights had broader foundations than simply abolitionism. 109 Although qualified women’s suffrage was briefly granted by some northern states at the end of the eighteenth century, the expansion of the market economy, the ideal of domesticity and the ultimate repeal of women’s suffrage impelled greater gender awareness amongst American women.110 Overall, the woman-slave analogy gained even greater immediacy in a nation that continued to disempower women whilst condoning chattel slavery. The rhetorical intensification of the woman-slave analogy must be attributed to American women’s involvement in the antislavery movement during the 1830s. In 1831, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler’s article, “Mental Metempsychosis,” a which signified the passage of the soul at death into another body, encouraged intellectual, imaginative and bodily identification with the enslaved. Not only did this process resemble the sensuality of contemporaneous religious practices, but it also represented a departure from a rhetorical focus on the “poor African” to a more corporeal

106 Eric Foner, “Free Labour,” 104-105. 107 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labour (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 23. See: Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (1979): 3-29; David W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” The Journal of Economic History 44, no. 1 (1984): 1- 26; Sharon Block, “Lines of Colour, Sex, and Service, Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past , ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 108 Carol Wilson and Calvin D. Wilson, “White Slavery: An American Paradox,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 19, no. 1 (1998): 1. 109 See: Ellen DuBois, “Women’s Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists , ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Louisiana State University Press, 1979). 110 See: Dinkin, Before Equal Suffrage , Chapter One: “The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods.”

39 imaginative engagement with chattel slavery.111 Chandler specifically encouraged abolitionists and their audiences to “imagine themselves for a few moments” in the slave’s “very circumstances, to enter into his feelings, comprehend all his wretchedness, transform themselves mentally into his very self,” so as to elicit “compassion.” Asking abolitionists to “let the fetter lie” with “weight upon their wrists,” Chandler particularly inspired women reformers to exercise this practice so as to engender understanding and empathy toward the enslaved. 112 The expansion and growing economic importance of chattel slavery led to a more assertive defence of the institution, but it also encouraged a more intimate expression of antislavery awareness. Thus, connections based on a common understanding of suffering could at once subvert and bolster racial hierarchy. 113 Chandler specifically encouraged women to “remember” the “oppression” of enslaved women, and asked: “When woman’s heart is bleeding, / Shall woman’s voice be hush’d?” 114 These injunctions helped shape a reform consciousness wherein women’s antislavery involvement was predicated on self- identification with the enslaved. A heightened awareness of the immediacy of American chattel slavery encouraged more direct engagement with discourses of slavery, and mental metempsychosis was widely adopted by antislavery reformers. Meditating alone with God, transcribed her very direct experience of identification: When I … become myself the slave – … I feel the fetters wearing away the flesh and grating on my bare ankle bone, … the naked cords of my neck shrinking away from the rough edge of the iron collar, … my flesh quivers beneath the lash, till, in anguish, I feel portions of it cut from my back; … I see my aged and feeble mother driven away and scourged, and then the brutish and drunken overseer lay his ferocious grasp upon the person of my sister and drag her to his den of pollutions[.] During such episodes of self-hypnosis, biographer Dorothy Sterling suggests that Kelley actually became the slave and identified with the physical and emotional degradation of the institution.115 In the process, however, white and middle-class abolitionist women were prone to ignore the crucial differences that shaped both race and class. 116 The “Personal Narratives” section of American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) revealed Angelina Grimké’s physical and emotional identification with the enslaved, and she recalled her response when listening to

111 Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 13 and 30-43. 112 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “Mental Metempsychosis,” The Genius of Universal Emancipation , February 1, 1831, in Benjamin Lundy, ed. The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler: With a Memoir of Her Life and Character (Philadelphia: Lemuel Howell, 1836), 117-118 (Google books). 113 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), Chapter Five: “Changing the Subject: On Making Your Suffering Mine.” 114 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “Think of Our Country’s Glory,” in Poetical Works , 64. 115 Abby Kelley to N.P. Rogers, July 8, 1841, in Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 132-133. 116 Yellin, Women and Sisters , 77.

40 stories of violence and abuse: “I felt as if I was passing the precincts of hell.” 117 The impulse toward corporeal identification was not limited to personal reflection. During public addresses, white abolitionists often encouraged their audiences to imagine entering the enslaved body “to ‘excite’ themselves and each other,” sometimes gesturing to the ex-slaves that accompanied them on the platform to incite activism. 118 In what could have been an example of this action, Susan B. Anthony asked her audience: “[C]ould we but feel for the slaves, … and love him as ourself, … how easy would be the task of converting us all to abolitionism.” 119 Unlike the associations generated through the earlier mobilisation of the abstract slavery analogy, these strategies resulted in a more heightened and direct relationship between reformers and their imagined idea of what it was like to be enslaved. The operation of mental metempsychosis was prone to asymmetry, but the process whereby reformers used discourses of slavery to foster awareness of women’s oppression still recognised the fundamental exploitation of chattel slavery. Certainly, the rhetorical focus was problematic because it was inherently imbalanced. Jean Fagan Yellin suggests that viewing slavery through the paradigm of gender identity challenged ideologies of racism, but also overlooked the inherent differences between the situation of free and enslaved women. 120 Even so, this rhetoric constituted an attempt toward intersectionality because it approached the exploitation of women and slaves in a way that acknowledged many sites of oppression. For Grimké, women’s rights should be “a part of the great doctrine of Human Rights,” while Ernestine L. Rose repeatedly invoked her personal refrain: “I go for the recognition of human rights, without distinction of , party, sex, or colour.” 121 In promoting antislavery, reformers concurrently employed culturally familiar discourses of slavery to frame the oppression of women as well as the oppression of the enslaved. In the process, they tried – and often failed – to look beyond their own situation and find more enduring points of intersection with the oppression of other groups. In the United States, the key scholarly critique of this rhetoric coalesces around the purported insincerity of the “sisterhood” between white and black women. Shirley J. Yee questions the degree to which white reform women were able to transcend racism and understand the

117 Angelina Grimké, “Testimony of Angelina Grimke Weld,” in Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839, 2010), 52-57, e-book. 118 Gay Gibson Cima, “Minstrelsy and Mental Metempsychosis: Mid-Nineteenth Century American Women’s Performance Criticism,” in The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies , ed. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (Thousand Oakes: Sage Publications, 2006), 112 and 114-115. See also: Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Anti-Slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), Chapter One: “From Sentimental Sympathy to Activist Self-Judgement.” 119 Susan B. Anthony, “Make the Slave’s Cause our Own,” Speech for Tour for American Anti-Slavery Society (c.1857) (Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). 120 Yellin, Women and Sisters , 24. 121 Angelina Grimké, in Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké; the First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 202; Ernestine L. Rose, “Speech at the Anniversary of West Indian Emancipation,” 1853, in Mistress , 152.

41 concerns of minority groups, especially because they often referred to the enslaved only “as a handy rhetorical device.” 122 An important corollary to this argument, therefore, is that examples of self- hypnosis and rhetorical self-identification with the enslaved were not limited to white women abolitionists. In 1832, Sarah Mapps Douglass addressed an African American group, the Female Literary Society of Philadelphia: My Friends – My sisters: How important is the occasion for which we have assembled … to stir up in the bosom of each … [a] feeling of deep sympathy for our brethren and sisters, who are … held in bondage the most cruel and degrading – to make their cause our own! 123 Differences emerged between the rhetoric of black and white women, but it is clear that a variety of women practiced mental metempsychosis to promote self-identification with the enslaved. According to Gay Gibson Cima, the increasingly stringent laws upon free blacks in the North led Douglass to realise her own embodied vulnerability.124 Although Douglass was not a slave, but a free black woman, she, too, was inspired to link her own body with that of the slave: “I saw his iron hand stretched forth to seize me as his prey, and the cause of the slave became my own.” 125 This contrasted with Chandler’s insistence that individuals imaginatively inhabit the enslaved body to feel empathy. Douglass emphasised self-sympathy first, a self-awareness that could generate acknowledgment of a shared body with the enslaved, and so belied a more profound awareness of her separateness – but also connectedness – with the enslaved body. 126 Since it was possible for black and white reformers to engage with mental metempsychosis in ways that could appreciate multiple sites of oppression, so too could rhetorical engagement with the woman-slave analogy. By looking beyond abolitionism, it becomes clear that the woman-slave analogy was not an antebellum cultural anomaly. In fact, slavery was more broadly used as a euphemism for oppression. The relationality between lived experience and rhetorical flourish influenced the way discourses of slavery were applied amongst reformers. Both abstract and direct discourses of slavery informed health reform and temperance. “There is no slavery of the body and mind equal to that of the opium taker,” the Water-Cure Journal maintained in 1845. 127 viewed “the Slave [as] a happy man compared with the drunkard,” while Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping (1877) imagined the need for alcohol and subsequent drunkenness through discourses of slavery. 128 The acknowledgement that there were many forms of slavery – of

122 Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 136 and 148. 123 Sarah Mapps Douglass, “Mental Feasts,” Liberator , July 21, 1832, in C. Peter Ripley and Michael F. Hembree, eds. The Black Abolitionist Papers, 1830-1846 , Vol.III (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 116. 124 Cima, “Minstrelsy,” 114. 125 Douglass, “Mental Feasts,” 116. 126 Cima, “Minstrelsy,” 115. 127 “Horrors of Opium Eating” (from the Sun ), Water-Cure Journal , January 1, 1845 (Google Books). 128 “Slavery and Intemperance,” Lily , May 1850; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Story , ed. Frances Smith Foster (Project Gutenberg, 1877, 2010), e-book. See also: Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood

42 oppression – ensured allusions to slavery did not only reference the institution that shaped southern agricultural labour forces, even though the idea of chattel slavery was constantly a latent connotation. Increasingly, references to slavery were used to justify a variety of reforms. In 1859, Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck declared: “[W]e hate slavery – hate it in all its forms – hate it when it enslaves man or woman, or when they enslave themselves to passions, appetite, fashion, or aught that degrades their highest man or womanhood.” 129 In this context, however, the exploitative way in which the woman-slave analogy could be used to focus on white women at the expense of black women meant it remained the most contentious incarnation of this rhetoric. It was in this context that reformers felt the need to justify their use of the woman-slave analogy, thus suggesting both unease with and commitment to this rhetoric. Many early women’s rights reformers were active abolitionists, so their personal experiences and awareness of mental metempsychosis informed their rhetoric. found the “comparison between women and the coloured race … striking,” concluding that both groups were defined by “affection more than intellect”; their “tendency to submission” meant they could be “kept in subjection by physical force, and considered rather in the light of property, than as individuals.” 130 Other reformers approached this rhetoric with more caution. When spoke in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1846, the ex-slave and reformer problematised the way discourses of slavery were frequently appropriated to describe workers and women. In response to the comparison between London’s supposed wage slaves and chattel slaves, Douglass did not “dispute the existence of much misery and suffering,” but “denied that they had slavery” in Britain: What was slavery? … Let one who has experienced it in his own person tell … the difference between American slavery and what, by the misuse of the term, was called slavery in this country. Douglass further emphasised that disenfranchisement was not slavery, “otherwise all women were slaves, because they [are] universally deprived of this right.” Slavery, Douglass concluded, was “the mark of the slave-driver’s lash,” “to be bought and sold in the market,” and to have “all the powers of the mind of a man” but nonetheless be considered property. 131 In spite of the way he absolutely refuted the appropriation of discourses of slavery, he did not abandon the comparison altogether. Later, in 1852, Douglass stated: “It is well said by some one, ‘as woman was the first,

Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 129 Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, “Revolvers – Gov. Wise – Northern White Slaves,” Sibyl , December 15, 1859. 130 Lydia Maria Child, in Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers: 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 1997), 108. 131 Frederick Douglass, “An Account of American slavery,” January 15, 1846, in Glasgow Argus , January 22, 1846, in John Blassingame and C. Peter Ripley, eds. The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One – Speeches, Debates, and Interviews , Vol.I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 131. My thanks to Professor Julie Husband for drawing my attention to this speech.

43 so will she be the last slave.’ May God speed the day of universal emancipation!” 132 In turn, less prominent reformers were inspired by their famous colleagues and extrapolated on this rhetoric through the equally elaborate explanations that proliferated in reform periodicals. The inherent contradictions in the ideological underpinnings of the woman-slave analogy meant it was simultaneously appropriated by competing groups. According to Nancy Leys Stepan, nineteenth-century pseudoscientific research was shaped by the perception that the characteristics of women and slaves were innate. Consequently, male scientists expanded the analogy between race and gender to validate the inferiority of both groups. 133 In these instances, any attempt toward intersectionality was undermined because invidious distinctions between white men and the analogised groups, rather than an overarching sense of common cause, were at the heart of the comparison. Similarly, proslavery southerners and politicians used variations upon the woman- slave analogy to reinscribe domestic ideology and social hierarchy.134 When compared with the rhetoric of reformers who sought to ameliorate interdependent oppressions, scientists and proslavery ideologues sought to reinforce these sites of social and political subordination. There was also dispute amongst reformers about the value of the woman-slave analogy, and these discussions often belied an attitude of . Paulina Wright Davis questioned how any “analogy” with African Americans – purportedly the “most hated and despised race on earth” – could be an effective women’s rights strategy, but still advocated this rhetoric because it could “startle some who sleep” and encourage “woman to feel her degradation[.]” 135 Other reformers condemned this rhetoric even more stridently, but they, too, sometimes courted intersectionality. Jane Grey Swisshelm proclaimed: The women of this glorious Republic are sufficiently oppressed without linking their course to that of the slave. The slave is sufficiently oppressed without binding him to the stake which has ever held woman in a state of bondage. 136 Swisshelm objected to the potential for the “American prejudice against colour” to unintentionally “sink woman into a lower degradation,” but inadvertently belied just how entrenched discourses of slavery had become when she described women’s oppression as a form of “bondage.” This dilemma continued during the postbellum era. In 1871, Thomas Wentworth Higginson questioned the way Gail Hamilton protested “alleged ‘Female Slavery’,” but his article, entitled “Where the Slavery Lies,” encountered the linguistic same problems as Swisshelm. Hamilton’s article derided

132 Frederick Douglass, “The National Woman’s Rights Convention at Syracuse,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper , September 17, 1852, in Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, 1992), 56. 133 See: Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis 77, no. 2 (1986): 261-377. 134 Davis, “Declaring Equality,” 14; Cott, Public Vows , 60. 135 Davis, “Pecuniary Independence,” Una , 1853. 136 Jane Grey Swisshelm, “Woman’s Rights and the Colour Question,” Pittsburgh Saturday Vister , November 23, 1850, 178, in Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, eds. Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 286-287.

44 the marriage vow through which women promised to “obey,” but viewed marriage as the only “‘relic of barbarism’” that continued to shape women’s lives. For Higginson, this missed the point: “Gail Hamilton shows laughingly the chains and stocks that mark her sex’s subjection.” 137 Not only did these competing perspectives validate the cultural prominence of this rhetoric, but they demonstrated how reformers valued the woman-slave analogy even as they approached it with unease. Following the Civil War, the heated political debates surrounding the extension of the elective franchise resulted in more heightened comparisons between women and slaves, or sex and race. As the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the end of the Civil War brought about reconsiderations of the status of African Americans and women, new comparisons were generated which in turn created new – and often more insidious – linguistic paradigms. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose rhetoric was particularly contentious, emphasised the “many points of analogy” between “all disfranchised classes,” stating: The fact that women and negroes have no voice in the government is one strong point of analogy; … the fact that women and negroes have ever been the slaves of white man, the one to his lust, the other to his avarice, makes too many points of analogy for woman to contemplate without a deep feeling of indignation. 138 In the wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, references to chattel slavery gave way to a preoccupation with race. Susan B. Anthony implored African American men to “remember the women by your side, and secure to them all you claim for yourselves,” emphasising that “black women and white, as well as black men must now be brought within the body politic.” 139 As the comparison between women and slaves transformed to a focus on sex and race, the latter category retained associations with chattel slavery. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869) emphasised how the “name of the negro had been associated with slavery, ignorance and poverty,” and alluded to the ongoing ideological associations between African Americans and chattel slavery. 140 This association continued into the twentieth century, as Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun: A Novel without A Moral (1928) similarly insisted that skin colour constituted the “difference between freedom and fetters.” 141 This postbellum rhetorical transformation was a source of both rhetorical significance and ambivalence.

137 T.W.H. [Thomas Wentworth Higginson], “Where the Slavery Lies,” Woman’s Journal , September 9, 1871. 138 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “**White Masters**,” in Lana F. Rakow and Cheris Kramarae, eds. The Revolution in Words: Righting Women, 1868-1871 (London: Routledge, 1990), 56-57. 139 Susan B. Anthony, New York State Coloured Men’s Convention, October 1, 1868, in Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , Vol.II: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 183-184; Susan B. Anthony, “Coloured Convention,” Revolution , October 22, 1868. 140 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Minnie’s Sacrifice (Project Gutenberg, 1869, 2010), 64, e-book. 141 Jessie Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (New York: Frederic A. Stokes Company, 1928, 2010), 136-137, e-book.

45 Transatlantic Connections The transatlantic antislavery connections founded in the late eighteenth century continued in the early nineteenth century. Beyond the individual reformers who toured Britain, abolitionists in the United States were influenced by their British counterparts. Enlightenment ideals continued to shaped the antislavery movement in a way that helped foster an ongoing transatlantic dialogue between reformers. Yet the contribution of women, and sometimes even ex-slaves, was not always accepted. In this context, the rhetorical exchange of the woman-slave analogy flourished. These questions dominated the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, hosted by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) in London during 1840. While the “woman question” did not disrupt the British antislavery movement, the gender-based schism which had plagued the American movement throughout the 1830s reflected the “greater integration” of women therein. 142 The breakaway American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS), a male-only organisation, was more ideologically compatible with the BFASS. Still, the Garrisonian American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) sent female delegates to the World’s Convention.143 The question surrounding women’s political voice became central to the 1840 convention because the AASS’s female delegates were effectively silenced through their relegation to the gallery. In response, Wendell Phillips drew a connection between women and slaves. American abolitionists did not accept the custom of denying “coloured brethren into our friendship,” so Phillips asked if the convention should “yield” to the “prejudice against women in Old England?” 144 The woman-slave analogy also emerged in the protest of the AASS’s female delegates. In a letter to Maria Weston Chapman, questioned the “inconsistency” of the appellation “World’s Convention” when only men were admitted. 145 Kathryn Kish Sklar observes how Mott’s diary divulged “arguments about women’s status derived from analogies with the status of black persons.” A black Jamaican delegate believed the Convention’s “dignity” would be impugned “if ladies were admitted,” but Mott rebuffed him by demonstrating how similarly futile and distracting arguments were employed to exclude African Americans from Pennsylvania antislavery meetings. Nathaniel Colver, a Bostonian, considered “Women constitutionally unfit for public or business meetings,” to which Mott replied, “the coloured man too was said to be constitutionally unfit to mingle with the white man.” Overall, the “analogy between race and gender” was potent, especially

142 Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation’: American and British Women Compared at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840,” Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 460 and 464. 143 Donald R. Kennon, “‘An Apple of Discord’: The Woman Question at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 5, no. 3 (1984): 245-246. 144 Wendell Phillips, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and , eds. History of Woman Suffrage , Vol.I (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 58, e-book. 145 Lucretia Mott to Maria Weston Chapman, 1840, in Clare Taylor, ed. British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 103-104.

46 in London, where people of African descent “appeared as exotic outsiders,” unlike in the United States. 146 The AASS delegates were not the only reformers to use this rhetoric to interrogate the contradictions of the Convention. A poem that satirised J.G. Whittier’s “The World’s Convention” (1839), entitled “England’s Usages!” later appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard : She may not speak? no; woman’s heart Its light and warmth may not impart In Freedom’s Council – tho’ the call Was sung throughout the world, for all The friends of those in ! It bade not slaves themselves to come! Is she not such? Let slaves be dumb, Whatever in her bosom glows, Whate’er she feels, whate’er she knows, Her “woman’s lips” may not reveal Before her lords! 147 These critiques emerged in the United States and England. Three years after attending the Convention, Englishwoman Marion Reid prefaced A Plea for Woman (1843) with the question: “Can man be free, if woman be a slave?” 148 Overall, the Convention had an important and ongoing influence on women delegates. Of especial significance was the introduction and subsequent friendship between Stanton and Mott. 149 The humiliation of the Convention clearly impacted Stanton, who, as a reformer, came to rely on the woman-slave analogy as a central social and legal interpretative paradigm. Women’s rights reformers of the 1840s realised that it was essential for women to understand the inequality of their situation, and later Stanton became convinced that men would only offer so much help: women needed to rely primarily on themselves.150 Stanton may have felt kinship with the enslaved when seated in the gallery at the World’s Convention, but her later references to this event often effaced the distinctive oppression of chattel slavery. In 1852, recalling how women were “denied … the right of free speech in an antislavery convention,” Stanton asked: “If Sambo had been cast out of the convention for any reason, I wonder if Wendell Phillips … would have coolly remarked

146 Sklar, “‘Women who Speak’,” 466-467. 147 “England’s Usages,” National Anti-Slavery Standard , August 27, 1840; “The World’s Convention” (1839), in J.G. Whittier, Anti-Slavery Poems: Songs of Labour and Reform (New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1888), e-book. See: Kennon, “‘An Apple’,” 255-256. 148 Marion Reid, A Plea for Woman: Being a Vindication of the Importance and Extent of Her Natural Sphere of Action (New York: Farmer & Daggers, 1845), (Google Books). See: Midgley, Women against Slavery , 164. 149 Kennon, “‘An Apple’,” 258-261; Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), Chapter Three: “Marriage and Mrs. Mott, 1840-47”; Michael P. Farrell, Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), Chapter Six: “Two Sticks of a Drum: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the Circle of Ultras,” 216-221. 150 Kennon, “‘An Apple of Discord’,” 261; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her: A Critical Study of Early (New York: Praeger, 1989), 34-35.

47 on his discomfiture, ‘Well, he is as happy outside as in!’” 151 Knowledge of the American legal system, founded on English common law, was instilled by Stanton’s upbringing, and further shaped what she saw as the efficacy of the woman-slave analogy. Stanton presupposed a legal remedy for women’s rights, a perspective that both influenced and limited the nineteenth-century women’s movement. 152 Reminiscing in 1898, Stanton still found it “remarkable” that “abolitionists, who felt so keenly the wrongs of the slave, should be so oblivious to the equal wrongs of their own , wives, and sisters,” when the common law accorded both groups a “similar legal status.” 153 These examples demonstrate that, unlike in Europe, American discourses of slavery were intrinsically shaped by the institution of chattel slavery. The process of transatlantic rhetorical exchange also existed in the way women reformers approached women’s history. The early writing of women’s history situated the female experience in terms of “an oppressed group and its struggle against its oppressors,” so the history of women was frequently interpreted as a form of slavery. 154 Since writing history highlighted gender inequality, women’s historical writing from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century must be understood alongside an emerging feminist consciousness. 155 Child’s The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1835) discussed the literal and epistemological enslavement of women around the world, and was framed by a quote – “I am a slave, a favoured slave” – from Lord Byron’s The Corsair (1814). 156 Similarly, American sex radical and free lover Thomas Low Nichols’ Woman in All Ages and Nations (1849) situated women’s history in terms of slavery. 157 This impetus was equally reflected in women’s rights periodicals. “Senex” proclaimed that “the antiquity of the slavery of the sexes does not make emancipation altogether hopeless.” 158 This historiographical trend must be contextualised alongside the wider transatlantic rhetorical prevalence of the woman-slave analogy. This perspective on women’s history underwent further transatlantic exchange because of the degree to which it permeated American women’s rights periodicals. As antislavery and women’s rights reformers embarked upon transatlantic travel, these networks intensified throughout the

151 Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, April 2, 1852, in Elizabeth Frost-Knappman and Kathryn Cullen- DuPont, Women’s Suffrage in America (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005), 100. 152 Elizabeth B. Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 8, no. 1 (1990): 26. 153 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), e- book. 154 Gerda Lerner, “New Approaches to the Study of Women in American History,” Journal of Social History 3, no. 1 (1969): 53-54; Stevenson, “‘Abolitionists’,” 161. 155 Mary Spongberg, Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 8. 156 Lord George Gordon Byron, The Corsair: A Tale (1814), in Lydia Maria Child, The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (Boston: John Allen & Co., 1835, 2010), 1, e-book. 157 Thomas L. Nichols, Woman in All Ages and Nations; from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1849, 2001), e-book. 158 Senex, “The Democratic Review on Woman’s Rights, No. 8,” Lily , December 1852.

48 nineteenth century.159 Biographical accounts of Mary Wollstonecraft appeared in Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck’s The Sibyl and Stanton and Anthony’s The Revolution , in 1859 and 1868 respectively, while was memorialised in biographical sketches in The Revolution during 1868 and 1869. 160 More importantly, The Revolution published Wollstonecraft’s Vindication serially under the title “The Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft,” and the writings of John Stuart Mill were also praised and available for purchase. 161 Both philosophers were celebrated by American reformers for the ideological reinforcement their rhetoric offered. Wollstonecraft’s question – “What does history disclose but marks of inferiority, and how few women have emancipated themselves from the galling yoke of sovereign man?” – was also asked of nineteenth- century American women. 162 Some reformers were aware of their feminist forebears, but the circulation of these texts facilitated the ideological engagement of those individuals who were completely unaware of their predecessors. 163 Consequently, transatlantic feminist exchange and development was facilitated by competing interpretations of the woman-slave analogy. In the United States, orientalist interpretations of the woman-slave analogy also belied the significance of transnational exchange. In 1850, Stanton concluded that women in “all eastern countries” were “mere slave[s], bought and sold at pleasure.” 164 This orientalist framework was much less prominent than American references to chattel slavery, but it still endured. In 1868, The Revolution republished an article, entitled “Emancipation of Turkish Women,” which asked if reformers were waiting for Turkish women to instigate the reform “initiative”: [T]hough there are some who curse the yoke which condemns them to be … beasts of burden and slaves to man’s sensuality, they are not ready to follow the example of Mrs. Stanton and other lady emancipators of America. … [T]he cause of the negro was well plead, even though he, like Turkish women, was reduced to silence by a social condition which took away all liberty. Why not then plead the cause of the Turkish woman[?] 165

159 See: Sandra Stanley Holton, “‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” The American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (1994): 1112-1136; Teresa C. Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (The University of Tennessee Press, 2011), Chapter Two: “Internationalising Black Feminisms: Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker Remond, and American Slavery in the British Isles and Ireland.” 160 “Mary Wollstonecraft,” Sibyl , November 15, 1859; “Mary Wollstonecraft,” June 4, 1868, TR ; Amos Gilbart, “Frances Wright,” Revolution , October 15, 1868; “Frances Wright D’Arusment,” Revolution , January 21, 1869; Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “Frances Wright,” Revolution , April 29, 1869. 161 Mary Wollstonecraft, “The Rights of Woman,” Revolution , August-September 1868; “Mr. John Stuart Mill,” Revolution , April 23, 1868. 162 Wollstonecraft, Vindication , 42. 163 See: Susan Schultz Huxman, “Mary Wollstonecraft, , and Angelina Grimké: Symbolic Convergence and a Nascent Rhetorical Vision,” Communication Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1996): 16-28; Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, “Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 4 (2004): 707-722. 164 Sun Flower [Elizabeth Cady Stanton], “Woman,” Lily , January 1850. 165 “Emancipation of Turkish Women” (from the Messenger Franco American ), Revolution , May 21, 1868.

49 The idea that polygamy was a form of slavery, or oppression, especially amongst Mormon women, was common within the women’s rights movement by the 1880s. 166 Orientalism also influenced transnational discussions of white slavery. According to Sharon E. Wood, orientalist art dwelt on the white-skinned luminosity of women in Circassian and Turkish harems, missionaries reported the exploitation of “heathen” women in seraglios, and fears emerged surrounding an organised trade in women by immigrants, especially Chinese or Russian Jews. 167 However, Progressive Era reformers were more concerned about the “capture” of middle-class white women and girls, and their descent into prostitution. As the woman-slave analogy provided the framework for the rhetoric of white slavery on the United States, this dialogue transformed from a concerted attempt to understand interdependent oppressions to a postbellum emphasis on the rights of white women. By the end of the nineteenth century, envisaging women’s oppression through discourses of slavery became increasingly untenable. An appendix in English economic historian John K. Ingram’s and (1895), entitled “The Use of the Words ‘Slave’ and ‘Slavery’,” denounced the “[c]areless or rhetorical” language of his contemporaries: [W]hen protesting against the so-called “Subjection of Women,” [writers] absurdly apply those terms to the condition of the wife in the modem society of the west — designations which are inappropriate …; and they speak of the modern worker as a “wage-slave,” even though he is backed by a powerful trade-union. has a language of its own, and poets and orators must doubtless be permitted to denote by the word “slavery” the position of subjects of a state who labour under civil disabilities, or are excluded from the exercise of political power; but in sociological study things ought to have their right names, and those names should, as far as possible, be uniformly employed. 168 Although American reformers such as Douglass, Swisshelm and Higginson had similarly questioned the woman-slave analogy during the nineteenth century, their dissent was not wholly clear because it, too, was expressed through discourses of slavery. This rhetoric had always been contentious because it overlooked the experience of actual slaves – whether in European colonies, the American South or the Eastern harem. Yet the inconsistencies that necessitated the foundations of this rhetoric became increasingly glaring. Until better terminology was developed, discourses of slavery were used to collectivise oppression.

Conclusion The development of the woman-slave analogy was based on hierarchical social structures that relegated women and slaves to a category of dependence. This perspective was theorised in classical and enlightenment philosophy and inscribed by European legal systems. The abstract

166 Sarah Barringer Gordon, “‘The Liberty of Self-Degradation’: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and in Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (1996): 815-847. 167 Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 8-9. 168 John K. Ingram, A History of Slavery and Serfdom (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1895, 2001), 261, e-book.

50 slavery analogy soon became an instrumental rhetorical framework that enabled European women to give expression to an emerging feminist consciousness. As European women gradually encountered other lands and cultures, there were some rare episodes of intersectional awareness. Overall, however, their rhetoric facilitated greater understanding of white women’s oppression rather than that of the enslaved or the racial other. The geographic distance from colonial slavery meant the European sense of self- identification with the enslaved was not as proximate as in colonial America. In the United States, the presence of chattel slavery, which underpinned the regional divide between North and South, made the concept of enslavement more immediate. Therefore, discourses of slavery were available to describe women’s subjugation amongst myriad other forms of oppression. The localised presence of chattel slavery shaped a strong sense of self-identification with the enslaved, especially through the process of mental metempsychosis. The antebellum era saw many individuals from different racial backgrounds make intensive identification with the enslaved; this was often suggestive of a desire to understand different forms of oppression. Although chattel slavery informed the way discourses of slavery were constructed, the idea of slavery came to represent an expression and rejection of oppression more generally. The prominence of the woman-slave analogy suggested a growing awareness of interconnected oppressions even as it belied a focus on the construction of gender as a social category. It is important to acknowledge the problems inherent in the use of the woman-slave analogy, but it is equally revealing to investigate how this rhetoric was used to challenge power structures and promote the empowerment and autonomy of all women.

51 CHAPTER TWO :

MARRIAGE : “B OUGHT AND SOLD LIKE A NEGRO SLAVE ”

A married woman is not supposed to have any legal existence. She has no more absolute rights than a slave on a southern plantation. ELIZABETH CADY STANTON , “W HY WOMAN MUST VOTE ,” THE LILY , MAY 1850

You know how women sell themselves and are sold in marriage, from queens downwards, eh? You know what the bible says about slavery, and marriage. Poor women, poor slaves. 1 MARY BOYKIN CHESTNUT , DIARY , MARCH 4, 1861, CHARLESTON , SOUTH CAROLINA

During the nineteenth century, American women from a variety of backgrounds viewed marriage as a form of slavery. Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a northern women’s rights reformer married to an abolitionist, and Mary Boykin Chestnut, a southerner married to a South Carolina lawyer, planter and secessionist, saw marriage and slavery as analogous. Where Stanton’s interpretation was shaped by the legal and political imperatives of the women’s rights movement, the gendered inequity of marriage alone was the point of contention for Chestnut. These women were informed by different perspectives, but the possibility of conceptualising the oppression of marriage united their rhetorical vision. As in previous centuries, the restrictions associated with the cultural formulation of marriage shaped women’s lives. Nineteenth-century legal and social structures rendered women, whether married or not, the dependants of male relatives – husbands, and brothers. In the United States, it was possible to directly extrapolate on a legal and structural comparison of marriage and chattel slavery. The prevalence of chattel slavery meant women and men from a variety of backgrounds found discourses of slavery relevant to their experience of marriage. Since this rhetoric was also used to understand power relations, attitudes toward marriage in the North and South, away from and in close proximity to chattel slavery, provide a useful binary through which to understand how this rhetoric operated. Antislavery reformers brought a heightened awareness of chattel slavery to their own often ambivalent experience of courtship and marriage; this informed the cultural products that they, and their women’s rights successors, created. For ex-slaves and African Americans, however, the institution of marriage diverged from slavery and freedom where their white contemporaries saw convergence. Ultimately, the cultural centrality of chattel slavery led a variety of groups to interrogate women’s experience of courtship and marriage by using the woman-slave analogy.

1 A Diary from Dixie: Mary Boykin Chestnut , ed. Ben Ames Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1905, 1949), 11.

52 The comparison between marriage and slavery has been the incarnation of the woman-slave analogy most frequently discussed by scholars. Yet this has been largely to condemn the way white women mobilised this rhetoric. This chapter will consider the connection many nineteenth-century individuals saw between marriage and slavery from a more comprehensive perspective. A pre- existing framework for a comparison between marriage and slavery existed in the legal inscription of marital hierarchy, and the woman-slave analogy was repeatedly used to challenge the limits of the law. Since popular culture venerated the association between love and marriage, the woman- slave analogy instead offered a critique of this institution. Reformers, in particular, were prone to use discourses of slavery to critique their own and marriages. The woman-slave analogy was also used to demonstrate how the limits of the law shaped the experience of mixed-race women, but this was equally influenced by the tragic mulatta and Jezebel stereotypes. Ultimately, the way African American reformers mobilised this rhetoric revealed how discourses of slavery could be used to condemn the way various forms of oppression intersected. Southern women, in contrast, were relegated to the same category of dependence as the enslaved and so largely rejected any meaningful cross-racial identification. Where abstract discourses of slavery often solely worked to interrogate the oppression of white women, the critiques which actually referenced chattel slavery usually demonstrated a concurrent awareness of plantation . Consequently, the rhetoric which acknowledged the exploitation of the enslaved exhibited greater intersectional understanding. Many antebellum cultural products considered the intersections between chattel slavery, race and gender in a way that both represented and influenced social ideologies. Following the Civil War, however, a new women’s rights trope – the fugitive wife – emerged. When northern reformers appropriated antislavery themes in the absence of chattel slavery, this ultimately resulted in a more complete focus on the matrimonial exploitation and oppression of white women.

Legal Foundations William Blackstone’s highly influential Commentaries on the Laws of England , published in four volumes between 1765 and 1769, clearly articulated the legal notion of “coverture” under which wives were rendered completely dependent on husbands. “By marriage,” Blackstone maintained: the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover , she performs every thing[.] 2 As outlined in Chapter One, the matrimonial hierarchy of English common law was consolidated by the British colonisation of North America. Blanche Glassman Hersh argues that coverture ensured

2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England , Vol.I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765, 2012), e-book.

53 the “married woman’s ‘legal death’,” which resulted in “the slavery of sex in its most concrete visible form.” 3 In the United States, the Married Women’s Property Acts, passed across multiple states during the mid-nineteenth century, constituted the most substantive transformation of women’s legal status under the common law. Yet this had the most significance for propertied white women and did not alter the marriage relation. 4 The comparison between women and chattel slaves overlooked the essential circumstantial differences that arose from lived experience, but the legal and structural parallels between husband and wife, master and slave, were of significance. According to Sandra L. Rierson, marital structures relegated women to “a legal status only slightly better than that of a slave.” White women could not be bought or sold, whereas slaves were property for life. Nonetheless, law and social custom entrusted the control of the married woman’s person, property and labour to the husband, as with the slave to the master. 5 The most striking element of the comparison was the “pairing of unequals,” because it imbued power and superiority to one partner in a way that constructed independence and dependence. 6 “The law regards the husband as ‘master and owner’,” Paulina Wright Davis asserted at the Boston Women’s Rights Convention of 1855. 7 Social comparisons between women and slaves were often exaggerated, but as a “description of legal relationships,” it was essentially accurate in important respects. 8 Legal disempowerment was not limited to marriage, as married women, children and slaves were understood to lack self-ownership.9 Even so, the reform critique of marriage was dominated by discourses of slavery. Throughout the nineteenth century, reformers condemned the legal treaties that inscribed the hierarchies they sought to revolutionise. Quoting Blackstone, abolitionist Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson concluded “Woman and Her Wishes” (1853) by stating, “The only demand of our female reformers is to be set free.” 10 In 1868, Stanton exhibited her legal knowledge: “From Coke down to Kent, who can cite one law under the marriage contract, where woman has the advantage?” 11 Coverture had legal, political and social consequences because it severely limited child custody and endorsed constant sexual access, discipline, and chastisement. In response, reform periodicals focused on explicit physical comparisons between marriage and

3 Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 2. 4 Carole Shammas, “Re-Assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 1 (1994): 9. 5 Sandra L. Rierson, “Race and Gender Discrimination: A Historical Case for Equal Treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 1 (1994): 89 and 96. 6 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 62. 7 P.W. Davis, “Woman’s Rights Convention in Boston,” Lily , November 1855. 8 Reva B. Siegel, “Home as Work: The First Woman’s Rights Claims Concerning Wives’ Household Labour, 1850- 1880,” The Yale Law Journal 103 (1993-1994): 1100. 9 Rierson, “Race and Gender,” 96. 10 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Woman and Her Wishes; an Essay: Inscribed to The Massachusetts Constitutional Convention (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1853), 26. 11 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Marriage and Mistresses,” Revolution , October 15, 1868.

54 slavery, especially reports of wife-whipping, to condemn the limits of the law. 12 At the turn of the twentieth century, Susan B. Anthony denounced the influence of Blackstone and English common law: “Its treatment of women was a blot on civilization only equalled in blackness by the slavery of the negro.” 13 The limits of the law constantly informed the use of the woman-slave analogy, but the idealisation of love and marriage was much more culturally prominent.

Love and Marriage From the late eighteenth century, marriage based on romantic love became an increasingly important cultural ideal. This process imparted comparative freedom to young people as partnerships could be less motivated by the dictates of class or fortune. 14 A vision of romantic love through spiritual became central to “falling in love,” and this process promoted a sense of women’s autonomy. 15 Since the institution of marriage still necessitated women’s dependence, antebellum Americans in the North and South used discourses of slavery to describe both perspectives on love and marriage. Revolutionary rhetoric and the spectre of American democracy shaped this exchange. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “democratic principles” did not subvert “” in Democracy in America (1840). Although women “irrevocably lost” their autonomy through “the bonds of matrimony,” Tocqueville suggested that women “learned by the use of … independence to surrender it without a struggle,” thus coming to marriage “voluntarily and freely[.]”16 Yet there is evidence that countless women were not necessarily resigned to such a loss of independence. During the early national period, many women employed “the egalitarian rhetoric of the Revolution to challenge the balance of power in marriage.” 17 As romantic ideals conflicted with the reality of marital hierarchy, northern and southern women alike used abstract discourses of slavery to understand the loss of independence that often followed marriage. The rhetoric that emerged did not yet focus on references the racialised institution of chattel slavery. In 1808, southerner Mary Brown viewed a girl’s marriage as

12 See: “Treatment of Women,” Lily , January 1851; “Wife-Whipping Legal in this Country,” Woman’s Journal , August 12, 1871. 13 Susan B. Anthony, “Woman’s Half-Century of Evolution,” North American Review 175, no. 553 (1902): 804. See: , Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 13-14. 14 Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 125. 15 Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), 31. 16 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America , trans. Henry Reeve, Vol.II (Project Gutenberg, 1840, 2010), Chapter X: “The Young Woman in the Character of a Wife”; Chapter XII: “How the Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes,” e-book. 17 Dawn Keetley and John Pettegrew, eds. Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism , Vol.I: Beginnings to 1900 (Madison: Madison House, 1997), 38.

55 “resigning her liberty.” 18 The sentimental emphasis on romantic love did not blind women to the fact that marriage was often contracted for economic reasons. 19 Northerner Mary Orne Tucker wrote in her 1802 diary that unless women had “proper” – as in, romantic – “motives,” which would render them “insensible of the bondage,” marriage could prove “a galling chain”: Souls must be to make the bands silken[.] … [T]he knot which binds me was not tied with any mercenary feelings, and … my heart is under the same sweet subjection as my hand .20 There was a growing connection between the way women imagined and experienced marriage and their awareness of degrees of unfreedom. In contrast, southerner William Wirt wrote to assure his fiancée Elizabeth Gamble that she was not a “prisoner,” and that “no compulsion, no fetters but such as Love shall forge … bind you to the engagement.” 21 Many women were not convinced by such arguments. In 1820, northerner Eliza Chaplin wrote to Laura Lovell to express her feeling that women “submit to the chains of hymen, and verbally acknowledge them silken , but their conduct tells another tale.” 22 Overall, abstract discourses of slavery informed the way women, and sometimes even men, denounced the inequality of the marriage relation, but women showed a greater awareness of the institution’s gendered restrictions in the process. The limited opportunities afforded women beyond marriage meant their compulsion toward the institution was envisaged through the woman-slave analogy. As women were encouraged to overlook individual ambition and instead find matrimonial satisfaction, there was an acute awareness of the significance of courtship.23 Northerner Lucy Beckley observed, “It is but seldom husbands bring / A lighter yoke to wear.” 24 The interaction between law and religious doctrine made the choice of husband particularly fateful. Matrimonial headship was based on a particular doctrinal interpretation (particularly Ephesians 5:1-2, 12-13) that reinforced the patriarchal structure of religion and .25 In 1853, Paulina Wright Davis condemned the “metaphysical oneness of matrimony” because it resulted in “the extinguishment of woman’s personal liberties and

18 Mary Brown to Margaret Steele, July 7, 1808, in Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 34. 19 Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 76-77. 20 Mary Orne Tucker diary, April 17, 1802, in Cott, Bonds of Womanhood , 76-77. 21 William Wirt to Elizabeth Gamble, August 3, 1802, in Anya Jabour, “‘No Fetters but Such as Love Shall Forge’: Elizabeth and William Wirt and Marriage in the Early Republic,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 2 (1996): 216-217. 22 Eliza Chaplin to Laura Lovell, July 27, 1820, in Cott, Bonds of Womanhood , 76. 23 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 273. 24 Lucy Beckley journal-book, 1819, in Cott, Bonds of Womanhood , 77. 25 David Blankenhorn, Don Browning, and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics (Cambridge: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004), xiv; Gila Stopler, “‘A Rank Usurpation of Power’ – The Role of Patriarchal Religion and Culture in the Subordination of Women,” Duke Journal of Gender Law and Policy 15, no. 1 (2008): 365-398.

56 pecuniary rights and interests, as completely as chattel slavery itself could effect.” 26 As a Christian interpretation of marriage prevailed, attempts to disrupt the idealisation of the institution hinged on discourses of slavery. Nor did the romantic ideal adequately account for the reality of marriage. Sarah Grimké deplored the way women were rendered “unpaid housekeepers and nurses,” yet viewed this as less problematic than when they became “chattels personal to be used and abused at the will of a master[.]” 27 As such, Amy Dru Stanley explains how the concept of slavery, as a metaphor for marriage, enabled an interrogation of the marriage relation in a way that the language of love did not allow. 28 This was clear throughout the nineteenth century. A contributor to The Woman’s Journal emphasised how the “idea of ownership,” wherein women were “the owned and men the owners,” had been culturally rendered “inseparable from the idea of love.” 29 Since slavery implied a lack of self-ownership, discourses of slavery were used to critique the social hierarchy that enabled and perpetuated many forms of oppression. The love ideal was privileged in verse and fiction, as in life, but many nineteenth-century American men and women, from the North and South, imagined the marriage relation through discourses of slavery. According to Elizabeth B. Clark, the word “slavery” – and its “reflexive counter,” “freedom” – enabled the development of a “language of personal independence” that carried “a transformative vision of equality.” 30 When reformers themselves discussed courtship, love and marriage, they used the woman-slave analogy in a way that focused on allusions to chattel slavery.

Reform Marriages The northern reformers of the antebellum era negotiated their own experience of marriage through the woman-slave analogy. Antislavery and women’s rights reformers were at the forefront of the growing public critique of marriage. Their understanding of the racial basis of chattel slavery was structured by culturally progressive reform ideologies, so their equally a heightened awareness of women’s oppression was explored through discourses of slavery. The woman-slave analogy continued to be expressed through both abstract discourses of slavery and direct references to chattel slavery. For Angelina Grimké, marriage was “sinful ,” and she used abstract rhetoric to describe men’s lack of regard for women: “Instead of the higher, nobler

26 Paulina Wright Davis, “Pecuniary Independence of Woman,” Una , December 1853. 27 Sarah M. Grimké (attributed by Gerda Lerner), “Marriage,” n.d., The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women’s Rights and Abolition , ed. Gerda Lerner (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 308. 28 Amy Dru Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labour: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (1988): 478. 29 Lydia Fuller, “Love Versus Ownership,” Journal , April 15, 1871. 30 Elizabeth B. Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 8, no. 1 (1990): 48.

57 sentiments being first aroused, and leading on the lower passions captive to their will, the latter seemed to be lords over the former.” 31 Yet as outlined in Chapter One, the ontological connection between reformers and slaves encouraged by mental metempsychosis led to more explicit allusions to chattel slavery. Karen Sanchez-Eppler suggests that the “intersecting rhetorics of feminism and abolitionism” meant the analogy between “woman and slave, marriage and slavery” became prevalent among women reformers. 32 This was informed by the condemnation of chattel slavery. “Marriage is to woman a state of slavery,” stated in 1854, as it rendered women “submissive in all things to her husband.” 33 The denunciation of marital hierarchy and chattel slavery existed in tension with the egalitarian relationships reformers sought to establish. Like the emotional process of falling in love, companionate marriage emerged as a new relationships ideal during the early nineteenth century. Chris Dixon discusses how many reformers hoped to revolutionise and reconceptualise the institution of marriage. The radical abolitionists who sought to restructure family and gender relations also strove toward companionate marriages, which promoted women’s autonomy.34 Blossoming from “spontaneous love,” the companionate ideal encouraged “personal fulfilment, happiness, and contentment” to be found within marriage. 35 When reformers idealised their companionate marriages, they often belied a belief that true individualism could be found through true marriage. “In the true marriage relation,” Lucretia Mott wrote in 1875, “the independence of the husband and the wife is equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal.” 36 Many reformers placed the companionate ideal against its antithesis: the marriage which was inherently oppressive and constituted the slavery of women. Importantly, the tendency to view marriage as a form of slavery was not limited to women. Prominent male abolitionists frequently desired to actively “liberate” their fiancées and wives from family restrictions through engagement and marriage.37 Elizabeth Cady’s father, Judge Daniel Cady, did not condone his daughter’s marriage to Henry Stanton – for political and financial reasons as well as ambivalence toward having a radical antislavery agent in the family. 38

31 Angelina Grimké to Theodore Dwight Weld, March 4, 1838, in G.H. Barnes and D.L. Dumond, eds, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844 , Vol.II (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965), 587. 32 Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3. 33 Lucy Stone, Editorial Letters, Oneida Sachem , July 8, 1854. See also: Cott, Public Vows , 64. Regarding Stone’s marriage, see: Joelle Million, Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement (Westport: Praeger, 2003), Chapter 17: Heart and Soul. 34 Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 8. 35 Karen Tracey, Plots and Proposals: American Women’s Fiction, 1850-90 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 32-33. 36 Lucretia Mott quote clipping, 1875 (Lucretia Coffin Mott – Biographical material and memorabilia [1873-1930, n.d.]) (Garrison Family Papers – Series IX: Wright Family, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College). 37 Dixon, Perfecting , 167. 38 Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 30.

58 Lamenting, Henry wrote to Gerrit Smith, his friend and a Cady , to express that should his sweetheart remain with her disapproving family while he was in London for the 1840 World’s Anti- Slavery Convention, Elizabeth would be “in chains” by his return. 39 This language, likely an absentminded extension of Henry’s professional rhetorical repertoire, was not necessarily linked to chattel slavery. Still, in proposing marriage, he ostensibly saved Elizabeth from family opposition. According to biographer Elisabeth Griffith, Henry offered “an alliance of affection and abolition” in which he expected his life’s work to become hers. 40 Yet soon after their marriage, the pair became ideologically divided over the inclusion of women at the Convention, an event which informed Elizabeth’s increasing commitment to women’s rights. In 1850, Stanton maintained that women took “the name of her master” following the loss of their legal existence upon marriage: “Civilly, socially and religiously, she is what man chooses her to be, nothing more or less, – and such is the slave, and this is slavery.” 41 Both partners clearly saw the viability of this rhetoric, but Henry used abstract discourses of slavery whereas Elizabeth tended to dwell on specific comparisons with chattel slavery. This suggests that women reformers were more likely to use heightened rhetoric to condemn the marriage relation, because its inequality most affected them. Following marriage, Henry continued to use abstract discourses of slavery to understand the way marriage imbued him with authority. Elizabeth, Henry wrote, is “my newly acquired treasure,” and though he sought to qualify this comment – “not because Elizabeth is mine ” – he still hinted at his sense of ownership. 42 Again, this rhetoric was not intrinsically related to chattel slavery, but it was informed by a vision of marital hierarchy that was understood by his male contemporaries. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1839 courtship letters to his sweetheart Sophia Peabody are a case in point. A novelist who socialised with reformers and transcendentalists, Hawthorne disagreed with most social reform principles, especially antislavery and women’s rights. Like Henry Stanton, he had a keen awareness of the rhetoric promoted by these social movements; indeed, his later sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody was herself a prominent reformer.43 Lesley Ginsberg contrasts the language in Hawthorne’s 1839 courtship letters with his literary depictions of freedom and captivity between 1848 and 1852. When Nathanial married Sophia in 1842, he became very controlling. The earlier letters constitute “the rhetorical inscription of his conflicted desires, which drive him to ‘own’ his lover while they lead him to anxiously reassure himself that her love is indeed freely bestowed.” 44

39 Henry Stanton to Gerrit Smith, May 10 1840, in Dixon, Perfecting , 168. 40 Griffith, In Her Own Right , 28 and 39. 41 Stanton, “Why Woman Must Vote,” Lily , May 1850. 42 Henry Stanton to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, n.d. [c. autumn 1843], in Dixon, Perfecting , 168. 43 See: Larry J. Reynolds, A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 44 Lesley Ginsberg, “‘The Willing Captive’: Narrative Seduction and the Ideology of Love in Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys ,” American Literature 65, no. 2 (1993): 264-265.

59 This method of expressing affection was not culturally isolated, as novelists similarly interrogated the space between the language of love and ownership. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Missing ; or, Miriam the Avenger (1855) depicts Edith’s young English suitor as one who “vowed to love and cherish her as the dearest treasure of his life,” but also asked her to “consent to be mine.” 45 Likewise, ’s African American father in Harriet E. Wilson’s (1859) is “proud of his treasure, – a white wife.” 46 Like Henry Stanton, these fictitious suitors described a sense of entitlement toward their paramours, whether or not the women desired such attentions. Yet northern women reformers also challenged the hierarchical foundations upon which the language of love rested. Denbeigh, the rapacious villain who abducts his unwilling object of affection in Lillie Devereux Blake’s Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm (1863), says, “My own darling Edith! at last I have you once more!” only to have Edith respond, “Oh let me go! let me go!” 47 When women used the woman-slave analogy, they interrogated the restrictions of courtship and marriage by challenging the sense of male ownership imbued in the language of love. The writings of Julia Ward Howe similarly used discourses of slavery to critique matrimony. Her unpublished 1840s manuscript, The Hermaphrodite , demonstrated how women’s autonomy was affected by the perception that they are “golden treasures, too easily lost or stolen, and therefore to be kept under lock and key[.]” 48 Howe’s writings were potentially infused with the knowledge of lived experience. Upon Julia’s engagement, her brother Samuel Ward expressed serious concern that his sister would be restricted from pursuing her own interests if she were to marry a handsome older man, Samuel Gridley Howe. As a young man, Howe was named a Chevalier of the Greek Legion of Honour for his service during the Greek Revolution (1821-1832) and thereafter nicknamed “the Chevalier” or “Chev.”49 “Love has given you authority,” Julia’s brother Samuel wrote to Chev in 1843: Let its influence work invisibly – and do not strive to accelerate the approach of the not far distant day, when every thought & desire will be stamped by your wishes, by insisting upon a formal renunciation of tastes & impulses which so far from being rivals will one day become your cherished friend. A woman cannot have too many qualities. 50 Biographer Valarie H. Ziegler observes how the Chevalier expected his wife to embody the restrictive ideal of true womanhood; her failure to do so was a persistent issue throughout their

45 E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Missing Bride; or, Miriam the Avenger (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1855, 2006), 87-88 (Google books). 46 Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (Project Gutenberg, 1859, 2010), 7, e-book. 47 Lillie Devereux Blake, Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm (New York: Carleton, Publisher, 1863, 2001), 136, e-book. 48 Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite (University of Nebraska Press, c.1840s, 2004), 131. 49 Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 24-25. 50 bMS Am 2119 (1782), Sam Ward to Samuel Gridley Howe, April 4, 1843 (Samuel Ward Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University).

60 tumultuous marriage. 51 Shortly after marriage, Julia wrote to her brother: “The Chevalier says truly – I am the captive of his bow and spear. His true devotion has won me from the world, and from myself.” 52 Just as reformers realised that marriage did not necessarily reach the romantic ideal, they also employed the woman-slave analogy to frame discussions of separation and divorce. Lydia Maria Child concluded that she was “sadly weary of this lonesome life” in an 1841 letter to Louisa Gilman Loring. Frequently separated from her husband David, she would sometimes “resolve to snap the cords that bind me; but then I cannot.” 53 According to biographer Carolyn L. Karcher, Child’s personal observations and her own experience led to a tacit acceptance of the need for . 54 Antebellum attitudes towards separation and divorce were often disparaging, but men and women alike used abstract discourses of slavery to come to terms with the overarching influence of the legal system. In 1859, William Ellery Channing wrote to Caroline Wells Healy Dall of his turbulent marriage to Margaret Fuller’s sister Ellen. For Channing, “it is the duty & interest of society to release the parties to a hopelessly discordant marriage.” Marital difficulties led Channing to “obtain my own freedom when & as I can,” and to abandon any “jurisdiction that irrevocably binds me to such a union.” 55 The law surrounding divorce was less stringent in the United States than England, but it was still more a difficult outcome for women to obtain. 56 Later in the century, similar rhetoric became central to Stanton’s persistent endorsement of the liberalisation of divorce laws.57 The tendency to view marriage as inherently oppressive meant women reformers were often ambivalent toward the institution. Regardless of the role Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone and their contemporaries played in creating and perpetuating the woman-slave analogy, they firmly believed its ideological foundations. Dorothy Sterling suggests that Kelley’s reservations about marriage were influenced by Angelina Grimké’s apparent retreat into domesticity following her marriage to Theodore Dwight Weld, a perspective which historians generally confirm.58 Although Grimké’s

51 Valarie H. Ziegler, Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 4-6. 52 Julia Ward Howe to Sam Howe, February 20, 1843, in Maud Howe Elliott and Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards, eds. Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (Alexandria: Library of Alexandria, 1925), (Google ebook). 53 Lydia Maria Child to Louisa [Gilman] Loring, December 22 1841 (Child Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, in the Collected Papers of Lydia Maria Child, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). 54 Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 325. 55 W.E. Channing to Caroline Wells Healey Dall, St Louis, MS, January 10, 1859 (Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, Microfilm: Reel 3, Box 2, Folder 18), 3 (Massachusetts Historical Society). 56 Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 23. 57 See: Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds,” 25-54. 58 Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), Chapter Fourteen: “The Path of True Love and Other Matters.” See also: Katharine du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974).

61 withdrawal from public life revealed the competing tensions and attractions of domesticity, it also demonstrated that reformers believed in reforming the individual as well as the world. 59 This latter was equally evident in Kelley’s approach to courtship. “I can and ought to discipline myself ,” Abby decided when writing of her feelings for fiancé Stephen Foster. But Stephen’s courtship repartee could not have helped allay her fears regarding the gendered restrictions of marriage. “Now you are my own ,” Stephen wrote to Abby: Perhaps you do not like the idea of being so thoroughly possessed by another, but I shall hold you fast . … I shall henceforth claim & hold you as my own property. I shall now tyrannise over you to my heart’s content so you may prepare for it & make a virtue of submission. 60 Reformers sometimes uttered possessive sentiments with irony, but this did not disrupt the language of ownership. Satirically invoking the biblical command, “wives submit yourselves unto your husbands,” Stephen directed his fiancée to “surrender … and submit quietly to my authority as a good dutiful loving wife should.” Their knowledge of the marriage contract and its implications meant such statements were primarily romantic banter and purposeful provocation. Abby believed Stephen to be “jesting,” but warned him not to “push your jokes too far.” Still, Abby concluded by saying that Stephen could indeed bring her “shackles broken, whips dust-trodden,” together with “a proclamation of emancipation,” after which she promised to “yield to her good knight, [who] holds her heart of hearts most truly.” 61 The explicit reference to emancipation framed this discussion in terms of the couple’s awareness of chattel slavery and its antebellum cultural centrality. Lucy Stone was similarly conflicted about her relationship with Henry B. Blackwell. Like Stanton, Stone’s comparisons between marriage and chattel slavery were informed by the law. In 1850, Lucy wrote to Antoinette Brown, her friend and future sister-in-law: “Tis next to a chattel slave, to be a legal wife.” 62 Unlike Henry Stanton and Samuel “Chev” Howe, Henry steadfastly wanted Lucy to maintain her individuality and reform efforts following marriage. His language, in contrast to Foster’s controlling rhetoric, “reaffirmed how abolitionist women’s concerns over slavery affected their personal lives.” 63 Henry assured Lucy that “my love shall never fetter you one iota,” but viewed her refusal to consider marriage as to “subject oneself to a more abject slavery than ever actually existed.” 64 Therefore, Blackwell’s interpretation placed chattel slavery, marriage and the legal system as part of a broader set of oppressions. Following Lucy’s consent to the marriage in 1854, the Stone-Blackwells created a marriage protest renouncing the legal power

59 Dixon, Perfecting , 92-93. 60 Abby Kelley to Stephen Foster, July 30, 1843 and Stephen Foster to Abby Kelley, August 10, 1843, in Sterling, Ahead , 204-205. 61 Abby Kelley to Stephen Foster, August 13, 1843, in Sterling, Ahead , 205. 62 Lucy Stone to Antoinette Brown, June 9, 1850, in Carol Lasser and Marlene D. Merrill, eds. Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93 (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 72. 63 Dixon, Perfecting , 169. 64 Henry B. Blackwell to Lucy Stone, May 2, 1854 and July 12, 1854, in Dixon, Perfecting , 169.

62 vested in husbands, and the document was circulated by Higginson, their marriage officiator. 65 The significance of this act was confirmed at the end of the century, when the Stone-Blackwell marriage protest was reprinted and venerated in The Woman’s Journal in 1893. 66 This rhetoric was replicated when other reform marriages were publicised in reform periodicals. The Lily reported on the marriage of dress reformer Mary E. Walker to Albert E. Miller. This article observed the way marriage was “enthralling women” with “laws and customs that give to man unlimited power to oppress her,” but emphasised that “true marriage” would result in “liberty” and “happiness.” 67 Other marriage protests preceded that of the Stone-Blackwells. In 1832, Robert Dale Owen and Mary Jane Robinson objected to the way married women’s legal status was one of the “barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system,” and the 1838 Grimké-Weld marriage omitted the word “obey” from the vows.68 Less prominent couples responded by penning their own protests. In 1857, Geo. Wellington Lewis and Harriet Wheeler Lewis published their vows in The Sibyl : Freedom is our motto[.] … We see nothing inviting in the track of bondage; we have no assurity that the flag of liberty floats there. Therefore, free to act and think, we have resolved never to wear the galling chains of modern legalisation. We are too well aware that love comes not from chains and prison walls[.]69 This couple challenged the way many reformers conceptualised marriage and its inherent oppression by instead looking toward the ideal of true individualism through true marriage, and encouraging similar efforts in others. Like more prominent reformers, the Lewis couple saw discourses of slavery as providing a normative description of marriage. Love, however, was cited as a necessary preclusion to marriage, which therefore established freedom as a corollary to the slavery that would otherwise be engendered. The increasing symbolic significance of the Stone-Blackwell marriage was related to a vision of self-ownership directly derived from understandings of chattel slavery. Lucy Stone was the first American woman to retain her maiden name following marriage, an act which encouraged other reformers to challenge patrilineal naming systems. 70 In 1858, “L.H.” contended that “ignoring the slave’s right to a name” was one of the most degrading elements of slavery. Together, slaves and

65 See: Henry B. Blackwell to Lucy Stone, December 22, 1854 and January 3, 1855, in Leslie Wheeler, “Lucy Stone: Radical Beginnings (1818–1893),” in Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers , ed. Dale Spender (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 115-116 and 135-136; “Marriage Protest of Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell,” May 1, 1855, in T. W. Higginson, “Marriage of Lucy Stone Under Protest,” Liberator , Vol.25, No. 18, May 4, 1855; “Marriage of Lucy Stone Under Protest,” Una , May 1855. 66 Lucy Stone and Henry Brown Blackwell, “Marriage Protest,” Journal , October 28, 1893. 67 “Unions,” Lily , January 1856. 68 Robert Dale Owen, concurred by Mary Jane Robinson, “The Marriage Contract of Robert Dale Owen and Mary Jane Robinson,” Marriage Contract , April 12, 1832, 2009, accessed March 21, 2014, http://alexpeak.com/twr/aswc/; Lerner, Grimké Sisters , 175-182. 69 Geo. Wellington Lewis and Harriet Wheeler Lewis, “Marriage without Ceremony,” Sibyl , July 1, 1857. 70 Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking out for Equality (Rutgers University Press, 1992), 41; Claudia Goldin and Maria Shim, “Making a Name: Women’s at Marriage and Beyond,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 2 (2004): 143-144.

63 women gained a new name alongside a new master: “What more degrading sacrifice of personal rights could any master ask?” 71 Throughout the nineteenth century, this question was repeatedly asked in terms that related the married woman’s to the lack of autonomy engendered by chattel slavery. In 1883, Blake’s Woman’s Place To-Day maintained that new wives see only “the words ‘Mr. and Mrs. So and So,’ the name is his alone, and Mr. placed before the Mrs.,” demonstrating the woman’s integration into her husband upon marriage. 72 From the 1850s onwards, Stone’s initial act was venerated in periodicals and suffrage conventions, as well as the biography penned by her daughter in 1930. 73 The Lucy Stone League, founded in 1921, was inspired by Stone’s convictions: “A wife should no more take her husband’s name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost.” 74 During the antebellum era and beyond, the romantic repartee of reformers demonstrated the cultural centrality gained by discourses of slavery. Some male reformers periodically used abstract rhetoric to describe their experience of marital hierarchy, by many women reformers directly referenced chattel slavery because of their acute understanding of the gendered restrictions of the institution. The idea that love should preclude marriage was often seen as a safeguard to an inherently oppressive union. From the law to chattel slavery, these reformers had a comprehensive understanding of many forms of oppression, and this repeatedly extended to the way they interpreted marriage.

Sex and Slavery The woman-slave analogy also informed reform discussions of sexual exploitation, in reference to both chattel slavery and marriage. Antislavery literature explored this association most comprehensively, and writers emphasised how the intersections between chattel slavery, race and gender were shaped by the law. The experience of mixed-race women was at the centre of these antislavery discussions, but depictions often relied on the of the tragic mulatta. This strategy also meant that concerns surrounding sexual exploitation could be fully displaced on enslaved or precariously free women of mixed race.

71 L.H., “The Cause of Woman,” Sibyl , August 15, 1858. 72 Lillie Devereux Blake, Woman’s Place To-Day (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1883, 2001), 111, e-book. 73 See: L.H., “Cause of Woman”; Susan B. Anthony, reply to Frederick Douglass, Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (Washington, D.C.: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1894), 85 (Schlesinger Library, Harvard University); Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Woman’s Rights (The University Press of Virginia, 1930, 2001), 62-63 (Google books). 74 Lucy Stone, in Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone, 1818-1893 (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961, 2001), 131, e-book. See: Mary Lou Parker, “Fashioning Feminism: The Making of the Lucy Stone League by Members and Media” (PhD thesis, University of Oregon, 1994).

64 The literary trope of the tragic mulatta focused on a mixed-race character, often enslaved, whose destiny was “overdetermined by the iniquities of plantation slavery.” 75 The lack of bodily autonomy engendered by chattel slavery meant many reformers saw a pertinent comparison between the tragic mulatta and the exploitation of marriage. 76 Julie Husband observes how the tragic mulatta trope provided a useful representational surrogate upon whom discussions of “sexual slavery,” violence and ownership – all characteristics of chattel slavery and marriage – could be supplanted. This resulted in an explicit “connection between the tragic mulatta’s fate and that of her free, white counterpart in marriage.” 77 Allusions to the connection between marriage and chattel slavery used the woman-slave analogy in an exploitative way, but this was both complicated and strengthened by the antebellum legal construction of race and sex. The absence of marriage under chattel slavery was used to emphasise these intersections in antislavery literature. When reformers characterised the mixed-race women of antislavery narratives, they focused on the precarious legal position that resulted from their inability to marry white men. Lydia Maria Child’s antislavery short story “The ” (1842) explored the legal implications of interracial relationships on southern . The mixed-race character Rosalie tells her white paramour that, should his affection diminish, “I would not, if I could, hold you by a legal fetter”; because the paramour is “weakened in moral principle, and unfettered by laws of the land,” he abandons Rosalie and their daughter Xarifa. 78 Child also used discourses of slavery in other contexts, as she equated “wifehood with servitude” in The Mother’s Book (1831).79 Her antislavery literature, however, put southern mixed-race women at the centre of this paradox. Although reformers realised that mixed-race and enslaved women were unprotected by even the imbalanced laws of marriage, they still viewed sexual exploitation as leading to the oppression of all women. African American reformers offered competing, but not wholly incompatible, interpretations of the power differential in sexual relationships that arose under chattel slavery. These antislavery novels similarly used discourses of slavery to interrogate the intersection between the legal construction of chattel slavery, race and sex. acknowledged the inspiration he gained from Child’s “” when writing Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853).80 His narrative commences with the character of Clotel, her “complexion as white as most

75 Eve Allegra Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 5. 76 Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty , 7-8. 77 Julie Husband, “‘The White Slave of the North’: Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of ‘Free’ Labour,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 16, no. 1 (1999): 15-16. 78 Lydia Maria Child, “The Quadroons,” The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings , 1842, 1997, accessed June 15, 2011, http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gcarr/19cUSWW/LB/Q.html. 79 Karcher, First Woman , 144-145. 80 Raimon, “Tragic Mulatta” , 65. See also: Geoffrey Sanborn, “‘People Will Pay to Hear the Drama’: Plagiarism in Clotel ,” African American Review 45, no. 1-2 (2012): 65-82; Samantha Marie Sommers, “A Tangled Text: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853, 1860, 1864, 1867),” (Honours thesis., Wesleyan University, 2009).

65 of those who were waiting with a wish to become her purchasers,” standing on the block. 81 This novel, like antebellum slave narratives, appealed directly to its northern reading audience by emphasising the similarities between enslaved women and their white sisters. 82 Adélékè Adéèkó condemns Brown for overlooking the problematic racial overtones that resulted from a “close proximity between ‘true’ womanhood and whiteness.” 83 Yet the novel constructs Clotel’s experience as reprehensible not only because of her whiteness, but also because of the legal vulnerability that results from her mixed-race ancestry. When Clotel and the young Horatio embark upon “marriage,” she vows that should his “affections fall” or “conscience” impel him to abandon her, she “would not, if I could, hold you by a single fetter.” As in “The Quadroons,” Horatio eventually marries a wealthy white woman; Clotel rejects the claim that she remain “his real wife” and spurns him.84 The absence of legal responsibility surrounding interracial relationships under chattel slavery was a central concern for Brown and Child alike. While Angelyn Mitchell criticises Brown’s “tendency to reduce the female characters merely to symbols of oppression,” it is necessary to recognise how these lines were drawn explicitly to show how interdependent oppressions, inscribed by law, converged in the figure of the mixed-race enslaved woman. 85 Slave narratives specifically emphasised how marriage between the enslaved was also illegal.86 This demonstrated the racial demarcations of both institutions as well as the competing attitudes black and white reformers held toward marriage itself. Freedom the “power of slave holders” is the central concern in ’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) positions. As a fugitive slave, Jacobs concludes: “[M]y story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free!” 87 A focus on the sexual exploitation of enslaved women and the comparative desirability of marriage meant African American reformers challenged the rhetorical connection between marriage and slavery. In contrast, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper used discourses of slavery to consider the institution of marriage from the perspective of white women. “The Two Offers” (1858) recounted the divergent experience of two white characters – Laura Lagrange, who chooses a less than devoted marriage, and Janette Alston, who remains single – to examine marriage from a legal and

81 William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (New York: Dover Publications, 1853, 2004), 7. 82 Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household , 376. 83 Adélékè Adéèkó, “Signatures of Blood in William Wells Brown’s Clotel ,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21, no. 1 (1999): 126. 84 Brown, Clotel , 21 and 43. 85 Angelyn Mitchell, “Her Side of His Story: A Feminist Analysis of Two Nineteenth-Century Antebellum Novels – William Wells Brown’s ‘Clotel’ and Harriet E. Wilson’s ‘Our Nig’,” American Literary Realism, 1870-1910 , 24, no. 3 (1992): 11. 86 See: Darlene C. Goring, “The History of Slave Marriage in the United States,” The Law Review 39 (2006): 299-347; Charles J. Heglar, Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of and William and Ellen Craft (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001). 87 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1861, 2001), 164.

66 social perspective. 88 For Harper, the ability to choose a romantic partner meant white women could negotiate the power disparity of marriage. Still, she used this rhetoric to acknowledge the oppressions that could result from marriage in a way that emphasised “the rights of slaves, not women.”89 Men did not view marriage “as a divine sacrament for the soul’s development,” Harper critiqued, but rather as a “title-deed” that gave him “possession of the woman he thought he loved.” Yet Harper also condemned the way superficial and materialistic marriages were culturally condoned. Her characters realise that marriage, “instead of being an affinity of souls or a union of hearts,” could instead become “a mere matter of bargain and sale, or an of convenience and selfish interest.” 90 Overall, Harper used discourses of slavery to concede that marital oppression could occur in the absence of romantic love and companionate marriage. Antislavery literature used discourses of slavery to demonstrate that marriage, like chattel slavery, could be an oppressive institution. African American reformers, however, complicated the point of identification between chattel slavery and marriage where white reform women tended to see their own vulnerability. Yet antislavery literature departed from a marriage plot because it moved toward a narrative conclusion of freedom. When reformers condemned chattel slavery in slave narratives and antislavery literature, they often used similar rhetoric to reject the existence of oppression more generally.

Inscribing Hierarchy The legal and economic disabilities of women were exhibited when northern and southern commentators used discourses of slavery to discuss the hierarchy inscribed by the marriage contract. From the seventeenth century onward, secular theorists redefined the marriage contract as the foundation of family property rights. 91 Unique in that it was indissoluble and relied on a power imbalance between contractors, the marriage contract additionally worked to regulate the orderly expression of sexuality and public investment in procreation. Together, these imperatives demonstrated the state incentive to regulate marriage. 92 Alternately, northern reformers and southern proslavery ideologues used the woman-slave analogy to condemn or to maintain the social structures that emanated from the marriage contract. Antebellum reformers used analogy to emphasise similarities and overlook differences, but they also explored the distinct legal differences between marriage and chattel slavery as points of

88 Tess Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 64. 89 Ibid., 65. 90 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Two Offers,” in Frances Smith Foster, ed. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 106-109. 91 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labour, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8. 92 Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds,” 477.

67 analogy. 93 In 1853, Paulina Wright Davis discussed how married women could not be “sold” or “bartered” for the husband’s “pecuniary benefit,” yet because husbands retained “a slave-holder’s life estate in her person,” women could not change “a bad master for a better one[.]”94 While it is equally unlikely that the enslaved could choose their masters, Davis still drew attention to the permanence of marriage. Another central difference hinged on the fact that women married voluntarily, relinquishing their rights to husbands in the process, but the condition of slavery was inherited from the matrilineal line.95 Since chattel slavery was not based on a voluntary contract, the comparison was seemingly rendered legally untenable. 96 However, the question of whether marriage and its legal ramifications were voluntary was also influenced by the limited education and unequal wages that bound women to the marriage contract. 97 Husbands, Davis continued, not only controlled the “nominal freedom” of wives, but children were “as absolutely at the disposal of her owner during their minority, as are those of the slave-mother.” 98 The property rights of husbands, which Peggy Pascoe suggests included “property rights in their wives and children,” were vastly disproportionate to those of wives. 99 If limits of the woman-slave analogy were clearer from a social than a legal perspective, reformers still used discourses of slavery to emphasise the common and dissimilar oppressions faced by free and enslaved women. The anxieties surrounding domestic hierarchy meant discourses of slavery were also used by southerners for proslavery purposes. Julie Husband describes southern society in terms of its “organic culture”: the state was imagined as “a macrocosm of the family, with a benevolent father figure governing, with sympathy and firmness, the subordinates who owe him obedience.” 100 Here, rhetorical allusions to chattel slavery and marriage were part of a vision of social hierarchy intrinsically shaped by enlightenment ideals. In response to radical abolitionism, southerners sought to “domesticate” slavery by using the benevolent language of “my family white and black”; domestic relations were praised and relationships of domination and subordination emanated from the supposedly indivisible hierarchies of master/servant, parent/child, and husband/wife. 101 When future Confederate officer Christopher C.G. Memminger addressed the Young Men’s Library Association of Augusta, Georgia, in 1851, he discussed how slavery could “dignify the family”:

93 Carla L. Peterson, “‘And We Claim Our Rights’: The Rights Rhetoric of Black and White Women Activists before the Civil War,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work , ed. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 139. 94 Davis, “Pecuniary Independence,” Una , 1853. 95 Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4. 96 Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds,” 477. 97 Rierson, “Race and Gender,” 103. 98 Davis, “Pecuniary Independence,” Una , 1853. 99 Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 22. 100 Julie Husband, Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67. 101 Cott, Public Vows , 60.

68 Each planter is in fact a Patriarch – his position compels him to be a ruler in his household. From early youth, his children and servants look up to him as the head, and obedience and subordination become important elements of education. … Domestic relations become those which are most prized. 102 Slaveholders further invoked the “positive good” thesis to demonstrate that slavery was inescapable but reciprocally beneficial in a civilised society.103 Racial and marital subordination, both foreordained by God and nature, therefore constructed a desirable hierarchy of rights and duties among family members. 104 Abolitionists, according to Husband, retaliated with a “family protection campaign” which sought to communicate the realities of benevolent paternalism – the separation of slave families, the rape of enslaved women, the sale of illegitimate enslaved children, and the vision of mother and child in the marketplace. 105 Although northern reformers appropriated antislavery arguments to redefine the constraints of marriage, many southerners emphasised a comparison between marriage and chattel slavery to argue for the unaltered perpetuation of both institutions. Since the hierarchy of southern organic culture ultimately empowered the white planter, marital subordination was justified through direct associations with chattel slavery. William Harper’s speech, “Memoir on Slavery” (1838), reprinted in the Southern Literary Journal , meditated upon domestic power relations to justify the peculiar institution. Southern hierarchy was fundamentally antithetical to the dictates of liberalism, and the degree to which it assumed inherent social inequality was evident in Harper’s musings.106 Harper acknowledged the “cruelties inflicted” by “brutal husbands on their wives; of brutal … on children; of brutal masters on apprentices,” and so demonstrated an awareness of the abuse of power. Yet he concluded: “Wives are protected from their husbands, and children from their parents.” 107 The perception of consent meant marriage was viewed as ennobling, not degrading, for women, while women and African Americans were thought to need the protection and guidance of benevolent paternalism.108 This southern proslavery rhetoric was at odds with the way northern reformers used the woman-slave analogy, validating, as it did, social and marital hierarchy.

102 Christopher C.G. Memminger, Lecture before the Young Men’s Library Association of Augusta, Georgia, 1851, in Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 16-17. 103 Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987, 2004), 101. See also: Erik S. Root, All Honour to Jefferson?: The Virginia Slavery Debates and the Positive Good Thesis (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008). 104 Cott, Public Vows , 61-62. 105 See: Husband, Antislavery Discourse , Chapter One: “The Emergence of the Family Protection Campaign and Antislavery Sentimentality.” 106 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). 107 William Harper, “Memoir on Slavery,” Southern Literary Journal 3, no. 2 (1838): 89-90. 108 Cott, Public Vows , 61-62.

69 This was not solely based on chattel slavery, but on hierarchical visions of race. Chattel slavery continued to influence southern legal codes even following the Civil War, so issues surrounding freedom and contract maintained parallels with the inequality of domestic relations. 109 Therefore, in spite of the abolition of chattel slavery, structural relationships based on racial hierarchy continued during the postbellum era in an even more insidious way. In 1865, C.A. White reflected on antebellum ideas about southern domestic hierarchy: A husband has a right of property in the service of his wife; he has the right to the management of his household . The master has a right of property in the service of his apprentice. All these rights rest upon the same basis as a man’s right of property in the service of slaves. 110 From their proslavery standpoint, both Harper and White were at odds with the way northern reformers used the woman-slave analogy to critique of marriage. Still, these comparisons were based on the idea that the subordination of wives and slaves was in their best interest, a fact supported by the legal strictures that constructed chattel slavery and marriage as domestic relations. The proslavery hierarchical correlation between marriage and chattel slavery meant southern white women sometimes understood their own experiences in such terms. “Poor women, poor slaves,” Mary Boykin Chestnut lamented in her diary. 111 Biographer Mary A. DeCredico reveals that Chestnut never felt a loving companionship with her husband, James Chestnut, Jr, and mediated upon the institution of marriage throughout her life.112 Susan Dabney Smedes, recalling the antebellum experiences of her mother, concluded that “the mistress of a plantation was the most complete slave on it.” 113 Unlike Memminger, Harper and White, southern women largely used discourses of slavery to critique marriage in a way that had more in common with the rhetoric of northern reformers. Ann Firor Scott views the comparison plantation mistresses made between themselves and their slaves to have occurred “too often to be counted simply as rhetoric,” suggesting that the discontent and constraint among elite southern women ultimately undermined patriarchal social structures. 114 This is a point of historiographical contention. Although slaveholding women experienced the material comforts of the plantation, Jacqueline Jones proposes that slavery “mandated the subordination of all women, both black and white, to masters-husbands whose behaviour ranged from benevolent to tyrannical, but always within a patriarchal context.” 115 In

109 Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds,” 477. 110 C.A. White, CG (38/2, January 10, 1865), 215, in Cott, Public Vows , 79-80. 111 Chestnut, March 4, 1861, in Diary , 11. 112 Mary A. DeCredico, Mary Boykin Chestnut: A Confederate Woman’s Life (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996), 19-22. 113 Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (Baltimore: Cushings & Bailey, 1887), 191, e-book. 114 Scott, Southern Lady , 50, 17 and 72. 115 Jacqueline Jones, Labour of Love, Labour of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 25.

70 contrast, Thavolia Glymph argues that such complete cross-racial gender identification was impossible because of influence of plantation racial hierarchy. Glymph extends Elizabeth Fox- Genovese’ assertion that plantation mistresses presented the “feminine face of paternalism,” and emphasises that southern white were “far from being victims of the slave system” because they were not encouraged to identify with their enslaved property. The slaves themselves endured the brunt of patriarchal and paternalistic authority.116 It is nonetheless important to account for the prominence of the woman-slave analogy in the . According to Stephanie McCurry, women’s subordination bore much of the “ideological weight of slavery, providing the most concrete example of how public and private distinctions were confounded in political discourse and culture.” 117 If genuine interracial gender identification and solidarity was not prevalent in the South, the ultimate relegation of women and slaves to the same hierarchical category of dependence was of structural and ideological significance. The difference, then, is that northern reformers and African Americans used the woman- slave analogy as a fledgling expression of intersectionality. They identified the similarities and also limits of the comparison to make critiques that encompassed multiple reform movements. Northern reformers and African Americans actually acknowledged and sometimes addressed the interactions between many forms of oppression, whereas southern women used this rhetoric solely to understand their own oppression. For elite southern women, this primarily related to power relations in courtship and marriage, and their experience was the focus of southern popular novelists.

Southern Strategies Antebellum popular literature provides a point of departure for the way southern women interpreted the oppression of marriage. Literary representations of southern slaveholding women challenged the prevailing perception that they accepted matrimonial and household dependence more willingly than enslaved women. 118 Yet this rhetorical critique of marriage was still strongly influenced by the hierarchies associated with proslavery ideology. These novels used both abstract discourses of slavery emerged alongside direct references to chattel slavery, but in so doing they solely emphasised the need to alleviate white women’s oppression. The 1850s popular novels of Caroline Lee Hentz and E.D.E.N. Southworth both engaged with the woman-slave analogy. Russ Castronovo identifies a literary countertradition wherein proslavery authors appropriated the slave narrative. In these novels, “race facilitates a gender

116 Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 4 and 23; Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household , 132. 117 Stephanie McCurry, “The Two Faces of Republicanism: Gender and Proslavery Politics in Antebellum South Carolina,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (1992): 1251-1252. 118 Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household , 96.

71 identification that hides the extent to which class-based notions of privileged womanhood originate in ruthless plantation production.” 119 This important observation overlooks an important difference, however. Where slave narratives strove toward freedom, southern popular novels concluded by reifying marriage – an institution which these novels constructed as inherently oppressive. This southern literature hinged on the way marriage drove its heroines away from freedom, so discourses of slavery were used to describe the female characters’ discontent. Hentz and Southworth’s novels used similar rhetorical strategies to describe the domestic and courtship experiences of southern women, but the authors’ backgrounds shaped their perspectives. Hentz was a northerner who migrated to the Upper South with her husband. Her proslavery interpretation of the master-slave relationship informed her critique of the husband-wife relationship among the privileged classes. Yet the expectations of the nineteenth-century literary marketplace complicated Hentz’s somewhat anachronistic engagement with the woman-slave analogy. While Hentz’s “stolen slave narrative” reinscribed race, class and gender to produce best- selling fiction, she also had to covet competing market interests: northern printing presses; a broad readership (regardless of region); and the cultural surveillance that demanded southern writers protect and defend southern organic culture. 120 Southworth, in contrast, was a reformer who lived primarily in Washington, D.C.; she wrote antislavery literature set in the South. Southworth’s ambivalence toward southern organic culture led her to question why women should aspire to marriage, and whether it could support them emotionally and economically. 121 Hentz was concerned primarily with white women’s experience of marriage, but Southworth’s resistance oppression emanating from race and sex set her apart. When Hentz’s popular novels depicted southern white women rebelling against arranged and , discourses of slavery were used to challenge the heroine’s oppression. According to Karen Tracey, Hentz redefined love in her manipulation of southern hierarchies; this made her narrative conclusions “appear natural” even though they “paradoxically increase the heroines’ autonomy and strengthen the system that confines them.” 122 The character of Florence, the young belle in Hentz’s Marcus Warland; or, the Long Moss Spring (1852), flouts convention and actively courts Marcus. Nevertheless, her consciousness of the restrictions of marriage leads her to avoid what she views as an inevitable engagement for as long as possible. Florence renames herself “L’éclair” – the title of a French opera, L’éclair (1835), translating to “the lighting flash” – and sends Marcus risqué letters in which she laments the restrictions of girlhood and fantasises

119 Russ Castronovo, “Incidents in the Life of a White Woman: Economies of Race and Gender in the Antebellum Nation,” American Literary History 10, no. 2 (1998): 240-242. 120 Castronovo, “Incidents,” 244; Tracey, Plots , 52. 121 Cindy Weinstein, “‘What Did You Mean?’: Marriage in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Novels,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 27, no. 1 (2010): 44. 122 Tracey, Plots , 54.

72 about life as a boy. As “L’éclair,” Florence dares Marcus: “Canst thou catch the lightning’s chain, and imprison it in thy grasp…?” 123 Here, Hentz used abstract discourses of slavery to challenge women’s oppression in a way that was distinct from allusions to chattel slavery. These novels also used direct allusions to chattel slavery to interrogate love and marriage. Hentz’s literary project promoted privileged white women’s empowerment in a way that reinforced the racism of organic culture, but the process of examining gender roles necessarily meant questioning the existence of chattel slavery. 124 “I have always dreaded the idea of love,” Florence laments, “because I know, if I once yielded to its power, I should become far more of a vassal than any slave on this broad plantation.” 125 The similarity between this sentiment, from an 1852 southern novel, and the quote at the beginning of this chapter from Stanton’s 1850 article in The Lily , is striking: Hentz and Stanton both used the association between marriage and chattel slavery to communicate the inherent contradictions between the romantic ideal and the actual restrictions of marriage. Yet here and elsewhere, Stanton used this example to demonstrate that women and slaves alike were denied a proper education, and to denounce the very system of chattel slavery. 126 Hentz, in contrast, showed little attentiveness toward the exploitation of the enslaved. This rhetoric demonstrated the ambivalence southern women felt toward courtship and marriage, but unlike northern reformers, did not reveal an underlying commitment to interdependent oppressions. For slaveholding women, the influence of paternalism often intersected with the demands of domesticity. 127 Yet the disparity between the ideal of the southern lady and the reality of household management led some elite southern women to question men’s dominance. In her diary, Chestnut concluded that “every man objects to any despot but himself,” and popular literature similarly depicted the tyranny inherent in the exercise of parental authority. 128 This was most apparent when elite slaveholders insisted on class-bound marriages to amalgamate property. Some planter families in the Upper South exhibited a comparatively egalitarian ethos by socialising children within their own circles to create matches.129 Popular novelists, however, used discourses of slavery to focus on the way patriarchal interests weighed on daughters, who bore the brunt of arranged marriages.

123 Caroline Lee Hentz, Marcus Warland; or, the Long Moss Spring (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1852, 2008), 91, e-book. See: Francine Yvonne Regaudie-McIsaac, “Three Opéras Comiques of the 1830s: Fra Diavolo , Zampa and Le Pré Aux Clercs and the Placement of Musical Soli within the Drama” (Masters thesis, The University of British Columbia, 1985). 124 Tracey, Plots , 50-52. 125 Hentz, Marcus Warland , 131-132. 126 Stanton, “Why Woman Must Vote,” Lily , May 1850. See: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Slave’s Appeal (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, Printers, 1860), e-book. 127 Marli F. Weiner, “The Intersection of Race and Gender: The Antebellum Plantation Mistress and Her Slaves,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 13, no. 1/2 (1986): 374-386; Glymph, Out of the House , Chapter One: “The Gender of Violence.” 128 Chestnut, February 25, 1861, in Diary , 7. See: Scott, Southern Lady , Chapter Three: “Discontent,” 45-79; Clinton, Plantation Mistress , Chapter Two: “Slave of Slaves,” 16-35. 129 Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children, 1800-1860 (Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 65-68 and 78-95.

73 These novels framed household patriarchs as tyrants in a way that recalled plantation power relations. The literary depiction of patriarchs reflects what Steven M. Stowe describes as the antebellum “rhetoric of authority,” wherein tension emerged between southern parents’ hierarchical views and the more egalitarian expressions of friendship and individuality their adolescent children learned at boarding school. 130 Hentz’s Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, the Heiress of Glenmore (1852) begins with the affluent patriarch informing his daughter she is to marry the neighbouring planter’s son; refusing, Eoline seeks employment as a music teacher at a female academy. Mr. Glenmore fears social disapproval but cannot abandon the “despotism in his bosom,” and though he asks himself whether Eoline should “be made a musical drudge, a hireling, a slave,” he still enforces the marriage. 131 Similarly, Southworth’s The Missing Bride (1855) positions Commodore Waugh as a patriarch who believes in his jurisdiction to arrange the marriages of his dependants. Waugh’s plantation – ironically named “Luckenough,” but verbally parodied by the enslaved Crazy Nell as “Lock-em-up” – is a place where he indulges “the solitary majesty of his own demoniacal passion.” When the elder niece Edith marries a heroic English soldier rather than the preferred Dr. Grimshaw, she is criticised for base ingratitude. Edith maintains that “honest hearts are not to be bought, or sold, or persuaded,” but Waugh thunders: “I am no tyrant, minion, do you hear!” Waugh also threatens his younger niece, Jacquelina: “I have the greatest mind to whip her to death!” 132 The depiction of these characters belied how the myth of benevolent paternalism concealed the tyrannical behaviour directed at dependents. Popular novelists subverted the idealisation of southern bellehood by demonstrating the potential for plantation mistresses to exhibit tyrannical behaviour. Hentz’s Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850) portrays the “despotism of Mrs. Walton,” a character whose merciless treatment of her adolescent stepdaughter is constructed through a directly analogy to chattel slavery. Linda, whipped and coerced into lodgings “scarcely thought good enough for a slave,” revolts against such “tyranny.” When Mrs. Walton arranges for Linda to marry her son, to retain the family plantation, Linda implores her stepmother to take her fortune: “I wish I were the poorest girl in the south-west, if I must be bought and sold like a negro slave.” Linda is instead reproached for addressing her stepmother with less respect than any “slave on the plantation.” Linda, however, actively protests, and does not consent to be “trafficked away in this vile manner.”133

130 Steven M. Stowe, “The Rhetoric of Authority: The Making of Social Values in Planter Family Correspondence,” The Journal of American History 73, no. 4 (1987): 916-933. 131 Caroline Lee Hentz, Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, the Heiress of Glenmore (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1852, 2008), 20, 85-86, 28 and 123, e-book. 132 Southworth, Missing Bride , 98, 61 and 110. 133 Caroline Lee Hentz, Linda; or, the Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1850, 2008), 84-89, e-book.

74 Both Linda and Mrs. Walton acknowledge that slaves were often sold against their will, but there is no further appreciation for their exploitation. Since the Jezebel stereotype promoted an image of black women’s insatiable lust, enslaved women faced contradictions attendant on the fact that their sexual commodification was often interpreted as the result of promiscuity. 134 Linda, in contrast, expects patriarchal and legal authority to work in her favour, concluding: “If my father does not protect me, I will appeal to the laws, and they shall.”135 Her attempt toward legal recourse is only possible because she is personally empowered, has access to representation, and retains the rights accorded unmarried women. Ultimately, however, Linda is duped: the law leaves her even more vulnerable, thus recalling the way Brown and Child emphasised the legal defencelessness of mixed-race women. Of course, the laws surrounding chattel slavery and race were more restrictive and disempowering, but these novels collectively used discourses of slavery to emphasise how patriarchal legal structures disadvantaged all women, although to different degrees. Nor is the prospective marriage to Mrs. Walton’s son any more appealing. Because Robert “labels his frantic desire to possess Linda as ‘love’, his willingness to coerce her into submission exposes his lack of respect,” the quality she most values. 136 In fact, Robert’s professions of love recall the language of ownership employed by male abolitionists. Whereas Linda hopes to postpone marriage and “revel awhile in the joy of freedom,” Robert swears to “claim you, Linda, as my own.” In contrast, Linda experiences “a glad sense of freedom, of relief from , and hope of future joy” at the prospect of marrying another beau, Roland Lee. 137 Hentz, like northern reformers, inscribed marriage through oppositional interpretations of slavery and freedom to demarcate the difference between loveless marriages and those based on romantic love and the companionate ideal. The woman-slave analogy was used to refute the idea that marriage should be a woman’s only life goal. Not all southern women preoccupied with marriage. As Elizabeth Ruffin confessed to her diary in 1827, “the sweets of independence are greatly preferable to that charming servitude under a lord and master.” 138 Remarkably, southern popular novelists sometimes praised the autonomy of single women. Hentz commends Eoline, “this noble young girl,” for her refusal to “sell her birthright” and instead sacrificing “luxury and home, rather than her soul’s independence, her heart’s liberty … in a traffic unsanctioned by God or man!” 139 Courtship, which led to the passage from the father’s to husband’s plantation, was potentially the only time the

134 Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South , Revised Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999), Chapter One: “Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery.” 135 Hentz, Linda , 86. 136 Tracey, Plots , 60. 137 Hentz, Linda , 93, 89 and 144. 138 Elizabeth Ruffin Diary, February 26, 1827, in Fox-Genovese, Plantation Household , 255. 139 Hentz, Eoline , 28.

75 southern belle could take control of her fate, so it was especially crucial. 140 The character of Eoline is not especially concerned about never marrying, nor is marriage constructed as her only option. However, she felt her “independent spirit” to be her “only , … after having thrown off the chains of parental despotism,” even though she finds some fulfilment as a school teacher.141 Hentz also used abstract discourses of slavery to depict the consequences of a disastrous marriage. When the character of Mr. Wilton explains the ramifications of arranged marriages to Mr. Glenmore, he draws on the debilitating experience of his daughter – a true woman who becomes a listless recluse following a discordant union. “Chains are chains, though forged of gold,” Wilton says as he chastises Glenmore’s heartlessness at forcing Eoline to marry. As Eoline eventually falls in love with her intended, it is implied that the couple would always have married if left to “free will.” 142 These heroines ultimately prove trustworthy arbiters of race and class interests, thus demonstrating how “families need not force them to be objects of exchange in marriage.” 143 Overall, the woman-slave analogy enabled Hentz to emphasise the distance between that which was acceptable for the enslaved – barter, trafficking and exchange – and the matrimonial practices considered untenable for white women. The way southern women used the woman-slave analogy proved to be purely rhetorical in many senses. Identification between privileged white women and their slaves was largely tenuous, but the impulse to directly reference chattel slavery became clearer in literary depictions of these relationships. Indeed, Linda’s acceptance of benevolent paternalism is clear when she embarks on a night-time expedition to a neighbouring plantation to arrange a good purchase for her mammy.144 Hentz’s novels hoped to establish that interracial and cross-class identification was improbable, a process epitomised in Linda’s gracious and courteous, but never familiar, behaviour toward her slaves. 145 Even a latent sense of identification between women and slaves could destabilise hierarchy. When the enslaved character Gatty attempts to empathise and identify with Eoline’s plight, questioning the viability of patriarchal and paternalistic authority, her voice is stifled:

GATTY : “I no mean speak disrespectable of nobody, … but I know something wrong, and I spect, I think[…]” EOLINE : “No, no, Gatty, … you must not suspect, you must not think, you must not speak. It will do no good, and may do a great deal of harm.” 146 Open discourse between women and slaves had the potential to subvert benevolent paternalism altogether. The fact that Eoline unambiguously silences Gatty attempted to negate the prospect that

140 Tracey, Plots , 57. 141 Hentz, Eoline , 35. 142 Hentz, Eoline , 86 and 179. 143 Tracey, Plots , 59. 144 See: Hentz, Linda , 40-42. 145 Tracey, Plots , 66-67. 146 Hentz, Linda , 27.

76 a disobedient daughter could inspire independence of mind in her slaves, but instead only accentuates this possibility. 147 It is clear that popular novelists such as Hentz – as well as the real life reflections of Smedes, Chestnut and Ruffin – did not seek direct identification with the slave for whom they plead. For the most part, therefore, these elite southern women did not court intersectionality. From a rhetorical perspectives, allusions to parental or social “tyranny” simply emphasised that white young ladies should not be treated like “negro slaves.” Although northern women reformers often shared reservations about the relationship between white and black women, their unequivocal rejection of chattel slavery represented a more holistic and egalitarian aversion to all forms of oppression. Indeed, Southworth’s novels presented a more complicated perspective. The prospect of Jacquelina’s in The Missing Bride leads her to ask: “How much would such a girl as myself bring in the of the Sultan’s city?” 148 Not only does Jacquelina identify with the enslaved, but Southworth imbues the character with a deeper understanding of matrimonial exchange and the expanding notion of the marriage market than any of Hentz’s characters. But this sense of identification is qualified, somewhat, because the direct comparison is with an orientalised (potentially “white”) slave, rather than the racially other African American slave. This anticipated the way the concept of slavery was both sexualised and whitened by the end of the nineteenth century. Most often, southern popular novelists and diarists refuted a direct identification between women and slaves. Their disinterest in the existence of intersecting forms of oppression set them apart from northern reformers and African Americans. In contrast, popular literature which engaged with reform principles did not completely negate the possibility of cross-racial identification and myriad forms of oppression. The woman-slave analogy was an important rhetorical device in southern popular literature, but discourses of slavery usually worked to emphasise the oppression of white women in a way which was not as prevalent among northern reformers until following the Civil War.

Philosophical Considerations Many antebellum writers considered the comparison between marriage and slavery at a more philosophical level. However, the prevalence of this rhetoric meant they were sometimes too prone to do so. William Harper’s “Memoir on Slavery” sought to justify the peculiar institution by suggesting that no one was, in fact, free: “Servitude is the condition of civilisation.” 149 When northern reformers reflected upon this concept, they showed an awareness of interdependent oppressions.

147 Tracey, Plots , 66-69. 148 Southworth, Missing Bride , 275. 149 Harper, “Memoir,” 87.

77 African American authors used discourses of slavery to consider the existence of different forms of oppression. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. designates ’ The Bondwoman’s Narrative (c.1850s), a recently discovered manuscript, as the first novel written by an African American woman. 150 Importantly, Crafts problematised the analogy between marriage and slavery. Her main character, Hannah, questions how marriage could be dignified “in a state of servitude,” and concludes that the “responsibilities” of marriage could “only be filled with profit, and honour, and advantage by the free.” 151 Still, Crafts found enduring points of comparison between women and slaves. The character of Mr. Trappe, a lawyer and trader in fancy slaves, traffics in the “sexual economy” of chattel slavery. 152 When Trappe blackmails the unnamed daughter of his previous employer, he threatens to reveal her mixed-race ancestry to her white planter husband. In consequence, Crafts followed her African American literary predecessors and considered how mixed-race women embodied the legal and cultural oppression of women and slaves. Yet in her characterisation of this slave trader, Crafts echoed William Harper. “We are all slaves to something or somebody,” Trappe utters, as he finally acquires the unnamed woman for the purpose of sale: A man perfectly free would be an anomaly, and a free woman yet more so. Freedom and slavery are only names attached surreptitiously and often improperly to certain conditions and in many cases the slave possesses more. They are mere shadows the very reverse of realities, and being so, if rightly considered, they have only a trifling effect on individual happiness. 153 The narrative ultimately refutes this possibility, but the manuscript nature of Crafts’ novel, complete with crossed out passages, enables the reader to see that she reconsidered whether the enslaved could possess more freedom than the free. It remains significant that Crafts explored the experience of mixed-race women, as well as her understanding of women’s oppression, through discourses of slavery. Although African American authors generally identified the limits of the woman-slave analogy, they did not wholly refute it. As women’s oppression became a primary focus of reformers, the analogy between marriage and slavery was sometimes used too dismissively. In 1953, Elizabeth Oakes Smith cautioned women against early marriage, so the “undeveloped girl” would not be “put into bondage for the rest of her life to one whom … the woman may perhaps despise.” 154 Others surmised that women were not fully culpable for these circumstances. It was suggested that husbands should abandon “the position of master” so the “strictest equality” could be realised in marriage, otherwise

150 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Introduction,” in Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative , ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, c.1850s, 2002), xxi. 151 Crafts, Bondwoman’s Narrative , 131. 152 Adrienne Davis, “‘Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle’: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in Sister Circle . 153 Crafts, Bondwoman’s Narrative , 97. 154 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “Sanctity of Marriage,” in Woman’s Suffrage Tracts, No. 5 (Pine-Grove, Syracuse: Lapthrop’s Print, 1853), 5-6.

78 women could ultimately “feel that he who promised at the altar to love, cherish and protect her, is but a legalised master and tyrant.” 155 Indeed, marriage involved the “traumatic removal” of girls from their mother’s network and consequent adjustment to husbands who came to marriage with vastly different life experiences.156 This sometimes even involved assimilation into a husband’s family. Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1854) anticipates the title character’s marriage as a “death-knell,” even though Ruth’s happy marriage is only marred by the undue influence of her in-laws.157 Women’s rights reformers saw the woman-slave analogy as an effective rhetorical device, but this acknowledgement sometimes led them to questionable conclusions. This was most obvious in Laura Curtis Bullard’s Christine; or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856). When the title character, a middle-aged woman’s rights reformer, weds her estranged first love, Philip, on his deathbed, rhetorical misappropriation abounds. As Philip begins to recover and the marriage vows become a reality, both inadvertently conclude that their marriage will be inherently oppressive. Christine convinces herself that the “chain that bound him to her was galling”; her presence was “valuable” and “delightful” as a nurse, but “as a wife it was unwelcome.” Upon his waking, Philip similarly believes that Christine is “unhappy under the chains I, in my selfishness, … imposed,” thus resolving that she “should not be my slave.” 158 This misinterpretation demonstrated the degree to which the matrimonial oppression was described in terms of slavery. A fictional women’s rights orator enabled Bullard to emphasise the need for the companionate marriage which Christine and Philip ultimately find. 159 But it also recalled the personal concerns actual women reformers voiced during courtships, and still married nonetheless. The structure of the slave narrative also shaped another significant discussion in Bullard’s Christine . Annie Murray, a happy young socialite, becomes engaged on the whim of the season to the rich Mr. Howard, only to discover their incompatibility following marriage. “Every day,” Bullard states, “the fetters which bound them seemed more galling, and contentions grew more and more frequent.” The Murray home features a penholder sculpted as “a slave in bronze” and “canary birds [that] trilled out their sweet songs” to symbolically represent the process of keeping women in their sphere, or their metaphorical “cage.” 160 In a chapter entitled “Gilded Misery,” Annie tells her uncle, Mr. Elliston: “Every day it grows harder to bear his tyranny[!]” When Elliston indicates that

155 “Husbands and Wives,” Lily , October 1, 1849; A.B., “Golden Rules for Wives,” Lily , February 15, 1854. 156 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 69. 157 Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1854, 1997), 3. 158 Laura Curtis Bullard, Christine; or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs , ed. Denise M. Kohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1856, 2010), 377 and 380. 159 Tracey, Plots , 126; Denise M. Kohn, “Laura Jane Curtis Bullard (1831-1912),” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 21, no. 1 (2004): 75. 160 Bullard, Christine , 198 and 266-267. See: Elaine Shefer, “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 3 (1991): 446-480.

79 he cannot help Annie and her daughter due to the laws that bind her to her husband, Annie laments: “Do you know what you are dooming me to? … [T]he life of a slave, who hates and fears her master[!]” Later, Elliston berates Howard for refusing to “let your slave escape” through the legal means of divorce. 161 From temperance to divorce, antebellum attempts to alleviate domestic tension and violence did not guarantee the safety of married women, so reformers instead emphasised the pragmatic impulse toward self-preservation.162 The increasing condemnation of this widespread legal and social failure led women’s rights reformers to recall the rhetoric that had shaped discussions of the oppression women experienced in marriage. The philosophical consideration of marriage, together with freedom and slavery, during the antebellum era derived from an awareness of the existence of interdependent oppressions. Following the Civil War, however, the abolition of chattel slavery meant discourses of slavery underwent a conceptual change. The earlier reform perspective which situated marriage alongside a variety of other oppressions increasingly gave way to a focus on how marriage engendered white women’s oppression. A new women’s rights trope encapsulated this process, and it drew directly on the form of the slave narrative.

Fugitive Wives When Christine depicts Annie Murray’s flight from her unhappy marriage, she becomes what women’s rights reformers increasingly labelled a “fugitive wife.” This trope was directly related to the plight of antebellum fugitive slaves. The Fugitive Slave Law (1850) legalised the existing practice of kidnapping African Americans in the North and returning them to chattel slavery, whether they were slave or free. Documented in slave narratives, the stories of fugitive slaves became a particular concern of abolitionists, black and white, who habitually flouted the law by offering assistance.163 But in the wake of the Civil War, the absence of actual fugitive slaves created a representational opening for women’s rights reformers. Just as Castronovo posits that the narratives of southern women adopted elements of the slave narrative, women’s rights literature similarly created this new trope through appropriation. Earlier antislavery literature such as Richard Hildreth’s The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) imitated slave narratives, and popular literature similarly depicted women and girls escaping domestic abuse to go to the factories of Lowell. The factory, recalling the northern star in slave narratives, becomes the “counterpoint to the oppressive circumstances from which the author

161 Bullard, Christine , 273, 275 and 277. 162 Jerome Nadelhaft, “Wife Torture: A Known Phenomenon in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Culture 10, no. 3 (1987): 39; Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds,” 28. See also: Michael Grossberg, “Who Gets the Child? Custody, Guardianship, and the Rise of a Judicial Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 2 (1983): 235-260. 163 Cindy Weinstein, “The Slave Narrative and Sentimental Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative , ed. Audrey A. Fisch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

80 escapes.” 164 Women’s rights periodicals also began to use this imagery in relation to marriage, as The Una reported upon failed marriage in terms of “runaway” husbands and wives in 1855.165 Other reformers drew a more explicit comparison between fugitive slaves and marriage. In 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Lucy Stone: Her bondage, though it differs from that of the Negro slave, frets and chafes her just the same. She too sighs and groans in her chains; and lives but in the hope of better things to come. She looks to heaven; whilst the more philosophical slave sets out for Canada. 166 According to Renford Reese, Canada was of great importance in the way fugitive slaves conceptualised liberty. 167 For Stanton, the freedom represented by Canada demonstrated the divergent experiences of women and chattel slaves. When the fugitive wife trope became more prominent in the postbellum era, the addition of the Canadian escape represented a greater level of appropriation of the slave narrative.

Figure 3. “Eliza Crosses the Ohio on the Floating Ice.”168

Antislavery and women’s rights reformers were accustomed to describing matrimonial oppression as slavery, and so the fugitive wife trope thrived. It found particular expression in fiction. Annie Murray, in Bullard’s Christine , leaves her husband and attempts to support herself

164 Husband, “‘White Slave’,” 16. See: Richard Hildreth, The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore , Vols.I and II (Boston: Whipple and Damrell, 1836, 1840), e-book. 165 “Unhappy Marriages,” January 1855, TU . 166 Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Lucy Stone, November 24, 1856, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage , Vol.I (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 860, e-book [hereafter HWS ]. 167 See: Renford Reese, “Canada: The Promised Land for U.S. Slaves,” Western Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 3 (2011): 208-217. 168 Hammatt Billings, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), in Jo-Ann Morgan, “Harriet Beecher Stowe in Our Time: Chapter 7,” Stowe Centre , 1852, 1853, n.d., accessed July 20, 2014, http://nationalera.wordpress.com/further-reading/chapter-7-comment-by-jo-ann-morgan/.

81 and her daughter as a seamstress. The struggling Annie is “rescued” by a family friend who proposes marriage, but as Annie is yet married, it is a bigamous union. Convinced that the marriage was “sacred” nonetheless, Annie’s story follows that of the mixed-race women in antislavery narratives – Rosalie from Child’s “The Quadroons”; Eliza from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852); Clotel from Brown’s Clotel (see Figures 3 and 4). Like these mixed-race women, the rogue paramour eventually leaves Annie, dooming her to a life of prostitution and early death. 169 The absence of chattel slavery and real fugitive slaves created a representational lacuna upon which postbellum women’s rights reformers capitalised.

Figure 4. “The Death of Clotel.” 170

The women’s rights use of the fugitive wife trope flourished in response to the legislative developments following the Civil War. The recent historiography of the Emancipation Proclamation is shaped by revisionist considerations of President . Originally the “Great Emancipator,” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) is framed alternately as politically expedient or an imperative toward the unification of the Union. 171 Historians posit that, during the nineteenth century, the Married Women’s Property Acts were viewed as analogous to the Emancipation Proclamation. Although neither resulted in equality, both undermined “patriarchal authority” and created new relationships between women, ex-slaves and the state. 172 Yet

169 Bullard, Christine , 297; Child, “The Quadroons”; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (Hertfordshire: Woodsworth Classics, 1852, 1995); Brown, Clotel . 170 William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853), 218, in Documenting the American South , 2004, accessed July 20, 2014, http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/brown/frontis.html. 171 Allen C. Guelzo, “Restoring the Proclamation: Abraham Lincoln, Confiscation, and Emancipation in the Civil War Era,” Howard Law Journal 50, no. 2 (2007): 397-415. 172 Shammas, “Re-Assessing,” 9.

82 emancipation had additional significance for ex-slaves because it resulted in legal marriage which created “new bonds between freedmen and freedwomen.” 173 The difference, however, was that emancipation ostensibly resulted in freedom for the enslaved but the hierarchical structure of marriage remained. Therefore, the fugitive wife trope, together with its appropriation of the slave narrative, operated in a way that emphasised the oppression of white women. As an extension of the woman-slave analogy, the fugitive wife trope became particularly important during the postbellum era. In 1868, Stanton maintained that women could not “run off, for they were fastened with silver chains to their tyrants, and there was no Canada for them on the habitable globe.” 174 It was impossible for fugitive wives, unlike fugitive slaves, to flee to Canada, Abigail Scott Duniway editorialised.175 The significance of Canada extended to the measured legal developments surrounding divorce. “ Liberal divorce laws for wives are what Canada was for the slaves – a door of escape from bondage,” the National Suffrage Convention stated in 1889.176 During the Reconstruction era, some reformers approached the absence of fugitive slaves as justification for their disregard of the situation of freedpeople. At the same time, the rhetorical framework of abolitionism was appropriated to inform the way direct references to chattel slavery were applied to women’s rights interpretations of marriage. Stanton again used her comprehensive legal knowledge to develop narratives depicting women’s experience of “the law of domestic relations to collectivise women.” 177 The Revolution recounted many stories of fugitive wives. It frequently cited the sexual double standard not only as an influence on women’s matrimonial oppression but also as a breaking point for unhappy wives. 178 In 1868, Stanton described a supposedly “real” fugitive wife who, after marrying a dishonest, rapacious and indebted rake, finally fled her husband; without assistance, “I should never have escaped from that bondage,” the woman confided. 179 This rhetoric continued in Stanton’s 1869 discussion McFarland/Richardson case, in which Abby Sage McFarland’s paramour, the journalist Albert Richardson, was fatally shot by her abusive ex-husband Daniel McFarland. “I rejoice over every slave that escapes from a discordant marriage,” Stanton concluded in reference to the lovers’

173 Stanley, From Bondage , 45. See also: Katherine M. Franke, “Becoming a Citizen: Reconstruction Era Regulation of African American Marriages,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 11 (1999): 251-309; Cott, Public Vows , Chapter Four: “Toward a Single Standard.” 174 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “What Rev. Theodore Cuyler Says,” Revolution , June 3, 1869. 175 Abigail Scott Duniway, “Editorial Correspondence,” New Northwest , March 10 1876. This article was renamed “No Canada for Fugitive Wives,” in Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety, eds. “Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), 127. 176 “The National Suffrage Convention of 1889,” in Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds. HWS , Vol. IV (Indianapolis: The Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 174. 177 Tracy A. Thomas, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Notion of a Legal Class of Gender,” in Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law , ed. Tracey Jean Boisseau and Tracy A Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 139. 178 See: Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 2 (1959): 195-216; Charles E. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1973): 131-153. 179 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Marriage and Divorce,” Revolution , October 22, 1868.

83 marriage on Richardson’s deathbed. 180 When McFarland was acquitted in 1870, Stanton and Anthony organised a women’s mass meeting to protest the verdict. Abby was a “fugitive wife,” Stanton proclaimed, and the McFarland decision was the women’s equivalent of the v. Sanford (1857) Supreme Court decision which ruled that African Americans had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”181 Other women’s rights reformers adopted the fugitive wife trope for broader reform purposes. Aurora C. Phelps asked whether lawmakers would “repeal our fugitive slave laws” and “emancipate all adult female slaves” in her 1868 plea for women’s suffrage. 182 The fact that these proclamations followed the Thirteenth Amendment meant the fugitive slave metaphor actually implied women – ostensibly white women. In 1869, Susan B. Anthony maintained that “we have sometimes women loose, as they had negroes loose, in slavery, & we have fugitive wives as they had fugitive slaves,” who ultimately had only choices between “marriage or prostitution.” 183 The emergence of the fugitive wife trope meant discourses of slavery, in reference to marriage, enabled more explicit references to the peculiar institution following the Civil War. The fugitive wife trope continued to inform reform literature in the postbellum era. Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master (1874) critiqued the exploitation of women in marriage. For the young belle Flora Livingstone, her vulnerability is in fact exacerbated by her wealth and privilege. Flora’s mother, the narrative recalls, had once “protested against her destiny as bitterly as … any revolted slave, but having for years past been contented with her chains, she could endure no thought of revolt in others.” 184 Grace Farrell describes how marriage was seen as “a profession for a woman” during the nineteenth century, and Flora’s parents correspondingly force her to pursue the socially-acceptable “career” of a belle rather than pursue her interest in studying law.185 This, as will be discussed in Chapter Six, was representative of the concept of the marriage market, “an economic transaction in which the beautiful object becomes the

180 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Editorial Correspondence,” Revolution , December 12, 1869. See: Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women’s Oppression,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for , ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979). 181 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Speech to a Mass Meeting of Women in New York, May 17, 1870, in Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony . Vol.II: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 336-354. See Melissa J. Ganz, “Wicked Women and Veiled Ladies: Gendered Narratives of the McFarland-Richardson Tragedy,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9 (1997): 255-303. 182 Aurora C. Phelps, “Ballot, Bench and Barricade,” Revolution , May 21, 1868. 183 Susan B. Anthony, American Equal Rights Association, New York, May 12, 1869, in Selected Papers , Vol. II, 240. 184 Lillie Devereux Blake, Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master: A Story of to-Day (New York: The Feminist Press, 1874, 1996) , 102-103. 185 Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 73.

84 possession of that man who has enough money to buy her.” 186 The woman-slave analogy was used to interrogate the absence of love and companionship in marriage. The Woman’s Journal and its observation that “ownership, bondage, slavery” was culturally “implied in the word love” was more fully explored in Fettered for Life .187 Flora, who is flattered by Ferdinand Le Roy, proudly boasts his romantic attentions: “I don’t care to be his slave for life, though I would like to see him at my feet.” 188 Once she lets Le Roy shows his romantic preference however, Flora loses her sense of autonomy; her virginal sensibilities are shattered when he kisses her. 189 As a suitor, Le Roy uses the language of ownership, but in a more insidious way than antebellum male abolitionists: “[C]ome, my sweet trembling little prisoner, you are fairly caught. Give me your promise.” As with Annie Murray’s marriage, Le Roy’s sense of empowerment leaves Flora feeling as if she had “received a master,” rendering her “no longer free[;] … ‘I have passed under the yoke,’ she thought, ‘I am a slave.’” 190 The appropriation of the woman-slave analogy thus challenged the language of love through the need for self-ownership – concepts historians identify as being critical to antislavery and women’s rights reform alike.191 Flora does not initially accept her suitor, but nonetheless feels “bound to him”; she eventually succumbs to an engagement remembered “as a mark of servitude” and envies the unmarried “because they, at least, are free.” 192 In a chapter entitled “Flora Seeks Freedom,” this character essentially becomes a fugitive fiancée. Flora flees to escape marriage to “a born tyrant,” and concludes that she would become “a slave bound hand and foot” were she to marry. When Le Roy apprehends Flora, he “bore the fainting captive away.” Unable to escape like Annie Murray, Blake emphasises the marriage vows through which women swore to “to love, honour and obey.” After marriage, Flora lives in a “prison-house” and eventually succumbs to her husband’s stifling expectations. On her deathbed, Flora imparts that “marriage without love, is worse than death.” 193 Blake’s depiction of a loveless marriage drew explicit connections with the fugitive wife trope to depict the hypocrisies of courtship and the antithesis of the companionate marriage. Yet this representation was almost completely devoid of any reference to chattel slavery, other than the ongoing cultural awareness of the institution.

186 Judith Fetterley, “‘The Temptation to Be a Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth ,” Studies in American Fiction 5, no. 2 (1977): 205. 187 Fuller, “Love Versus Ownership,” Journal , 1871. 188 Blake, Fettered , 72-73. 189 See: Ana Stevenson, “The Novel of Purpose and the Power of the Page: Breaking the Chains That Bind in Fettered for Life ,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics 6, no. 2 (2013): 111. 190 Blake, Fettered , 128 and 129. 191 Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 230; Rierson, “Race and Gender,” 96; Cott, Public Vows , 64. 192 Blake, Fettered , 232 and 146-148. 193 Ibid, 236, 241, 245, 263 and 351.

85 Later novels similarly appropriated the fugitive wife trope without reference to chattel slavery. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) depicts Edna Pontillier’s character transformation from a “caged bird” to a “free bird” unwilling to enter another cage: marriage. 194 Edna’s awakening is predicated upon her realisation that she is “no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions,” and she instead asserts, “I give myself where I choose.” 195 The novella concludes with Edna abandoning her internalised oppression by disrobing – essentially freeing herself of the “symbols of body discipline that affect her mind,” issues which will be discussed in Chapter Three – thus removing “all the barriers that cage her.” 196 Yet this incarnation of the fugitive wife trope ends in the character’s suicide. The ongoing social censure of divorce compounded the already limited opportunities for women during the nineteenth century. Following the Civil War, the rhetorical paradigm of slavery versus freedom remained prevalent in women’s rights discussions of divorce. 197 Blake’s Woman’s Place To-Day (1883) posited that the “most potent cause of divorce” was the “monstrous doctrine of the headship of man,” and this fostered “a spirit of tyranny” which could “drive a wife into indignant rebellion.” 198 Although divorce laws were liberalised as attitudes toward marriage changed, there were strong continuities in the use of this rhetoric. In 1892, Stanton’s “The Solitude of Self,” questioned the philosophy of why women were taught to abandon their inner selves in pursuit of love and marriage. 199 So too does ’s The Custom of the Country (1913) present the preponderance of high-society divorce as a consequence of the “fact that the average American looks down on his wife.” The character of Charles Bowen asks: “If we cared for women in the old barbarous possessive do you suppose we’d give them up as readily as we do?”200 This conclusion both foregrounded and interrogated one of the reform preoccupations of the nineteenth century – the possession of wives. 201 As the expectations surrounding marriage and chattel slavery changed, the comparison between these institutions transformed whilst maintaining a certain rhetorical consistency. Most insidious was the fugitive wife trope, which represented the complete appropriation of antislavery rhetoric for the purposes of white women’s rights. Even so, late-nineteenth-century descriptions of marriage placed the institution as one of many types of oppression.

194 Zoila Clark, “The Bird That Came out of the Cage: A Foucauldian Feminist Approach to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening ,” Journal for Cultural Research 12, no. 4 (2008): 335 and 345. 195 Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories (State College: A Penn State Electronic Classics Series Publication, 1899, 2008), e-book, 113. 196 Clark, “Bird,” 345-346. 197 Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds,” 30. 198 Blake, Woman’s Place , 96. 199 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Stanton’s ‘The Solitude of Self’: A Rationale for Feminism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 3 (1980): 304-312. 200 Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (London: Constable, 1913, 1941), 77 and 154-155. 201 See: Debra Ann MacComb, “New Wives for Old: Divorce and the Leisure-Class Marriage Market in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country ,” American Literature 68, no. 4 (1996): 765-797.

86 Conclusion During the nineteenth century, the analogy between marriage and slavery was central to many reformers, but especially within the antislavery and women’s rights movements. The woman-slave analogy enabled reformers to delineate the effects of marriage whilst offering revisionist conceptions of the institution. A variety of voices – northern reformers, African Americans, and southern proslavery ideologues – attested to the centrality of slavery as a conceptual framework, even following the Civil War. When individuals challenged the sentimental ideal of romantic love, they invoked discourses of slavery to prove that the ideal was not always realised. Male and female northern reformers used abstract and direct discourses of slavery in complementary and competing ways. For African American reformers, the concepts of marriage and love, chattel slavery and freedom often diverged at the point where white women reformers saw convergence. Yet because African Americans periodically employed discourses of slavery to critique chattel slavery together with other forms of oppression, their use of the woman-slave analogy was not wholly incompatible with that of white reformers. In contrast, southern popular novelists did not seek to court intersectionality and instead used this rhetoric solely to interrogate white women’s experience of marriage. Overall, the language of love was revealed to rely on utterances of ownership in literature and life alike. By the end of the antebellum era, these impulses converged to create the fugitive wife trope. This trope endured as one of the most persistent postbellum incarnations of the woman-slave analogy, but it belied an overt focus on white women’s experience of marriage in the absence of chattel slavery. Nineteenth-century reconsiderations of marriage strove toward an ideal of voluntary and spontaneous romantic love, but at the same time, the woman-slave analogy was used to portray the depth of gendered inequality perpetuated by the institution.

87 CHAPTER THREE :

FASHION : “T YRANT CHAINS ”

Poor, silly, chain-fettered things. How in my heart I pity your weakness. Would that I could “break your chains,” and bid you go free. LYDIA M. COLLINS , “D ETERMINED AND INDEPENDENT ,” THE SIBYL , NOVEMBER 1857

I had Bloomers enough when I was in bondage. SOJOURNER TRUTH , IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE , “S OJOURNER TRUTH , THE LIBYAN SIBYL ,” ATLANTIC MONTHLY , APRIL 1863

Fashion, like marriage, was interpreted as a form of slavery by many nineteenth-century reformers and cultural commentators. Since the oppression that resulted from fashion was tangible, it was discussed in competing ways. Lydia M. Collins, a radical but comparatively unknown dress reformer, used discourses of slavery to suggest that women could free themselves from fashion’s constraints. Although Sojourner Truth, the African American ex-slave and reformer, did not specifically agree with this possibility, she still appreciated the way fashion worked as a form of social control, especially in conjunction with chattel slavery. The relationship between fashion and the idea of slavery was at once superficial and central to the way the restrictions of dress were imagined and interpreted. Nineteenth-century fashion was a form of display through which understandings of gender and class were constructed. As dissatisfaction with women’s restricting and cumbersome clothing increased, comparisons between fashion and slavery gained prominence. The rhetoric surrounding fashionable dress also influenced more substantive dress reform attempts. Fashion was the visible outcome of women’s oppression, but tensions emerged over who should modify women’s dress and whether or not a change of fashion was actually useful or empowering. Still, the woman-slave analogy emerged amongst a range of nineteenth-century cultural commentators, from conservative observers to the most radical reformers. When discourses of slavery were applied to fashion, they also encompassed a strain of nativism that sought to displace the faults of women’s fashion back to Europe. The woman-slave analogy thus played a crucial role in the development of fashion critique and dress reform in a way that permeated mainstream discourse in the United States. The meaning of “fashion” and “dress” is a subject of debate among scholars, but these terms will be used interchangeably because such ontological differences were less apparent during the nineteenth century. 1 However, it is important to make a distinction between fashionable dress and reform variations. The “reformed dress” will describe the imprecise and varied character of the

1 Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, “Dress and Identity,” Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1992): 1-8; Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender (Yale University Press, 1994), Chapter One: “‘Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender.”

88 costume iterations proposed by reformers; this term encompasses, but is not limited to, the “bloomers,” the famous costume promoted by Amelia Jenks Bloomer and later adopted by the National Dress Reform Association (NDRA).2 The significance of the reformed dress does not inhibit a broader approach to nineteenth-century fashions. Indeed, the process of looking beyond the women’s rights and dress reform movements facilitates a better understanding of the underlying “principles and desires ” of dress reform. 3 This, in turn, demonstrates the significance of the woman-slave analogy for mainstream fashion critique and reform movements alike. A more holistic understanding of the tensions surrounding fashion can be realised by considering the broad spectrum of commentators, reform causes and reformers who engaged with this rhetoric. This chapter will discuss how a variety of reformers and cultural commentators used the woman-slave analogy to critique nineteenth-century women’s fashion, from fashionable dress to the reformed dress. Historians of dress reform acknowledge that slavery was a metaphor within the movement, but there has been no consideration of how this existed in a broader rhetorical framework wherein discourses of slavery were used to critique marriage, fashion and many other forms of oppression. This rhetoric spanned the antislavery, women’s rights and dress reform movements, and even influenced health reformers. Unlike other thematic manifestations of the woman-slave analogy, fashion critique largely applied discourses of slavery in the most abstract manner. This trend was only disrupted in the decade prior to the Civil War. While some direct references to chattel slavery continued in the postbellum era, commentators generally returned to their previously abstract rhetoric. There was a shifting focus on what style of garment was thought to engender women’s freedom, and what constituted women’s slavery – women’s oppression.4

Interpreting Fashion The cultural connotations associated with fashion informed the use of the woman-slave analogy throughout the nineteenth century. As the limits of addressing women’s rights through legal and political means became apparent, fashion emerged as a more tangible expression of women’s oppression. According to Ronald G. Walters, many reformers believed that individuals could not act with moral responsibility “unless their bodies were unfettered and uncorrupted.” 5 Clothing was viewed as both a signifier and cause of the political and economic status of women, and the way discourses of slavery were applied to fashion belied this perspective.6

2 Shelly Foote, “Bloomers,” Dress 6, no. 1 (1980): 1-12. 3 Annemarie Strassel, “Designing Women: Feminist Methodologies in American Fashion,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 41, no. 1 & 2 (2013): 39-40. 4 Sections of this chapter are based on: Ana Stevenson, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’: Fashion and Dress Reform in the Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 20 (2014): 5-20. 5 Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers: 1815-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 1997), 147. 6 Patricia A. Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850-1920 (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2003), 1.

89 The changing nature of nineteenth-century fashionable dress informed the use of this rhetoric. Vast developments in style and silhouette, the product of technological development, illustrated shifting attitudes toward masculinity and femininity. 7 In previous centuries, ornamental and elaborate clothing characterised fashions amongst the affluent irrespective of gender, but exaggerated nineteenth-century distinctions meant women’s fashion continued to be decorative whilst men’s became subdued and uniform. 8 The ever-changing popular silhouette sought to morph and accentuate the female form, rendering women dependent upon undergarments – corsets, petticoats, crinolines and bustles. 9 Anthropologists argue against the conflation of corsetry and women’s oppression; not only were corsets thought to medically prevent physical disfigurement, but they also lent women a measure of empowerment. 10 Historians, however, emphasise the effects these garments on women’s health, with ample evidence to confirm the deleterious influence of corsetry and the popular practice of tight lacing. 11 Fashion communicated and reinforced the gendered nature of difference, especially among the privileged classes. All women needed to be appropriately fashionable to maintain respectability, but the intricacy of design and expense of materials distinguished class affiliation, from slave and indentured to free status. 12 As fashion also inscribed a sense of place, it validated domesticity. Clothing signified a “proper temporal location,” thus necessitating “the ballroom gown, lawn party dress, riding habit, walking dress, or morning wrapper” – all clothing for a specific occasion. 13 Alongside the cult of true womanhood, fashion symbolically and substantively restricted women’s potential to work. As such, fashion operated as a form of social control to formulate and maintain woman’s perceived place in society. 14 In 1851, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

7 Philippe Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century , trans. Richard Bienvenu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 26; Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 147. See also: Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, eds. The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2010). 8 Carol Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 8. 9 Cunningham, Reforming , 1. 10 Rosemary Ann Knight, “Beyond Separate Spheres: Acknowledging the Agency of Nineteenth Century Corsetieres” (PhD thesis, The University of Queensland, 2012). 11 See: Ann Douglas Wood, “‘The Fashionable Diseases’: Women’s Complaints and their Treatment in Nineteenth- Century America,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 1 (1873): 25-52; R.M. Morantz, “Making Women Modern: Middle Class Women and Health Reform in 19th Century America,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 4 (1977): 490-507; Jeanette C. Lauer and Robert H. Lauer, “The Battle of the Sexes: Fashion in 19th Century America,” The Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 4 (1980): 581-589; Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2001). 12 See: Jonathan Prude, “To Look Upon the ‘Lower Sort’: Runaway Ads and the Appearance of Unfree Labourers in America, 1750-1800,” The Journal of American History 78, no. 1 (1991): 124-159; Leigh Summers, “Yes, They Did Wear Them: Working-Class Women and Corsetry in the Nineteenth Century,” Costume 36 (2002): 65-74. 13 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 7. 14 Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16.

90 asked: “Is being born a woman so criminal an offence, that we must be doomed to this everlasting bondage?” 15 The fashionable ideal presented in popular periodicals endorsed the cult of true womanhood and separate spheres. The most influential periodicals were Godey’s Lady’s Book , Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art , and later the Ladies’ Home Journal . Magazine fashion plates, which developed from about 1827, encouraged women to follow subtle transformations within Parisian fashion; these images were freely available throughout America in the absence of copyright laws. 16 Although an ability to “resist the vagaries of fashion” was a defining element of republican motherhood, fashion plates retained their widespread influence. 17 Throughout the nineteenth century, commentators expressed dismay toward the “slavish following of fashion-plates,” and observed that women who had “emancipated themselves from the bondage of conventional dress have liberty of thought in other directions.” 18 According to Julie Wosk, the apparent need to follow fashion injunctions led critics to satirise “women as foolish slaves to fashion’s whims.” 19 From these tensions emerged a body of literature wherein abstract discourses of slavery were used to express vehement objections to the developments in women’s fashion. Conservative fashion criticism came primarily from the clergy, medical practitioners, and journalists, a group Gayle V. Fischer labels “antifashion.” Where fashion defined arbitrary standards of beauty and true womanhood, antifashionists ensured women did not forsake these expectations. 20 Even so, popular magazines and editors occasionally encouraged moderate fashion reform. Alison Piepmeier describes Sarah Josepha Hale, Godey’s typically conservative editor, as “a moderate fashion reformer” because she advocated health and comfort rather than fashion alone. 21 Between 1828 and 1877, Godey’s presented images of women at “the centre of her own culture” through fashion plates celebrating women’s friendship and intimacy. 22 Hale’s Traits of American Life (1835) expressed

15 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our Costume,” Lily , April 1851. 16 Gayle V. Fischer, Pantaloons & Power: A Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2001), 17. 17 Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother and the Woman Citizen: Contradictions and Choices in Revolutionary America,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past , ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 119. See also: Linda Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment – An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1976): 187-205. 18 Helen Gilbert Ecob, The Well-Dressed Woman: A Study in the Practical Application to Dress of the Laws of Health, Art, and Morals (New York: Fowler & Wells, Co., 1893, 2008), 233, e-book. 19 Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 53. 20 Fischer, Pantaloons , 23-24. Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter define the term “anti-fashion” differently, as “any style in clothing which goes against what is currently in fashion,” often within a specific subculture, for the purpose of “making a political statement, and is meant to communicate a message about the group that embraces it.” Ted Polhemus and Lynn Proctor, Fashion and Anti-Fashion: of Clothing and Adornment (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), 27. 21 Alison Piepmeier, Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 179. 22 Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 1 and 63.

91 indignation at the “the tyranny of fashion” imposed by European milliners and encouraged American women to create their own costume. 23 Yet because Hale offered no fashion alternative, she and other commentators revealed the “” of conservative dress reformers.24 Still, the woman-slave analogy was both widely available and widely employed to condemn fashion. This cultural commentary relied on abstract discourses of slavery to offer a tempered critique of fashion. The supposedly intrinsic link between dress reform and a feminist consciousness is problematic. 25 Still, those conservative critics who mobilised the woman-slave analogy revealed that concern about fashion was not limited to reformers. If antifashionists offered little to no alternative fashion for women, reformers were more willing to experiment. The association between fashionable dress and femininity made it increasingly difficult to challenge mainstream fashion, but some antebellum communities still made the attempt.

Trend Transgressors Antebellum defiance toward mainstream fashion similarly coalesced around abstract discourses of slavery. Quakers (or the Religious Society of Friends) and utopian communities exhibited degrees of fashion resistance, but discontent became more prominent amongst women’s rights reformers. In these circles, however, the fashion autonomy exhibited by women was sometimes challenged by the undue influence of men. The woman-slave analogy shaped the way these groups constructed fashion critique, and this further influenced discussion of the reformed dress in antebellum print culture. From their seventeenth-century English origins, Quakers valued “plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel.” 26 This principle was transferred through transatlantic exchange, and American Quaker women espoused a simple, plain and modest style which gained domestic and religious connotations. 27 Unlike other religious denominations, Quakerism encouraged women to speak in church. Quaker women, including Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley Foster, and the southerners Sarah and Angelina Grimké, became some of the first prominent female reformers. The quiet opposition inherent in Quaker women’s dress offered alternate perspectives on mainstream fashion, but it also demonstrated how any fashion could gain oppressive connotations.

23 Sarah Josepha Hale, Traits of American Life (E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835, 2012), 273 (Google books). Deborah Jean Warner notes that Hale “inveighed against ‘the tyranny of fashion,’ and sought to enlighten women’ on the ‘pernicious effects of tight lacing’.” See: Hale, “Health and Beauty,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 36, (1848): 66-67, in Deborah Jean Warner, “Fashion, Emancipation, Reform, and the Rational Undergarment,” Journal of the American Costume Society 4 (1978), 25. 24 David Kunzle, “Dress Reform as Antifeminism: A Response to Helene E. Roberts’s ‘The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman’,” Signs 2, no. 3 (1977): 570-579. 25 Jihang Park, “Sport, Dress Reform and the Emancipation of Women in Victorian England: A Reappraisal,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 6, no. 1 (1989): 11. 26 Joan Kendall, “The Development of a Distinctive Form of Quaker Dress,” Costume 19 (1985): 58. See also: Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 30. 27 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 26 and 30-36.

92 When Sarah Grimké found a new spiritual home amongst Philadelphia’s Orthodox Quakers, she, and later Angelina, discarded the elaborate clothing of a Charleston, South Carolina belle. Sarah described the decorative elements of fashionable dress as “superfluities of naughtiness.” 28 According to Carol Mattingly, the act of abandoning the fashionable dress of slaveholding women enabled the Grimké sisters to foster closer associations with the enslaved population on whose behalf they spoke. 29 This seems a superficial comparison. Quakers often experienced competing class and religious impulses, opting for a plain style made from the best available materials: the Grimké sisters did not wear the linsey-woolsey Harriet Jacobs described as “one of the badges of slavery.” 30 Still, the sisters’ experiences as abolitionist orators led to a greater awareness of the connotations surrounding women’s clothing. 31 Under her “lordly master,” Sarah’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Condition of Woman (1837) later emphasised, “woman’s elevation” was impeded by “her love of dress.” 32 In contrast, Angelina’s husband Theodore Dwight Weld questioned whether Quaker fashion resistance was in fact empowering. Weld intimated that by enabling “a certain shade of colour … or arrangement of seams and angles,” even in simple designs, to become a “religion and principle,” the Grimkés could become fashion’s “ slaves instead of rulers.” Weld’s antislavery worldview would have made such rhetoric accessible, yet it also indicated his “sense of the disciplining power inherent in clothing.” 33 In spite of the inherent challenge posed by Quaker women’s fashion, discourses of slavery could work to contradict the autonomy women exhibited in their mode of dress. Utopian communities also challenged mainstream fashion and normative gender roles. New Harmony, Indiana, promoted a reformed dress during the mid-1820s, as did the 1840s millennial Oneida Community in New York State.34 These communities sought to develop social alternatives that redefined gender roles, partially through fashion. Yet this initiative was often achieved more in philosophy than action, because challenging fashion could become less about clothing and more about who had the power to determine and maintain women’s “place.” 35 Alternate family structures and housekeeping meant utopian communities afforded women greater freedom. But women did not necessarily have direct influence over their own dress and were often persuaded to

28 Angelina Grimké, Diary, February 1, 1828, in Katharine du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 31. 29 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 32. 30 Frederick B. Tolles, “‘Of the Best Sort but Plain’: The Quaker Aesthetic,” American Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1959): 484- 502; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1861, 2001), 13. 31 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 32; 32 Sarah M. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (Boston: Knapp, 1837, 2010), 67 and 71, e-book. 33 G.H. Barnes and D.L. Dumond, eds, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844 (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965), 508; Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 31. 34 Fischer, Pantaloons , Chapter Two: “The First Dress Reformers: New Harmony, Indiana, 1824-27.” 35 Ibid., 17.

93 wear reformed dresses as the political statement of the men around them. 36 Henry B. Blackwell later condemned this type of male interference as “an impertinence,” maintaining that women’s dress should concern women alone. 37 Consequently, antebellum variations on the reformed dress did not disrupt power relations in communal and private settings, and modesty dictated bifurcated pantaloons to be “indecent.” The alternative lifestyles and perceived moral transgressions of utopian communities further influenced public perceptions of dress reform. 38 When the concept of bifurcated garments became more prominent, discourses of slavery were at once used to condemn their perceived impropriety and advocate their benefits. The rhetorical connections other male reformers made during the 1840s and 1850s represented a growing attempt to engender dress reform connections across social movements. In the sermon, “On the Rights and Condition of Women” (1845), Rev. Samuel J. May emphasised: God created woman to be the companion of man, not his slave, not his menial[.] … [A] frame cheated of half its growth … by subserviency to fashion, will be less pleasing than a frame made, by wholesome exercise, proper nourishment, and due obedience to the laws of health[.] 39 For May, attention to fashion was as much about women’s rights as it was about health. Gradually, the health reform focus on a “healthful” lifestyle – based on homeopathy, hydrotherapy (the water cure), phrenology, and Sylvester Graham’s dietary reforms – encompassed the fledgling dress reform movement.40 Where reformers viewed fashion’s constraints as inherently oppressive, a change in clothing was thought to result in women’s freedom. Llike antifashionists, however, these reformers did not offer an alternative. Soon, efforts towards a new costume were circulated in both reform and mainstream print culture, so the accompanying rhetoric gained widespread prominence. Elizabeth Smith Miller, one of the first antebellum women to publicly don an alternative style, repeatedly used the woman-slave analogy to describe fashionable dress. Her diary reveals how fashionable dress “clung in fettering folds about her feet,” and she later reflected how years of “dissatisfaction … suddenly ripened into the decision that this shackle should no longer be endured.” 41 Yet Miller’s experience also reflected the undue influence of male reformers: her prominent father, the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, may have unduly influenced her interest in the

36 This particular research includes Quakers under the designation of “utopian community,” with a focus on Brook Farm, Oneida, the Koreshans and Llano Del Rio. Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, “A Feminist Theoretical Approach to the Historical Archaeology of Utopian Communities,” Historical Archaeology 40, no. 1 (2006): 152-185; Fischer, Pantaloons , 38. 37 Henry B. Blackwell, “Dress Reform Convention,” Woman’s Journal , February 20, 1875. 38 Fischer, Pantaloons , 53, 49 and 77. 39 Samuel J. May, “The Rights and Condition of Women,” Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1848-1921 – Rare Book and Special Division, Library of Congress, 1845, 1998, accessed June 12, 2012, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html. 40 See: Morantz, “Making Women Modern,” 490-507; Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 2. 41 Elizabeth Smith Miller, n.d. (Smith Family Papers), in Amy Kesselman, “The ‘’: Feminism and Dress Reform in the United States, 1848-1875,” Gender and Society 5, no. 4 (1991): 497; Elizabeth Smith Miller, “Symposium on Women’s Dress, Part I,” Arena 6, (1892): 490.

94 reformed dress. 42 In 1853, Smith wrote to his cousin Elizabeth Cady Stanton to express his hope that mid-century women’s rights conventions would produce “women whose dress would indicate their translation … from slavery to freedom,” a perspective that could not have been lost on his daughter. 43 Between 1850 and 1851, however, Miller clearly experienced a newfound freedom of movement on account of the reformed dress. When she visited her cousin Elizabeth in Seneca Falls, New York, the pair expressed a “common misery in the toils of crippling fashion,” and Stanton was so impressed with Miller’s ensemble that she quickly adopted similar attire. 44 Stanton expressed delight in the physical freedom the reformed dress enabled. In an 1852 letter to Lucretia Mott, Stanton described woman as “a slave to her rags” who could “never develop in her present drapery.” 45 These reformers could directly compare the restrictions of fashionable dress with the mobility of the reformed dress, and they viewed this as a transition from slavery to freedom. In her 1898 memoir, Stanton recalled how the reformed dress made her feel like “a captive set free from his ball and chain,” further exulting: “What incredible freedom I enjoyed for two years!” 46 Amelia Jenks Bloomer, Stanton’s friend and neighbour, soon appropriated the woman-slave analogy to describe her experience of the reformed dress, too. As the editor of The Lily , Bloomer became the main proponent of the new costume (see Figure 5). Hoping all women would adopt the reformed dress so as to “throw off the burden of clothes that was dragging her life out,” Bloomer later provided her most explicit description in the Ladies Home Journal : It consisted of a skirt shortened to a few inches below the knees, and the substitution of trousers made of the same material as the dress. In other respects the dress was the same as worn by all women. At the outset, the trousers were full and baggy; but we improved upon them by making entirely plain and straight, falling to the shoe like trousers of men. 47 Alongside the new costume, women’s rights reformers continued to inscribe fashionable dress as a form of oppression. As Stanton wrote in The Lily , “‘the drapery’ is quite too much – one might as

42 Robert E. Riegel, “Women’s Clothes and Women’s Rights,” American Quarterly (1963): 394; Roberta J. Park, “‘All the Freedom of the Boy’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Nineteenth-Century Architect of Women’s Rights,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 18, no. 1 (2001): 17-18. 43 Gerrit Smith to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Peterboro, December 1, 1853, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage . Vol. I (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 838, e- book [hereafter HWS ]. 44 Miller, n.d. (Smith Family Papers), in Kesselman, “‘Freedom Suit’,” 497. 45 Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Lucretia Mott, October 22, 1852, in Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds. Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary and reminiscences , Vol.II (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), 44-45, e-book. 46 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 201, e-book. 47 Amelia Bloomer, Ladies Home Journal , in Frances E. Russell, “A Brief Survey of the American Dress Reform Movements of the Past, with Views of Representative Women,” Arena XXXIII (1892): 326-327. See also: Amelia Bloomer, “Short Dresses” and “Our Dress,” Lily , April 1851; “The New Costume,” Lily , May 1851; “Our Fashion Plate,” Lily , January 1852.

95 well work with a ball and chain.” 48 The binary between the restrictions of fashionable dress and the freedom of the reformed dress was constantly reiterated.

Figure 5. “Bloomers.” 49

Not all reform sympathisers supported the need to reform women’s dress. When a reader directed Bloomer’s husband to “‘exercise his authority ’” and prohibit her from wearing the reformed dress, Bloomer condemned such matrimonial “dictation and tyranny” and concluded that a “silken chord is sometimes stronger than an iron chain, and a respectful entreaty has more power than the tyrant’s command.” 50 In this sense, discourses of slavery were mobilised across reform movements in which women were encouraged to consider the power relationships that shaped their experience. Just as rhetoric transcended specific reforms, interconnected attempts toward reforming women’s dress were characteristic of the interrelations between nineteenth-century reform movements more broadly. The health reformers who supported the reformed dress used similar rhetoric, especially in the Water-Cure Journal . Mary Gove Nicholls rejoiced in “all new freedom for women,” believing that fashionable dress was “enthralling and expensive” and rendered women “the pretty slave of man.” 51 Many health reformers were physicians and so demonstrated how this rhetoric flourished even beyond reform movements.52 Anticipating “a day of ‘universal emancipation’ of the sex,” Brooks Gleason, M.D., promoted the reformed dress and exulted at how “glorious would it be to see

48 Stanton, “Our Costume,” Lily , 1851. 49 “‘A Bright Star in the East’,” Lily , July 1851; “Amelia Bloomer,” Lily , September 1851; “Amelia Bloomer, Originator of the New Dress,” Illustrated London News , September 27, 1851, in The Victorian Web , 1851, 2004, accessed August 5, 2012, http://www.victorianweb.org/art/costume/bloomer.html. 50 Bloomer, “Our Dress,” Lily , 1851. 51 Mary Gove Nichols, “The New Costume,” Water-Cure Journal , August 1851, in Cayleff, Wash , 131. 52 See: Susan Shifrin, “‘Fitting In’: The Constraints of Clothing in the Medical Profession, 1850-1918,” Dress 23, no. 1 (1996): 85.

96 every woman free from every fetter that fashion has imposed!” 53 Since discourses of slavery were used to inscribe fashionable dress as a site of women’s oppression, reformers continuously imagined the freedom offered by the reformed dress. Use of the woman-slave analogy gained greater exposure as the reformed dress gained prominence. The New York Tribune and other publications circulated excerpts from The Lily and exchanges between Bloomer and the Seneca County Courier . Initially, the reformed dress was well accepted by the press and public alike; editors offered positive comment and took pride in the way their local women rejected Parisian fashions.54 Yet a growing body of criticism saw commentators on both sides of the debate rely on abstract discourses of slavery to structure their responses. Jane Grey Swisshelm, who rejected the reformed dress, still described the controversy as the “campaign against the bondage of petticoats.” 55 In spite of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s ambivalence toward the reformed dress, he admitted that “our eye is yet in bondage to the old forms” and conceded to “let every woman have a bloomer dress, for the sake of foot excursions.” 56 Importantly, fashion periodicals expressed their opinion largely through silence. Sartain’s Magazine originally referred to the hype merely as a news item, but during September 1851, it drew attention to American women’s attempt “to break the thraldom in which they have been so long held … by the artistes of Paris and London.” 57 The publication of this news item was a significant moment in Sartain’s publication history. 58 Like antifashionists, Sartain’s acknowledged the “thraldom of fashion” without providing an alternative or endorsing the benefits of the reformed dress. The “bloomers” appellation dominated mainstream discourse due to the association with self-display and “immodest ‘blooming’,” but discourses of slavery were equally apparent in labels developed by reformers. 59 Bloomer sought to disassociate herself with the name, but The Lily ’s engraving of her wearing the reformed dress (see Figure 5) was circulated by the Illustrated London News and dubbed “Amelia Bloomer, Originator of the New Dress.” The alternate names developed in reform print culture, in contrast, were inspired by discourses of slavery. A contributor to The Sibyl referenced “the ‘freedom suit’,” because it gave its wearer “freedom of both mind and body[.]” 60 Health and dress reformers referred to the “reform dress,” as well as the “short dress,”

53 Rachel Brooks Gleason, M.D., “The New Costume,” Water-Cure , 1851, in Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (University of North Carolina Press, 1985, 2000), 38. 54 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 40-42 and 62-66. 55 Jane Grey Swisshelm, “The Bloomer Costume,” Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter , in Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 54. 56 Henry Ward Beecher, Star Papers; or, Experiences of Art and Nature (Boston: Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1855), 175 (Google books). See also: Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 38. 57 “The Bloomer Costume,” Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art , September 1853, (Google books). See: Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 62-66 and 76-77. 58 Heidi L. Nichols, The Fashioning of Middle-Class America: Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art and Antebellum Culture (Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2004), 23. 59 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 70. 60 H., “Value of the Reform Dress,” Sibyl , August 15, 1858.

97 the “Turkish dress,” and “the Camille costume.”61 The Lowell Bloomer Institute supported “Costumal Reform,” while a contributor to the Water-Cure Journal recalled how she had “thrown off the bonds of fashionable slavery” to adopt “the full ‘American costume’.” 62 The National Dress Reform Association (NDRA), The Woman’s Journal , and designer Annie Jenness Miller later labelled permutations on the reformed dress the “American Costume” to emphasise its supposedly republican virtues. 63 The latter terminology, though it never gained the same popularity as the “bloomers,” demonstrated the way discourses of slavery permeated myriad reform movements. Antebellum challenges to mainstream fashion emerged across many communities, for different purposes and through different modes of dress. Together, these examples demonstrated the way reformers used abstract discourses of slavery to condemn fashion as one form of women’s oppression among others. Such references to fashion were comparatively innocuous in that they neither directly referred to chattel slavery nor used this reference contentiously, as would become the case throughout the 1850s.

Satire and Sketches As the reformed dress gained prominence, abstract discourses of slavery continued to inform literary and satirical interpretations of fashionable dress. The oversized steel-hooped petticoats of the 1850s inspired humourists because the wiring “tended to make women look like mechanical dolls.” 64 Visually, this produced an alternate imagining of the woman-slave analogy, particularly the epistemological relationship with the idea of a “cage.” Again, the transatlantic exchange in visual and print culture led to greater circulation of this rhetoric. Reform literature used the woman-slave analogy to demonstrate how fashionable dress and domesticity together confined women. Julia Ward Howe’s unpublished manuscript, The Hermaphrodite (c.1840s), emphasised the connection between women’s dress and separate spheres through the character of Laurence, a gender amorphous individual whose parents imbued him with “the name and rights of a man” because it would give their “imperfect” child greater autonomy. This character enabled Howe to emphasise that women were “very naturally glad” to embrace any opportunity “to throw off their chains with their petticoats, and to assume for a time the right to go

61 Kesselman, “The ‘Freedom Suit’,” 497-498; Gayle V. Fischer, “‘Pantalets’ and ‘Turkish Trowsers’: Designing Freedom in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century United States,” Feminist Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 110-140. 62 “The Lowell Bloomer Institute,” Lily , December 1851; Sarah K. Selby, “Dress Reform. A Bloomer to Her Sisters,” Water-Cure , June 1853 (Google books). 63 Carol A. Nickolai, “Decently Dressed: Women’s Fashion and Dress Reform in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations: From Private to Public ed. Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood (New York: Springer, 2013), 223; Patricia Cunningham, “Annie Jenness Miller and Mabel Jenness: Promoters of Physical Culture and Correct Dress,” Dress 16, no. 1 (1990): 49-61. See: “American Costumes Superior to Foreign,” Sibyl , December 1, 1858; Harriet N. Austin, M.D., “Woman’s Dress,” Journal , September 30, 1871; Dress Reform Picnic, 1870, in Cunningham, Reforming , 44-45; Frances R. Russell, “Progress of the Dress Movement,” Journal , January 14, 1893. 64 Wosk, Women and the Machine , 52 and 61.

98 where they please, and the power of doing as they please.” Laurence embarks on a social experiment where he lives as a woman with his friend’s unknowing sisters. For Howe, this illustrates the disjuncture between men’s “luxury of freedom,” in terms of personal autonomy and clothing, and the “bondage” of the “narrow life” experienced by women. In women’s clothing, Laurence feels “encased” in a “complete armour of silk and linen,” and later laments that his experience was “full of uneasiness” and “torture.” Following the experiment, Laurence is only too glad to be “released from the ignominious bondage of petticoats,” and exalts in his ability to expand his diaphragm to a “freedom broader than the lacings of a woman’s bodice.” 65 Throughout this manuscript, Howe used abstract discourses of slavery to describe fashion and domesticity as sites of women’s oppression. The way fashion reinscribed separate spheres became a particular concern of women’s rights reformers. Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s “Woman and Her Needs” series (1851-1851) observed how confinement to the “narrow” private sphere meant that “[woman] grieves and frets in the cage, and the fault is grievous.” 66 Elaine Shefer describes the “bird in the cage” metaphor as “a Victorian construction that served as a physical and metaphysical metaphor for women’s place in society.” 67 This imagery was repeatedly used to represent women’s confinement within the home. In 1853, Paulina Wright Davis highlighted the tensions that arose alongside the ideals of fashion and separate spheres: You tell us that we are angels, but instead of the wings of that pretty bird of paradise, we are handcuffed with golden bracelets, and yoked with necklaces, and are asked to wear these symbols of our slavery as the ornaments of our dependency. 68 When reformers coupled discourses of slavery with the caged bird metaphor, they emphasised how fashion worked to preserve domesticity. Davis acknowledged how “the tyrannic law of fashion” compelled women’s “[abject] submission,” even though she did not support the reformed dress. 69 Visual aesthetics, together with the embodiment of clothing, were used to inscribe fashion as a site of women’s oppression in a way that was inspired by the woman-slave analogy. For satirists, the 1856 development of the “cage crinoline” further encouraged a visual reliance on discourses of slavery. Helene E. Roberts observes how this undergarment “literally transformed women into caged birds surrounded by hoops of steel.” 70 Sometimes called the

65 Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite (University of Nebraska Press, c.1840s, 2004), 29, 130, 136, 147 and 187. See: Stevenson, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’,” 8-9. 66 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “Woman and Her Needs,” New York Tribune , in Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-1893) , 1850- 1851, 2013, accessed April 15, 2013, http://www.neiu.edu/~thscherm/eos/eospage.htm. 67 Elaine Shefer, “The ‘Bird in the Cage’ in the History of Sexuality: Sir John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 3 (1991): 480. See: Elaine Shefer, Birds, Cages and Women in Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Art (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 68 Paulina Wright Davis, “The Moral Character of Woman,” Una , June 1, 1853. 69 Paulina Wright Davis, “Dress, Taste, and Fashion,” Una , April 1854. 70 Helene E. Roberts, “The Exquisite Slave: The Role of Clothes in the Making of the Victorian Woman,” Signs 2, no. 3 (1977): 557.

99 “American cage,” the crinoline was seen as an improvement on the bulk of the numerous starched or flounced petticoats needed to give body to the expansive fashionable skirt. 71 The London-based periodical Punch , circulated widely in the United States, depicted crinolines without overskirts to create the image of a crinoline cage (see Figure 6). 72 An 1862 Punch satire, “Crinoline Ashore and Afloat,” compared crinolines and steamships to emphasise the way corsets encompassed “girls with ribs of steel.” 73 The critique of the crinoline was dominated by the association between discourses of slavery and the cage metaphor.

Figure 6. A Crinoline Cage? 74

Just as the visual significance of the cage crinoline transcended national boundaries, so too did images and rhetorical inscriptions of the reformed dress. Transatlantic audiences were captivated by the reformed dress because of “the titillation caused by crossing the boundary between the sexes,” and satirists derided it in print culture.75 If the parody of the crinoline was somewhat sympathetic, however, the mockery of the reformed dress was characterised by outright

71 Wosk, Women and the Machine , 45-46 and 49; Roberts, “The Exquisite Slave,” 577. Both Julie Wosk and Beverly Gordon use the terminology of “American cage,” but only in their secondary source writings. Wosk, Women and the Machine , 51; Beverly Gordon, “Woman’s Domestic Body: The Conceptual Conflation of Women and Interiors in the Industrial Age,” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 4 (1996): 297. In the English Saturday Review , the crinoline was called an “iron-cage,” while Punch similarly satirised the clothing. Americans also labelled the crinoline the “cage.” See: “Fashions,” Saturday Review , March 29, 1862, 351. 72 For circulation, see: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazine: 1741-1850s (Vols.I-IV, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939-1957); Charles Johanningsmeier, “Welcome Guests or Representatives of the ‘Mal- Odorous Class’?: Periodicals and Their Readers in American Public Libraries, 1876–1914,” Libraries & Culture 39, no. 3 (2004): 274. 73 “Crinoline Ashore and Afloat,” Punch , 42, 1862, in Shu-chuan Yan, “‘Politics and Petticoats’: Fashioning the Nation in Punch Magazine, 1840s-1880s,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 15, no. 3 (2011): 361. 74 Punch , August 1856, in The Fashion Historian , 2010, accessed July 9, 2012, http://www.thefashionhistorian.com/2010_06_01_archive.html. 75 Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 197; Kesselman, “‘Freedom Suit’,” 496. See: Sarah Levitt, “From Mrs Bloomer to the Bloomer: The Social Significance of the Nineteenth-Century English Dress Reform Movement,” Textile History 24, no. 1 (1993): 27-37

100 scorn. The controversy surrounding the reformed dress was not solely because it offered a change in fashion, but because it suggested a radical reimagining of women’s social position in the United States and beyond. In September 1851, Punch united some of these themes in a cartoon, “Bloomerism – An American Custom” (see Figure 7). The Lily , the Belfast News Letter and the Caledonian Mercury , reported upon “bloomer” sightings in London, while the October 1851 London lectures of Mrs. Caroline Dexter, who promoted the reformed dress, appeared in The Evening Post , New York Times and The Liberator .76 Beyond the United States, the visual and actual circulation of the reformed dress generated transatlantic rhetorical connections that, while not directly causal, reiterated the significance of the woman-slave analogy.

Figure 7. “Bloomerism – An American Custom” (1851). 77

These transatlantic discussions observed the way discourses of slavery dominated reform rhetoric in the United States. Visually, this was most apparent an 1851 Punch cartoon entitled “Woman’s Emancipation” (Figure 8). This image depicted women wearing a variety of reformed dresses and standing in “men’s” poses. Like “Bloomerism – An American Custom,” these women were smoking and freely chatting in a manner unbefitting of respectable women. It also cast class- related aspersions on the women wearing the reformed dress. The shadowy figure in the background, holding a whip, suggests that the scene takes place in a disrespectable location, while the bulldog in the foreground was a metaphor closely associated with bull-baiting and the bullring during the early nineteenth century. 78 The reformed dress, therefore, was seen to cross the

76 Stieve De Lance, “When Bloomerism Went Down Under: Caroline Dexter’s Bloomer Costume in Victorian England and Introduction to Colonial Australia,” Academia.com , n.d., accessed March 3, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/5053997/Caroline_ Dexter_Bloomerism_in_England_and_its _introduction_to_Australia. See: The Evening Post , October 15, 1851; New York Times , October 17, 1851; Liberator , November 1, in Newspapers.com , 2014, accessed March 4, 2014, www.newspapers.com. 77 Punch , September 27, 1851, in Victorian Era Cartoons , 2012, accessed June 30, 2012, http://punch.photoshelter.com. 78 Harriet Ritvo, “Pride and Pedigree: The Evolution of the Victorian Dog Fancy, Victorian Studies (1986): 227-253.

101 boundaries of gender and class. Collectively, these satirical images produced a catastrophic vision of gender inversion which hinged on bifurcated garments.

Figure 8. “Woman’s Emancipation” (1851). 79

A reprint of “Woman’s Emancipation” also appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine . This was accompanied by a satirical article authored by the fictional “Theodosia E. Bang, M.A.” The accompanying text ridiculed the image (framed as a cartoon from a fictional periodical, the “Free Woman’s Banner ”) as well as American women’s rights rhetoric: We are emancipating ourselves, among other badges of the slavery of feudalism, from the inconvenient dress of the European female. With man’s functions, we have asserted our right to his garb, and especially to that part of it which invests the lower extremities. … [I]t is generally calculated that the dress of the Emancipated American female is quite pretty – as becoming in all points as it is manly and independent. 80 This satire reproduced the discourses of slavery that had become central to American reformers, particularly women’s rights and dress reformers. When Harper’s New Monthly Magazine satirically delineated slavery, freedom and emancipation, it specifically echoed the rhetoric of American reformers. Not only did this establish the degree to which an awareness of the woman- slave analogy shaped transatlantic interpretations of American social movements, but it also validated the significance of such rhetoric for American reform conceptions of fashion and dress reform.

79 Punch , 1851. Reprint: “Woman’s Emancipation,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , August 1851, in Project Gutenberg , 2012, accessed September 31, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38409/38409-h/38409-h.htm 80 Theodosia E. Bang, “Woman’s Emancipation (Being a Letter Addressed to Mr. Punch with a drawing by a strong- minded American woman),” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine , August 1851, in Project Gutenberg , 2012, accessed September 31, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38409/38409-h/38409-h.htm.

102 At midcentury, the visual and rhetorical discussion of women’s dress was based around the woman-slave analogy. The metaphor of the “cage” was used to critique marriage, domesticity and fashion alike, while transatlantic discussion of the reformed dress belied just how prominent this rhetoric had become. Competing attitudes toward the reformed dress soon emerged amongst American reformers of various persuasions, but discourses of slavery continued to shape bipartisan discussions of fashion and dress reform.

Rhetorical Persistence When reformers became divided over the reformed dress during the 1850s, the woman-slave analogy remained important to both sides of the debate. Women’s rights reformers became increasingly dedicated to legal and political reform, but the growing dress reform movement was, in contrast, dedicated to that cause alone. Many women’s rights reformers continued to support dress reform ideals and were cautious of the intensifying negativity surrounding the reformed dress, but they were equally wary of its impact on other facets of the movement. “Had I counted the cost of the short dress, I would never have put it on,” Stanton wrote to Miller in 1851, but then vowed to “never take it off, for now it involves a principle of freedom.” 81 The women reformers who experienced personal controversy over the reformed dress repeatedly justified their choices – to themselves and others – through discourses of slavery. As Bloomer observed, “the blessings of freedom” should ensure women would not have to “rivet the chains upon ourself again,” even “to avoid the frowns of slavish conservatives.” 82 These reformers “‘made the personal political,’ taking pantaloons reform dress out of private homes and into the muddy streets”; in so doing, they drew inadvertent associations between women and political issues in a way that constructed the image of woman as a public speaker. 83 Still, the reformed dress created contention because audiences tended to fixate on the clothing women reformers wore rather than on their arguments. 84 Mainstream newspapers habitually commented on the pretty fashionable dress of women reformers, but the vulgar associations established in the transatlantic satire associated of the reformed dress were more difficult to counter. The psychological force of mainstream criticism compelled Stanton to lead the slow but steady abandonment of the reformed dress across the 1850s. 85 In spite of her earlier proclamations, by 1854, Stanton no longer saw the freedom it engendered as, in fact, freeing. When Lucy Stone first adopted the reformed dress, she became “a fashion rage” and particularly captured the attention

81 Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Elizabeth Smith Miller, June 4, 1851, in Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 72. 82 Bloomer, “Our Fashion Plate,” Lily , 1852. 83 Fischer, Pantaloons , 79; Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 37. 84 Fischer, Pantaloons , 105. 85 Riegel, “Women’s Clothes,” 394; Fischer, “Designing Freedom,” 127-128.

103 of the press. 86 Stone, together with Elizabeth Smith Miller and Susan B. Anthony, remained steadfast much longer than other women’s rights reformers, but when she finally abandoned it she agonised over the inherent principle in a letter to Anthony. “Women are in bondage,” Stone proclaimed, yet she questioned whether reformers “should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?” 87 Anthony, too, was conflicted about returning to what Stanton described as “the tyranny of fashion,” but Stanton consoled them both: “We put it on for greater freedom, but what is physical freedom compared with mental bondage?” 88 Not only did these women envisage their clothing through discourses of slavery, but this philosophical dilemma informed their interpretation and experience of the intersection between gender and other forms of oppression. The official dress reform movement developed as prominent women’s rights reformers abandoned the reformed dress. Although the woman-slave analogy remained central to their fashion critique, it was often used to different ends. Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck’s The Sibyl became the official newsletter of the National Dress Reform Association (NDRA), established by Dr. Jackson in 1856. Organised dress reform aimed to individually empower women to abandon the constraints of fashion if they chose, but it was more simply than a movement toward fashion change. It attacked the way this fundamental social structure acted as a signifier of gender and class. 89 Ironically, Hasbrouck ensured The Sibyl ’s comparative longevity by “clubbing” it with popular fashion magazines such as Godey’s and Peterson’s .90 This again exposed new audiences to the meaning of the woman-slave analogy and the benefits of the reformed dress, because Hasbrouck scathingly criticised those reformers who abandoned it.91 In 1856, Hasbrouck challenged The Sibyl ’s readers to “arise to a more enlarged freedom,” lest demands were made “upon others to unshackle you, while you fold your robes supinely around you, uttering complaints, yet riveting your own bonds more closely?” 92 When dress reformers used the woman-slave analogy, it was mobilised to position fashion as the primary cause of women’s oppression. 93 The Sibyl ’s readers demonstrated a deep awareness of the woman-slave analogy. The rhetoric of prominent reformers influenced the way contributors to reform periodicals interpreted fashion,

86 Joelle Million, Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 113-114. 87 Lucy Stone to Susan B. Anthony, 1854, in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years , Vol.I (Indianapolis: The Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898), 116, e-book. 88 Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone, 1854, in Harper, Life and Work , 115. 89 Kathleen M. Torrens, “All Dressed Up with No Place to Go: Rhetorical Dimensions of the Nineteenth Century Dress Reform Movement,” Women’s Studies in Communication 20, no. 2 (1997): 189-190. 90 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 58. 91 See: Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, “Lucy Stone’s Position,” Sibyl , April 15, 1859; “The Reform Dress: Lucy Stone, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton,” Sibyl , January 1, 1857. 92 Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, Sibyl , August 1856, in Torrens, “All Dressed Up,” 195. 93 Stevenson, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’,” 14-15.

104 together with the other social and political disabilities faced by women. But the embodied experience of fashion led contributors to repeatedly characterise fashionable dress as a “badge of servility and degradation.” 94 In contrast to antifashionists, who used discourses of slavery to shape their tempered fashion critique, dress reformers used this rhetoric to describe the need for a viable fashion alternative. “Ladies who in hoops are bound,” an 1857 parody pointedly declared, were encouraged to reform their dresses: Now’s the day, and now’s the hour, Would you crush the Tyrant’s power, And be free forevermore, From chains and slavery? Still may those who dare to be From all hoops and fetters free, Let the tyrant Fashion see That they dare her frown. Sisters, if you wish to find, Health and joy, and peace of mind, Bow no more at Fashion’s shrine – Nature’s laws obey. By your weak and suffering frames, By your children’s woes and pains, Swear you’ll break the tyrant’s chains, That you will be free. 95 This parody echoed Hasbrouck’s earlier challenge for women not to succumb to “the trail, and cords, and stripes of fashion’s domain,” but to instead gain “a rising above fashion’s thraldom[.]” 96 The Sibyl was a site of rhetorical exchange between contributors and prominent reformers, whose understanding of the woman-slave analogy had long shaped their perspectives toward different types of oppression. The growing ideological differences between the politically-oriented women’s rights reformers and the fashion-centred dress reformers emerged in arguments couched in similar rhetoric at the Dress Reform Convention of 1857. Those women’s rights reformers who had abandoned the reformed dress continued to frame the need for dress reform through abstract discourses of slavery. Stone saw woman’s “miserable style of dress” as “a consequence of her present vassalage, not its cause,” but believed the acquisition of rights would enable women to “dictate the style of her dress.” 97 In contrast, dress reformers used this rhetoric to emphasise fashion’s central role in women’s oppression. Louisa Humphrey provided historical context for women’s “servile and dependent position” in the family. Fashion may be “the real cause of her bondage,” but Humphrey

94 S.H., “Thoughts on Mrs. Weld’s Letter,” Sibyl , November 1, 1857. See: Stevenson, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’,” 5- 20. 95 “Parody,” Sibyl , March 1857. 96 Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, Sibyl , August 1856, in Torrens, “All Dressed Up,” 193. 97 Lucy Stone, “Letters Read at the Convention,” Sibyl , July 1 1857.

105 still acknowledged the other social and familial oppressions experienced by women. 98 By 1860, however, the NDRA promoted a more catholic interpretation in a resolution stating that woman could never expect “to be recognised the equal of man, until she emancipates herself from a dress which is both cause and the sign of her vassalage.”99 These exchanges demonstrated the process whereby discourses of slavery retained their rhetorical significance and shaped intersecting discussions for competing reform factions. Since the reformed dress was derided beyond reform circles, reformers also interpreted this exclusion through discourses of slavery. It continued to gain some acceptance at health reform establishments. The “reform ambience” of water cure establishments, especially hydrotherapist Dr. James C. Jackson’s Dansville Water Cure, “made them havens for dress reform.” 100 In contrast, one devotee wrote to The Circular , the Oneida community’s newspaper, reporting that those women who continued to wear the reformed dress were “quite imprisoned” in the city. 101 These enclaves represented the vestiges of antebellum dress reform, even though some working class and frontier women persisted with the reformed dress, particularly during frontier travel following the Civil War. 102 Together, the complementary and competing use of the woman-slave analogy amongst antebellum reformers represented its wide rhetorical import. Where women’s rights reformers used discourses of slavery to frame fashion as one of many forms of oppression, dress reformers used this rhetoric to emphasise the effects of fashion. As the reformed dress became increasingly isolated, however, the coming of the Civil War influenced dress reformers’ rhetoric in increasingly problematic ways.

Civil War Overtures The antebellum fashion critique of antifashionists and reformers alike did not emphasise a comparison between fashion and chattel slavery. In the heightened political climate of the 1850s, however, an increasing focus on the peculiar institution and transpired. The media prominence and journalistic sensationalism surrounding the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and subsequent “free soil” struggles, together with the political rhetoric of “” and “bleeding Kansas,” can be seen as hastening the coming of the Civil War. 103 These political developments profoundly influenced the transformation of dress reform rhetoric throughout the 1850s.

98 Louisa Humphrey, “Letters Read at the Convention,” Sibyl , July 1, 1857. 99 “National Dress Reform Association,” Sibyl , June 15, 1860, in Fischer, Pantaloons , 122. 100 Cayleff, Wash , 130; Crane, Fashion , 120. 101 “A Word for the Short Dress ,” Circular , March 4, 1867, 404, in Fischer, Pantaloons , 112. 102 Brenda M. Brandt, “Arizona Clothing: A Frontier Perspective,” Dress 15, no. 1 (1989): 71; Sally Helvenston, “Fashion on the Frontier,” Dress 17, no. 1 (1990): 141-155. 103 Craig Miner, Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1845–1858 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008).

106 The earlier antebellum fashion critique dominated by abstract engagement with discourses of slavery gave way to more direct allusions to chattel slavery among dress reformers during the 1850s. An 1854 contributor to The Lily viewed “the petty despotism in which society holds woman” as most “ridiculously apparent” in the opposition to any change in fashion, and this led her to conclude, “it would be difficult to say in what particular her condition differs, either legally or socially, from the Southern slave!” 104 As a reform periodical, The Sibyl belied a real commitment to antislavery, but because it saw dress reform as equally important, it positioned women’s oppression as literally and ideologically analogous to that of the southern slave. The reports of John Brown’s raids and “bleeding Kansas” impelled The Sibyl to ever more “militant” rhetoric, which appeared side by side with dress reform articles. 105 Not all direct analogies with chattel slavery were made in a way that was oblivious to the exploitation of the enslaved, but the dress reform rhetoric of the late 1850s was particularly insular. Overt dress reform allusions to chattel slavery occasioned greater “insensitivity to the plight of enslaved African Americans in the South, as the NDRA opportunistically compared the ‘negro slavery crisis’ to women’s ‘slavery’ to fashion.”106 Since dress reformers considered such rhetoric to be effective, they were prone to elaborate and exaggerated assertions. “Slavery to fashion is one of the meanest, most grinding and debasing of bonds,” a contributor to The Sibyl protested as they decried the struggles of dress reformers in comparison to the success of antislavery and temperance. 107 When Hasbrouck discussed “ Northern White Slaves ,” she blurred the limits of the woman-slave analogy by bringing together multiple rhetorical impulses – fashion, labour, white slavery, chattel slavery, 1850s politics, and women’s oppression. 108 The attempt to delineate so many forms of oppression distorted the meaning of slavery so as to enable a more complete conflation between white women’s oppression and chattel slavery. The influence of 1850s politics was most apparent in a letter by Dr. F.R. Harris, which featured as The Sibyl ’s cover story for January 1859. 109 This article was prefaced and framed by a couplet: “‘The fetters have fallen, the woman is free .’” Since Harris claimed to “[detest] slavery in all its forms, whether moral, social, or physical,” the attempted an intersectional awareness between fashion and other forms of oppressions. Harris chronicled how she “struggled long” with the “galling fetter” of fashionable dress, but when the “last fetter” was “broken” she felt “free and happy” in her reformed dress. This experience was described through three analogies – an eagle, a prisoner, and a slave. Harris expressed feelings of joy: “the caged eagle … [that] burst the bars of

104 S.L. Brown, “Dress,” Lily , August 1854. 105 Stevenson, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’,” 16. 106 Fischer, Pantaloons , 123. 107 X., “Thoughts on Dress Reform,” Sibyl , May 15, 1858. 108 Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, “Revolvers – Gov. Wise – Northern White Slaves,” Sibyl , December 15, 1859. 109 Dr. F.R. Harris, “The Wanderer Returned,” Sibyl , January 15, 1859.

107 his unnatural prison … for freedom’s flight”; “the prisoner just released from … the captive’s cell”; and “the ransomed slave just … breathing freedom’s atmosphere.” Since Harris was concerned that she could again succumb to fashion, she inverted these analogies to ask if: “the caged eagle … voluntarily return[ed to] … his cage again?”; “the prisoner … crave[d] an asylum again within the prison walls?”; and “the southern slave … [sought] a master’s protection[?]” This self-reflexive reasoning used discourses of slavery to communicate the personal experience of fashion, but in so doing, it defied comparison with the social death of chattel slavery. A metaphor for the dehumanising effects of chattel slavery, historians discuss the effective social death the institution necessitated.110 If fashion was restrictive, it was nonetheless a meaningful personal experience which enabled the social assertion of personal identity. Unlike the enslaved, Harris gloried in a sense of “release” from her “long-loathed fetters” because she had some ability to choose her own destiny. Harris “abjure[d] the tyrant sway of fashion,” so she vowed to never “voluntarily submit” to such “servile submission” again. Consequently, the metaphor of slavery’s social death identified the limits of an analogy between fashion and slavery. The conclusion to Harris’ article again emphasised the distance between fashion and chattel slavery. In fact, she reiterated her understanding of how fashion interacted with other reform imperatives: “‘pecuniary dependence’ … will tell my tale, and that of many another slave[.]” 111 This rhetoric expressed the extent of Harris’ self-identification with the enslaved at the same time as it belied the distance between social reform efforts and the actual peculiar institution. Yet the process of self-identifying with chattel slaves was not uniform. It sometimes resulted in a general sense of disempowerment amongst dress reformers. At the 1857 Dress Reform Convention, Humphrey suggested that “woman forges the chains that bind her body, and rivets the shackles that fetter her limbs.” 112 This presented a divisive view of fashionable dress for those who chose it. At the same time, dress reformers could inadvertently undermine the empowerment gained through determining one’s mode of dress by passing the blame for women’s purported enslavement. The NDRA viewed physical and political empowerment as consonant, so freeing women’s bodies enabled a “physical vitality” thought to divert attention away from the individual and toward political issues. 113 Yet Harris, like other dress reformers, denounced those who embraced fashionable dress as analogous to “the prisoner fettered by chains of his own forging!” 114

110 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” The American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1233-1234; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 52-69. Thanks to Professor Julie Husband for suggesting this useful conceptual link. 111 Harris, “The Wanderer Returned,” Sibyl , 1859. 112 Humphrey, “Letters Read,” Sibyl , 1857. 113 Fischer, Pantaloons , 123. 114 Harris, “Wanderer Returned,” Sibyl , 1859.

108 The woman-slave analogy inspired women to experience the freedom of the reformed dress, but it could also be used to imply that fashion controlled women. A growing rhetorical focus on chattel slavery thus created ambiguity within antebellum dress reform. Women were encouraged to reform their dress, but should their personal discipline fail, they were seen as responsible for their own oppression. 115 In 1856, The Sibyl not only criticised “men for oppressing women,” but equally condemned “women for consenting to be oppressed.” 116 Passing the culpability for enslavement was not a new phenomenon. François Furstenburg observes that the revolutionary era focus on individualism, together with the rhetoric of liberty versus tyranny, implied that those unable to maintain their freedom were deserving of slavery. Alongside the emergence of racial slavery and the pseudo-science of racial hierarchy, this ideology was particularly insidious.117 Further reinforced by the paternalism of proslavery ideology, even non-violent abolitionists praised slave insurrections because they supposedly proved that the enslaved resisted their condition. 118 The process of blaming women for fashionable dress contributed to the gendered power differentials of dress reform, while the rhetorical focus on chattel slavery reinscribed racial hierarchy. As the rhetorical focus on chattel slavery grew, African American women used discourses of slavery in a revealing response to dress reform. Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper distanced themselves from the reformed dress because they were interested in the image fashion conveyed, but approached fashion from the perspective of practicality. Still, their interpretation often used similar rhetoric in a way that juxtaposed white reform critiques of fashionable dress.119 In spite of Truth and Tubman’s illiteracy, Jacqueline Jones Royster suggests it to be likely that they understood “literacy as emanating from lived experience.”120 These African American reformers challenged the way white reformers employed the woman-slave analogy even as they appropriated discourses of slavery to inscribe fashion with new meanings. Antebellum attempts to render dress reform respectable existed alongside African American women’s struggle for mainstream social acceptance, a process which often necessitated adherence to the cult of true womanhood and fashionable dress. 121 Yet if Truth had “Bloomers enough … in bondage,” she did not wholly refute the intersection between fashion and chattel slavery.122 For Truth, fashion’s power to inscribe social control was more problematic for the enslaved than for

115 Fischer, Pantaloons , 120-123. 116 Sibyl , September 1, 1856. 117 François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1302-1303 and 1310-1311. 118 See: John R. McKivigan, and Stanley Harrold, Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999). 119 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 110; Stevenson, “‘Symbols of Our Slavery’,” 17. 120 Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 45. 121 Shirley Wilson Logan, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 112. 122 Sojourner Truth, in Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl,” Atlantic Monthly , XI, April 1863.

109 free women. Truth and Harper, according to Pamela E. Klassen, drew on the Quaker concept of Holiness in their dress. As previously discussed, however, women’s Quaker dress was in itself mildly transgressive. Still, Harper viewed fashion as representative of “a woman’s virtue in a world suspicious of women who spoke in public.” 123 Tubman, in contrast, viewed the reformed dress as “physically liberating” – though not in public. 124 Fashionable dress was inconvenient and dangerous during Tubman’s missions to rescue slaves from beyond Union lines. In 1863, Tubman resolved “never [to] wear a long dress on another expedition of the kind,” but to obtain “a bloomer as soon as I could get it.” 125 As she led others to freedom, Tubman praised the utility and mobility of the reformed dress. In spite of Truth and Tubman’s illiteracy, it is likely that they understood “literacy as emanating from lived experience.”126 Therefore, iterations upon discourses of slavery emerged even amongst those African Americans who questioned the premise of dress reform as a movement. The political developments of the Civil War era further shaped dress reform rhetoric. During the 1850s, white and black reformers came to realise that it was unrealistic to completely reform women’s dress, and a subtle shift to a focus on undergarments ensued.127 Subsequently, dress reform philosophies influenced the use of lightweight textiles, while the rejection of constrictive underwear created rich marketing and publicity opportunities.128 Where proponents of the reformed dress focused on its capacity to give women freedom, the rhetoric surrounding these new undergarments inverted the way the woman-slave analogy was mobilised in reference to fashionable dress. One of the first new lightweight reform varieties, the “emancipation union under flannel,” often known as the “combination,” emerged during 1868. By 1875, Susan Taylor Converse designed an improved version, the “Emancipation Suit,” while another corset alternative was called the “Emancipation Waist” (see Figure 9). These appellations were linked to the cultural currency of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Reconstruction Amendments. Ultimately, the success of “rational” fashion was predicated on its ability to release women from fashion’s restrictions in a concealed manner. 129 Its name played no small part in this process. The discourses of slavery used to describe reformed undergarments conceptualised women’s emancipation, rather than their oppression, in a way that did not receive mainstream critique.

123 Pamela E. Klassen, “The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century,” Religion and American Culture 14, no. 1 (2004): 45. 124 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 110. 125 Harriet Tubman, June 30, 1863, in Michelle Diane Wright, ed. Broken Utterances: A Selected Anthology of Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Social Thought (Three Sistahs Press, LLC, 2007), 90. 126 Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 45. 127 Warner, “Fashion,” 25; Cunningham, Reforming, Chapter Three: “The Invisibles: Hygienic Underwear, ‘Dress Systems,’ and Making Fashion Rational.” 128 Breward, Culture of Fashion , 156. 129 Cunningham, Reforming , 75-76.

110 Figure 9. Emancipation Suits. 130

Following the Civil War, there was still a tendency to place the onus on women to change their own fashion. This was still sometimes accomplished through direct references to chattel slavery. “Woman’s ‘subjection’ in dress is very galling and degrading,” Faith Rochester lamented in 1873. A dubious analogy between “happy slaves in the South” and women of “easy circumstances” who could “dress in fashion or not, just as suits their fancy,” was used to conclude that women themselves were “the tyrants who hold ourselves (individually) in subjection.” 131 As will be discussed in Chapter Six, this rhetoric reflected a broader transformation in the application of the woman-slave analogy, where explicit references to chattel slavery were used to affect a more complete focus on white women’s oppression. The dress reform rhetoric of the Civil War era reflected the heightened national consciousness surrounding the sectional issue of chattel slavery. This rhetoric also revealed that the dress reform movement, unlike the antebellum antislavery and women’s rights movements, was primarily concerned with the experience of white women. As the urgency of the Civil War slowly receded

130 Warner, “Fashion,” 24-29; “Dress Reform,” Journal , March 25, 1876. 131 Faith Rochester, “The Dress Question,” Journal , June 28, 1873

111 from popular memory, specific comparisons between fashion and chattel slavery again became less frequent. Dress reformers increasingly courted an intersectional understanding of women’s oppression, but in the postbellum era, this did not often extend to issues of race.

A Broad Church With the demise of the NDRA in 1864, the antebellum dress reform movement receded following the Civil War. The ongoing discussion of alternatives to fashionable dress continued to be premised on the woman-slave analogy in a way that distanced itself from allusions to chattel slavery. Postbellum fashion critique returned to the abstract discourses of slavery that dominated among early-nineteenth-century antifashionists and reformers, but this was coupled with a growing focus on the way fashion was one among many forms of women’s oppressions. This at once demonstrated the connections between postbellum reform movements, a growing awareness of intersectionality, and the continued importance of the woman-slave analogy. During the late 1860s, Stanton and Anthony’s The Revolution expressed a tangential concern with fashion, even though its organisational affiliate, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), avoided the issue of dress reform. 132 The Revolution ’s proprietor, George Francis Train, encouraged women to “break the bondage of fashion” at the same time as emphasising the primacy of women’s suffrage. Yet, in blaming women for their own oppression, he also implied that an intrinsic antipathy existed between them: “Did woman, in order to debase woman, invent the badge of slavery which she takes pride in wearing?” 133 These discussions did not necessarily encompass an acceptance toward any style of reformed dress. When the editor of the Tribune asked The Revolution to respond to a question – “What is to be the costume of the emancipated woman?” – their reply denigrated dress reform and expressed annoyance. 134 According to Jennifer Ladd Nelson, the rise and fall of the antebellum reformed dress rendered the dress reform message no longer radical. 135 If the idea of dress reform was less radical by the postbellum era, the prevalence of the woman-slave analogy had normalised a form of fashion critique which viewed women as “voluntarily bound hand and foot, soul and body, with her galling chains.” 136 In spite of the differences between women’s suffragists (which will be considered in Chapter Four), the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) expressed ongoing concerns about

132 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 120; Lana F. Rakow and Cheris Kramarae, eds. The Revolution in Words: Righting Women, 1868-1871 (London: Routledge, 1990), 140. 133 “Letter from George Francis Train,” Revolution , November 19, 1868. For the misogynistic discourse of women hating women, see: Alana Jayne Piper, “In Bad Company: Female Criminal Subcultures in Brisbane and Melbourne, 1860-1920” (PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2014), Chapter One:” The Imagined Realm: Danger and Discord,” 23-54. 134 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 120. See also: “Costume,” Revolution , 1869, in Revolution in Words , 155. 135 Jennifer Ladd Nelson, “Dress Reform and the Bloomer,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23, no. 1 (2000): 24. 136 Mrs. M. Stephenson Organ, M.D., “Grace Greenwood and Dress Reform,” Revolution , March 11, 1869.

112 fashion through intrinsically similar rhetoric. The affiliated New England Women’s Club (NEWC), formed in 1868 by Julia Ward Howe, endorsed and promoted the aforementioned undergarments. Advertisements for reform-related underwear were found in popular and reform publications, from the Ladies Home Journal to The Woman’s Journal . Rational fashion was dubious because of the degree to which the rhetoric of emancipation was appropriated whether or not the garment warranted the appellation (see Figure 10).137 In 1873, the NEWC invited Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, the famous author and reformer, to speak on the subject of “What to Wear?” Phelps’ vision of dress reform was largely non-radical because it emanated from her Christianity and moderate women’s rights activism. 138 Yet Phelps, too, predicated her supposedly non-radical dress reform rhetoric on abstract discourses of slavery. She argued that women were robust, perhaps even more so than men, “or we should have sunk in our shackles long ago.” Denouncing the popular “wasp waist,” which “[im]prisoned [the] vital organs … it binds,” Phelps proclaimed “Off with the corsets!”: No, don’t give them to Biddy. Never fasten about another woman, in the sacred name of charity, the chains from which you have yourself escaped. ... Make a bonfire of the cruel steel that has lorded it over [your body] … [for] so many thoughtless years, and heave a sigh of relief; for your “emancipation” … has from this moment begun. 139 Indeed, working-class women, like middle-class women, wore corsets that were sometimes acquired as cast offs from their employers. 140 In spite of the nativism Phelps exhibited, which was indeed characteristic of the broader women’s rights movement, she nonetheless sought to proclaim the sisterhood of all women when it came to combatting the oppression engendered by fashion.

Figure 10. “‘Good Sense’ Corset Waists” (1886). 141

137 Warner, “Fashion,” 26. 138 Roxanne Harde, “‘One-Hundred-Hours’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ Dress Reform Writing,” in Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature , ed. Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson (New York: Cambria Press, 2007), 168-169. 139 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, What to Wear? (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873, 2001), 18-19, 66 and 78-79, e-book. Regarding the “wasp waist,” see: Hannah Aspinal, “The Fetishisation and Objectification of the Female Body in Victorian Culture,” brightONLINE: Online Journal of Literary Criticism , no. 2 (2012). 140 Summers, “Yes, They Did,” 65 and 67. 141 Ladies Home Journal , March 1886.

113 This new generation of comparatively conservative dress reformers used abstract discourses of slavery in a way that framed fashion as one of many oppressions experienced by women. The NEWC’s Dress Reform Committee inadvertently perpetuated the rhetoric established by Phelps in a lecture series organised by Abba Goold Woolson, and later documented in Dress-Reform (1874).142 Woolson, together with four female physicians, discussed fashion and the need for dress reform by using discourses of slavery that alluded to various oppressions from a transatlantic perspective. Mary J. Safford-Blake, M.D. complained that society continued to hold women “in immovable bondage”; the “thumb-screws of the inquisition” were less harmful than the corset’s “firm plates of metal” between which women were “cruelly pressed … so snugly that an impression of her fetters is indented into the flesh.” 143 This corporeal emphasis on fashion did not directly reference chattel slavery, but the allusion to the Spanish Inquisition was similarly opportunistic. Women’s dress, according to Mercy B. Jackson, M.D., had “become a terrible tyrant” which subjected body and mind to its “tormenting control[.]” 144 Woolson herself returned to the hypothetical gendered dress inversion with which Howe experimented during the antebellum era. If men and women were required to exchange dress for a day, Woolson suggested, men would celebrate “their escape from the strange bondage[,] … while the wailing of the women at their return to the old fetters would be heart-rending to hear.” 145 These reformers used discourses of slavery to suggest that anyone could become oppressed if their physical mobility was impeded by fashionable dress. Just as the rhetoric of prominent reformers inspired the readers of The Sibyl , discourses of slavery similarly informed contributors to the AWSA’s official newspaper, The Woman’s Journal . This newspaper featured reports from the American Free Dress League and the National Dress Reform Association, and its readers expressed much pleasure in dress reform discussions.146 In 1873, a contributor praised the Journal for creating a “fellowship” of women to combat “slavery to the demands of fashion,” even though she still despaired “the extent of their slavery to fashion.” 147 Many women were still reluctant to publicly don any type of reformed dress. Yet some were open to experimenting with “hygienic dress,” which visually recalled the earlier emancipation suits (see Figure 11). 148 As the AWSA’s primary focus was women’s suffrage, fashion was often linked to back women’s disenfranchisement. This was epitomised by articles such as Henry B. Blackwell’s

142 Warner, “Fashion,” 26; Abba Gould Woolson, Dress-Reform; a Series of Lectures Delivered in Boston, on Dress as It Affects the Health of Women (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874, 2001), e-book. 143 Mary J. Safford-Blake, M.D., in Dress-Reform , 20 and 23. 144 Mercy B. Jackson, M.D., in Dress-Reform , 70-71. 145 Woolson, Dress-Reform , 171-172. 146 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 123. 147 C.M.S., “Dress Reform and Moral Reform,” Journal , May 31, 1873. 148 For reluctance, see: Lucia E. Bloust, “Dress Reform,” Journal , February 22, 1873; M.H. McKee, “A Comfortable Dress Reformer,” Journal , March 22, 1873; C.M.S., “Dress Reform,” Journal , 1873; Sophia L.O. Allen, “The Significance of Dress Reform,” Journal , February 6, 1875. For patterns, see: Martha Williams, M.D., “Hygienic Dress,” Journal , February 1, 1973; “Hygienic Dress,” Journal , March 4, 1873.

114 “Suffrage or Servitude.”149 These articles repeatedly implied that if one form of oppression is rectified, the others would soon follow and women would experience freedom. The Journal also featured controversial articles that actively supported a transformation in women’s dress: “Trousers for Girls” (1873); ’s “Why Do Women Not Reform Their Dress” (1886); and “Radical Dress Reform” (1886). 150 More explicitly titled articles centred upon discourses of slavery: Stephen Foster’s “Resistance to Tyrants” (1873); “Are Women Enslaved to Dress?” (1884); and “Dress Emancipation” (1893). 151 The similarities between these articles and the dress reform rhetoric in the NWSA’s Revolution challenge the apparent conservatism of the AWSA. This is tempered only by the scholarly consensus that postbellum dress reform had become non-radical, in spite of its focus on discourses of slavery.

Figure 11. “Hygienic Under Garments.” 152

Although the postbellum discussion of fashion was fragmented amongst many different reform movements, it still maintained rhetorically continuity. In contrast to antebellum dress reform, postbellum dress reform necessarily interacted with other reforms because it was no longer a discrete movement. Indeed, the radical free love publication Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly was

149 Henry B. Blackwell, “Suffrage or Servitude,” Journal , August 16, 1873; D.D., “‘Female Suffrage and Clothes’,” Journal , July 1, 1871; G.B.K., “The Waist,” Journal , January 25, 1873. 150 “Trousers for Girls,” Journal , August 23, 1873; Charlotte Perkins Stetson (later Gilman), “Why Do Women Not Reform Their Dress,” Journal , October 23, 1886; Celia B. Whitehead, “Radical Dress Reform,” Journal , December 18, 1886. 151 S.S. Foster, “Resistance to Tyrants,” Journal , June 21, 1873; Celia B. Whitehead, “Are Women Enslaved to Dress?” Journal , May 24, 1884; Alida C. Avery, reply by Frances E. Russell, “Dress Emancipation,” Journal , October 21, 1893. 152 “Hygienic Under Garments,” Journal , October 20, 1877.

115 strongly aligned with the principles of dress reform. A contributor described fashion as “the badge of her servitude,” but more specifically, a “natural outgrowth of the harem, of social and political inequality, of marriage, customs, and laws, which give woman to man”; upon “release from that servitude” women would create “a costume which shall fitly express her free womanhood.” 153 The Weekly emphasised how fashionable dress inhibited economic independence in an article entitled “Fashion vs. Freedom,” and featured reports from the Anti-Fashion Convention. 154 Other women’s suffrage periodicals similarly connected fashion to broader reform imperatives. Abigail Scott Duniway, who worked in millinery and dressmaking prior to becoming a reformer, condemned current fashions in her west coast suffrage publication, The New Northwest .155 “A trailing dress is an emblem of degradation,” and this demonstrated “dependence and incompetence” as well as women’s “frailty and subjugation.” 156 Increasingly, fashion was positioned as another example of women’s oppression amongst many forms of oppression. In the process, “slavery to custom” emerged as a phrase used to explain interdependent forms of oppression. The “the tyranny of fashion over women,” a contributor to The Woman’s Journal argued, represented a broader problem wherein society placed both sexes were “under a kind of thraldom” – the concept of “slavery to custom,” then, affected all. 157 “Our Girls,” Stanton’s important 1880s lyceum circuit lecture, also coveted this perspective. 158 “Custom,” Stanton affirmed alongside frequent references to fashion, “has made the girl the slave, and subject womanhood perpetuates the custom.” 159 This reiterated the ongoing method wherein many reformers used slavery as a broader euphemism for oppression, and thus a fledgling expression of intersectionality. In the wake of the Civil War, the woman-slave analogy was used to critique of fashionable dress in a way that structured the reconsideration of dress reform across multiple reform movements. Many reformers engaged with abstract iterations of this rhetoric, alluding to other forms of oppression as a point of comparison rather than solely looking toward chattel slavery to describe fashion’s demands and effects. In the process, race was barely a point of discussion. It becomes clear that even if dress reform itself had become less radical, those who continued to express concern about fashion used the radical dialogue of the woman-slave analogy to do so.

153 Olive Frelove Shepard, “Woman’s Dress,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly , February 24, 1872. 154 “Miscellaneous: The Anti-Fashion Convention,” Woodhull , February 14, 1874; “Fashion vs. Freedom,” Woodhull , January 17, 1874. 155 Abigail Scott Duniway, “About Ourself,” New Northwest , May 5, 1871. 156 Abigail Scott Duniway, “Trained Dresses,” Northwest , April 12, 1872, in Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety, eds. “Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), 66. 157 Martha Perry Lowe, “The Power of Fashion,” Journal , March 4, 1871. 158 Lisa S. Strange, “Dress Reform and the Feminine Ideal: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the ‘Coming Girl’,” Southern Communication Journal 68, no. 1 (2002): 1-13. 159 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Our Girls” (1880), in Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project , 2009, accessed August 30, 2014. http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/stanton-our-girls-speech-text/.

116 Fashion’s Slaves The postbellum tendency to position fashion as one of many forms of oppression also emerged in women’s rights literature. Novels explored late-nineteenth-century attitudes toward women’s exercise, wherein the ideal of a “healthy girl” existed in tension with cultural aesthetics that “made looking sick fashionable.” 160 Corsetry and tight lacing adversely affected middle-class fertility rates because the consequent bodily distortion influenced conception, frequency of coitus and foetus survival. 161 Indeed, reformers cited tight waists as the source of “degenerate offspring” and considered the health benefits of trousers during pregnancy. 162 From health reform to gender passing and bifurcated garments, the woman-slave analogy was used to discuss the adverse effect of fashionable dress on both body and mind. From the antebellum era onwards, literary representations of “passing” across racial, gender, or class lines subverted the gendered connotations of fashionable dress. Slave narratives such as William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) and Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) portray female slaves who don male attire to facilitate their escape, and women writers frequently acknowledged “the importance of dress for demonstrating ethos and for passing.” 163 Howe’s antebellum manuscript, The Hermaphrodite, depicts the shame and confusion that resulted when an individual could not conform to the expectations surrounding gender and fashion. When the character of Laurence lives as a hermit, he is humiliated to discover in his “long robe de chamber” and “wild profusion of my locks,” he “looked like a woman.” 164 So too does Florence, the heroine of Caroline Lee Hentz’s Marcus Warland (1852), disguise herself as an enslaved to nurse her , while Capitola, the protagonist of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand (1888), dresses as a boy to support herself on the streets of New York. 165 The discussion of cross-dressing in postbellum women’s rights fiction reimagined the clothing inversions in slave narratives. The relationship between psychology, physical health and passing was explored in Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master (1874). The issue of who could regulate the dress of the character Flora Livingston, a young belle, represented her lack of autonomy following her engagement to an unwanted suitor. The control Flora’s fiancée seeks generates

160 See: Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Patricia Anne Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Exercise and Doctors in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 161 Mel Davies, “Corsets and Conception: Fashion and Demographic Trends in the Nineteenth Century,” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 24, no. 4 (1982): 611-641. 162 Williams, “Hygienic Dress,” Journal , 1873; “Free Dress and Pregnancy,” Woodhull , June 13, 1874. 163 Prude, “To Look Upon,” 156-157; Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 87. See: William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft (London: William Tweedie, 1860), e-book; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 1861, 2001). 164 Howe, Hermaphrodite , 51. 165 See: Caroline Lee Hentz, Marcus Warland; or, the Long Moss Spring (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1852), e-book; E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Hidden Hand (New York: A.L. Burt, Publisher, 1888), e-book.

117 mental anguish: “I must dress and act, as it suits him; … I should be a slave bound hand and foot, if I married him, and I cannot!” A more direct concern over the physical robustness of girls was voiced by other characters. Mrs. Darcy, M.D., laments how the “impress of the corset” was evident in the “stylish smallness of waist” among a group of fashionably dressed girls. This resulted in “transparent complexions” that indicated “a total lack of vitality, and a want of open-air exercise,” which led Darcy to condemn the “oppressive finery” that necessitated “stifling steel-clasped garments” instead of “plain serviceable frocks” that would help girls “gain health and strength.” 166 Blake also depicted the utility of passing through a cross-dressing female character, Frank Heywood. By abandoning the restrictions associated with women’s clothing, Heywood is able to pursue a journalistic career and thus “use his voice to defend women publicly against male oppression.” 167 Women’s rights reformers also used discourses of slavery to argue that political equality and sexual purity could be ensured by disguising the physical. Antebellum periodicals cited the practicality and safety engendered by bifurcated garments, an impulse that continued in the postbellum era.168 In 1869, Stanton suggested that the sexes should “dress as nearly alike as possible” because the “male costume” would enable equal wages for equal work. The “concealment of sex,” moreover, would empower girls and women and protect them from various forms of oppression. 169 Surprise and outrage were expressed when everyday women took these measures; passing was associated with cross-dressing, which physicians and sexologists viewed as a symbol of “sexual inversion or impurity.”170 Stanton professed that cross-dressing was illegal, and although her legal knowledge would have ensured she knew otherwise, women who wore men’s clothing were frequently detained in spite of the lack of official statutory prohibitions. 171 Only a degree of fashion appropriation was considered acceptable. Some postbellum women engaged in what Diana Crane defines as “nonverbal resistance” through “alternative dress,” wherein elements of male fashion – ties and hats, suit jackets, waistcoats and shirts – were appropriated into an otherwise feminine wardrobe. 172 Indeed, Xavier Chaumette describes the suit jacket as “the symbol of the emancipated woman” during the nineteenth century. 173 In spite of their pronouncements, women’s rights reformers were often dismayed when faced with the overt enactment of these ideals.

166 Lillie Devereux Blake, Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master: A Story of to-Day (New York: The Feminist Press, 1874, 1996), 236 and 74. 167 Caroline Field Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 129-132. 168 See: “Mrs. Kemble and Her New Costume,” Lily , December 1, 1849. 169 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Woman’s Dress,” Revolution , July 22, 1869. 170 Levander, Voices , 117-118. 171 See: Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 119. 172 Crane, Fashion , 101. 173 Xavier Chaumette, Le Costume tailleur: la culture vestimentaire en France au XIXème siècle (Paris: Esmond Edition, 1995), 9.

118 Women reformers who appropriated masculine dress further than fashion dictated did not receive general acceptance, but such women were often already on the fringe of reform movements. donned masculine dress at the height of her popularity, yet managed to “avoid a debilitating sexualisation” by negotiating an “adequately feminine” appearance. 174 However, the experience of Dr. Mary E. Walker was quite different.175 When she was sixteen, Mary’s father supposedly encouraged her to abandon corsets, stating what a “shame” it was that “women encase their bodies in those steel torture instruments,” in strikingly similar rhetoric to the physicians in Dress-Reform and Fettered for Life .176 As a young medical student and Civil War surgeon in a Washington hospital, Walker experimented with clothing. Unlike those engaged in passing, however, she never sought to conceal that she was a woman. Walker worked within a traditionally feminine nurturing capacity, but controversy mounted as she fulfilled the masculine role of doctor and surgeon whilst choosing to wear the accompanying male uniform. 177 Her first book, Hit (1871), belied the way rhetorical inscriptions of slavery and freedom shaped her experience of clothing. Walker dedicated this book to the “great sisterhood,” and wished to “place in your hands that power which shall emancipate you from the bondage of all that is oppressive.” 178 When she lost the long feminine ringlets of a young woman as she aged, Walker “came to be seen as merely eccentric.” 179 Women who actually acted on the rhetorical injunctions of dress reform experienced many difficulties because their contemporaries found it difficult to come to terms with the surprising consequences of the practices they theoretically advocated. From the Gilded Age onwards, dress reform and health reform continued to rely on abstract discourses of slavery. Alongside the emergence of “aesthetic dress,” which was significant in the renegotiation of gender boundaries, the visual imagining of fashion as slavery persisted in reform rhetoric and satirical representations (see Figure 12) alike. 180 B.O. Flower’s The Arena , with its focus on health and dress, also emphasised dress reform to become what Ruth C. Engs describes as “the most intellectually respectable reform publication of the early Progressive era.” 181 In 1891, Frances E. Russell observed how the continued efforts of women dress reformers who wore bifurcated garments meant that the “fiction that women have no legs is now fully discredited,” in an

174 Cari M. Carpenter, ed. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), xx. 175 Gayle Veronica Fischer, “A Matter of Wardrobe? , a Nineteenth-Century American Cross- Dresser,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 2, no. 3 (1998): 245-268. 176 “Woman Whom Congress Let Don Male Garb Dies,” Washington Post , February 23, 1919, in Fischer, “A Matter of Wardrobe?” 248. 177 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 93; Fischer, “A Matter of Wardrobe?” 246-247. 178 Mary E. Walker, Hit (New York: The American News Company, 1871), 5 (Google books). 179 Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] , 97. 180 Mary W. Blanchard, “Boundaries and the Victorian Body: Aesthetic Fashion in Gilded Age America,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (1995): 21-50; Jennifer Ann Barrows, “The Sources, Rhetoric, and Gender of Artistic Dress,” (PhD thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009). 181 Ruth Clifford Engs, The Progressive Era’s Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 34-35.

119 article entitled “Fashion’s Slaves.” 182 When Russell collated the history of dress reform attempts of prominent women in “A Brief Survey of the American Dress Reform Movements of the Past, with Views of Representative Women” (1892), she inadvertently demonstrating the centrality of the woman-slave analogy to fashion critique throughout the nineteenth century. 183

Figure 12. Harper’s Weekly proof etching by Thomas Nast, potentially unpublished. 184

This rhetoric also informed the bicycling culture that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Importantly, Stanton and other reformers viewed the bicycle as “a tool of emancipation.”185 A contributor to The Woman’s Journal thought the bicycle was “a godsend” because it helped “free” women from the “thraldom of dress” more than all other combined reforms.186 Similar ideas circulated in the writings of African American women. Pauline E. Hopkins’ novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) features a scene in which Ma Smith, a bicycling woman, overhears some men talking about women being “the weaker vessel, an’ subjugatin’ theirself to be led by men”; her suitor believes that “no man could be suferior to ’ooman, ’cause she was his rib.” The pride this character shows in her

182 Frances E. Russell, in B.O. Flower, “Fashion’s Slaves,” Arena , XXII, September 1891, in Project Gutenberg , 2012, accessed March 19, 2014, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22419/22419-8.txt. 183 Russell, “Brief Survey,” 325-40. 184 Patricia A. Cunningham and Gayle Strege, “Reforming Fashion, 1850-1914: Politics, Health, and Art” (Columbus: Historic Textiles & Costumes Collection, Department of Consumer and Textiles Science, Ohio State University, 2000). 185 Lisa S. Strange and Robert S. Brown, “The Bicycle, Women’s Rights, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal 31, no. 5 (2002): 615 and 618. 186 John J. Shaw, “Woman’s Dress: A Man’s View,” Journal , January 29, 1898.

120 suitor is coupled with her desire to learn to ride her bicycle, in her “new pale blue bicycle suit.” 187 Whether or not this outfit was a reformed dress does not detract from how Hopkins linked the concept of women’s freedom to fashion and bicycling culture. The bicycling phenomenon did not visibly influence mainstream fashions, but it reinvigorated the rhetoric and fashions ideals of reformers for a new generation.188 Even at the end of the nineteenth century, the woman-slave analogy maintained significance in the many different movements toward reforming women’s fashion. The focus on abstract discourses of slavery represented a general preoccupation with white women’s oppression in a way that did not overtly include race. Still, considerations of fashion still sought to understand the interaction between different forms of oppression in a way that promoted intersectional possibilities. As in the antebellum era, a range of reformers and cultural commentators continued to use this rhetoric to frame their fashion critique.

Conclusion The nineteenth century comparison between fashion and slavery was at once a form of mainstream and reform social commentary that crossed the boundaries of gender, race and class. The woman- slave analogy was simultaneously used to position women’s dress as both the root cause of women’s oppression and a visual manifestation of their dependence. Since abstract discourses of slavery dominated fashion critique throughout the nineteenth century, the discussion of fashion was often quite distinct from the rhetoric surrounding other forms of women’s oppression. It diverged from marriage and other women’s rights issues because the embodied nature of fashion enabled a more tangible form of “emancipation” to transpire – in the reformed dress, as well as reformed undergarments. Yet fashion itself had little in common with chattel slavery, so the direct references to the institution which emerged during the 1850s and 1860s must be seen as highly opportunistic. African American women reformers periodically questioned the demands of fashion, but they equally demonstrated ambivalence to viewing fashion itself as slavery, or oppression. The postbellum return to more abstract discourses of slavery reflected the prominence of this rhetoric during the antebellum era. A consideration of the woman-slave analogy demonstrates how ideologically disparate strands of fashion critique – from religious and antifashion to dress reform and aesthetic dress, as well as literature – coalesced throughout the nineteenth century.

187 Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: The Coloured Co-operative Publishing Co., 1900), 366-367, e-book. 188 Julia Christie-Robin, Belinda T. Orzada, and Dilia L όpez-Gydosh, “From Bustles to Bloomers: Exploring the Bicycle’s Influence on American Women’s Fashion, 1880-1914,” The Journal of American Culture 35, no. 4 (2012): 315-331.

121 CHAPTER FOUR :

SUFFRAGE : “P OLITICAL SLAVERY ”

[Through the Fourteenth Amendment’s] clause “,” a special allusion is made to woman. By all men’s definitions of the term, the withholding of the ballot and representation while are imposed, is the most abject of servitude. 1 SUSAN B. ANTHONY , SPEECH TO THE TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURE OF WASHINGTON , OCTOBER 19, 1871

The men alone of this country live in a republic, the women enter the second hundred years of national life as political slaves. 2 MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE , “C ALL FOR THE MAY ANNIVERSARY ,” 1876

From the American Revolution onwards, the woman-slave analogy was central to the way women described their disenfranchisement and challenged prevailing attitudes about citizenship. The antebellum women’s rights movement emphasised women’s suffrage from at least 1848, but the debates that followed the Civil War generated contention between antislavery and women’s rights reformers. During the postbellum era, the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction amendments were largely assumed to have rendered African Americans equal citizens. In response, use of the woman-slave analogy transformed from a comparison between women and slaves to focus on the categories of sex and race. As editors of the History of Woman Suffrage , Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage chronicled the significance of this rhetoric for suffragists and the broader women’s movement. For Anthony, the Reconstruction amendments were hypocritical because of the oppression women continued to experience, and, in consequence, Gage specifically saw women as “political slaves.” Many women’s rights reformers rhetorically constructed sex as the only surviving form of oppression in the United States. The parameters of citizenship were shaped by discourses of slavery because reformers described those excluded from the national body politic in these terms. Citizenship represents the full membership of an individual to the political community, together with the symbolic and material rights and privileges that ensue. Rhetorically, the concept of the “citizen” was defined against the concept of the “noncitizen” – aliens, slaves, women. Civil citizenship entailed “equality before the law, freedom of contract, and protection of person and property,” but political citizenship – enfranchisement – was “seen as a privilege reserved for those who were qualified to exercise it.” 3

1 Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , Vol.II: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, 1866 to 1873 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 458. 2 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage , Vol.III (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), 18, e-book [hereafter HWS ]. 3 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labour (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 19, 20 and 26. Nancy F. Cott further describes citizenship as the “bond between an individual and the state.” Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830- 1934,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1440.

122 This related to marriage, because the institution rendered the pair “one person – the husband,” who was responsible for the wife and “became the one full citizen in the household.” 4 With the expansion of Jacksonian democracy, women did not experience citizenship in same way as the ever more inclusive idea of male citizenship. The classification of women alongside slaves and racial minorities shaped interpretations of citizenship and suffrage. The woman-slave analogy provided the conceptual link between the exclusion of different groups from political rights. This chapter will explore how the woman-slave analogy was used to critique women’s exclusion from suffrage. Marriage and fashion also inscribed separate spheres, but suffrage directly worked to limit women’s engagement in the public realm because it related to politics and citizenship. Late-eighteenth-century attitudes toward women’s suffrage and antebellum petitioning collectively intensified the ideological connections reformers made between women and slaves. This rhetoric was so pervasive during the antebellum era that it provided the foundations for the postbellum demands of women’s rights reformers. National citizenship was difficult to define prior to the Civil War because it was applied unequally under state jurisdictions, but the exclusionary legal vision of Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) ruled that African Americans could not be citizens of the United States.5 The Reconstruction era made the issue of manhood suffrage versus women’s suffrage divisive because its political developments benefitted one group and not the other. In response, discourses of slavery were mobilised to gain for women the rights extended to African Americans, a process which often resulted in racism and nativism. The consequent rhetorical transformation encompassed a focus on sex and race, rather than women and slaves, which gradually enabled discussions of white women’s suffrage to dominate postbellum debates. Although nineteenth-century “universal suffrage” sometimes implied “manhood suffrage” – votes for all men, but not women – this term will be used in the way women’s rights reformers interpreted it. Faye E. Dudden describes this perspective as “truly universal suffrage.” 6 Any references to sex and race are also predicated on nineteenth-century understandings of these terms. The woman-slave analogy remained important from the point of burgeoning nationhood in 1776 and throughout the antebellum era, as well as at the nation’s centenary in 1876 and beyond.

Revolutionary Beginnings From the beginning of American nationhood, abstract discourses of slavery emerged in discussions of women’s citizenship and enfranchisement. François Furstenberg observes how the political rebellion of the American Revolution was articulated in terms of “enslavement,” the “conceptual

4 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 11- 12; 95-96. 5 Cott, “Marriage,” 1444; Sandra L. Rierson, “Race and Gender Discrimination: A Historical Case for Equal Treatment under the Fourteenth Amendment,” Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy 1 (1994): 89. 6 Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and in Reconstruction America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 63-64.

123 force” of which “lay in the parallel with the ‘other’: the African slave.” 7 Early discussions of women’s suffrage did not overtly reference chattel slavery, but latent associations with the institution always remained. When prominent women used this rhetoric to emphasise their own experience, they initiated the earliest discussions of women’s suffrage in the United States. Abigail Adams articulated this concern to her husband John Adams in 1776. A woman of vast contradictions, Adams was politically conservative in spite of her outspoken support of the American Revolution. But she also detested injustice, from the British control of the American colonies to the disempowerment of women or the enslavement of Africans. 8 Abigail was actively involved in her husband’s political career. When she approached John during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, she presented her own perspective. This was framed by the Revolutionary era’s patriotic rhetoric of tyranny and slavery versus freedom. 9 Abigail characterised men as “Naturally Tyrannical” masters who enforced women’s oppression, and insinuated that men who “wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.” In condemning those men who treated women “only as the vassals of your Sex,” she emphasised the importance of women’s political voice: I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives. ... [W]e have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet – “Charm by accepting, by submitting sway Yet have our Humour most when we obey.” 10 John Adams aspired to create unity among the colonies, so he was unlikely to introduce the potentially divisive issues of slavery or women’s rights into political debate.11 Yet it is significant that the disenfranchisement of women was early interpreted as a form of political oppression and critiqued in terms of the woman-slave analogy. Following the American Revolution, petitioning became a means through which disenfranchised groups, including slaves, free African Americans, women, and reform societies, could influence politics. 12 The First Amendment (1791) encouraged freedom of speech and

7 François Furstenberg, “Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse,” The Journal of American History 89, no. 4 (2003): 1300-1301. 8 Lynne Withey, Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 1981), x. 9 Edith B. Gelles, First Thoughts: Life and Letters of Abigail Adams (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 14. 10 Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776 and May 7, 1776, “Correspondence between John and Abigail Adams,” in Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, ed. Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003, accessed December 9, 2012, http://www. masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/letter/index.html. 11 According to Edith B. Gelles, Adams was “unlikely to introduce either issue, as John’s driving mission was to create unity among the diverse and quarrelsome colonies, and for him to support the dissolution of slavery or the civil rights of women would have had the opposite effect – It would insure disunity.” Gelles, First Thoughts , 16-17. 12 Gerda Lerner, “The Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” in The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké , ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, 1998), 177.

124 guaranteed the right of disenfranchised groups to petition for a redress of grievances; in asserting these citizenship rights, antebellum black and white women alike experienced greater political power. 13 Those antebellum women who circulated petitions, participated in reform organisations, and lobbied the legislature utilised and pioneered methods for governmental influence beyond electoral channels.14 As Angelina Grimké wrote to her opponent Catharine Beecher, petitioning “is the only political right that women have: why not let them exercise it whenever they are aggrieved?” 15 Antislavery petitioning thus constituted an early attempt by women toward significant government influence. 16 When the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) adopted petitioning as a tool for public education in 1835, many women participated in numerous campaigns in a way that inscribed the burgeoning epistemological relationship between women and slaves.17 During the Grimké sisters’ speaking tour of 1837, Angelina tried to convince women that, even though chattel slavery was a political subject, “women were citizens & had duties to perform to their country as well as men.” 18 Petitioning gathered force as “an antislavery instrument” throughout the 1830s, leading the House of Representatives to pass the so-called Gag Rule in May 1836. 19 Southern congressmen attempted to inhibit the abundance of antislavery petitions by insisting they be tabled and not read, but this instead instigated a free speech campaign which ultimately broadened the antislavery awareness of the general public. 20 Female antislavery societies were emboldened to join the petition drive and produced a “major outpouring of discourse aimed at encouraging female activism and articulating in greater detail an emerging ideology of female citizenship.” 21 The Gag Rule suppressed women’s voices on behalf of the enslaved; in so doing, it intensified the existing ideological connections antislavery women were making between their own experience and that of slaves. According to Anna M. Spiecher, the “ability of free women to identify with the enslaved did more than

13 Constitution of the United States of America, 1st Article of Amendment, 1791; Erica Armstrong Dunbar, “Writing for True Womanhood: African-American Women’s Writings and the Antislavery Struggle,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (Yale: Yale University Press, 2007), 305. 14 Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 621. 15 Angelina E. Grimké, Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A.E. Grimké (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837, 2001), e-book. 16 See: Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 17 Lerner, “Political Activities,” 177. 18 Angelina Grimké to Jane Smith, New York, February 4, 1837, Weld-Grimké Collection, in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents (United States: St Martins Press, 2000), 93-94. 19 Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12. 20 Despite his objection to the content of the antislavery petitions, the former president John Quincy Adams encouraged their submission nonetheless. Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 194. 21 Zaeske, Signatures , 72.

125 strengthen their commitment to antislavery action.”22 Simultaneously, the Gag Rule reconfigured the concept of what it meant to be a disenfranchised American citizen. For Angelina Grimké, “the rights of the slave and of woman blend like the colours of the rainbow.” 23 The issue of whether the Grimké sisters had the right to public oratory reinforced their interpretation of the woman-slave analogy. Controversy intensified when the sisters flouted patriarchal restrictions by addressing “promiscuous” – gender mixed – audiences, but the sisters responded by gradually integrating women’s right arguments into their antislavery address.24 Attempts to silence the sisters only increased their awareness of the enforced silence engendered by the system of chattel slavery, and both saw politics as a means through which women could maintain their voice. Sarah Grimké’s An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836) proposed that “the daughters of Virginia” bear “testimony to the evils of slavery” so as to encourage southern women’s political action. 25 Similarly, Grimké focused one of her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (1837) on the “Legal Disabilities of Women” to demonstrate that they had “no political existence” and were merely “counted, like the slaves of the South,” to proportionally increase the numbers of government legislators.26 Personally, Grimké believed women had the right to influence politics and legislative reform because, enfranchised or not, they were citizens whose duty was to be politically engaged. 27 According to Gerda Lerner, Sarah Grimké “managed to construct social theory on the basis of comparing two kinds of systems of oppression.” 28 Her understanding of chattel slavery shaped her perspectives on women’s rights because she did not position one as more oppressive than the other. When Grimké acknowledged the legal disabilities and disenfranchisement of enslaved women and white women, she saw the intersections between these different forms of oppression. As petitioning became more prominent, so too did the use of this rhetoric. Despite the ambivalence of some abolitionists, Angelina Grimké became the first woman to address the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1837. It was deemed appropriate for a woman to make this

22 Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 109. 23 Angelina Grimké, 1837, in Larry Ceplair, ed. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 286; Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké; th e First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 203. 24 Susan Zaeske, “The ‘Promiscuous Audience’ Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman’s Rights Movement,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 2 (1995): 191-207; Lerner, Grimké Sisters , 116-145. 25 Sarah M. Grimké, “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States,” Antislavery Literature Project , 1836, 2012, accessed February 17, 2013, http://antislavery.eserver.org/religious/grimkeepistle/grimkeepistle.pdf, 17. 26 Sarah M. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837, 2010), 46, e-book. 27 Alison M. Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 73 and 77. 28 Lerner, Feminist Thought , 24.

126 unprecedented address because it accompanied petitions containing thousands of women’s names. 29 For Grimké, her womanhood influenced her duty toward the abolition of chattel slavery: “I stand before you as a citizen, on behalf of the 20,000 women of Massachusetts, whose names are enrolled on petitions which have been submitted to the Legislature[.]” As a repentant slaveholder, Grimké characterised herself as a “moral being” and a southerner unwillingly exiled from her birthplace because of chattel slavery. More importantly, Grimké identified with the slaves for whom she pled: “I feel that I owe it to the suffering slave … to do all that I can to overturn a system of complicated crimes, … cemented by the blood and sweat and tears of my sisters in bonds.” 30 Alongside petitions which tangibly represented a multitude of women, Grimké’s argument rhetorically coalesced around direct discourses of slavery. By the late 1830s, the growing discomfort toward the power of petitioning and women’s public oratory impelled reformers to persist with comparisons between women and slaves. Women’s apparently clear constitutional right to petition was challenged by ministers, educators and politicians who now deemed it inappropriate for women to be involved in the ostensibly male world of politics. Even Catharine Beecher’s An essay on slavery and abolitionism, with reference to the duty of American females (1837) argued that women should not have a vocal role in abolitionism. 31 Some male abolitionists reinscribed petitioning itself as an overtly political act, and what Alison M. Parker describes as “an ineffective tool that was used as a last resort by white women and slaves who could not participate directly at the polls.” 32 When the clergy condemned the Grimkés’ public oratory in an 1837 “Pastoral Letter,” John Greenleaf Whittier satirically responded in The Liberator : So, this is all, — the utmost reach Of priestly power the mind to fetter! When laymen think, when women preach, A war of words, a “Pastoral Letter!”33 These events only inspired other budding women reformers. Lucy Stone acknowledged that the “pastoral letter broke my bonds.” 34 Principally, women reformers supported the Garrisonian dedication to women’s rights; the male abolitionists who favoured a more political approach to

29 Katharine du Pre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 130-131; Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 225. 30 Angelina Grimké “Speech Before the Legislative Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, February 21, 1838,” Liberator , March 2, 1838. 31 Catharine Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837, 2012), e-book. 32 Parker, Articulating , 71. 33 “The Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Congregationalist Clergy,” Liberator , August 11, 1837; John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Pastoral Letter,” Liberator , October 1837, in Lane Memorial Library , n.d., accessed February 18, 2013, http://www.hampton.lib.nh.us/ hampton/poetry/pastoralletter.htm. 34 Lucy Stone, in Joelle Million, Woman’s Voice, Woman’s Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement (Westport: Praeger, 2003), 30.

127 abolition and rejected women’s inclusion, becoming the political abolitionists who later constituted the Liberty Party. 35 Throughout the 1840s, this rhetoric remained important within the fledgling women’s rights movement. At the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls during 1848, some women were reluctant to foreground women’s suffrage because they feared ridicule. The ex-slave Frederick Douglass nonetheless encouraged Elizabeth Cady Stanton to advocate this demand.36 The “Declaration of Sentiments,” which was modelled upon the Declaration of Independence, professed: “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” The ninth resolution emphasised that such “tyranny” was achieved because man “has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.” 37 From here on, women’s rights reformers would view suffrage as an essential element of citizenship, and discourses of slavery were continuously used to frame this demand. If the discussion of women’s suffrage was foremost among women, many Garrisonians still used discourses of slavery to advocate this demand. ’s “Human Equality” (1850), set to the music of A Man’s a Man, For a’ That , championed women’s enfranchisement: In every land, through every age, How hard her log, and a’ that! A vassal state her heritage, Dependent, poor, and a’ that. … Though subjected from her birth, She still aspires, for a’ that! 38 Garrison, reflecting the rhetoric of women’s historical writing discussed in Chapter One, viewed women’s historical experience in terms of slavery. 39 The interest abolitionist men showed in women’s rights was atypical of their contemporaries, but Garrison did not necessarily practice what he preached. Like many male reformers, Garrison’s marriage illustrated how those who sought to reform the public and private spheres at once could still be influenced by separate spheres

35 See: Dudden, Fighting Chance ; Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (University Press of , 2004). 36 Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 54-57; Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 140. 37 “Declaration of Sentiments,” 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention, in Robert H. Walker, The Reform Spirit in America: A Documentation of the Pattern of Reform in the American Republic (New York: G.P. Putnman’s Sons, 1976), 469. See also: Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past , ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211. 38 William Lloyd Garrison, “Human Equality” (1850), in Danny O. Crew, Suffragist Sheet Music: An Illustrated Catalogue of Published Music Associated with the Women’s Rights and Suffrage Movement in America, 1795-1921 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002), 17. 39 See also: Sun Flower [Elizabeth Cady Stanton], “Woman,” Lily , January 4, 1850; E.F., “Sphere of Man,” Revolution , May 20, 1869; Parker Pillsbury, “Woman in History,” Revolution , July 8, 1869.

128 ideology. 40 Even so, Garrison, like his contemporaries, used discourses of slavery to describe women’s disenfranchisement, and this led reformers to view the political demand of suffrage as an essential element of women’s freedom. Since antislavery women constituted the nucleus of the early women’s rights movement, they brought with them the rhetorical strategies with which they were already familiar. Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone, Paulina Wright Davis and Dr. Harriot Hunt discussed how the women’s movement could gain structure at the New England Anti-Slavery Society meeting of May 1850.41 Following the address of Sojourner Truth, a unanimous resolution encouraged a wholly inclusive attitude towards women’s rights: [T]he cause we have met to advocate … bids us remember the two millions of slave women at the South, the most grossly wronged and foully outraged of all women; ... we will [remember] ... the trampled womanhood of the plantation, and omit no effort to raise it to a share in the rights we claim for ourselves. 42 This intersectional impetus to recognise the rights of all women, including enslaved women, was evident at other mid-century women’s rights conventions. Ernestine L. Rose, the first woman to lobby for married women’s expanded property rights, emphasised how the “republican principle of universal suffrage” should include women or admit “‘Freedom and Power to one half of society, and submission and slavery to the other’.” 43 When antebellum antislavery women used the woman- slave analogy, their role in the nascent women’s rights movement articulated an ongoing concern for the rights of slave women as well as white women.

Suffrage Ambivalence Importantly, those who opposed women’s suffrage also employed discourses of slavery to denounce the idea. As discussed in Chapter Two, southern proslavery ideologues viewed the “domestic” institutions of marriage and chattel slavery as analogous. In response to radical abolitionist attacks on the peculiar institution, southerners emphasised the supposed benevolent familial connections it fostered.44 This inscription of domestic hierarchy made it difficult to conceive of women’s suffrage, because women and slaves were relegated to the same category of dependence on the white male. When southerners used direct discourses of slavery to ridicule women’s suffrage, their arguments shared remarkable rhetorical similarities with that of northern reformers.

40 Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 167 and 117-119. 41 Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 263-264. 42 “Resolutions from the First National Women’s Rights Convention, Worcester Convention, 1850,” in Society for the Study of American Women Writers , 2012, accessed 22 November 2012, http://www.lehigh.edu/~dek7/SSAWW/writWRDRFirstR.htm. 43 Ernestine L. Rose, “‘Unsurpassed’ Speech,” 1851, in Paula Doress-Worters, ed. Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose, Early Women’s Rights Leader (New York: The Feminist Press, 2007), 95. 44 Cott, Public Vows , 60.

129 The southerner Louisa McCord used the woman-slave analogy in what appears to be the mocking imitation of the women’s suffrage arguments she sought to oppose. One of the foremost conservatives in antebellum America, McCord’s use of this rhetoric, even in refutation, therefore had widespread circulation.45 McCord made direct, not abstract, comparisons between women and chattel slaves. The 1852 publication, “Enfranchisement of Women,” stated: “Follow close, ladies. The door of privilege is open pretty wide for the admission of Cuffee. Should he get in, surely you might follow.” McCord used discourses of slavery for conservative purposes, so her rhetoric was at odds with northern women’s rights reformers. Still, this rhetoric was viable because it emanated from the domestic hierarchy of southern organic culture. When this hierarchy was reversed it created concerns for southern cultural commentators; as discussed in Chapter Two, imagining women beyond the category of dependence necessarily disrupted racial hierarchy. McCord argued that women’s suffrage unwarrantedly challenged “nature’s laws”: Woman’s condition certainly admits of improvement …, but never can any amelioration result from … [enfranchisement]. Here, as in all other improvements, the good must be brought about by working with, not against[,] … Nature’s laws. Woman, seeking as a woman, may raise her position; seeking as a man, we repeat, she but degrades it.” 46 For McCord, women were degraded beyond domesticity. “[W]hen have the strong forgotten to oppress the weak?” McCord asked, but in acknowledging this, she did not seek to examine interdependent oppressions. David Brion Davis finds it problematic that McCord “could agree with abolitionist/feminists that women suffered from a kind of slavery,” but views this anomaly as due to the “specificity and generality of the concept ‘slavery,’ a word that signifies the ultimate in the loss of freedom and independence.” 47 Privileged white southern women such as McCord overwhelmingly endorsed chattel slavery as the price necessary for their own societal position.48 For plantation mistresses, there were hierarchies within hierarchies, and McCord saw ways to ameliorate that oppression even if elite women continued to be relegated to the hierarchical category of dependence, with the enslaved. Where proslavery and conservative commentators refuted the possibility that domestic hierarchy could be oppressive for dependants, northern reformers saw points of intersection. Although reformers sometimes employed arguments that venerated domesticity, the difference lay in what they conceived as women’s “natural” position. The Una provided a useful comparison: it often e employed remarkably similar rhetoric as McCord to arrive at vastly different conclusions. In an article entitled “The Right of Woman to the Elective Franchise,” a contributor suggested that

45 Michael O’Brien, “Introduction,” in Richard C. Lounsbury, ed. Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 1. 46 Louisa S. McCord, “Enfranchisement of Women” (1852), in Louisa S. McCord , 107 and 108. 47 David Brion Davis, “Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery,” in Women’s Rights , 14. 48 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 242.

130 enfranchisement “would tend to ennoble and elevate [woman] as a moral and intellectual being,” proposing that disenfranchisement was “always debasing” and had the same result as African slavery. 49 In 1853, editor Paulina Wright Davis proclaimed that and maidens, even if “released from the bondage of domestic masterdom,” still suffered “like the ” on account of “all the disqualifications and oppressions of caste” – including laws surrounding inheritance and property. For Davis, “sex, as absolutely as colour,” was instrumental in denying “all the political rights of citizenship,” and so challenged the negative effects of domestic hierarchy because of the subordinate status afforded women and slaves.50 Such an argument anticipated the way a comparison between sex and race, rather than between women and slaves, would come to dominate postbellum suffrage debates. The question surrounding the political status of ex-slaves constituted the political focus of Reconstruction. Attempts to prove that citizenship did not necessarily include political rights or enfranchisement, therefore, looked toward the legal and political status of other disenfranchised groups. When Republican politicians John Bingham and Lyman Trumbull tried to justify the continued of freedmen in 1866, they cited that half the white adult population who were considered citizens – women – were not voters.51 During the antebellum era, northerners and southerners alike saw the distinction between civil and political rights as coalescing around women and slaves in a way that demonstrated the significance of this categorisation.

Rhetorical Contention Alongside the initial gains the women’s rights movement made through state legislatures in the years prior to the Civil War, the woman-slave analogy was used to emphasise how the law shaped citizenship and enfranchisement. The increasing dedication to legislation and policy meant, according to Elizabeth B. Clark, “the slavery paradigm took on a new value as a language of political opposition.” 52 Yet the emphatic use of this rhetoric created contention among reformers. This encouraged a clear response from African Americans, and although they did not refute the woman-slave analogy in and of itself, they repudiated the racist purposes to which it could be dedicated. This rhetoric influenced the women’s rights petitioning of the 1850s. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, reporting to The Una about recent petitions, emphasised that it was because the “majority” of citizens did not consider “their wives and mothers” to be “household chattels” that women should

49 Mrs. S.T. Martyn, “The Right of Woman to the Elective Franchise,” Una , February 1854. 50 Paulina Wright Davis, “Pecuniary Independence of Woman,” Una , December 1853. 51 Cott, “Marriage,” 1449-1451. 52 Elizabeth B. Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 8, no. 1 (1990): 31.

131 be “accepted as Citizens in a country to which they owe their birth[.]”53 Many reformers idealised motherhood and the womanly virtues of purity and honesty; they did not wholly discard the assumptions instilled by domesticity and separate spheres ideology. As a result, discourses of slavery were at once used to adhere to and challenge domesticity. The legal focus that accompanied petitioning did not undermine the woman-slave analogy, but rather encouraged the use of rhetoric which justified its relevance. When Stanton addressed the New York State Legislature in 1854 about the legal disabilities of women, including disenfranchisement, she used this rhetoric in a way that was at once divisive and directly exclusionary toward free African Americans. This speech said little in support of the enfranchisement of African American men, but instead censured their “superior position” over the “wives and mothers” of New York State. Still, Stanton challenged lawmakers unable to comprehend “the idea that men and women are alike”: It is impossible to make the southern planter believe that his slave feels and reasons just as he does – that injustice and subjection are as galling as to him – that the degradation of living by the will of another, … is as keenly felt by him as his master. … He says, the slave does not feel this as I would. 54 Stanton neither misunderstood nor condoned the exploitation engendered by chattel slavery. But the way she conflated women’s oppression with that of the enslaved positioned chattel slaves as a legitimately oppressed group, whereas she viewed free African American men as wholly responsible for demanding their own rights. Her condemnation of the laws which disenfranchised women and classed them “with idiots, lunatics, and negroes” did not invoke the empathy reserved for allusions to the enslaved. 55 This anticipated the way Stanton and others would use this rhetoric in an ever more contentious manner following the Civil War. Even during the 1850s, Stanton aroused the ire of her fellow reformers to the point where some disputed her rhetorical methods. Frederick Douglass endorsed the pamphlet version of Stanton’s speech, and, importantly, did not refute the general structure of her discussion of women’s oppression. Yet Douglass criticised Stanton’s “seeming assumption” of women’s “superiority over negroes”; he viewed women as having “as good a right” to enfranchisement as African Americans, “but we cannot grant even as a matter of rhetoric or argument, that she has a better.” 56 Faye E. Dudden suggests that Douglass realised Stanton’s rhetoric could be

53 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, “Woman’s Petitions,” Una , January 1855. 54 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Address to the Legislature of New York, 14/20 February, 1854, in Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , Vol.I: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 240. This speech was also printed in The Lily and The Una . 55 For the role of in conjunction with this rhetoric, see: Elizabeth V. Spelman, Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), Chapter Five: “Changing the Subject: On Making Your Suffering Mine.” 56 Frederick Douglass, “Address to the Legislature, etc.,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper , March 3, 1854, in Dudden, Fighting Chance , 43.

132 argumentative or pragmatic rather than arising from personal conviction, but he also saw that this rhetorical strategy had the potential to incite racism. 57 This was not because he viewed discourses of slavery as inherently racist – as previously demonstrated, Douglass and other African Americans themselves used this rhetoric to describe women’s oppression. But Douglass rejected the way this rhetoric could be used to reinscribe racial hierarchy. Therefore, African American reformers did not often endorse the way white reformers mobilised this rhetoric due to the logic of racism that often informed the comparison. When the woman-slave analogy came to be predicated on comparisons with race rather than chattel slavery during the postbellum era, it incited further indignation. Even in this context, however, African American reformers continued to mobilise discourses of slavery to emphasise the experience of enslaved women. The coming of the Civil War created a changing framework for the employment of the woman-slave analogy. As this conflict united reform organisations in an effort to abolish chattel slavery, women’s suffrage became only a latent goal. The Civil War saw a flurry of female voluntarism which was of great importance during the conflict, but would be forgotten by the turn of the twentieth century. 58 This voluntary impetus encompassed reformers. While antebellum women’s rights reformers believed that abolitionism was morally right, they also anticipated that slave emancipation would inspire a reconsideration of the rights of free people from which women would benefit. 59 The Emancipation Proclamation (1863), together with the later Reconstruction amendments, shaped the changing focus of this rhetoric. Many women reformers joined the Woman’s National Loyal League, an organisation aligned with the Radical Republicans. 60 The League equated women and slaves in its emphasis on ubiquitous “political equality,” as epitomised in Resolution #5: The property, the liberty and the lives of all slaves, all citizens of African descent, and all women are placed at the mercy of a legislation in which they are not represented. … There never can be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political equality of every subject of the Government shall be practically established. 61 Therefore, the League interpreted “freedom” as the universal extension of equal rights and enfranchisement – for white and black men, as well as all women. According to Dudden, the League “defined loyalty to encompass emancipation, defined emancipation to imply equal rights, and defined equal rights as extending across race and gender lines,” but even so, not all members

57 Ibid., 43. 58 Frances M. Clarke, “Forgetting the Women: Debates over Female Patriotism in the Aftermath of America’s Civil War,” Journal of Women’s History 23, no. 2 (2011): 64-86. 59 Dudden, Fighting Chance , 48-49 and 50-51. 60 Wendy F. Hamand, “The Woman's National Loyal League: Feminist Abolitionists and the Civil War,” Civil War History 35, no. 1 (1989): 39-58. 61 Proceedings of the Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic, Held in New York, May 14, 1863 , in Dudden, Fighting Chance , 51.

133 supported equal rights for all. 62 As the prospect of slave emancipation became more viable, the increasing slippage between references to chattel slavery, African Americans and “negroes” affected the use of the woman-slave analogy. When the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) was passed, aided in part by the League’s petitioning, it abolished chattel slavery throughout the United States. This amendment changed the rhetorical framework of the woman-slave analogy because chattel slavery itself no longer existed thereafter. In the coming debates over manhood suffrage, Radical Republicans quickly withdrew support for women’s suffrage because they believed it would impede the freedmen’s enfranchisement. Ultimately, the Reconstruction amendments ensured the rights of freedmen alone.63 The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) overruled the Scott v. Sanford Supreme Court decision, securing citizenship rights African Americans and ensuring equal protection of the law, but it also inaugurated the word “male” into the Constitution. Soon after, the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) ensured citizens of the United States would be granted voting rights regardless of “race, colour, or previous condition of servitude,” but this was mitigated by the content of the previous amendment. 64 If the remembrance of chattel slavery continued to be used as an analogy, references to race and sex became more frequent in the suffrage debates of the Reconstruction era. These developments informed the contemporaneous arguments and rhetoric surrounding universal suffrage. In its changing guise, the woman-slave analogy was driven to its limits as women attempted to gain full citizenship rights. Ellen Carol DuBois observes how those in favour of manhood suffrage could speak of the “freedmen’s historically specific need” for the protection of enfranchisement, so it was necessary to bring women’s rights into the political discourse which was, in broad strokes, fixated on the idea of race.65 Therefore, the woman-slave analogy was used to create a greater sense of urgency for universal suffrage. To achieve this, African American women were placed at the centre of these reform discussions because their position represented the greatest political hypocrisy. In the process, white women’s rhetorical allusions situated African American women as ultimate victims in a way that was ultimately disempowering.66 The racist potential of this rhetoric, coupled with the ideology of white supremacy, meant this was often the case. The Reconstruction amendments provoked the particularly virulent mobilisation of the woman-slave analogy. In turn, this galvanised the fragmentation of the women’s suffrage

62 For example, Dudden describes how a Mrs. Hoyt from Wisconsin viewed “women’s rights as an unpopular ‘ism’” that would draw attention away from the sectional conflict. Dudden, Fighting Chance , 51. 63 Rierson, “Race and Gender,” 101-109. 64 Constitution of the United States of America: 13th Article of Amendment, 1865; 14th Article of Amendment, 1868; 15th Article of Amendment, 1870. 65 Ellen Carol DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820-1878,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (1987): 847. 66 Jen McDaneld, “White Suffragist Dis/Entitlement: The Revolution and the Rhetoric of Racism,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 30, no. 2 (2013): 243-264.

134 movement by 1869. Stanton and Anthony, who led the breakaway National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), derided the amendments which Stanton believed to situate men as “the rightful owners and masters of all womankind.” 67 The vast majority of reformers, led by Lucy Stone and what would become the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), viewed Stanton and Anthony’s campaign against the Reconstruction amendments as “politically unwise” and “morally repugnant.” 68 It is still necessary to consider how many of the universal suffrage arguments of the Reconstruction era sought to include the interests of black and white women alike. Indeed, African American women remained central to Reconstruction discussions in a way that enabled a continued, if increasingly imbalanced, emphasis on interdependent forms of oppression. The rights of white and black women shaped discussions at this important juncture, but the focus on African American women became less prominent from the 1870s onwards. Between 1865 and 1870, the woman-slave analogy remained the central method through which the oppression of all women was envisaged.

“The Negro’s Hour” Following the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, political expediency led to factionalism among reformers and politicians alike. When reformers briefly came together to campaign for universal suffrage, the woman-slave analogy and the rights of African American women were central to their arguments. The rhetoric of some women’s rights reformers became particularly desperate, so discourses of slavery were mobilised for competing purposes. In the process, reformers belied their perception that the categories of race and sex were becoming more salient than comparisons between women and slaves. An 1865 pronouncement by Wendell Phillips initiated the new rhetorical focus on race rather than chattel slavery. In his first speech as the president of the AASS, Phillips stated: “As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘One war at a time,’ so I say one question at a time. This hour belongs to the negro.” 69 Phillips was a long supporter of women’s rights, but following the Civil War he sought to compel deference to manhood suffrage to maximise its chance for success. 70 James Brewer Stewart concludes that Phillips took “the correct historical position,” because abolitionism had never demanded affiliation with “extraneous issues” – temperance, pacifism, women’s rights – as a measurement of antislavery allegiance. 71 According to DuBois, the “unprovoked” nature of

67 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association,” Revolution , May 13, 1869. 68 Andrea Moore Kerr, “White Women’s Rights, Black Men’s Wrongs, Free Love, Blackmail, and the Formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association,” in One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement , ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Troutdale: NewSage Press, 1995), 77. 69 Wendell Phillips, “Thirty-Second Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society,” National Anti-Slavery Standard , May 13, 1865. 70 Dudden, Fighting Chance , 8; Gordon, Selected Papers , Vol.I, 565. 71 James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 283.

135 Phillips’ divisive outburst indicated how “obvious and compelling the connection between woman suffrage and black suffrage was in the first years of Reconstruction.” 72 As women’s rights reformers became convinced that suffrage was a natural right, distinctions based on race were interpreted in terms of the perceived “inferiority of women and negroes.” 73 Yet Phillips’ outburst was perhaps not wholly “unprovoked,” because the substance of antebellum women’s rights arguments had been predicated on the comparison between women and slaves for years previous. Since the Reconstruction amendments resulted in freedmen’s enfranchisement, the idea that women, too, should likewise be “emancipated” was compelling. Yet when the opportunity to demand universal suffrage arose, Phillips and others demurred. This suggests that when reformers flouted the pertinence of the woman-slave analogy, it was severely lacking in the eyes of others. Beyond the nucleus of antebellum reform culture, women’s political oppression was viewed as dissimilar – not analogous – to that of African Americans. Nor was it widely thought to not require alleviation through enfranchisement. Therefore, an awareness of the rhetorical prominence of the woman-slave analogy during the antebellum era both contextualises Phillips’ comments and informs the general impetus to prioritise manhood suffrage. In direct contrast to Phillips, Stanton and Anthony believed that women’s suffrage was a timely issue that would not impede, but may even assist, manhood suffrage. Stanton mockingly challenged Phillips’ rhetoric: “This is the negro’s hour.” Are we sure that he, once entrenched in all his inalienable rights, may not be an added power to hold us at bay? Have not “black male citizens” been heard to say they doubted the wisdom of extending the right of suffrage to women? Why should the African prove more just and generous than his Saxon compeers? If the two millions [sic] of Southern black women are not to be secured in their rights of person, property, wages, and children, their emancipation is but another form of slavery. In fact, it is better to be the slave of an educated white man, than of a degraded, ignorant black one. 74 This perspective anticipated the burgeoning racism that would become increasingly common during the Reconstruction era and beyond. But it also demonstrated an awareness of the ease with which a patriarchal social order could be inscribed. Stanton, unlike many of the politicians and reformers arguing for manhood suffrage, still emphasised the rights of African American women. The sincerity of this attention may be questioned because of the degree to which Stanton later abandoned cross-racial reform imperatives, but she nonetheless understood that the oversight of African American women was intensely hypocritical.

72 Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 60. 73 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 845-846. 74 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “This is the Negro’s Hour,” NASS , December 26, 1865.

136 The condemnation of the “negro’s hour” persisted during the late 1860s. This indicated a shift to comparisons based on race rather than chattel slavery at the same time as it represented continued attempts toward intersectionality. Stephen Foster critiqued the “rank tyranny” faced by the disenfranchised, and expressed his hope for “justice to all classes and colours” at an 1866 AASS meeting. 75 Stanton publicly and privately maintained that African American suffrage opened the “constitutional door” for women’s suffrage.76 The defence of universal suffrage therefore represented the growing acceptance of legal comparisons between women and African Americans, rather than women and slaves. More specifically, Parker Pillsbury questioned: “When has she ever claimed that ‘this is woman’s hour?’ When has she ever asked the negro to wait one moment for her? … Never! Nowhere! Side by side with the negro, is all she asks.” 77 In 1870, Robert Purvis, an African American reformer, also voiced this rhetorical shift: I ask no right that I will not give to every other human being, without regard to sex or colour. I cannot ask white women to give their efforts and influence in behalf of my race, and then meanly and selfishly withhold countenance of a movement tending to their enfranchisement. 78 Margaret Hope Bacon suggests that Purvis’s commitment to women’s rights and universal suffrage derived from his “deeply held convictions on human rights.” 79 Consequently, the rhetorical links between chattel slavery and race were changing. The significance of the woman-slave analogy persisted, but it was increasingly predicated on comparisons between sex and race. When ex-abolitionists, Radical Republicans and even some women’s rights reformers justified their shifting allegiances by suggesting the nation was not yet ready for women’s suffrage, they again structured their arguments through this categorisation. Thomas W. Higginson revealed his newly acquired awareness of women’s “political rights” by acknowledging “the impossibility of a race of contented slaves”: I had always taken the ground that the acquiescence of the vast majority of women was like that of slaves, but observation has taught me that no such phenomenon is to be found among slaves. The acquiescence of women – for it is not an unwilling, coerced [or] ... dogged submission, – is an argument hard to answer for a man. Certainly men can never secure their woman’s rights vicariously for them. 80 To counter the idea that women’s suffrage was as yet too controversial, other reformers engaged in numerical comparisons that emphasised the need for universal suffrage. This strategy drew latent

75 Stephen Foster, American Anti-Slavery Society meeting (9 May 1966), Selected Papers , Vol.II, 581-582. 76 See: Stanton, “This is the Negro’s Hour,” 564; Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Martha C. Wright, December 20, 1865, Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, eds. Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922), 108-109, e-book; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815-1897 (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), e-book. 77 Parker Pillsbury, “Fifteenth Amendment,” Revolution , July 1, 1869. 78 Robert Purvis, in Lana F. Rakow and Cheris Kramarae, eds. The Revolution in Words: Righting Women, 1868-1871 (London: Routledge, 1990), 65. 79 Margaret Hope Bacon, “‘The Double Curse of Sex and Colour’: Robert Purvis and Human Rights,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CXXI, no. 1/2 (1997): 54. 80 Thomas W. Higginson to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, May 2, 1866, Selected Papers , Vol.II, 578.

137 association with the Three-Fifths Compromise (1787), which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for political representation.81 An 1866 Petition for Universal Suffrage emphasised a numerical comparison between the rights of “four millions of emancipated slaves” and women, who constituted “fifteen million people – one half the entire population of the country[.]”82 This was further influenced by the way reformers used the Declaration of Independence to affirm their commitment to the individual rights of women and the enslaved.83 Frederick Douglass emphasised that “one-half the citizens are disfranchised by their sex, and about one-eighth by the colour of their skin,” therefore arguing that “ on account of sex or race” must be eliminated in “a 84 GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE , AND THE WHOLE PEOPLE ; FOR THE PEOPLE AND THE WHOLE PEOPLE .” Together, republican principles and numerical comparisons strengthened associations between women and chattel slaves in a way that shaped allusions to the woman-slave analogy. Despite the contention between women’s suffrage and manhood suffrage, a postwar organisation dedicated to universal suffrage emerged. The American Equal Rights Association (AERA), established in 1866 at the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention in New York. The AERA emphasised what they viewed as the similar position of women and ex-slaves. As its founders, Stanton and Anthony were instrumental in shaping its rhetoric. Stanton expressed her hope “to see the Anti-Slavery and Woman’s Rights organisations merged into an Equal Rights association,” because their issues “were now one and the same” – African American men and all women ostensibly only sought “the right of suffrage.” 85 Although this statement denied important structural and social differences, it demonstrated a layover from the ongoing antebellum awareness of interdependent oppressions. For Anthony, the AERA also presented a timely opportunity to pursue “universal suffrage”; the “Woman’s Rights platform” needed to transform “in name – what it ever has been in spirit – a Human Rights platform.” These reformers trusted that the formation of the AERA could and would reconcile these issues. This was expressed through the resolution: “By the act of Emancipation and the Civil Rights bill, the negro and woman now hold the same civil and political status , alike only needing the ballot[.]” 86 The political interconnections predicated on

81 See: James Oakes, “‘The Compromising Expedient’: Justifying a Proslavery Constitution,” Cardozo Law Review 17 (1995): 2023-2056. 82 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “A Petition for Universal Suffrage,” National Archives: The Centre for Legislative Archives , 1866, n.d., accessed May 15, 2013, http://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/suffrage/. Signatories included Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Ernestine L. Rose. See also: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, Martha C. Wright, and Susan B. Anthony, “Petition: Appeal to the Women of New York,” November 1860, in Doress-Worters, Mistress , 285-286. 83 Nicholas Buccola, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 42. 84 Frederick Douglass, “Memorial of the American Equal Rights Association to the Congress of the United States,” NASS , December 22, 1866. 85 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, May 10, 1866, Selected Papers , Vol.I, 587. 86 Susan B. Anthony, Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1866, Selected Papers , Vol.I, 584.

138 suffrage reinforced the ideological foundations of the woman-slave analogy even as the discussion of ex-slaves gave way to a focus on race. A concentration on race, however, was concomitant with the way white reformers increasingly inscribed a vision of racial hierarchy alongside the discussion of domestic ideology. Since arguments for universal suffrage were often framed toward a male audience, they sometimes invoked separate spheres. This was usually to demonstrate that white women should receive better treatment than African Americans. In an 1867 speech, Anthony asked: [Should] our wives and daughters … remain in that political degradation – below even the slaves[?] … When you propose to elevate the lowest and most degraded classes of men to an even platform with white men ... it is certainly time for you to begin to … lift the wives, daughters and mothers of your State to an even pedestal. 87 Chris Dixon describes this as an illustration of the “limits to the abolitionist sisterhood,” because such an interpretation of disenfranchisement invoked discourses of slavery alongside the rhetoric of separate spheres. 88 Soon, reformers such as Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would challenge the assumptions that emanated from such divisive suffrage arguments. The differentiation of white women from slaves and racial minorities caused divisions amongst reformers, who found it increasingly difficult to argue toward a common cause among all women. Manhood suffrage quickly gained greater prominence and support than universal suffrage. As Stanton and Anthony could not see manhood suffrage as any more important than women’s suffrage, they were its most outspoken opponents. This was further problematised when reformers stood up to air such views at interracial conventions. The performative process would have revealed the reality of white women’s comparatively privileged experience, so the woman-slave analogy would have seemed even less ideologically tenable when directly compared to the lives of the recently emancipated slaves. With the combative mobilisation of this rhetoric meant, its racist overtones became increasingly obvious. Not all reformers acceded to the deterioration of this rhetorical strategy, and African Americans were at the forefront of a rhetorical critique.

Racial Limits? During the 1860s, some arguments toward universal suffrage used the woman-slave analogy to address the hypocrisy of overlooking African American women. One of the strengths of Reconstruction debate, according to DuBois, was the possibility to focus on, or even emphasise, the experiences of African American women in a framework that disregarded race and sex as categories and instead looked toward a shared humanity. A variety of African American and white reformers explored “what it might mean to put black, not white, women at the centre of the movement’s

87 Susan B. Anthony, Speech in St. Louis, Missouri, November 25, 1867, Selected Papers , Vol.II, 111. 88 Dixon, Perfecting , 235.

139 concerns,” thus foregrounding women’s capacity for resistance rather than weakness. 89 When reformers truly explored the parameters of citizenship from the perspective of freedwomen, rather than white women or freedmen, this rhetoric revealed rich and nuanced intersectional tendencies. Sojourner Truth often inverted the way many white reformers engaged with discourses of slavery. According to Dudden, Truth reflected the AERA’s “deep need for a heroic black woman who could resolve race and gender differences and speak truth to power in both directions.” 90 While Truth accepted the immediate need for manhood suffrage, she also genuinely supported universal suffrage. 91 This was reflected in the way she mobilised references to chattel slavery in conjunction with discourses of slavery. Certainly, she directly discussed the exploitation and abuses of chattel slavery. For Truth, however, discourses of slavery could also be as a euphemism – one that did not refer solely to chattel slavery but encompassed real and epistemological forms of oppression. This use of language, all the more extraordinary due to her personal experience of enslavement, was part of the rhetorical landscape of antebellum social reform. It was not the Emancipation Proclamation or Thirteenth Amendment alone that eliminated Truth’s understanding of what constituted slavery. At the AERA’s first annual meeting in 1867, Truth emphasised the experience of enslaved women whilst claiming rights for all: I come from another field — the country of the slave. They have got their liberty — so much good luck to have slavery partly destroyed; not entirely. I want it root and branch destroyed. Then we will all be free indeed. … [I]f coloured men get their rights, and not coloured women theirs, you see the coloured men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. 92 This interpretation reflected how the Freedmen’s Bureau replicated patriarchal social structures through the authority of husbands, including his “command over the persons and labour of his wife and children,” as a “reward” of freedom and evidence of citizenship. 93 The oppression African American women could face within marriage was, of course, different from the abuses of chattel slavery, but patriarchal legal and social structures still made them vulnerable following slave emancipation. Overall, Theresa C. Zackodnik suggests, “the advancement of ‘the race’ was directly linked to the status of African American women.”94 As an ex-slave and African American woman, Truth employed discourses of slavery to challenge prevailing social and political structures whilst circumventing the issues of racism that white women’s rights reformers encountered and perpetuated.

89 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 846-847. 90 Dudden, Fighting Chance , 19. 91 Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 222-223. 92 Sojourner Truth, American Equal Rights Association, May 10, 1867, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage , Vol.II (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 193, e- book. 93 Cott, Public Vows , 93. 94 Teresa C. Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (The University of Tennessee Press, 2011), xx-xxi.

140 Conversely, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s conflicted approach to manhood versus universal suffrage informed her rhetorical practices. “We are all bound up together,” Harper emphasised in a speech at the Eleventh Women’s Rights Convention of 1866, where she revealed a different perspective: You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a coloured woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if … my hand [was] against every man, and every man’s hand against me.95 Although Harper, like Truth, predicated her analysis on the experience of African American women, her perception of rights differed. Harper, anticipating arguments based on separate spheres to instil racial hierarchy, refuted the idea that white women were “dew-drops just exhaled from the skies.” The vote may provide the incentive for responsible citizenship, but it was also a “normal school,” Harper suggested, the lessons from which “selfish” white women were most in need. If Harper’s recent experiences as a enabled her to understand the hardship that accompanied women’s lack of property rights, she still saw the needs of the disadvantaged African American community as more immediate.96 The realisation that Americans were “all bound up together” meant, for Harper, that the rights of African Americans and women alike needed to be realised. 97 Increasingly convinced of white and black women’s failure to unite on even fundamental issues, the Radical Republicans’ support of the Reconstruction amendments encouraged Harper to condemn Stanton’s “Sambo” imagery. 98 Increasingly, the racist potential of the woman-slave analogy led some African American reformers to view it with repugnance. Ultimately, Harper used discourses of slavery to emphasise the rights of the enslaved and racial minorities over that of women. 99 Harper’s short novel, Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), further revealed this ideological conflict. The character of Minnie, raised as a white child by abolitionist Quakers, discovers and embraces her African heritage as a young woman and works to strengthen the Reconstruction South. Yet to the surprise of her new husband Louis, she also supports women’s suffrage: “Louis” said Minnie very seriously, “I think the nation makes one great mistake in settling this question of suffrage. It seems to me that everything gets settled on a partial basis. When they are reconstructing the government why not lay the whole foundation anew, and base the right of suffrage not on the claims of service or sex, but on the broader basis of our common humanity.” “Because, Minnie, we are not prepared for it. This hour belongs to the negro.” 100

95 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges , 198. 96 Shirley Wilson Logan, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 44 and 69. 97 Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1-3. 98 Parker, Articulating , 119-120 and 112. 99 Tess Chakkalakal, Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 65. 100 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Minnie’s Sacrifice (Project Gutenberg, 1869, 2010), 56-57, e-book.

141 In response to this echo of Wendell Phillips, Minnie asks: “[I]s it not the negro woman’s hour also? Has she not as many rights and claims as the negro man?” Louis emphasises that the improvement of the “coloured man” also benefits women, but Minnie recognises that the claims of “the negro man” were not in isolation because enfranchisement would enable women to “have some power to defend herself from oppression, and equal laws as if she were a man.” Although Harper’s support for the Fifteenth Amendment did not mean she rejected women’s suffrage, Minnie’s Sacrifice presented the dilemma faced by many reformers.101 An appreciation for the oppression engendered by race and sex emerged to justify competing attitudes toward the Reconstruction amendments. Following the Civil War, some white women reformers similarly focused on the experience of African American women. This strategy may have emerged to bring women’s rights into a postbellum conversation preoccupied with race, but it was not always “so opportunistic,” according to DuBois. 102 Frances Dana Gage frequently centred her arguments on the rights of African Americans. The enslaved would not demonstrate their desire for freedom in front of their master, so neither would women express their desire for enfranchisement, Gage said, in an 1867 speech before the AERA.103 However, many inconsistencies arose when reformers sought to focus on the rights of African American women. In 1869, Phoebe Couzins noted how “the claims of, and justice to, the black woman are of paramount importance,” but the remainder of her speech was predicated on the mobilisation of racist and nativist rhetoric. 104 Even when reformers attempted to use the woman-slave analogy for inclusive purposes, the cultural forces that shaped their own experiences impaired their ability to present an unwavering rhetorical insistence on the existence of interdependent oppressions. This disconnect slowly drove the woman-slave analogy to its limits. Stanton, in particular, exhibited this tension, because she fully exploited the racist potential of the woman-slave analogy at the same time as using it in a more moderate and inclusive manner. Both impulses were exhibited in her 1865 denunciation of the “negro’s hour,” which concluded that “the disfranchised all make the same demand, and the same logic and justice that secures Suffrage to one class gives it to all.” 105 By 1869, Stanton continued to exhibit a concern for the African American women, who were ostensibly about to “change their form of slavery from white to black masters, under the same code of laws we have been repudiating for ourselves for the last twenty years.”106 The moments where Stanton emphasised interdependent oppressions, however, were no longer representative of her broader rhetorical impulses. Biographer Elisabeth Griffith concludes that the majority of Stanton’s

101 Parker, Articulating , 120. 102 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 846-847. 103 Frances Dana Gage, “American Equal Rights Association,” May 10, 1867, in HWS , Vol.II., 200. 104 “Speech of Phoebe Couzins: Before the National Woman Suffrage Association,” Revolution , July 8, 1869. 105 Stanton, “This is the Negro’s Hour,” 565. 106 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Fifteenth Amendment,” Revolution , May 20, 1869.

142 postbellum suffrage defence “adopted an antiblack, antimale, profemale argument” that was so racist and nativist that it alienated even her supporters. 107 In the absence of chattel slavery, the rhetoric of many white women’s rights reformers was often at odds with their lack of interest in the needs of freedpeople. Many of these issues came to the fore at the AERA’s annual meeting of 1869. Stephen Foster objected to the renomination of Stanton and Anthony, ostensibly because of their newspaper, The Revolution , and one proclamation in particular – “Educated Suffrage, Irrespective of Sex or Colour.” 108 The idea of qualified suffrage, which would become more prominent in the 1870s, was at odds with the AERA’s principle of universal suffrage. In response, Henry B. Blackwell offered that the meeting was “united” because Stanton and Anthony, too, “believe in the right of the negro to vote.” Yet The Revolution came under further discrepancy. Douglass, like Harper, refuted Stanton’s use of “Sambo” imagery therein. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and ,” Douglass proclaimed, “then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” Paulina Wright Davis, however, could not condone the Fifteenth Amendment without a Sixteenth Amendment, “for woman would have a race of tyrants raised above her in the South”; this situation, Davis knew, would disproportionately impact black women. 109 The ebb and flow of all these arguments hinged on a comparison between women and slaves, and sex and race, to the degree that its foundations – the woman-slave analogy – was found wanting. Not surprisingly, 1869 saw the dissolution of the AERA to make way for the emergence of two new competing organisations dedicated to women’s suffrage. These organisations were differentiated by their approach to the Fourteenth and proposed Fifteenth Amendments. Initially, Stanton and Anthony’s more radical NWSA campaigned for the Fourteenth Amendment to be revised to include women’s suffrage. Yet the NWSA became a broad church which overtly supported many other women’s rights issues, including labour and divorce reform. In contrast, Stone and Blackwell’s AWSA supported the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and viewed manhood suffrage as a more critical Reconstruction goal. The AWSA believed women would be enfranchised following manhood suffrage, but when this did not transpire women’s suffrage became their primary goal. This was pursued through a state-by-state approach that encouraging organisation and activism at the state level.110

107 Griffith, In Her Own Right , 124. 108 The Revolution ’s first issue stated: “The Revolution will advocate: 1. In Politics – Educated Suffrage, Irrespective of Sex or Colour,” Revolution , January 8, 1868. 109 “The May Anniversaries in New York and Brooklyn,” in HWS , Vol.II, 379-398. 110 Holly J. McCammon, “Stirring up Suffrage Sentiment: The Formation of the State Woman Suffrage Organisations, 1866-1914,” Social Forces 80, no. 2 (2001): 453.

143 However, these ideological differences did not affect rhetorical continuity of the suffrage debate. The woman-slave analogy remained central to both organisations and was habitually mobilised in their periodicals. Prior to the AERA meeting of 1869, Stanton and Anthony’s The Revolution called: Women of America; ye into whose souls has entered this iron of caste legislation! Has our slavery been so sweet that we can calmly contemplate the further riveting of its chains? 111 Stone and Blackwell’s The Woman’s Journal also maintained that “the subjection of woman is by far more subtle, more profound, more complex, than any chattel slavery.” 112 Both factions, moreover, used discourses of slavery to refute the anti-suffrage argument that women did not desire the ballot. A contributor to The Revolution concluded that many women did not know that they desired enfranchisement, by providing the dubious corollary that “the emancipation of our millions of slaves did not first come from the bondmen,” while the Journal viewed “the chief labour … in convincing the oppressed class that they are oppressed.” 113 Ultimately, this rhetoric transcended the allegiance of the suffragists themselves. Women were unable to gain enough leverage to ensure that women’s suffrage remained central to the post-Civil War debate. In response, the racial tensions illuminated by the AERA persisted within both factions for decades to come.114 The slow success of the state by state suffrage campaign continued when the NWSA and AWSA reunited as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. The woman-slave analogy would continue to shape suffragist rhetoric, but the failure to secure suffrage for all women during the Reconstruction era led to a latent focus on white women’s suffrage.

New Departures Alongside the development of the NWSA and the AWSA, new suffrage strategies emerged in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1869, at the first convention of the Missouri Woman Suffrage Association, Francis and Virginia Minor conceived of a different approach to the Reconstruction amendments which suggested a constitutional approach to women’s suffrage. 115 The Minors were fundamentally inspired by the success of African American manhood suffrage

111 R.C.M., “Ingratitude of Coloured Men,” Revolution , January 7, 1869. 112 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Slaves and Women,” Woman’s Journal , June 3, 1871. 113 Anonymous, “The True Question,” Revolution , 1870, in Revolution in Words , 232; Higginson, “Slaves and Women,” Journal , 1871. 114 See: Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Daughters of Jefferson, Daughters of Bootblacks”: Racism and American Feminism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1986), Chapter One: “The Woman Suffrage Movement and the Black Freedom Movement”; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), Chapter One: “Revisiting the Question of Race in the Woman Suffrage Movement”; Louise Michele Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 115 Ellen Carol DuBois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell , Minor , and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” in One Woman , 85.

144 through the Reconstruction amendments. Where the AERA conflicts illustrated the racial tensions that resulted from misplaced rhetoric and argumentative strategies, the Minors’ rhetoric demonstrated a more discernible shift in the use of the woman-slave analogy. In their legal arguments, the transition from comparisons between women and slaves to a focus on sex and race belied a more complete emphasis on white women’s suffrage. The Minors’ “New Departure” strategy was premised on the idea that women merely had to claim the rights that were already theirs. 116 Beginning with Wyoming territory in 1869, the earliest extension of the franchise to women occurred in western states; indeed, frontier society challenged the more rigid gender demarcations of established regions.117 It is likely that this contributed to the Minors’ constitutional interpretation and attitudes toward suffrage. The Minors combined natural rights, popular democracy, and reverence for the Constitution with national sovereignty to place the elective franchise under national control; their Fifteenth Amendment interpretation was based on the premise that citizenship encompassed enfranchisement, a connection most legislators and jurists denied.118 The NWSA adopted this new strategy as policy, and the resolutions from the Missouri convention were circulated in The Revolution .119 In 1869, Francis Minor stated: “We no longer beat the air – no longer assume merely the attitude of petitioners. We claim a right, based upon citizenship.” 120 Because such rights had recently been extended to freedmen, this example was central to the Minors’ argument and rhetorical strategy. In the process, the construction of sex and race as categories became much more important that the comparison between women and slaves. The Minors’ interpretative paradigm “relied on a symbolic reformulation of the federal citizen, to one who possessed no characteristics of race, sex, regional or national origin, socioeconomic status, or religion that were relevant to the government.” 121 They expanded the reform reliance on legal and constitutional transformation to instigate social change. Stanton, for example, invariably employed the woman-slave analogy to emphasise the need “to bury the black man and the woman in the citizen,” and these arguments were grounded in her legal background. 122 As the Minors similarly viewed female citizens as people, rather than an anomaly or member of a separate class, they focused their arguments on the relationship between women and the government. 123 In her 1869 address before the Missouri Woman Suffrage Association, Virginia

116 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 853. 117 Holly J. McCammon, Karen E. Campbell, Ellen M. Granberg and Christine Mowery, “How Movements Win: Gendered Opportunity Structures and U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movements, 1866 to 1919,” American Sociological Review 66, no. 1 (2001): 54. 118 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 852-853. 119 Angela G. Ray and Cindy Koenig Richards, “Inventing Citizens, Imagining Gender Justice: The Suffrage Rhetoric of Virginia and Francis Minor,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93, no. 4 (2007): 379-380. 120 Francis Minor, “Make the Trial,” Revolution , October 21, 1869. 121 Ray and Richards, “Inventing,” 387. 122 Stanton, Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, 1866, Selected Papers , Vol.I, 587. 123 Ray and Richards, “Inventing,” 388.

145 Minor emphasised the connection between citizenship for African Americans and women. Minor critiqued the length of time it had taken for African American citizenship to be acknowledged, but saw enfranchisement as dependent “merely on the acknowledgment of [women’s] right as citizens.” Because this was the “discovery” of powerful judiciary men, Minor emphasised, arguments for women’s suffrage were not imagined by “illogical, unreasoning women, totally incapable of understanding politics.” 124 When Minor used discourses of slavery, she accentuated the “simple equivalence” that women, like African Americans, had always been citizens. 125 When the Minors’ took legal action, their argument continued to rely on the woman-slave analogy and further developed its ideological foundations. The Supreme Court of Missouri, responding to the Minors in 1873, concluded that, as the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that “freedmen” were “equal with other citizens before the law,” it did not apply to women. This judgement impelled more explicit comparisons based on the categories of race and sex. The Minors stated that the Fourteenth Amendment “was designed as a limitation on the powers of the States,” thus protecting the privileges and immunities of male citizens: It can not be pretended that the Constitution of the United States makes, or permits[,] … any distinction between its citizens in their rights and privileges; that the negro has a right which is denied to the woman. The discrimination, therefore, … by the State of Missouri … is an unjustifiable act of arbitrary POWER, not of right[.] 126 The Minors further sought to prove that voting rights were a “privilege of citizenship” with which freedmen were already bestowed under the Fifteenth Amendment. The Minors citing Roger B. Taney’s opinion in Scott v. Sanford , which stated that “persons of the African race” would be “entitled to all of these privileges and immunities” if considered as citizens. In so doing, the Minors rendered the analogy explicit: “Now, substitute … for ‘persons of the African race,’ women , … and you have the key to the whole position.” These arguments relied heavily on a comparison with a race in a way that viewed the rights of African Americans as already secured – not yet to be gained, as in antebellum comparisons with chattel slavery. Therefore, the Minors’ use of the woman-slave analogy resulted in a greater focus on the suffrage rights of white women. Angela G. Ray and Cindy Koenig Richards contend that the Minors’ arguments were informed by the logic of white supremacy. 127 At the same time, the Minors were unlike many politicians in that they did not refute African American male citizenship or voting rights. They simply believed that women should also have these rights. When Minor v. Happersett (1875) failed to convince the United States Supreme Court, exclusionary suffrage on the basis of sex was fully endorsed. This again suggests that the majority did not see analogies between women and slaves, or

124 “Mrs. Francis Minor,” Revolution , October 28, 1869. 125 Ray and Richards, “Inventing,” 389. 126 “Virginia L. Minor’s Petition,” in HWS , Vol.II., 726, 728, 719 and 723; Dred Scott v. Sanford , 1857. 127 Ray and Richards, “Inventing,” 390-391; Minor v. Happersett , 1875.

146 sex and race, as relevant or evocative. For reformers, the failure of the New Departure emphasised that unequal citizenship could be constructed through sex, but no longer on the basis of race. After hearing the Minors’ argument at the 1869 convention, Victoria Woodhull appropriated the New Departure strategy and its accompanying rhetoric. In 1871, Woodhull became the first woman to speak before a United States congressional committee. Addressing the New York House Judiciary Committee, Woodhull argued that women, as citizens, were already enfranchised.128 This interpretation was stronger than that of the Minors’ because it situated enfranchisement as an inherent quality of citizenship; Woodhull encouraged women to register and vote, and potentially go to court and to jail, for that right. 129 So too did this version of the New Departure mobilise comparisons between sex and race. Women, Woodhull stated, “belong to races,” and because a “race of people comprises all the people, male and female,” enfranchisement could not be “denied on account of race ... unless otherwise prohibited.” 130 In conjunction, Woodhull made the overtly political suggestion that Congress pass a declaratory act – already widely known as the Sixteenth Amendment – to clarify women’s constitutional right to vote. 131 A continued emphasis on the African American manhood suffrage demonstrated how a focus on sex and race, rather than women and slaves, became central to the postbellum expression of the woman-slave analogy. Throughout the Reconstruction era, the manner in which reformers enacted the voting-based civil disobedience encouraged by the New Departure was informed by the enfranchisement of freedmen. For hundreds of women, the idea of “‘taking’ their freedom meant exacting their rights at the point where citizenship was ‘produced’: the polling booth.” 132 The first instances of performative voting took place prior to the emergence of the Minors during 1868-69. 133 These women discussed citizenship in a way that was influenced by the arguments of prominent reformers. Prior to the passage of women’s suffrage in Washington Territory, Mary Olney Brown described her interpretation of suffrage to polling booth election officials: I went on to show them that the original constitution recognised women as citizens, and that the word citizen includes both sexes[;] … the emancipation of the Southern slaves threw upon the country a class of people, who, like the women of the nation, owed allegiance to the government, but whose citizenship was not recognised. To settle this question, the fourteenth amendment was adopted. 134

128 Cari M. Carpenter, ed. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), xvii-xviii. 129 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 855; DuBois, “Taking the Law,” 88; Rierson, “Race and Gender,” 106. 130 Virginia Woodhull, “Constitutional Equality,” in Selected Writings , 25. 131 DuBois, “Outgrowing,” 853-854. These rights were set forth in Section 1 but not guaranteed to women in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Rierson, “Race and Gender,” 111. 132 Kathi Kern and Linda Levstik, “Teaching the New Departure: The United States vs. Susan B. Anthony,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 1 (2012): 127; United States of America v. Susan B. Anthony (1873). Mrs. M.M. Ricker of New York voted in 1872: “Woman Suffrage,” Woodhull , April 13 1872. 133 DuBois, “Taking the Law,” 86. 134 Mary Olney Brown, 1881, in HWS , Vol.III, 783.

147 The Grimké sisters also engaged in this “theatrical form of civil disobedience” by voting with a group of women in an 1870 Massachusetts town election. 135 Many such efforts took place in groups, as women believed suffrage to be “an individual right that would be achieved and experienced collectively.” 136 When Anthony was arrested for casting an illegal ballot in 1872, her justification rested on the fact that “the slaves who got their freedom” had to “take it” in spite of “the unjust forms of law” – women, too, similarly needed to “take” the opportunity to have their voices heard in government. 137 In the wake of the Minor v. Happersett ruling, the New Departure strategy was largely abandoned. 138 However, the way reformers used the woman-slave analogy was inspired by the overt connections that the Minors and Woodhull made between sex and race. The cultural prevalence of the Reconstruction amendments also encouraged reformers to structure their use of the woman-slave analogy on the specific wording of the amendments. The Minors understood women’s disenfranchisement as “a badge of servitude” that breached the Thirteenth Amendment. 139 Just as the Minors’ legal proceedings invoked the Fourteenth Amendment, reformers exploited all the Reconstruction amendments to make connections between African Americans and women. “Women, white and black, have from time immemorial groaned under what is properly termed in the Constitution ‘previous condition of servitude’,” Woodhull claimed. 140 Anthony’s address to the Territorial Legislature of Washington in 1871, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, invoked the Dred Scott decision to show how citizenship included “civil and political” rights. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, Anthony concluded, together determined “who are citizens and who are entitled to vote.” 141 By directly invoking the wording of the Fifteenth Amendment, it was implied that women were the only oppressed group that remained in the United States. The arguments toward a women’s suffrage “Sixteenth Amendment” employed similar rhetoric. Stanton viewed the existing amendments as creating “an antagonism between black men and all women,” which resulted in a “greater tyranny” toward the disenfranchised of all classes.142 The History of Woman Suffrage , relating the contentions of 1869, discussed the multiple imperatives toward a Sixteenth Amendment. 143 Although many reformers became increasingly wary of Woodhull’s reputation, her periodical engaged in discussions reminiscent of the broader

135 Parker, Articulating , 85-86. 136 DuBois, “Taking the Law,” 87. 137 Susan B. Anthony, “Speech before the Circuit Court,” 1872, in Selected Papers , Vol.II, 613–16. 138 Parker, Articulating , 85-86; Griffith, In Her Own Right , 168. 139 “Virginia L. Minor’s Petition,” in HWS , Vol.II., 730. 140 Woodhull, “Constitutional Equality,” 25. 141 Anthony, Speech to the Territorial Legislature of Washington, 1871, in Selected Papers , Vol.II, 458-459. 142 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association,” Revolution , May 13, 1869. 143 “The Sixteenth Amendment,” HWS , Vol.II., 333-337.

148 women’s suffrage movement. 144 In support of the Sixteenth Amendment, a contributor to Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly maintained: “Negro slavery involved a few millions of individuals. The woman question involves hundreds of millions scattered all over the face of the earth.” 145 Pressure toward a Sixteenth Amendment continued throughout the 1870s. The official committees formed to present arguments to the Senate often employed discourses of slavery. The 1878 committee, for example, included Stanton and Gage together with Lillie Devereux Blake and Isabella Beecher Hooker. 146 As chattel slavery became ever more distant, the framework for the woman-slave analogy necessarily changed. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham demonstrates that, prior to the Civil War, chattel slavery provided the “social context for the construction of race as a tool for black oppression,” but following emancipation, race alone became the distinctive category of otherness and was consequently inscribed as an antithesis to whiteness. 147 In conjunction, the woman-slave analogy transformed throughout the 1860s – from a comparison between women and slaves, to a discussion based on the perceived likeness of sex and race. Simultaneously, the concept of race became increasingly distanced from chattel slavery. This enabled suffragists to return to abstract discourses of slavery, another rhetorical shift which again did not often attempt an intersectional focus on the oppression of all women. This rhetoric was influenced by the significance of the national centenary.

Competing Strategies Upon the centennial anniversary of the United States, movements toward women’s suffrage promoted the argument that disenfranchised women were the only oppressed group left in the Republic. This argument continued to be predicated on discourses of slavery, but these references were more abstract – based on metaphors of the American Revolution rather than a racialised form of chattel slavery. In the absence of chattel slavery, the rhetorical categorisation of sex and race enabled a greater focus on white women’s rights. Throughout the nineteenth century, women’s suffrage discussions invoked the revolutionary rhetoric that “taxation without representation” was a form of oppression. From the 1850s onwards,

144 Stanton and then Anthony had initially been enchanted by Woodhull, and Anthony particularly “sympathised with any woman attacked for radical views or unconventional behaviour.” Griffith, In Her Own Right , 148. For Woodhull’s controversial persona, see: Amanda Frisken, “Sex in Politics: Victoria Woodhull as an American Public Woman, 1870- 1876,” Journal of Women’s History 12, no. 1 (2000): 89-111. 145 “The Sixteenth Amendment,” Woodhull , October 4, 1870. 146 See: Transcript of Record, “Arguments before the Committee of the United States Senate, in Behalf of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Prohibiting the Several States from Disfranchising United States Citizens on Account of Sex, and Protest against Woman Suffrage, to Same Committee” (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878), (Suffrage Collection: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College). 147 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 256. See also: Angelo Rich Robinson, “Race, Place, and Space: Remaking Whiteness in the Post- Reconstruction South,” The Southern Literary Journal 35, no. 1 (2002): 98.

149 this was both a focus of women’s rights print culture and a matter of action.148 Many women reformers refused to pay taxes until they were enfranchised. Lucy Stone’s 1858 protest stated that “women suffer taxation, and yet have no representation, which is not only unjust to one-half the population, but is contrary to our theory of government[.]”149 Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck praised Stone’s courage to actively protest taxation and “gain the rights she justly demands.” Upon Hasbrouck’s own protest, the collector informed her that she “ belonged to another man,” to which she replied that she was a co-labourer with her husband, “ not his property .” 150 This principle was similarly discussed and enacted throughout the 1870s, by prominent and lesser known reformers alike.151 Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen made a practical demonstration in 1872 by refusing to pay taxes on their farm until Abby was allowed to vote.152 Virginia Minor claimed that “taxation without representation is the sum of all tyranny,” and Lydia Maria Child offered a critique to The Woman’s Journal .153 The mobilisation of revolutionary ideals did not negate the woman-slave analogy, but instead represented a shift in women’s suffrage rhetoric as the national centenary approached. The NWSA viewed the centennial anniversary as an opportunity for suffragists to use a patriotic setting to present “a new Declaration of Women’s Rights.” 154 Between 1870 and 1876, different Boston groups laid claim to the centennial celebrations in sometimes competitive ways. At the 1873 Tea Party centennial, allusions to “taxation without representation” were used to emphasise a link connecting the Yankee of prominent suffragists to the rhetoric of the Revolution. 155 As part of the 1876 centennial celebrations, Gage and Anthony called women to “unite … in this declaration and protest” and sought to prove that “the women of 1876 know and feel their political degradation no less than did the men of 1776”:

148 See: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Why Women Must Vote,” Lily , May 1850; “Letter to the Women’s Convention, Held at Akron, Ohio, May 28, 1851,” Lily , June 1851; Amelia Bloomer, “Taxation Without Representation,” Lily , September 1851; Sarah M. Grimké, “If You Would have Freedom, Strike for It,” Lily , April 1852; Harriot K. Hunt, “Taxation Without Representation,” Lily , November 1852; Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, “Taxation and Representation,” Sibyl , March 1857; B.S., “Taxation Without Representation,” Sibyl , May 1857; L.N.M. “Woman’s Ability and ,” Sibyl , October 15, 1857; “No Taxation without Representation,” Revolution , April 9, 1868; Maud Miller, “What the People Say,” Revolution , February 25, 1869; Susan B. Anthony, “Miss Anthony’s Tax,” Revolution , June 17, 1869; Henry B. Blackwell, “Tyranny in Massachusetts,” Journal , May 27, 1871; “Woman’s Suffrage,” Woodhull , May 14, 1870; “‘Taxation No Tyranny’,” (from Harper’s Weekly ), New Northwest , October 22, 1875. 149 Lucy Stone, “Protest of Lucy Stone, made in Orange, (December 18, 1858) by the following letter to Mr. Mandeville, Tax Collector” (Women’s Rights Collection, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). Other women’s rights reformers made similar annual protests: “To the authorities of the City of Boston (Mass.) and the Citizens Generally,” Una , December 1853; “Women and Taxes,” Sibyl , January 15, 1857. 150 Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, “Taxation without Representation,” Sibyl , February 1, 1858. 151 See: Abigail Scott Duniway, “The Oregon State Woman Suffrage Association Convention,” Northwest , October 2, 1878, in Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety, eds. “Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), 170. 152 Sterling, Ahead , 367-373. 153 “A Woman Refuses to be Taxed,” Journal , October 25, 1873. See also: “Mrs. L. Maria Child on Taxation,” Journal , August 28, 1875. 154 Griffith, In Her Own Right , 166. 155 Craig Bruce Smith, “Claiming the Centennial: The American Revolution’s Blood and Spirit in Boston, 1870-1876,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 7-53.

150 On July Fourth, while the men of this nation and the world are rejoicing that “All men are free and equal” in the United States, a declaration of rights for women will be issued …, and a protest against calling this centennial a celebration of the independence of the people, while one-half are still political slaves. 156 The History of Woman Suffrage later stated that the most “fitting contributions” women could make to the centennial exposition were “these protests, laws and decisions which show her political slavery.” 157 As the rhetoric surrounding women’s suffrage increasingly structured this legal disability as the only remaining form of oppression, references to the American Revolution exemplified the substantive shift that was already underway. The rhetoric surrounding suffrage increasingly positioned white women’s rights as more important goal than a truly universal vision of suffrage. The centennial celebrations also figured prominently in suffrage songs. Nineteenth-century reformers often integrated music with social reform. The Hutchinson Family Singers were the most famous antislavery and women’s rights ensemble, and their performances shared “soul-stirring songs.”158 Their music demonstrated the “vibrant cultural space” of antebellum reform culture and their “musical metamorphosis” was based on an innovative ability to integrate popular blackface minstrelsy melodies and church hymns to forge “a native American identity” through “a new kind of ‘sacred’ music.” 159 From the 1850s onwards, the Hutchinsons adapted “One Hundred Years Hence” for antislavery and women’s rights gatherings: Oppression and war shall be heard of no more, Nor the foot of a slave, leave its print on our shore; … For mankind shall be brothers a hundred years hence. Then Woman, man’s partner, man’s equal shall stand, While beauty and harmony govern the land, To think for one’s self shall not be an offence, For the world will be thinking, a hundred years hence. 160 In the song’s 1876 iteration, the lyrics used the recent success of the antislavery movement to demonstrate how the abolition of chattel slavery meant that women’s rights also needed to be realised for all oppression to be eliminated. Again, this indicated the growing belief among women’s rights reformers that women’s oppression was the only social wrong still in need of reform. Since women’s suffrage was not achieved on the national centenary, suffragists continued to critique the bounds of citizenship in a way that made fewer allusions to the need for the rights of African Americans to be realised.

156 Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony, 1876, in HWS , Vol.III, 21-22. 157 Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., HWS , Vol. III, 56. 158 “The May Anniversaries in New York and Brooklyn,” in HWS , Vol.II, 400. 159 Scott Gac, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Reform (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 4-5 160 Frances Dana Gage and John Hutchinson, “One Hundred Years Hence” (1876), in Crew, Suffragist Sheet Music , 66.

151 The anti-suffrage arguments of the 1870s also coalesced around these themes, to the point where they used the memory of chattel slavery as an analogy. When the prominent historian Francis Parkman published a series of anti-suffrage articles in the North American Review , he drew latent comparisons between women’s suffrage and the antislavery movement: Some half a century ago, a few devoted men began what seemed a desperate crusade against a tremendous national evil. American slavery has now passed into history. It died a death of violence, to our shame be it said; for the nation had not … wisdom enough, to abolish it peacefully and harmlessly; but it is dead. 161 Like Louisa McCord, Parkman mockingly used the rhetoric of suffragists to condemn their demands. He ridiculed the divisions among reformers: “While one thinks that women are ‘omnipotent,’ and wants to lessen their power by requiring them to vote, others cry with emotion that they are slaves, whose shackles the ballot must strike off.” 162 According to biographer Wilbur R. Jacobs, Parkman directed a “tone of cool rage” toward the reformers who publicly challenged his assertions, including Julia Ward Howe, Stone and Stanton; yet male opponents Phillips and Higginson received the most incensed reaction, ostensibly because they were men. 163 Caroline Wells Healey Dall wrote a private condemnation of Parkman, in which she questioned the implications of variations on the woman-slave analogy. Dall’s interest in qualified suffrage anticipated another exclusionary impetus to enfranchise educated white women through educational and taxpaying limitations. To provide context for her argument, Dall considered the way women’s historical experience was viewed by many as one of slavery. Dall observed the tendency of suffragists to “declaim against past & present generations of men, as if they had been conscious tyrants or women unwilling slaves.” Yet men, Dall emphasised, needed to realise that “their attitude is tyrannical,” and women that “theirs is slavish,” thus creating a contradictory argument based on the premise that women’s very attitude was inherently oppressive.164 If Dall saw women’s attitude as “slavish,” this presumably did not extend to educated women. Yet it simultaneously departed from Frances Harper’s derision of the “normal school” of enfranchisement, where selfish white women demanded the vote for themselves alone. This perspective provided just another example of how, during 1870s, discourses of slavery were used to diverge further from the ideal of universal suffrage. This changing rhetorical impetus expanded alongside the development of the southern women’s suffrage movement during the 1870s and 1880s. The southern movement, a generation

161 Francis Parkman, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,” North American Review 127, no. 263 (1878): 19. See also: Francis Parkman, “The Woman Question,” North American Review 129, no. 275 (1879): 303-21; Francis Parkman, “The Woman Question Again,” North American Review 130, no. 278 (1880): 16-30. 162 Parkman, “The Woman Question Again,” 18. 163 Wilbur R. Jacobs, Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years (University of Texas Press, 1991), 146. 164 Caroline Wells Healey Dall, “Mr. Parkman on Woman Suffrage in the North American Review,” December 5, 1879 (Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University).

152 behind its northeastern counterpart, was similarly influenced by factors such as a growing middle class, women’s education, industrialisation, and increasing urban populations plagued by poverty. 165 Emily Parmely Collins, a New England native but long-time Louisiana resident, reiterated the new focus of this suffrage rhetoric. “I feel that now if ever is the time to strike for woman’s emancipation,” Collins wrote to Anthony in 1879. Collins believed that, given the opportunity, she would make a strong constitutional convention candidate based on the support of “coloured people,” because “I have ever been their steadfast friend, and they themselves owe their emancipation chiefly to women.” 166 These attitudes became increasingly prominent from the 1880s onwards, and racial tensions only deteriorated further. When discourses of slavery were used to focus on comparison between sex and race, the emphasis on white women became more obvious because of the implicit assumption that the rights of African Americans had been secured. Collins later reflected on the antebellum antislavery movement, and expressed surprise that “all Abolitionists did not see the similarity in the condition of the two classes” – women and slaves. For Collins and others, the “denunciation of the wrongs of the Southern slave” and arguments for their emancipation were, in the postbellum era, as “equally applicable to the wrongs of my own sex.” 167 The idea that white women should be rewarded for their antislavery efforts demonstrated how rhetoric based on discourses of slavery transformed following the Reconstruction amendments. The efforts of white southern suffragists demonstrated their newfound engagement in postbellum social reform, but they employed this rhetoric to advocate their own enfranchisement alone. In 1889, southern author and suffragist Elizabeth Avery Meriweather actively engaged in petitioning with her friends. Her servant, “a coal-black woman,” overheard the activity: [I]f I would give her a paper she could get a thousand names among the black women, [as] many … felt that they were as much slaves to their husbands as ever they had been to their white masters. I gave her a petition, and said to her, “Tell the women this is to have a law passed that will not allow the men to whip their wives [.]…” “Every black woman will go for that law!” She … procured … 110 signatures against the strong opposition of black men who in some cases threatened to whip their wives if they signed. … [M]y servant … feared some bodily harm would be done her by the black men. 168 This African American woman’s language was mediated by Meriweather, a southerner who had associations with the Ku Klux Klan.169 These vastly competing perspectives mean it is not clear which individual – the servant or Meriweather herself – mobilised this rhetoric in reference to

165 Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 2. 166 Emily Parmley Collins to Susan B. Anthony, 1879, in HWS , Vol.III, 807. 167 Emily Parmley Collins, “Reminiscences,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. HWS , Vol.I (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 89, e-book. 168 Elizabeth Avery Meriweather, December 11, 1889, in HWS , Vol.III, 154. 169 Kathleen Christine Berkeley, “Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, ‘An Advocate for Her Sex’: Feminism and Conservativism in the Post-Civil War South,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1984): 390-407; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 159.

153 women’s suffrage. Still, the History of Woman Suffrage considered this event “both novel and amusing” at the expense of the African American women’s signatures. 170 Even so, discourses of slavery, expressed through “whipping,” were used to describe the belief that all women’s oppression could be ameliorated through political action. The way southern prejudices were increasingly coveted for suffragist purposes continued to draw on the relevance of comparisons between women and slaves, sex and race. During the 1890s and 1900s, the “Southern Strategy” – which encompassed racist, classist and nativist approaches to women’s suffrage – accompanied the NAWSA impetus toward qualified suffrage. 171 Henry B. Blackwell’s “A Solution of the Southern Question” (1890), in its his arguments for qualified suffrage, built on the southern fear of African American voters: “[I]f educated Southern women were enfranchised, there would no longer be a negro majority of voters in any State[.]” 172 The southern suffrage movement, and the opportunistic rhetoric that repeatedly relied on discourses of slavery, did not work to gain more support for women’s suffrage among white southerners. It instead aggravated the racial tensions because it had the potential to further alienate those white southerners in areas with large black populations who remained fearful of women’s suffrage. 173 The tension among northern, southern and African American suffragists led to a watershed moment when the woman-slave analogy was wholly appropriated to describe the disenfranchisement of white women. In 1885, wrote to the AWSA to proclaim herself “a traitor” if she did not support the “emancipation of the white slaves of America.” 174 Not only did this assume that the rights of African Americans were fully realised; it also overlooked the disenfranchisement of African American women while implying that white women’s suffrage only needed to be granted to eliminate all forms of oppression. The term “white slavery,” associated with labour during the antebellum era and prostitution by the Progressive Era, will be considered in Chapters Five and Six. Still, Alcott’s appropriation of this term demonstrated how the interests of African American women were sidelined, both substantively and rhetorically, in late-nineteenth- century suffrage rhetoric. Again, this process was further achieved through references to American Revolution. Ten years after the national centenary, Gage proclaimed: “The women of the United States, denied for one hundred years the only means of self-government – the ballot – are political slaves, with greater

170 Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eds., HWS , Vol.III, 154. 171 Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 117-121. 172 Henry B. Blackwell, “A Solution of the Southern Question,” Woman Suffrage Leaflet 11, no. III, October 15 1890, 2 (Suffrage Collection, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College). See also: C.L. James, “Intelligent Suffrage,” Revolution , January 6 1870. 173 Green, Southern Strategies , 39. 174 Louisa May Alcott, 1885, in HWS , Vol.IV, 412.

154 cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution, than the men of 1776.” 175 Although direct comparisons between women and slaves continued, the way white reformers mobilised the woman- slave analogy progressively referenced sex and race in a way that focused on the oppressions resulting from sex. As a result, this rhetoric became increasingly disconnected from race in both its application and ideological foundations. In spite of the tendency of white reformers to use discourses of slavery in an ever more exclusive way during the late nineteenth century, African Americans continued to use this rhetoric in a more inclusive and intersectional manner. When Frederick Douglass openly re-established his support of women’s suffrage in 1888, his speech, entitled “Emancipation of Women,” was reprinted in The Woman’s Journal . Douglass recognised that his “special mission in the world” was the abolition of chattel slavery and enfranchisement of freedmen, but he expressed the belief that women’s suffrage was “a much greater cause” and, in fact, a movement that was “a continuance of the old anti-slavery movement.” 176 Like Francis Parkman, Douglass used the memory of chattel slavery to discuss women’s suffrage. Where Parkman invoked memory for the purpose of ridicule; Douglass, however, referenced the antislavery movement to underscore the many forms of oppression that characterised the nineteenth century. At the turn of the twentieth century, African American reformers expressed a similar perspective in their memorialisation of Douglass. At an 1899 Douglass memorial, Rosa Hazard Hazel maintained: The woman who would battle for the freedom of the slave soon found that … she herself worked with fettered limbs, and unworthily, until her own individuality was recognised, her own freedom accomplished. 177 Hazel, like white reformers, drew attention to the antislavery work of African American women. Yet she also proclaimed that African American men, on account of their own experience of oppression, had “less excuse for an attitude of indifference to the political inferiority of woman, in that his own escape from bondage has been largely due to her efforts.” Indeed, African American women sought to challenge prevailing ideas about their own inferiority through their activism. 178 While white reformers used the woman-slave analogy to focus on white women’s suffrage, African American reformers continued to use discourses of slavery to engender a greater awareness of the existence of interdependent oppressions.

175 Matilda Joslyn Gage, “Protest at the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty,” 1886, in Sally Roesch Wagner, “Selected Quotes from Matilda Joslyn Gage,” Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, 2009, accessed June 12, 2012, http://www.matildajoslyngage.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/selected-quotes-from-matilda-joslyn-gage.pdf. 176 Frederick Douglass, “Emancipation of Women: Speech at the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the New England Woman Suffrage Association,” Journal , June 2, 1888. See: S. Jay Walker, “Frederick Douglass and Woman Suffrage,” The Black Scholar 14, no. 5 (1973, 1983): 18-25. 177 “Mrs. Rosa H. Hazel at Douglass Memorial Meeting, St. Paul, Minnesota,” Twin City American , May 4, 1899, in Philip S. Foner, ed. Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, 1992), 172 and 174. 178 Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 112.

155 Figure 13. Lou Rogers, “Tearing off the Bonds” (1912). 179

Many white reformers had abandoned the goal of universal suffrage by the end of the nineteenth century, but this was not because they were no longer aware of the existence of interdependent oppressions. Anthony demonstrated her ongoing understanding of the way race and sex intersected at the National Negro Race Conference of 1900. The conference, she insisted, should work toward “political equality for all the race, and not for the male half alone”: [T]he coloured wife owed service to a husband instead of to a slave-owner, so that legally she simply exchanged a white master for a coloured one who controlled her earnings, her children, and her person. 180 This audience impelled Anthony to reconsider the antebellum suffrage rhetoric that encompassed a concern for the oppression of all women. However, the mainstream rhetoric and imagery of the early twentieth century women’s suffrage movement was structured for white audiences and focused on white women’s suffrage. When the visual aesthetic of the woman-slave analogy appeared in early-twentieth-century suffrage print culture (see Figure 13), it presented an oppressive

179 “The Modern Woman,” Judge , October 19, 1912, in Wikimedia Commons , 2014, accessed December 29, 2013, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rogers_the_Bonds_ 1912.jpg. 180 Susan B. Anthony, “National Negro Race Conference,” July 12, 1900, in Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 319.

156 physical restriction that reflected the broader attention to white women’s suffrage.181 At the turn of the twentieth century, allusions to the woman-slave analogy largely worked to situate sex as the only extant site of oppression.

Conclusion The woman-slave analogy had enduring rhetorical significance for women’s rights discussions of women’s suffrage throughout the nineteenth century. As with marriage and fashion, this rhetoric was central to the way women’s exclusion from the public sphere was understood. The common disenfranchisement of women and chattel slaves during the antebellum era meant discourses of slavery were used to demonstrate the similar political experience of these groups. Women voiced their political aspirations in letter writing, petitioning, and public oratory, and concluded that prevailing attitudes toward citizenship and enfranchisement resulted in their “political slavery.” Anti-suffragists also used this rhetoric to ridicule social reform, but this only meant that such rhetoric gained further distribution. The Civil War and Reconstruction brought about a change in the application of the woman- slave analogy. Slowly, the comparison between women and slaves yielded to discussions based around sex and race. When a concerted effort toward universal suffrage was the dominant reform imperative, the experience of African American women was of consequence to black and white reformers alike. Yet the prevailing assumption that the rights of African Americans had been secured meant many white reformers succumbed to racist rhetoric which, although common to mainstream culture, undermined the more intersectional imperatives of the antebellum era. The competing and increasingly divisive conflict between reformers guaranteed that discussions based around sex and race would enable a focus on white women’s suffrage during the late nineteenth century. This rhetorical was also reflected in postbellum discussions of women’s labour.

181 See: Alice Sheppard, “Suffrage Art and Feminism,” 5, no. 2 (1990): 122-136.

157 CHAPTER FIVE :

LABOUR : “T HE UNCOMPLAINING DRUDGE ”

Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave, For I’m so fond of liberty, That I cannot be a slave. 1 LOWELL MILL STRIKES (1836), SUNG TO THE TUNE OF “I WON ’T BE A NUN ”

I suppose I am kept here because something remains for me to do, I suppose I am yet to help to break the chain. 2 SOJOURNER TRUTH , AMERICAN EQUAL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION (1867)

The rhetoric associated with labour and labour reform interacted with interpretations of what constituted women’s oppression in a way that transcended class and race. From the antebellum era onwards, discourses of slavery provided the basis for labour reform discussions of the plight of working men, and women, expressed through the rhetoric of free labour, , and white slavery. The Lowell Mills of Massachusetts helped reconceptualise women’s work beyond the home, but the associated labour strikes used the woman-slave analogy to describe the exploitation of female operatives. Many workers expressed ambivalence toward rhetorical associations with chattel slavery. Yet this rhetoric simultaneously emphasised the multifaceted nature of nineteenth- century women’s labour – beyond the home, within the home, and across social movements. Sojourner Truth, too, conveyed the sense of self-worth women reformers found in their labours. These varied perspectives both challenged and reified the epistemological relationship between women’s labour and slavery. Ultimately, many contradictory impulses were reflected in the way the woman-slave analogy was appropriated to describe women’s labour. The development of the market economy influenced rhetorical inscriptions of women’s labour. The early nineteenth century was characterised by local markets surrounding manufacturing cities, particularly in New England. Charles Sellers argues that connections existed between the growth of the economy, the national transformations based on railroads and territorial expansion, religious revivalism, and the changing roles of women.3 The anxiety surrounding women’s contribution to the market was often understood through, and represented via, discourses of slavery. Wage labour, domesticity, social reform and women’s writing were affected by these changes, but

1 Philip S. Foner, American Labour Songs of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1975), 45. 2 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Woman Suffrage , Vol.II. (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 193-194, e-book [hereafter HWS ]. 3 Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, Jacksonian America: 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5. See also: Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds. The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 (The University Press of Virginia, 1996).

158 they still remained linked to the patriarchal structure of marriage and citizenship.4 Beyond the home, women only had access to “low-paid, servile, or care-taking jobs.” 5 Marriage remained central to women’s lives, and provided the fundamental structure for an ideology wherein the sexual division of labour demanded unpaid work within the home. The large numbers of working-class women engaged in wage labour reshaped definitions of women’s work even as the ideology of domesticity confined many middle-class women to the home. 6 Boarding houses, largely run by women within the home, created a liminal space that bridged these disparate sites of labour. 7 Therefore, the terminology of labour encompassed many different facets of women’s work. This chapter will consider how the woman-slave analogy informed attitudes toward women’s labour. Historians have not been sufficiently attentive to the influence of this rhetoric, and how it gradually shaped the meaning of white slavery. The changing economic tides of the antebellum era resulted from industrialisation and led to the expansion of a low-skill workforce. This, in turn, influenced labour reform. Some discussions of labour encouraged direct references to chattel slavery, while others were reticent to use the woman-slave analogy to make connections that were perceived as degrading to white women. As the controversies surrounding antislavery women reformers during the 1830s were never truly resolved, women’s public presence the marketplace – both as writers and reformers – remained contentious throughout the century. The ideology of domesticity, prominent throughout the nineteenth century, was constantly in tension with the reform imperative for women to subvert their own economic dependence through labour. During the Progressive Era, radical reformers recognised the significance of labour issues but politicians and business owners became increasingly antagonistic toward worker’s rights. The exploitation of wage earning women, the confines of domesticity, and women’s public presence in social reform and the literary marketplace were all critiqued through discourses of slavery. Following the rapid transformation of the market economy and the abolition of chattel slavery, however, the exploitation of white women was often at the heart of labour reform discussions.

Antebellum Free Labour Toward the end of the eighteenth century, labour was reconfigured into gender-based undertakings which shaped perceptions of women’s work. The idea of a “working woman,” according to Jeanne

4 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2-3. 5 Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 25-26. 6 See: Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10 (1969): 5-15; Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 7 See: Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 62-84; Wendy Gamber, “Tarnished Labour: The Home, the Market, and the Boardinghouse in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 22, no. 2 (2002): 177-204.

159 Boydston, increasingly became “a logical inconsistency – an oxymoron.” 8 When the family wage emerged as an ideal, it accompanied a decline in requirements for skilled artisans and an increasingly fluid and unskilled labour market. 9 The emphasis on male employees and their need to provide for families resulted in the gendering of working class labour. The absence of “femaleness” ensured the workplace was increasingly defined as “male.” 10 As property ownership became less central to the meaning of white men’s independence, male autonomy was increasingly associated with the economic concept of “free labour.” According to Julie Husband, “The ‘self-evident’ equality of men was severely challenged by the rise of nativism and the growth of a significant landless, wage-dependent community in the North.” 11 It became ideologically necessary to juxtapose free labour against its opposite – slave labour. 12 These concepts were inextricably linked with class and nativism; free labour, aligned with whiteness, worked to racialise unfree labour and chattel slavery. 13 Another consequence of market expansion was the association between wage labour and gendered dependence. Amy Dru Stanley suggests that the position of the hireling, in contrast to the independent yeoman, was seen as equivalent to wifely subordination. This threatened gender identity, so capitalists sought to redefine the independence of the hireling in the free labour system. Yet the gradual demarcation between work and the home meant the household became a site of gendered inequality. 14 Whiteness also became central to the way workers resisted the dependency of wage labour, and the rhetoric of “white slavery” and “free labour” shaped this opposition. 15 These hierarchical understandings of labour and the home existed alongside labour reform rhetoric which appropriated discourses of slavery. During the 1830s, the majority of these references were used to describe the exploitation of male workers. Northern labour spokesmen directly referenced chattel slavery to critique the position of white male wage workers. Stephen Simpson’s The Working Man’s Manual (1831) found that “slavery combined with labour” meant “industry and toil” were “associated with

8 Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labour and the Transition to Capitalism in the United States,” Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 2 (1996): 183-206. 9 Martha May, “Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labour Unions and the Family Wage,” in Women, Work & Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labour History, ed. Ruth Milkman (London: Routledge, 1985), 3. 10 Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought,” Signs 16, no. 3 (1991): 464. 11 Julie Husband, Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 14. 12 Eric Foner, “Free Labour and Nineteenth-Century Political Ideology,” in The Market Revolution in America , 100. See also: Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labour, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, 1995). 13 See: Marcus Cunliffe, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery: The Anglo-American Context, 1830-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1979, 2008); Frank Towers, “Projecting Whiteness: Race and the Unconscious in the History of 19th-Century American Workers,” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 2 (1998): 47-57; Gregory L. Kaster, “Labour’s True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827-1877,” Gender and Society 13, no. 1 (2001): 24-64. 14 Amy Dru Stanley, “Home Life and the Morality of the Market,” in Market Revolution , 84-86. 15 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991, 1999), 13-14.

160 baseness and degradation,” and concluded: “[B]ondage degrades, cramps and degenerates man; labour shares the same disgrace because it is part of the slave.” 16 In spite of the very real differences between free labour and chattel slavery, this comparison emphasised the compulsion and exploitation experienced by free labourers. 17 The relationship between free labour and antislavery remains a point of historiographical contention. Paul Goodman argues that the “heterogeneous appeal” of abolitionism engaged both wage earners and the middle class. Jonathan A. Glickstein similarly observes how northern economic tension created “cultural anxieties [that] both encompassed and transcended white racism.” According to Husband, however, the deteriorating conditions of wage work meant the working classes felt an ontological identification with the enslaved, even as they were inclined to differentiate their own situation from chattel slavery. Ultimately, these contradictory impulses rendered the iconography of antislavery significant within working-class movements. 18 Historiographical differences reflect the varying perspectives of antebellum reformers themselves. In spite of the northern ambivalence to free African American wage workers, the ideological leap between free labour and antislavery was plausible. Abolitionists such as Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone, however, viewed labour reformers’ connection between chattel slavery and wage slavery as a diversion from antislavery activism.19 The many sides of the labour question were repeatedly structured by the rhetoric of slavery versus freedom. Proslavery ideologues used this to defend the support chattel slavery supposedly afforded the “family,” white and black.20 In contrast, African American reformers refuted this comparison. Frederick Douglass reflected that wage labour made him his “own master … [in] a state of independence.” 21 When the North replaced its own history of chattel slavery with “free labour” and “free soil” during the early nineteenth century, this was followed by the 1850s development of Liberty Party, Free Soil Party and ultimately the Republican Party, which debated the free soil status of new states. 22

16 Stephen Simpson, The Working Man’s Manual: A New Theory of Political Economy, on the Principle of Production the Source of Wealth (Philadelphia: Thomas L. Bonsal, 1831), 16 (Google Books). 17 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labour (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 67-68; Foner, “Free Labour,” 100. 18 Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xvii; Jonathan A. Glickstein, American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labour in the Antebellum United States (University of Virginia Press, 2002), 46; Husband, Antislavery Discourse , 3. 19 Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women’s Oppression,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 139; Foner, “Free Labour,” 108. 20 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labour, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60-61. See: Wilfred Carsel, “The Slaveholders' Indictment of Northern Wage Slavery,” The Journal of Southern History 6, no. 4 (1940): 504-520. 21 Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Project Gutenberg, 1855, 2013), 208, e-book; Foner, “Free Labour,” 110. See: Foner, “Free Labour,” 105. 22 See: Alan M. Kraut, “Partisanship and Principles: The Liberty Party in Antebellum Political Culture,” in Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System , ed. Alan M.

161 The way male labour reformers of the 1830s engaged with discourses of slavery was again reflected at the end of the nineteenth century. Labour reformers of the 1880s used the rhetorical flourish of “slave power” to demand the “emancipation” of the labourer and the “abolition of the wage system.” 23 However, postbellum comparisons between labour and chattel slavery were largely exclusionary because of the assumption that the rights of African Americans were secured during Reconstruction. Reflecting on the American Railway Union’s Chicago strike of 1894, labour reformer Eugene Debs used the Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) case as an analogy: Did the Supreme Court of the United States write the “concluding words” in the history of chattel slavery when it handed down Chief Justice Taney’s decision that black men had “no rights that the white man is bound to respect?” These “concluding words” will but hasten the overthrow of wage slavery as … the Supreme Court in 1857 hastened the overthrow of chattel slavery. 24 Over the course of the nineteenth century, some of the labour issues pertaining to the working conditions and wages of male workers were ameliorated. It is therefore possible to conclude that these rhetorical practices were largely effective for the men’s labour movement. Yet male labour reformers, who did not often seek to extend their arguments to racial minorities or women, did not court intersectionality. Many still inscribed gendered hierarchy even when seeking to refute oppression more generally. Debs also stated: “ Man’s superiority will be shown, not in the fact that he has enslaved his wife, but that he has made her free.” 25 The rhetoric of the labour movement was used to critique labour exploitation of white men, but it simultaneously reiterated the oppression of women. The woman-slave analogy therefore had special significance for those who sought to improve women’s labour conditions, too. Although this rhetoric was not as successful in generating support for women’s labour, discourses of slavery were significant to the women labour reformers themselves.

Female Operatives From the beginning of the Republic, women and girls were a primary labour source for the emerging textile industry. This contradicted the idea that the workplace was a male environment, and women had to constantly validate their contribution as workers. 26 A focus on the rhetoric of female operatives demonstrates how use of the woman-slave analogy not only transcended race, as demonstrated in previous chapters, but also class. As the gendered demarcations surrounding free

Kraut. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983); Jonathan E. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 23 Foner, “Free Labour,” 120-121. 24 Eugene V. Debs, “The Federal Government and the Chicago Strike,” 1904, in Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches (Girand: The Appeal to Reason, 1908, 2001), 193, e-book. 25 Eugene V. Debs, “Woman – Comrade and Equal,” in Robin Morgan, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 35. 26 Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There,” 205-206.

162 labour sidelined women wage earners, men and women alike used discourses of slavery to bring women’s labour into public discussion. The divergence between the domestic ideal and women’s wage work was discussed and critiqued through direct references to chattel slavery. David R. Roediger observes how the male labour leaders of the 1830s, who used discourses of slavery to describe their own situation, were even more likely to describe the exploitation of women and children workers in these terms. If labour beyond the home was degrading for women, domesticity reified family hierarchy. 27 Labour leader Seth Luther further observed a class distinction in 1833: “[T]he wives and daughters of the rich manufacturers would no more associate with a ‘ factory girl ,’ than they would with a negro slave . So much for equality in a republican country.” 28 The apparent working class desire to adhere to normative gender roles was reinscribed through discussions of domesticity. 29 William English looked toward a time “when our wives [are] no longer doomed to servile labour,” so they could instead be the domestic companions of husbands and educators of children. 30 In contrast, antislavery and women’s rights reformers directly addressed the earning power of women workers. Could the men who make women “drudges” and “pay them … miserable pittances” respect their workers, abolitionist Rev. Samuel J. May asked. “Yes, about as much as the slaveholders feel for their slaves .” 31 Where male labour reformers used the woman-slave analogy to maintain gender hierarchy, antislavery reformers emphasised how the market presented an opportunity for women to gain independence through their labour. The small number of antebellum women who did actually organise around these issues used the woman-slave analogy more emphatically. Women labour reformers, unlike their male counterparts, used this rhetoric to justify their contribution to the market economy. Yet women working in industrial settings still experienced tensions between the ideal of true womanhood, their position as working-class wage earners, and the benevolent paternalism of factory owners. 32 New England mill corporations used an idealised image of the “mill girl” as a propaganda tool, and debates surrounding the “representation” of working women ensued. 33 As the Dover, , women textile strikers of 1828 asked, who could “ever bear the shocking fate of slaves

27 Roediger, Wages , 70-71. See also: May, “Bread before Roses,”4-5. 28 Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, on The State of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and America (New York: George H. Evans, 1833, 2012), 19 (Google books). 29 May, “Bread before Roses,” 5. 30 William English, “National Trades’ Union,” 1835, in Helen Sumner, Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage Earners in the United States , Vol.9: History of Women in Industry in the United States (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910, 2007), 29, e-book. 31 Samuel J. May, “The Rights and Condition of Women: A Sermon, Preached in Syracuse, Nov., 1845,” in Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1848-1921 , 1845, 1998, accessed June 12, 2012, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/naw/nawshome.html, 11-12. 32 Anne F. Mattina, “‘Corporation Tools and Time ‐Serving Slaves’: Class and Gender in the Rhetoric of Antebellum Labour Reform,” Howard Journal of Communications 7, no. 2 (1996): 154-155. 33 See: Amal Amireh, The Factory Girl and the Seamstress: Imagining Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century American Fiction (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), Chapter One: “Inventing the ‘Mill Girl’,” 4-20.

163 to share?” 34 Between the 1820s and 1840s, the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, pioneered textile industrialisation by combining the process of spinning and weaving for the first time in the United States. In the process, some female operatives realised that the “oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us.” 35 During the Lowell strikes of 1834, female operatives invoked the rhetoric of the American Revolution to a protest a 15% reduction in wages: Let oppression shrug her shoulders, And a haughty tyrant frown, … I value not the feeble threats… While the flag of Independence O’er our noble nation flies.” 36 Following the economic crisis of 1837, the 1840s saw an increase in female operatives becoming the primary family wage earners. Since these women foresaw themselves in long-term rather than temporary employment, they became more committed to improving their working conditions. 37 The rhetoric female operatives used across the 1830s represented a growing frustration with their industrial oppression. When The Lowell Offering developed in this capitalist context, however, its contributors mobilised discourses of slavery with some ambivalence. The developing economy created a contradiction between the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of yeoman farmers and the development of an industrial economy that relied on a significant number of working women. According to Husband, the Offering used “metaphors of slavery and seduction” to give wage labour positive connotations – an alternative to the “slavish dependence” of rural family life. 38 Therefore, the Offering created an outlet for the literary self-representation of female operatives. Its major emphasis was to confront the assumption that factory work was degrading and exploitative, even though its contributors experienced tensions between the ideal of femininity and the reality of labour. 39 “Woman,” an 1840s article, invoked the history of “savage nations” where women were the “slave of man” to counterpoint the way men’s rights were “so vehemently asserted” in America. Although the contributor critiqued the way American women’s rights were overlooked, she still concluded that physical “superiority” made men “her worshipper.” 40 This writer did not necessarily

34 Mechanics’ Free Press , January 17, 1829, in Roediger, Wages , 69. 35 Boston Evening Transcript , February 18, 1834, in Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: ‘The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us’,” Labour History 16, no. 1 (1975): 108. 36 “Lowell Women Workers’ Petition to the Manufacturers,” 1834, in Catherine Lavender, “‘Liberty Rhetoric’ and Nineteenth-Century American Women,” A Website for Student Discovery , 1998, accessed June 15, 2013, http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/liberty.html. 37 Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labour Movement: From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 33-35 and 55-56. 38 Julie Husband, “‘The White Slave of the North’: Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of ‘Free’ Labour,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 16, no. 1 (1999): 13. 39 , “‘What Factory Girls Had Power to Do’: The Techno-Logic of Working-Class Feminine Publicity in The Lowell Offering ,’ Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 50, no. 2 (1994): 109-128. 40 Ella, “Woman,” Lowell Offering , 1840-1841.

164 or consciously engage with reform imperatives, but still used abstract discourses of slavery to describe her general sense that women were oppressed. The Offering also used the rhetoric of white slavery to counterpoint the position of northern workers against the absolute unfreedom of chattel slavery. 41 One contributor used this rhetoric to directly position the labour of female operatives against the exploitation of chattel slavery. Certain “myths” described the mill girl as “a mere servile drudge, chained to her labour by almost as strong a power as that which holds a bondsman in his fetters,” and even “the white slave of the North.” If this reference to white slavery signified women, the terminology was not gendered to the same degree as it would be by the end of the nineteenth century. Because these writers sought to disassociate themselves from chattel slavery, they sometimes acknowledged that the enslaved face a much worse situation. This contributor emphasised that the “real situation” of female operatives did not approach the “extremes” of chattel slavery.42 In refuting this comparison but still acknowledging the oppression of the institution, female operatives simultaneously demonstrated racist and intersectional impulses. Recalling her antebellum labours, Harriet H. Robinson’s Loom and Spindle; or, Life among the Early Mill Girls (1898) similarly refuted the possibility that “‘Southern slaves are better off than Northern operatives.’” 43 A sense of class consciousness impelled some to view themselves as fortunate, which in turn led to a fledgling intersectional awareness. Female operatives engaged with discourses of slavery to reclaim their sense of dignity as women workers, but they also demonstrated an understanding of myriad sites of oppression. The more radical of Lowell’s female operatives created other platforms to condemn their working conditions. The Female Labour Reform Association (FLRA) actively questioned the of the perspective championed by the Offering .44 According to Anne F. Mattina, the FLRA’s class consciousness and gender awareness created “a unique public voice” that represented a different group of women reformers. 45 The way the FLRA used discourses of slavery was not in isolation, but part of the broader antebellum rhetorical trend among antislavery, women’s rights and dress reformers discussed in previous chapters. While some of these female operatives demonstrated an awareness of various types of oppression, others referenced chattel slavery only to condemn the labour exploitation of white women. In comparison to the Offering , more emphatic references to chattel slavery emerged amongst the FLRA. The 1845 article “Some of the Beauties of our Factory System – Otherwise, Lowell

41 John McWilliams, New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 267-268. 42 “A Week in the Mills,” Offering 5, 1845, in Husband, “‘The White Slave’,” 20. 43 Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle: Or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1898), 196, e-book. 44 Amireh, Factory Girl , 19. 45 Mattina, “‘Corporation Tools,’” 151.

165 Slavery” had been previously rejected by the Offering . “Amelia” reported on the “tyrannous and oppressive rules” faced by female operatives, which rendered them “a slave, a very slave to the caprices of him for whom she labours.” Amelia drew multiple points of intersection between American operatives and the “poor peasant of Ireland, or the Russian serf,” and further asked when they would be “reduced to the servile condition” of English factories. The long hours and cloistered boarding house life of mill girls was viewed as incongruous with American ideas, and instead illustrative of the “petty tyranny of the employer.” Amelia, through the FLRA, sought to demonstrate to the “ drivelling cotton lords, … [the] aristocracy of New England” that the workers’ “rights cannot be trampled[.]” 46 Her rhetoric somewhat distanced white working women from the enslaved, but it simultaneously generated a transnational perspective toward labour exploitation. In another article, Amelia further stated: Ye children of New England! Where millions bow beneath the rod The summons is to you! … Of tyranny oppressed. … Come, fling your banner to the breeze, [S]tay ye till your hands have laid For liberty and light[.] … Each proud oppressor low. … Thy vows are registered on high, God will break the oppressor’s chains, To perish or be free[.] … And set the prisoner free. 47 Together, Amelia’s writings referenced revolutionary ideals whilst drawing explicit connections between female operatives and chattel slavery. “Juliana” also condemned the aristocratic bearing of factory owners – the “Nobility of America” – in her anticipation of how “the yoke of tyranny” would lead to a future wherein the nation was “one great hospital, filled with worn out operatives and coloured slaves!” 48 By referencing the many forms of oppression that resulted from social hierarchy in the United States and abroad, contributors contrasted the exploitation of industrial workers and chattel slaves with the Jeffersonian ideal. In spite of repeated rhetorical allusions to chattel slavery, and parallels between the “cotton lords” of the North and South, Lowell women did not necessarily demonstrate a sense of solidarity with their enslaved counterparts, or even with immigrant workers. 49 Many of these women were aware of how white slavery could associate workers with degradation, as well as the implication of sexual exploitation. 50 Even so, two impulses emerged amongst radical women labour reformers’ references to chattel slavery; one situated the exploitation of female operatives as indefensible, like chattel slavery; the other implied that the exploitation of women workers was worse than chattel

46 Amelia, Female Labour Reform Association (Lowell, Mass.) [hereafter FLRA], 1845, “Some of the Beauties of our Factory System – Otherwise, Lowell Slavery,” in Lise Vogel, “Their Own Work: Two Documents from the Nineteenth- Century Labour Movement,” Signs 1, no. 3 (1976):798-800. 47 Amelia, FLRA, 1845, “The Summons,” in Vogel, “Their Own Work,” 801-802. 48 Julianna, FLRA, October, 1845, “The Evils of Factory Life: Number One,” in Vogel, “Their Own Work,” 796-797. 49 Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work , 102. 50 Roediger, Wages , 85.

166 slavery. The first demonstrated an intersectional awareness of the existence of many forms of oppression, while the second sought to draw attention solely to the oppression of white women. Other women’s labour publications of the 1840s used the woman-slave analogy to expose the realities of the factory without really engaging with the oppression engendered by chattel slavery. A large proportion of working women, Mehitable Eastman wrote in the Voice of Industry , were “destined to a servitude as degrading, as unceasing toil can make it.” 51 The FLRA continued this emphasis in an 1845 article, “Factory Life As it Is: By an Operative” – an article with a strikingly similar title to Theodore D. Weld’s American Slavery As it Is (1839). The article asked if “tyranny and cruel oppression be allowed to rivet … chains” on those who were “the real producers of all its improvements and wealth[?]” The “real producers,” the article clarified, were “the female operatives of New England,” and while “no coloured slave” could exist in the ostensibly “ free states,” mill women were rendered “slaves in every sense of the word!” 52 A strong sense of regional and class awareness could therefore undermine an understanding of the oppression that resulted from chattel slavery and race. The “New Definitions” developed by a contributor to The Factory Girl more directly appropriated discourses of slavery, thus resulting in more direct comparisons between chattel slavery and factory work: Overseer. – A servile tool in the hands of an Agent; who will resort to the lowest, meanest and most grovelling measures, to please his Master, and to fill the coffers of a soulless Corporation. 53 When Lowell women used discourses of slavery to focus on industrial labour, their understanding of oppression was fully introspective. The tendency to bring the comparison back to the specific oppression of female operatives revealed the belief that white northern women should not experience the exploitation and oppression of chattel slavery. Still, early women labour reformers markedly expanded on the rhetoric of their male predecessors and, in their use of the woman-slave analogy, made creative parallels between chattel slavery and women’s industrial labour. In the process, women labour reformers did not condone the oppression that resulted from either. Women labour reformers had more discrete interests than many of their antislavery and women’s rights contemporaries, in that they were primarily concerned with industrial exploitation. Like their contemporaries, however, they sometimes used discourses of slavery to discuss other forms of women’s oppression. The literary connections between wage-work and chattel slavery hinged upon the issue of bodily ownership and the embodied nature of labour, an emphasis which

51 Mehitable Eastman, Voice of Industry , September 4, 1846. 52 FLRA, “Factory Life As it Is: By An Operative,” 1845, in Vogel, “Their Own Work,” 794-795. See: Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (San Francisco: Internet Archive: American Libraries, 1839, 2010) e-book. 53 N.H., “New Definitions,” The Factory Girl , January 15, 1845, in Philip S. Foner, ed. The Factory Girls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 76-77.

167 had obvious implications for marriage. 54 When the Voice followed The Liberator and established a “Female Department” in 1846, it enabled a broader discussion of women’s issues. 55 A contributor emphasised that “true liberty and freedom” would only be realised when women assumed their “proper place … as a rational intelligent being – a fit companion and friend of man, not a slave [.]” 56 Another article, the “Rights of Married Women,” emphasised the inconceivability of “one soul” being “subservient to another” in its discussion of true marriage. Since “same lie which reveals itself in slavery, is at the bottom of our marriage institution,” mutual “elevation” was needed in marriage. 57 Huldah Stone similarly condemned those middle-class men who considered themselves “Lord and Master,” and believed an “ equal she must not be.” 58 However, the middle-class constituency of the antebellum women’s rights movement largely ignored labour leaders such as Eastman and Stone. 59 The clear rhetorical similarities between the discussion of women’s rights in the antislavery, women’s rights, and labour movements suggests that use of the woman-slave analogy transcended class and race in a way that the reformers themselves could not. The woman-slave analogy provided a powerful critique of the exploitation experienced by female operatives, but the ideal of ameliorated working conditions for women still remained out of reach. If the rhetorical focus of female operatives had been very insular in that they were primarily concerned with themselves, these women still showed an awareness of the exploitation of chattel slavery. Subsequently, reformers looked beyond women’s wage work to discuss women’s labour in a broader framework. In the process, the reformers who relied on discourses of slavery sometimes demonstrated a greater awareness of interdependent oppressions.

Hidden Labours Working women played a significant role in the industrialisation of New England, but the exclusion of women from notions of free labour often made marriage a necessity. As discussed in Chapter Two, many nineteenth-century cultural commentators compared marriage to slavery. So too did women use discourses of slavery to critique the ideal of marriage, and the way it confined women to domesticity. In the process, they sought to generate greater awareness of women’s labour, both within and beyond the home. The antebellum reformers who critiqued domesticity emphasised the need for women’s financial independence and the reform of marital property laws. Repeatedly, these issues were framed through direct references to chattel slavery.

54 Cindy Weinstein, The Literature of Labour and the Labours of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20-21. 55 See: Jacqueline Bacon, “The Liberator ’s ‘Ladies’ Department,’ 1832-37: Freedom or Fetters?” in Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity , ed. Meta G. Carstarphen and Susan C. Zavonia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999). 56 “Female Department,” Voice , March 6, 1846. 57 “Rights of Married Women,” Voice , August 14, 1847. 58 H.J.S. [Huldah Stone], Voice , July 9, 1847. 59 Foner, Women and the American Labour Movement , 72.

168 The expectation that privileged women capitulate to the demands of domesticity meant they were constrained in powerful but often intangible ways. 60 Although free labour remained precarious alongside capitalist industrialisation and the expansion of chattel slavery, an assumption remained that male independence entailed the control and ownership of the labour of wives and children. 61 Since industrial work was deemed unsuitable for middle-class women, domesticity was constructed as the sphere to which they should be confined. The gainful nature of women’s domestic labour was questioned against the gendered conceptions of home and work. When household labour was redefined and idealised as leisure, women were left to the “reproductive” tasks associated with the social unit – a process Boydston describes as “the pastoralisation of housework.” 62 Many male labour reformers romanticised the domestic labour of wives, and some even used discourses of slavery to benevolently describe the struggles women experienced in the household. In 1843, as part of his communitarian labour ideal, Albert Brisbane critiqued women’s subjection to “unremitting and slavish domestic duties” within the home: The wives of the poor are complete domestic drudges, whose whole time is absorbed in complicated household cares and occupations, and the women of the more favoured classes who escape the burthen of toil of the isolated household, do so only at the expense of a class of their fellow-creatures who are reduced to the most menial Servitude, to a degrading bondage and dependence[.]63 Brisbane’s condemnation of the “servile system of domestic Servitude” acknowledged the importance of women’s domestic labour. The repeated use of discourses of slavery demonstrated the degree of his concern surrounding this issue. It also demonstrated how the household labour of working-class women was often more tangible, while extraneous ideological trappings rendered the contribution of privileged women less obvious. 64 Brisbane, furthermore, hoped to see “this and all other species of servitude” abolished, and so understood oppression as emanating from many sources. 65 Like other reformers, an appreciation for many types of oppression could coexist with the perspective that women’s oppression was completely untenable. The woman-slave analogy even emerged alongside the cultural idealisation of domesticity. Although domesticity was glorified in Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy

60 Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 9. 61 Glenn, Unequal Freedom , 56-57. 62 Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labour in the Early Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 155, Chapter Seven: “The Pastoralisation of Housework,” 142-163. 63 Albert Brisbane, “Exposition of Views and Principles,” The Phalanx , October 5, 1843, in David Brion Davis, ed. Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretative Anthology (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979), 452. 64 Boydston, Home and Work , 128. See also: Jeanne Boydston, “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence,” Radical History Review 35 (1986): 7-25. 65 Brisbane, “Exposition,” 452.

169 (1841), it could also be seen to construct the home as women’s proper cage.66 “I would be free,” a contributor wrote to The Sibyl ; neither would she consent to be a “weak slave,” nor a “parlour bird.” 67 Hence, the caged bird metaphor, used to critique the restrictions of marriage and fashion, was likewise mobilised to condemn domesticity. More direct references to chattel slavery were used to critique the notion of “Woman’s Sphere”: An equal be to lordly man; Be not a slave, like the African! Plead, plead thy cause, ’tis woman’s sphere, Till man shall yield thy rights so dear. 68 The moral elevation and idealisation of the home existed alongside the “economic devaluation of the work performed there.” 69 Because domesticity, separate spheres and marriage institutionalised a social structure in which “women worked for men,” men, in turn, both supported and took advantage of this domestic labour. 70 When reformers challenged the veneration of domesticity, the woman-slave analogy was used to condemn the restrictions this ideology placed on women. From a broader perspective than mill work, women’s effective exclusion from the labour market led reformers to use the woman-slave analogy in critique of the severity of forced economic dependence. Whether women were married or living with family, they were thought to have access to support from male relatives who, in return, reaped the benefits of female domestic upkeep. Employers, in extension, could justify lower wages for their female employees. Simultaneously, reformers sought to reconceptualise household labour as real and valuable work equivalent to that done beyond the home.71 The women’s rights movement, according to Reva B. Siegel, exposed the role of the state in defining the private sphere because dependence was legally imposed and, essentially, enforced. 72 “Not being free,” Susan B. Anthony stated, women were taught that “the fruits of her industry belonged to others”: [Woman is] the uncomplaining drudge of the household, condemned to the severest labour, … systematically robbed of her earnings, which have gone to build up her master’s power, and she has found herself in the condition of the slave, deprived of the results of her own labour. 73

66 Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1841, 1843, 2001), e-book. 67 See: “Anthem of the Free,” Sibyl , April 1, 1857; Olive H. Davison, “I Would Be Free,” Sibyl , September 15, 1858. 68 H** B**, “Woman’s Sphere,” Lily February 15, 1854. 69 Folbre, “Unproductive Housewife,” 465. 70 Susan Thistle, From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 16. 71 See: Glenn, Unequal Freedom , 67; Barbara Easton, “Industrialization and Femininity: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century New England,” Social Problems 23, no. 4 (1976): 389-401. 72 Reva B. Siegel, “Home as Work: The First Woman’s Rights Claims Concerning Wives’ Household Labour, 1850- 1880,” The Yale Law Journal 103 (1993-1994): 1075. 73 Susan B. Anthony, “WOMAN: The Great Unpaid Labourer of the World,” c.1848, in Leslie B. Tanner, Voices from Women’s Liberation (New York: Mentor, 1970), 42.

170 In response, women’s rights reformers drew attention to the value of domestic labour. Antoinette Brown Blackwell concluded that wives owed “service and labour” to husbands “as much and as absolutely as the slave does to his master,” and if women should be thus contented, “so should the slave …, for according to the established price paid for labour, he does not earn enough to take care of himself.” 74 This allusion to chattel slavery emphasised that women and slaves alike should not be content with their situation. When the woman-slave analogy was used to expose the inequality of market exchange and the invisibility of women’s household labour, reformers also looked toward the market economy for resolution. Similar rhetoric therefore shaped the solutions reformers proposed. In 1853, Paulina Wright Davis insisted that, through work, women “ must purchase themselves out of bondage” to achieve their own “emancipation.” 75 A strategy where chattel slaves could purchase themselves or be purchased by benevolent northerners was both enacted and suggested by reformers, including Fanny Wright. 76 Since women’s economic dependence resulted from the limited occupations available to women and the boundaries placed on their independence, antebellum reformers made financial independence a pivotal part of their demands for women’s rights.77 “Pecuniary independence first and political freedom will come as a necessity,” Davis wrote to Caroline Wells Healey Dall. During the 1850s, Davis took action and had her periodical, The Una , printed by women. The fact that women apprentices were more expensive was viewed as inconsequential, because the empowerment of wage-earning would enable them to “resist taxation without representation” – another form of oppression derided by women’s rights reformers. 78 The realisation that marital property laws imposed dependence was also critiqued through very specific references to chattel slavery. Frances Dana Gage observed how the “husband and master” was legally given “entire control of the person and the earnings” of both “woman and the slave,” so women should assert their “rights to be free” to escape the “prison-house of law.” Gage further addressed how the ideology of true womanhood influenced the perception of women’s labour amongst male reformers. When Gage debated Gerrit Smith, she critiqued male reformers’ often myopic view of women and perhaps even obliquely derided his wealth:

74 Antoinette Brown Blackwell, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. HWS , Vol.I (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 580 and 587, e-book. 75 Paulina Wright Davis, “Remarks at the Convention,” Una , September 1853. 76 Benevolent northerners raised money to purchase Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs from southern slaveholders. Philip S. Foner, ed. Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, 1992), 10; Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 95; Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 101. 77 Siegel, “Home as Work,” 1121. 78 Paulina Wright Davis to Caroline Wells Healey Dall, October 13, 1853 (Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, Microfilm: Reel 2, Box 2, Folder 7) (Massachusetts Historical Society).

171 Mr. Smith says, “That women are helpless, is no wonder, so long as they are paupers”; he might add, no wonder that the slaves of the cotton plantation are helpless, so long as they are paupers. 79 Gage, like Antoinette Blackwell, condoned neither those ideologies that implied the helplessness of women or slaves, or the broader perception that they were “property.” Many women’s rights reformers believed women’s oppression could be remedied through demands for joint marital property laws, and the Married Women’s Property Laws alleviated some of the restrictions surrounding property ownership. 80 Still, reformers continued to use discourses of slavery to condemn sometimes overlapping inequalities that resulted from domestic labour, marriage, and chattel slavery.

Figure 14. “Domestic Sewing Machine” (c.1882). 81

When the sewing machine emerged, it presented an opportunity to alleviate the demands of women’s labour. The eighteenth-century inventions that created the folklore of “Yankee ingenuity”

79 Frances Dana Gage to Gerrit Smith, December 24, 1855, in Stanton, Anthony and Gage, HWS , Vol.I., 843. 80 Siegel, “Home as Work,” 1113; Tracey Jean Boisseau and Tracy A Thomas, eds. Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 4-5. 81 Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Historical Collections, in Visual Information Access: Harvard Library , accessed September 17, 2012, http://viacs.hul.harvard.edu/via/deliver/chunkDisplay?_collection= via&inoID=178454&recordNumber=4&chunkIndex=0.11_0.11.0&method=view&image=full.

172 were followed by mechanised alternatives proposed to ameliorate women’s labour. 82 A contributor to The Sibyl viewed technological advancement as a means of “emancipating” women. The sewing machine, she believed, would relieve women “from slavery to the needle,” bringing them “freedom from care and anxiety” and the “drudgery” of sewing. This article did not challenge marital hierarchy or the division of labour, but its writer viewed her sewing machine as “among the great blessings of my life.” 83 While reformers wrote about the potential of the sewing machine to free women from certain domestic labours, popular representations often reinforced the relationship between the sewing machine, marriage, and women’s domesticity (see Figure 14). Even so, the mere possibility of relieving women’s domestic labour was premised on the ability to purchase a sewing machine. This rhetorical inscription of freedom necessitated the means to afford such innovative technology, and therefore had clear class demarcations. The sewing machine and the “emancipation” it provided not available to those who actually worked beyond the home as seamstresses. The woman-slave analogy continued to be central to the expression of reform concerns during the postbellum era. As with the broader trajectory of the woman-slave analogy, many of these references did not invoke the equal or greater exploitation engendered by chattel slavery. For Victoria Woodhull, women were driven to serve a “drunken tyrant to whom the law has made her slave, both sexually and industrially.” 84 Domesticity, venerated throughout the nineteenth century, continued to shape discussions of women’s household labour. Abigail Scott Duniway critiqued how “woman’s ” constituted “a lifetime of unpaid servitude and personal sacrifice.” 85 In 1897, Anthony voiced the same concerns as antebellum women. Observing how women could maintain respectability if they worked like “galley slaves” for their family, she reiterated how they would experience social condemnation if they secured “pecuniary independence” in wage work beyond the home. 86 This rhetoric remained central to deconstructing the ambivalence surrounding women’s work in a way that amplified the concerns of white women, even at the turn of the twentieth century. The persistence of this rhetoric suggests that reform critiques based on the woman-slave analogy were unsuccessful in drawing attention to the existence or importance of women’s labour. It is likely that references to chattel slavery or abstract discourses of slavery impeded this process.

82 Steven Lubar, “Culture and Technological Design in the 19th-Century Pin Industry: John Howe and the Howe Manufacturing Company,” Technology and Culture 28, no. 2 (1987): 262. 83 Anna Hope, “‘Position of Women’,” Sibyl , February 15, 1858. 84 Victoria Woodhull, “The Scare-Crows of Sexual Slavery,” 1873, in Cari M. Carpenter, ed. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 204. 85 Abigail Scott Duniway, “Personal Reminiscences,” in Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety, eds. “ Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), 11. 86 Susan B. Anthony, “Status of Woman, Past, Present, and Future,” Arena May (1897): 902.

173 The ownership of one’s labour was a preeminent concern for reformers, but in so many other ways, the domestic labour of wives was thoroughly unlike chattel slavery. Nancy F. Cott contends that the devaluation of women’s household labour continued well into the twentieth century. From a legal perspective, judges were perplexed by the idea that women owned their own domestic labour because “to do so would contravene their very wifehood.” 87 Many women experienced the contradiction between domestic ideals and their own economic circumstances. For both working class and privileged women, as for women reformers, the woman-slave analogy provided what they saw as a relevant way to critique and understand the tensions resulting from the domestic ideal.

Labouring for Reform Many antislavery women understood the importance of labour because they recognised the exploitation of the enslaved. 88 Their awareness of oppression was based on the atrocities of chattel slavery, so their rhetoric was informed by the peculiar institution. Some women reformers used separate spheres ideology to define political involvement as an extension of women’s morality, while others critiqued domesticity. 89 Abolition was often viewed as a “vocation,” and antislavery women constantly negotiated the “permeable boundaries” of separate spheres. 90 In the midst of the 1837 controversy surrounding the Grimké sisters’ antislavery oratory, Angelina emphasised that women’s “ right to labour … must be firmly established,” further asking: “can you not see that women could do, and would do a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?”91 Since women reformers gained a sense of self-worth by labouring on behalf of the enslaved, their rhetorical justifications for their own right to labour were informed by discourses of slavery. For Abby Kelley, “striving to strike his [the slave’s] irons off” enabled women to discover “most surely that we were manacled ourselves.”92 Writing and public oratory were central to social

87 Nancy F. Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1934,” The American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1453. See also: Judith Olans Brown, Lucy A. Williams and Phyllis Tropper Baumann, “The Mythogenesis of Gender: Judicial Images of Women in Paid and Unpaid Labour,” UCLA Women’s Law Journal 6 (1995): 457-539. 88 See: Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), Chapter Six: “‘It Is Not the Cause of the Slave Only Which We Plead’: Faith in Action for Women’s Rights.” 89 See: Gertrude Reif Hughes, “Subverting the : ’s Critique of Women’s Work,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 3, no. 1 (1986): 17-28; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Yale University Press, 1990); Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolition: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 90 Donald M. Scott, “Abolition as a Sacred Vocation,” in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists , ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 51; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 1 (2001): 79-93. 91 Angelina Grimké to J.G. Whittier and Theodore Weld, August 20, 1837, in G.H. Barnes and D.L. Dumond, eds. Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844 (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965), 40. 92 Abby Kelley, 1838 Album, Western Anti-Slavery Society papers, in Speicher, Religious World , 109.

174 reform, so women reformers had many opportunities to express the significance their own labours in a way that repeatedly alluded to that of the enslaved. “[A]re the rights of female slaves in the South … secured?” Angelina Grimké’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) asked. Although “women may labour to produce a correct public opinion at the North,” she acknowledged, southern attitudes could not change without the efforts of southern women. 93 Many reformers were cognisant of the fact that greater autonomy could be gained through a commitment to social reform. Sarah Grimké condemned the benevolent organisations that required “subserviency to men, who guide our labours,” and Margaret Fuller recognised that “there exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling towards women as towards slaves[.]”94 This rhetoric strengthened the ontological identification women reformers made with the enslaved. It also meant that their conceptualisation of labour and reform was more closely informed by the realities of the peculiar institution. Antislavery and women’s rights reformers, unlike women labour reformers, did not generally object to drawing overt rhetorical connections between themselves and the enslaved. Labouring for reform gave women greater meaning in their lives in a political culture which devalued their contribution. A contributor to The Una condemned women’s “wilful hugging of the chains of slavery,” believing that by “working for the slave I know I emancipate myself” and achieve “more for the freedom of white women, than I possibly could in any other way[.]” 95 The process of finding self-worth in reform work continued following the abolition of chattel slavery. When Sojourner Truth hoped to “break the chain,” she inadvertently expressed the fulfilment she found in reform”96 This was especially true when reformers worked together. ’s experience among women’s rights reformers in strengthened her resolution to “work to [for] womans’ [sic] entire freedom from man’s power over her subsistence,” because women everywhere remained “in slavery to man’s dominion[.]” 97 These efforts were idealised on women’s rights songs and verse, including “The Yellow Ribbon” (1876): Today we women labour still for Liberty and Right. … We boast our land of freedom, the unshackling of the slaves; We point with proud, though bleeding hearts, to myriads of graves; They tell the story of a war that ended slavery’s night, And still we women struggle for our Liberty, our Right. 98

93 Angelina E. Grimké, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (Project Gutenberg, 1836, 2010), e-book, 30. 94 Sarah M. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker (Internet Archive: American Libraries, 1837, 2010), 73 and 75, e-book; Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 1843, 1997), 112. 95 H.M.C., “To the Editor of The Una ,” Una , August 1854. 96 Sojourner Truth, “American Equal Rights Association, “1867, HWS , Vol.II., 193-194, 97 Martha Coffin Wright to Ellen Wright Garrison, July 14, 1871 (Garrison Family Papers, Series IX: Wright Family – correspondence, Box 301, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College). 98 Marie Le Baron, “The Yellow Ribbon” (1876), Music: Wearing of the Green , in Danny O. Crew, Suffragist Sheet Music: An Illustrated Catalogue of Published Music Associated with the Women’s Rights and Suffrage Movement in America, 1795-1921 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002).

175 “I will say to other women, / Labour, struggle and achieve,” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also concluded in 1890. 99 For these reformers, discourses of slavery helped foster the rewarding realisation that women could labour individually and collectively for the greater good. In contrast to many women labour reformers, antislavery and women’s rights reformers used this rhetoric to contest the oppression of other groups, as well their own. In the years following the Reconstruction amendments, women’s rights reformers expressed their continued regret and frustration through discourses of slavery. Parker Pillsbury questioned: “Were I a coloured man, and had reason to believe that should woman obtain her rights she would use them to the prejudice of mine, how could I labour very zealously in her behalf?”100 The antebellum antislavery movement continued to provide reformers with inspiration, and its memory was increasingly appropriated for the purpose of the women’s movement in the postbellum era. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s autobiography, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897 (1898), recalled the women’s suffrage disappointment following the Civil War. When women asked for recognition “as citizens of the Republic, equal before the law,” they were compelled to remain “silent” and “labour for the emancipation of the slave” even though both groups desired the same rights. 101 The historic opportunity many women reformers sensed at the end of the 1860s led them to court political compromise.102 Yet in spite of the transitory focus on African American women that followed the Civil War, discussed in Chapter Four, their rhetoric was often at odds with their actions. The practical endeavours of white reformers did not effectively extend to the African American community following slave emancipation.103 Overall, white and black women reformers found a sense of self-worth through their own reform endeavours. In affirming their own labour, these women drew attention to the importance of reform as well as the value of women’s labour in the market economy. The greater antebellum commitment to reform on behalf of the enslaved was provoked because of the vast exploitation that occurred within chattel slavery. Yet emancipation and the Reconstruction amendments led many white reformers to erroneously believe that advocacy on behalf of African Americans was no longer needed. The idea that African Americans could and should become responsible for their own rights fundamentally overlooked the continued problem of racism. It does, however, accounts for the

99 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “To White Ribbons of Maine Who Gave to Me Their Blessed Gifts” (1890), Frances Smith Foster, ed. A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: The Feminist Press, 1990), 264. 100 Parker Pillsbury, “Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association,” 1867, in Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , Vol.I: In the School of Anti-Slavery, 1840 to 1866 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 67. 101 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897 (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 254 and 240-241. 102 Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. 103 Jeffrey, Great Silent Army , 231-232.

176 increased appropriation of discourses of slavery for the purposes of women’s rights. In contrast, throughout the nineteenth century, African American reformers expressed greater awareness of the existence of interdependent oppression, a fact demonstrated in their use of the woman-slave analogy.

Deeper Intersections This rhetoric was also used to describe the incongruities that shaped the labour of African American women. Indeed, North and South, enslaved or free, work continued to be a necessity and a reality for many following slave emancipation. When African Americans discussed labour, they sometimes referred directly to the labour of enslaved women and at other times made reference to chattel slavery or abstract discourses of slavery in a more rhetorical sense. In 1831, Maria Stewart noted that while men “practiced nothing but head-work,” African American women did their “drudgery” – she asked how long “the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” 104 Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ar’n’t I a woman?” speech from the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention explored the connections between labour, chattel slavery and gender. 105 This speech was at its heart a consideration of the labour of enslaved women. Some historians condemn the way Truth’s quote has been appropriated during the twentieth century; white feminists have often used it to illustrate the hardiness and strength of black women for their own purposes. Phyllis Marynick Palmer suggests that this practice in fact undermines Truth’s statement original statement, because white women use the quotation to prove their own ability to engage in productive work.106 Yet this critique assumes that the divisions of twentieth-century feminism were identical during the 1850s. Theresa C. Zackodnik, in contrast, observes how Truth’s use of the “woman as slave analogy” both encompassed and transcended the rhetorical paradigm of white women reformers. Truth, unlike white women, turned the “analogy back to the particular conditions of the formerly enslaved, specifically African American women.” 107 African Americans, like other nineteenth-century Americans, acceded to the cultural prominence of discourses of slavery, so the purposes to which this rhetoric could be dedicated differed based on the political persuasion of the individual.

104 Maria Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” 1831, in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents (United States: St Martins Press, 2000), 80. 105 See: Frances Dana Gage, “Reminiscences by Frances D. Gage: Sojourner Truth,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. HWS , Vol.I. (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1881, 2010), 115-117, e-book. 106 Phyllis Marynick Palmer, “White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 152. See also: Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). 107 Teresa C. Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (The University of Tennessee Press, 2011), 120.

177 During the antebellum era, the majority of southern domestic labour was necessarily undertaken by chattel slaves who were managed by plantation mistresses. This could prove trying for slave and mistress alike, and so it led to much frustration. “I lost control of my temper to- night[,] Eliza provoked me very much,” plantation mistress Ann Lewis Hardeman confessed to her diary in 1859. Admitting she had “behaved very badly,” Hardeman vowed to “try & regain my balance – anger is majestic – but makes slaves of weak minds.” Importantly, however, Thavolia Glymph demonstrates how the ideology of domesticity meant that household slave women were expected to work “as if their own interests were involved.” 108 This reality of enslaved domestic labour challenges the pronouncement that northern white women were inherently oppressed by their household labour, especially because many took pride in the artisanal aspects of domestic tasks.109 A clear disparity therefore existed between the situation of African American women and their white mistresses, but this difference went largely unrealised when both groups mobilised this rhetoric to discuss the many facets of women’s labour. The vastly dissimilar perspective African American women brought to this discussion can be seen in their attitude toward free labour. Frances Harper’s antebellum free labour rhetoric differed from that of labour reformers, a tendency with which she persisted following the Civil War. 110 To describe this rhetorical disconnect, she made direct references to chattel slavery. For Harper, “Free Labour” entailed boycotting goods – in this case clothing – produced by enslaved labour. Many antislavery women boycotted slave-made goods in the hope of undermining the market for such southern produce while instilling and enacting antislavery morals. 111 “This fabric is too light to bear / The weight of bondsmen’s tears,” Harper found, and neither did it “bear a smother’d sigh, From some lorn woman’s heart[.]” This rhetoric questioned the way many labour reformers used allusions to chattel slavery to discuss free labour. Instead, it emphasised the perspective of most African American reformers: that chattel slavery was the most egregious form of oppression during the antebellum era. In boycotting slave produce, Harper concluded, “I have nerv’d Oppression’s hand, For deeds of guilt and wrong.” 112 Enslaved women, besides performing the coercive work of the plantation, also carried out the majority of the essential household tasks for their own families. 113 If the African American women who used the woman-slave analogy did so in more nuanced way than white women, due to their

108 “The Journal of Ann Lewis Hardeman, 1850-67,” November 23, 1859, in Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 44 and 6. 109 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, 2000), 47 and 226. 110 See: Michael Stancliff, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State (Routledge, 2011). 111 Jeffrey, Great Silent Army , 20-21. 112 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Free Labour,” Brighter Coming Day , 81. 113 Thistle, From Marriage, 21-22.

178 own experiences of chattel slavery, they also challenged the patriarchal interests that African American men could espouse. In 1863, Robert Smalls, an ex-slave, testified to Congress: “The coloured men in taking wives always do so with reference to the service the women will render.” 114 When Truth emphasised that women did as much work as men, “but did not get so much pay,” she instead presented an intersectional awareness that saw exploitative practices based on labour and sex as equally oppressive. “You have been having our rights so long,” Truth concluded in 1867, “you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us.” 115 Truth, like other African American women reformers, drew overarching conclusions about women’s oppression in a way that was attentive to the legacy of chattel slavery. This use of the woman-slave analogy demonstrated the intersection between labour, chattel slavery, race, and gender which continued to be of central concern to African American reformers. When Truth and Harper used discourses of slavery, they hoped to simultaneously reveal the coercion of chattel slavery and the existence of interdependent oppressions. Throughout the nineteenth century, African American reformers remained committed to using the woman-slave analogy to interrogate the intersections between race and gender, together with chattel slavery, labour, and sexuality. The conclusions they reached identified the issues at once common to many women and specific to the experience of African Americans.

Writing Labour The many middle-class women who laboured at writing to support themselves also used this rhetoric in their literature. When writers considered reform topics, they often used discourses of slavery to describe women’s oppression. Their literary interrogation of women’s labour – as reformers, seamstresses and housewives – challenged the fallacy that women did not work. The simple fact that women’s writings appeared in print challenged the ideal of domesticity. 116 Nathaniel Hawthorne resented the “special appeal” of women writers because he assumed them to be free from financial cares. The biographers of Fanny Fern, Harriet Beecher Stowe, E.D.E.N. Southworth and Lillie Devereux Blake, however, reveal that they actually began writing to support themselves and their families.117 Similarly, the problems women writers encountered when they entered the literary marketplace were often described in terms of the woman-slave analogy.

114 Robert Smalls, “American ’s Inquiry Commission, South Carolina,” 1863, in Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80 (University of Illinois Press, 1998), 133. 115 Sojourner Truth, “American Equal Rights Association,” May 10, 1867, in HWS , Vol.II, 193-194. 116 Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 101. 117 Husband, Antislavery Discourse , 57. See: Joyce W. Warren, Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman (Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Melissa J. Homestead and Pamela T. Washington, eds. E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2012); Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).

179 The women’s rights periodicals developed during the 1850s were often an overtly political expression on the part of their women editors. The Lily , edited by Amelia Bloomer, recounted how the editor of the Dollar Newspaper condemned Mrs. H.J. Nichols, who became editor of the Brattleboro (Vermont) Democrat due to her husband’s invalidism. Bloomer lauded women such as Nichols. Indignantly, she editorialised that if the editor had to undertake “ one half the labour that is done by many women” – in addition to his professional work – he would “consider it little better than slavery .” Writing for newspapers, and writing more generally, was better than having to “tamely submit to slave out her life to support a miserable wretch,” Bloomer emphasised, so women needed the opportunity to “contest” the “right to choose” their labour by which to support themselves. 118 Many women writers looked to the exploitation of seamstresses for literary inspiration, and used discourses of slavery to describe their plight. The expanding market for ready-made clothing in the wholesale trade meant needlewomen became wage workers, but they faced miserable working conditions at home or in “slop shops,” for long hours and at low “piece rate” pay. These conditions generated discussions of class and women’s oppression. Lori Merish observes how the sentimentality associated with antebellum antislavery became central to descriptions of class and poverty, rendering the “sentimental seamstresses” a literary trope of much interest to women writers. Antebellum seamstresses, unlike female operatives, had “few opportunities to engage in acts of literary self-definition,” so they were depicted as the “deserving poor” because their economic dependence was thought to be inherently dictated by capitalism. 119 “The Oppressed Seamstress: A True Tale” (1851) narrates the plight of a woman who cannot make a living even with “most untiring industry,” but is still afraid to demand her full wage. When a private employer cheats the seamstress out of half her wage, the seamstress realises she should “better vindicate my rights – but they who oppress the poor have the worst of it.” 120 Literary seamstresses became “representationally submerged” in gendered discussions of the supposedly feminine nature of economic dependence, which expressed cultural anxieties about the economic and sexual autonomy of working women. 121 Antebellum reform literature sought to esteem all women’s labours, from that of the seamstress to the public role of the reformer. This was epitomised in Laura Curtis Bullard’s Christine; or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs (1856), a novel which Denise M. Kohn describes as

118 Amelia Bloomer, “A Wife is a Wife,” Lily , January, 1850. 119 Lori Merish, “Representing the ‘Deserving Poor’: The ‘Sentimental Seamstress’ and the Feminisation of Poverty in Antebellum America,” in Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women , ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005), 50. 120 Mrs. E. Wellmont, “The Oppressed Seamstress: A True Tale,” Lily , February 1851. 121 Merish, “Representing,” 50-51.

180 presenting “one of antebellum America’s most radical heroines: a woman’s rights leader.” 122 Since reformers were keenly aware of the importance of public perception, this novel sought to instil positive associations between women’s rights and women’s labour. Caroline Wells Healey Dall realised that “‘Woman’s Rights’ [is]… a phrase which we all hate,” spoken of “with such unction, as a slave might clank his chains,” so reformers sought to demonstrate women’s productivity and independence beyond marriage and motherhood to guarantee “the assertion of her Right to Labour.” 123 Literature became a platform for reformers to counter the negativity surrounding women’s rights. Writing about the labour exploitation of seamstresses often prefaced broader discussions of women’s political, economic and social issues. 124 Bullard’s Christine used abstract discourses of slavery to critique the exploitation experienced by seamstresses. The character of Annie Howard, the fugitive wife described in Chapter Two, turns to needlework – toiling “day and night” and “earning a mere pittance” – after fleeing her marriage. The foreman sexually harasses Annie when she seeks her wages, but she is determined to continue “her never-ending drudgery, her never- resting needle” to support her sick child. 125 According to Merish, such sentimental representations based the seamstress’s “irresistible claim to support” on her feminine weakness and delicacy; this eroticised dependency as it anchored poverty to the sexual appeal of afflicted women. The seamstress’ feminine modesty and “tragic fatalism” result in “economic ineptitude” – epitomised in Lily Bart’s failure as a milliner in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) – because “economic success and agency” was viewed as a masculine characteristic. 126 Like Lily, Annie is unable to prevail economically and is forced into prostitution, dying as a fallen woman. This leads the title character Christine to argue that women should be employed in any profession in which they excel, and should “be paid for her labour as much as a man would be, for the same amount.” 127 The woman-slave analogy was used alongside descriptions of how the market economy led to and maintained women’s oppression. Following the Civil War, this rhetoric continued to be used to esteem women’s labour. Louisa May Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience (1873) presents an ambivalent picture of the labours available to women. The character of Christie resolves to take up needlework only if all other employments failed, and so demonstrates the undesirability of the work. When Christie

122 Denise M. Kohn, “Introduction,” in Laura Curtis Bullard, Christine; or, Woman’s Trials and Triumphs , ed. Denise M. Kohn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1856, 2010), ix. 123 Caroline Wells Healy Dall, “Progress of the Cause” (Fraternity Lecture), October 23, 1860, 3-4 (Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). 124 Jaqueline M. Chambers, “‘Thinking and Stitching, Stitching and Thinking’: Needlework, American Women Writers, and Professionalism,” in Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century , ed. Beth Harris (Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 172. 125 Bullard, Christine , 282-284. 126 Merish, “Representing,” 54 and 59. 127 Bullard, Christine , 184.

181 becomes a domestic servant, Alcott negotiates the differing cultural expectations surrounding gender, race and class through a discussion of white and black women’s labour. Privileged white women could rely on servants to undertake much of the heavy household labour, but Christie is happy to work as a domestic servant because she never saw housework as degrading. However, the narrator contradictorily notes that Christie “assumed her badge of servitude” upon donning her white servant’s apron. Moreover, when Christie is asked to clean her employer’s wellingtons, she sees it as a “degradation” to which she “won’t submit[.]” Instead, the African American cook Hepsey does the job, saying: “[D]is ain’t no deggydation [sic] to me now; I’s a free woman.” It is only upon learning that Hepsey had been a slave that Christie apologies and does the job herself. 128 Therefore, Alcott directly referenced chattel slavery to force her white character to gain humility. This strategy encouraged an intersectional awareness of many sites of oppression, but it also emphasised the incomparability of enslaved labour with the far less degrading labour opportunities afforded white women. The reform literature of the postbellum era also used discourses of slavery to discuss the contradictions that resulted from marriage, domesticity and women’s labour. Nineteenth-century conceptions of individualism were paradoxical because selfhood was identified with the feminine but ultimately denied women. 129 Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master: A Story of To-Day (1874) contemplated this inconsistency through the character of Agnes Moulder and her futile attempts to embody the cult of true womanhood. Mrs. Moulder’s experience of marital submission and domestic confinement is constructed through metaphorical references to “caged birds.” Indeed, Mrs. Moulder and her yellow canary Cherry are appreciated whilst safely inside their domestic “cage” but perceived to create havoc beyond. Marian Scholtmeijer explains how this narrative strategy enables isolated domestic suffering to be reclaimed and challenged through “a posited kinship” between victimised women and animals. 130 The descriptions of the Moulder household suggest that domesticity could at once be harmonious and confining: “The room was very pleasant, the afternoon sunshine was coming into it through the open window, the flowers on the stand were in bloom, the bird sang in its cage.”131 Since this private and “feminised space” existed in opposition to the male public arena and demands of the market, the presence of Mr. Moulder, who arrives home “tired and cross,” creates a tension which leads him to take out his wrath on the bird.132 Cherry sings his “soft warbling song” for Mrs. Moulder, but Mr. Moulder

128 Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (New York: Schocken Books, 1873, 1977), 16 and 21-24. 129 See: Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 130 Marian Scholtmeijer, “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction,” in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations , ed. Carol J. Adams and . Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 235. 131 Lillie Devereux Blake, Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master: A Story of to-Day (New York: The Feminist Press, 1874, 1996) , 287; also 80. 132 Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581.

182 denigrates this voice as being “obtrusively disagreeable,” just as women’s voices were seen as aberrant in the public realm. When Cherry escapes his cage, an enraged Mr. Moulder strikes the bird repeatedly until its death. 133 Cherry’s murder represents the metaphorical death of its owner, and her emotional response induces a miscarriage and physical deterioration.134 As with references to marriage and fashion, these variations on the woman-slave analogy demonstrated the confinement that resulted from domesticity. Elizabeth B. Clark further suggests that Fettered for Life illustrates how the “right to hold a job, to pursue a career or profession, came to be seen as a critical part of woman’s emancipation.” 135 Women’s writing had gained greater acceptance and respectability by the Reconstruction era, but it was still viewed with suspicion, especially among the upper classes. 136 Fettered for Life challenged these prevailing attitudes by implying that writing could be a positive outlet for women. As discussed in Chapters Two and Three, the character Flora Livingstone becomes a fugitive fiancée prior to succumbing to an unhappy marriage, only to experience a lack of autonomy on account of her dress. Following marriage, her friend Laura Stanley encourages Flora to resume her passion for writing, and the publication of some poetry gives her a sense of purpose. This anticipated Edith Wharton’s confession: “The publishing of ‘The Greater Inclination’ broke the chains which had held me so long in a kind of torpor.” 137 When Flora’s husband forbids her writing, she succumbs to a nervous fever and dies with the knowledge that “women as well as men need an occupation[.]”138 The purportedly liberating benefits of writing were seen to ameliorate the sense of domestic confinement that could accompany an unhappy marriage. The anxiety surrounding domesticity and women’s writing were also at the heart of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), which follows a married woman’s mental instability following the birth of her child. To interrogate domestic confinement, Gilman more clearly invoked abstract discourses of slavery. The nameless woman’s husband is her “prisonmaster,” which recalled the rhetorical connections that were drawn between antebellum slave owners and husbands, as well as antebellum factory owners. Kari J. Winter also connects the Gothic overtones of this short story with slave narratives.139 The “prisonmaster” symbolically

133 Blake, Fettered , 132-134 and 288-291. 134 See: Ana Stevenson, “The Novel of Purpose and the Power of the Page: Breaking the Chains That Bind in Fettered for Life ,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics 6, no. 2 (2013): 111-113. 135 Elizabeth B. Clark, “Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America,” Law and History Review 8, no. 1 (1990): 34. 136 Maureen E. Montgomery, “Gilded Prostitution”: Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870-1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 52. 137 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934, 2008), 122. 138 Blake, Fettered , 351. 139 Kari J. Winter, Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), esp. 102-103. See also: Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Colour in America,” Feminist Studies 15 (1989): 427-428; Margaret Carol

183 confines his wife to the old nursery, with windows “barred for little children, and … rings and things in the walls.” 140 The woman’s subversive journal writing accompanies her increasing transfixion with the patterns of the yellow wallpaper, but, like Blake’s Flora, she finds solace in writing and reading – activities frequently used as justifications for nineteenth-century women’s illnesses. 141 Eventually attempting to free an imaginary woman she believes to be trapped behind the wallpaper pattern, the woman’s “‘madness,’ indeed, is the ‘madness’ of mistaking the metaphoric for the literal.” 142 When women were unable to realise the expectations surrounding domesticity, discourses of slavery were used to demonstrate their sense of confinement and need for fulfilling labours. Postbellum literary descriptions of women’s labour largely invoked abstract discourses of slavery, but direct references to chattel slavery appeared in conjunction with the depiction of ex-slaves. This trope was used to describe the labour of writing, and also persistently illuminated the writing of labour.

Working Women During the postbellum era, women’s rights reformers paid greater attention to the labour of working women. Antebellum discussions of women’s labour had been predicated on some awareness of many forms of oppression, especially amongst women labour reformers, but the postbellum use of discourses of slavery became increasingly abstract as the meaning of white slavery underwent further change. As a result, slavery was increasingly deployed as a euphemism for oppression in a way that primarily referred to the exploitation of white women. In spite of the emerging tensions surrounding race and class, antebellum labour reformers demonstrated a basic awareness of interdependent forms of oppressions. A 1858 contributor to The Woman’s Advocate emphasised that “we feel earnestly for all victims of tyranny,” including the “slaves of the cotton lord, or slaves of the cotton loom”: Our compassion is equally excited by the story of the black slave dragging out her weary life in constant terror of her brutal overseer, as by that of the slave of the needle in continual fear of beggary or starvation. 143 When discourses of slavery were used to present both chattel slavery and women’s labour as exploitative, it was not necessarily implied that one should type of oppression should undermine the other. Frederick Douglass recognised that it was unfair to be “underpaid for labour faithfully

Davidson, “Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal 33, no. 1 (2004): 59. 140 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper (New York: The Feminist Press, 1892, 1973). 141 Barbara Hochman, “The Reading Habit and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’,” American Literature 74, no. 1 (2002): 89-94. 142 Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser, “The Feminist Voice: Strategies of Coding in Folklore and Literature,” The Journal of American Folklore 100, no. 398 (1987): 419. 143 Anne E. McDowell, “All Victims of Tyranny Important,” The Woman’s Advocate , February 16, 1858, in Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae, eds. The Radical Women’s Press of the 1850s (New York: Routledge, 1991), 234.

184 performed,” it was “harder still not to be paid for labour at all”; still, he viewed the labour exploitation of women as particularly oppressive because they had “no rights which white men are bound to respect.” 144 The antebellum urge to describe multiple sites of labour exploitation frequently managed to describe neither as inherently worse than the other, but simply to acknowledge that all forms of oppression and exploitation were undesirable and should be ameliorated. A prominent critique of the exploitation of seamstresses earlier emerged in Thomas Hood’s renowned “The Song of the Shirt” (1843), published in London’s Punch . As discussed in Chapter One, the “Song” used discourses of slavery to critique women’s labour exploitation. It was so popular that it generated transatlantic reprints, appearing in various American labour and reform periodicals. First published in the Fall River Mechanic , on December 7, 1844, a portion of the “Song” also appeared alongside an appeal by the Shirt-Sewers’ Co-Operative Union in the New York Tribune of July 31, 1851 (these funds enabled the establishment of the New York Cooperative Clothing Store). 145 It also inspired subsequent imitations. Fifteen years after its initial publication, the “Song” appeared in the American women’s rights framework as a covert advertisement for Grover and Baker sewing machines in an 1858 edition of The Sibyl . Hood’s original featured alongside a parody (written by “ AS GOOD ”), entitled “A Song Over a Shirt”: With fingers taper and white, “Click! click! click! And eyes that would grace a queen, While the sun is clear and bright; A lady sat in her easy chair, For me there is no more toil Plying her Sewing Machine – While the stars whine through the night. Stich! stitch! stitch! I’m no longer a slave So pleasant, and pretty, and pert, Under a barbarous Turk – While with a voice of musical pitch But, my sewing done, the hours I save She sang as she made a shirt. I devote to Christian work![”] 146 This implied that women’s labour could be alleviated through devotion to “Christian work,” but it was again aimed at privileged women who could afford a sewing machine. In consequence, this parody largely refuted the way discourses of slavery were used to describe the plight of working women in the original. Although this advertisement appeared in a reform periodical, it did not challenge the labour exploitation of poor, wage-earning seamstresses in the United States or England. When women’s rights reformers used the woman-slave analogy to discuss and incorporate the labour concerns of working women, it could become a fraught process. A scrapbook of women’s rights news clippings compiled by Dall demonstrated the general interest women reformers took in

144 Frederick Douglass, “Lucy Stone and Senator Douglass,” Douglass’ Monthly , 1959, in Philip S. Foner, ed. Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, 1992), 76. 145 T.J. Edelstein, “They Sang ‘The Song of the Shirt’: The Visual Iconology of the Seamstress,” Victorian Studies 23, no. 2 (1980): 184; Foner, Women and the American Labour Movement , 89. 146 “BY HOOD ,” “The Song of the Shirt” and “ AS GOOD ,” “A Song Over a Shirt,” Sibyl , October 1, 1858.

185 the exploitation of working women. One clipping featured an 1863 article from the Mercury , which described the death of an overworked milliner: “[N]o class of persons would submit to a system of labour more destructive to health than slavery if they were not virtually defenceless.” 147 This conclusion, unlike many of its antebellum counterparts, however, emphasised the oppression and exploitation of milliners over that of all other labourers. During the late 1860s, Stanton and Anthony’s The Revolution also explored the issue of women’s labour. Its attention to the Hester Vaughn case – a domestic who was charged with infanticide after giving birth alone in 1868 – turned into a rhetorical conflict between public representations of race and class by middle-class reformers. 148 This led to the first of the women’s meetings Stanton and Anthony organised between 1868 and 1871, later followed by the McFarland/Richardson case discussed in Chapter Two. It enabled these reformers to emphasise the need for a single sexual standard whilst outlining the economic, social, and political connections that enabled and sustained women’s oppression. 149 In support of Vaughn, Anna Dickinson addressed the Working Women’s Association to demand expanded employment opportunities for women, equal pay for equal work. 150 Middle-class suffragists constantly used Vaughn’s case to advocate for working women, but also to demand enfranchisement. It was “‘Manhood Suffrage’,” Stanton argued in 1869, which enabled Vaughn to be imprisoned under a double sexual standard. If “every extension of rights prepares the way to greater freedom to new classes,” Stanton meanwhile saw disenfranchisement as resulting in “greater tyranny on those who have no voice in the government.” 151 The way in which other contributors to The Revolution used quotes from the “Song” resulted in further tensions in the representation of working women. An article entitled “Life and Death by the Needle” recounted how a woman forced into needlework contracted consumption and died. Quoting the original poem – “Band and gusset, and seam, / Seam and gusset, and band” – the contributor concluded that women needed practical skills to support themselves, but generally must “have work , they must have better wages .” 152 These writers did not necessarily advocate unionisation or a minimum wage, and so their call to alleviate women’s oppression did not necessarily have any discernible impetus beyond the rhetorical. Moreover, these discussions largely

147 “The Case of Mary Anne Walkley,” Leeds Mercury , June 26, 1863, in Caroline Wells Healey Dall scrapbook, “Progress of the Woman’s Cause – 1861 to 1864” (Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). 148 Angela G. Ray, “Representing the Working Class in Early U.S. Feminist Media: The Case of Hester Vaughn,” Women’s Studies in Communication 26, no. 1 (2003): 1-26. See: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Infanticide,” Revolution , August 6, 1868; Elizabeth Cady Stanton , “Hester Vaughan,” Revolution , November 19, 1868. 149 DuBois, “Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage,” 145-146; Elizabeth Pleck, “Feminist Responses to ‘Crimes against Women,’ 1868-1896,” Signs (1983): 453-455. 150 Anna Dickinson, “Struggle for Life,” New York Times , November 6, 1868. 151 “Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association: Address of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Revolution , May 13, 1869. 152 L., “Life and Death by the Needle,” Revolution , April 9, 1868.

186 focused on white women workers and sometimes included the interests of immigrant women, but rarely included references to African American women. The idea of white slavery gained significance in discussions of working women. Just as abolitionists sought to emphasise the humanity of the enslaved, another contributor used the “Song” to foreground the low wages and horrendous conditions faced by women workers: Oh men with sisters dear: Oh men with mothers and wives: It is not linen you’re wearing out, But human creature’s lives. Stitch, stitch, stitch: In poverty, hunger, and dirt: Sewing at once with a double thread, A shroud as well as a shirt. Following the abolition of chattel slavery, however, the rhetoric of white slavery could problematise worker exploitation without acknowledging the continued exploitation faced by emancipated African Americans. The article continued: “[W]hat kind of battle must white slaves wage before they may throw off their shackles?” 153 As chattel slavery no longer existed, discourses of whiteness meant that the postbellum labour of African American was often not considered in discussions of women’s labour. This demonstrated the broader postbellum transformation of the woman-slave analogy, wherein it was increasingly appropriated to describe the oppression of white women. Postbellum suffragists used discourses of slavery to position capitalism as a major source of women’s oppression. From the perspective of the mainstream labour movement, this discussion was not prevalent because of the degree to which the “labour question” largely overlooked women. 154 Dall’s The College, the Market, and the Court; Or, Woman’s Relation to Education, Labour and Law (1867) emphasised that competition between wage-earning men and women was not beneficial; cooperation and solidarity would instead render men and women “equal partners, and no longer master and slave.” 155 When postbellum reformers did make direct references to chattel slavery, it was often intimated that emancipated African American men no longer encountered labour problems because they were enfranchised. If African Americans were discussed, however, white reformers often indicated that they should be responsible for the amelioration of their own labour issues. In an 1868 speech entitled “On Labour,” Stanton extended the focus of antebellum labour reformers by pronouncing that “the same principle degrades labour as upheld slavery,” because the “motive for making a man a slave was to get his labour” for free. 156

153 Eleanor Kirk, “Another Dose of Facts,” Revolution , October 29, 1868. 154 Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 31-32. 155 Caroline Wells Healey Dall, The College, the Market, and the Court: Or, Woman’s Relation to Education, Labour and Law (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867), 320 (Google books). 156 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “On Labour,” 1868, in Ellen Carol DuBois, “On Labour and Free Love: Two Unpublished Speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 261.

187 Stanton went so far as to suggest that the increased labour opportunities for enfranchised African Americans demonstrated the need for women’s suffrage: Woman, without the ballot, has no place by man’s side in the profitable and honourable work of life; … with all the rights of citizenship she would dignify every employment she entered; … have a place in trade, commerce and the professions, … and vote her own salary in proportion to her work. 157 Although women’s rights reformers realised that women’s oppression was central to the class experience and contributed to the exploitation of women workers, they did not necessarily extend these principles to African Americans.158 Therefore, when discourses of slavery emerged to critique the labour exploitation of women, white reformers had greater difficulty comprehending that racism continued to be a divisive factor in spite of the abolition of slavery. Still, the few cross-class alliances that directly followed the Civil War used the woman-slave analogy in a way that was often advantageous to working women. 159 Stanton and Anthony, following the lead of The Una , worked closely with a group of New York women typesetters to publish The Revolution during the late 1860s. This venture formed the short-lived Working Women’s Association (WWA), one of the few groups of skilled women workers in the male- dominated field of printing. 160 In 1868, reported on the WWA to emphasise how working women’s “oppression” was on account of “corrupt and avaricious employers,” and resulted in “poverty, misery and death.” 161 The WWA did not seek to victimise working women but instead identified properly remunerated work, of particular types and under certain conditions, as a positive development. 162 In 1868, Stanton used the example of how “slave labour crowded free labour out of the Southern States,” just as the “cheap labour of women” would undercut men’s employment opportunities, as a means to “dignify” women’s labour. 163 Yet, like other suffragists, Stanton viewed the gender-based wage system as “an institution that drove women into dependence in marriage.” 164 The WWA was short-lived, however, due to the differences between the interests of working women and its increasing emphasis on suffrage. Giving primacy to the issue of women’s suffrage appealed more strongly to middle-class women, independent businesswomen, professionals, and artists of means. 165

157 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Degradation of Woman,” Revolution , January 15, 1868. 158 Diane Balser, Sisterhood & Solidarity: Feminism and Labour in Modern Times (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 61. 159 See: Balser, Sisterhood , 43; Glenn, Unequal Freedom , 57. 160 Ava Baron, “Women and the Making of the American Working Class: A Study of the Proletarianisation of Printers,” Review of Radical Political Economics 14, no. Fall (1982): 23-42. 161 “Working Women’s Association,” New York Times , September 18, 1868. 162 Dubois, “Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage,” 142-143. 163 Stanton, “Degradation of Woman,” Revolution , 1868. 164 Siegel, “Home as Work,” 1129. 165 Balser, Sisterhood , 73-83. See also: Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and as Sisters: Feminism, the Labour Movement, and the Women’s Trade Union League of New York (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Wendy Gamber, “A Gendered Enterprise: Placing Nineteenth-Century Businesswomen in History,” Business History Review 72 (1998): 188-218.

188 The rhetoric used by the WWA also appeared in the NWSA’s advocacy of women’s labour. In spite of the 1869 schism between suffragists, the NWSA continued to frame its support for women’s labour through discourses of slavery. Ultimately, this demonstrated some awareness of the connections between women’s rights issues: “More than any class of men, woman represents the great unpaid labourer of the world — a slave, who, as wife and daughter, absolutely works for her board and clothes.” 166 This rhetoric transcended both women’s labour and suffrage, but it was not enough to maintain more substantive cross-class connections between suffragists and working women. During the 1870s, the few reformers who remained concerned with women’s work used the woman-slave analogy in an attempt bridge the ideological distance between domesticity and labour beyond the home. In 1875, Abigail Scott Duniway critiqued the way women were taught to consider wage labour “humiliating,” even though they had no “aim or object” in their own sphere. Quoting the San Francisco Morning Call , which anticipated that women could become “useful and enterprising citizens” and find occupations if their “shackles could be knocked off,” Duniway critiqued the idealisation of dependence because it only worked to “degrade” the labours of “their less fortunate sisters,” “reduce the wages,” and “perpetuate their own moral enslavement.” 167 The recognition of the significance of women’s labour remained uncommon in spite of antebellum organisations such as the FLRA, the transient postbellum WWA, and the NWSA’s limited concern. When the Association for the Advancement of Women (AAW) argued that women who worked within the home were, in fact, gainfully employed in 1878, this posed a direct challenge to the ideal of domesticity. 168 Therefore, abstract discourses of slavery were pivotal in the attempts reformers made to draw attention to different forms of women’s labour alongside a rapidly growing and industrialising economy. During the Gilded Age, women labour reformers used the rhetoric of white slavery in a way that contributed to its increasingly gendered connotations and changing dynamic. The working- class women of late-nineteenth-century labour movements invoked the domestic ideal to critique the competitive capitalism they viewed as disruptive to women’s sphere. 169 When the Knights of Labour became a public organisation in 1881, they finally admitted women (having previously excluded them due to the assumption they could not keep secrets) and emphasised unanimity

166 Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Mrs. Chandler, Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Haggart, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. HWS , Vol.III (Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1886), 181, e-book. 167 “Women Workers,” Northwest , Vol.IV, May 14, 1875. 168 Association for the Advancement of Women, “Memorial of Mary F. Eastman, Henrietta L.T. Woolcot, and others,” 1878, in Folbre, “Unproductive Housewife,” 483-484. 169 Susan Levine, “Labour’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labour,” Journal of American History 70, no. 2 (1983): 323.

189 between skilled and unskilled workers that was advantageous to the organisation of women. 170 Leonora M. Barry became the only woman to hold national office with the organisation, but there was general indifference to her organisational efforts due to the ongoing influence of domesticity, which even affected Barry herself. 171 In her 1887 report, Barry asked for attention toward “the poor down-trodden white slave, as represented by the women wage-workers of this country,” cautioning women not to “foolishly” believe that their association with labour should end with marriage. 172 Evidently, the rhetoric of white slavery emphasised the ongoing exploitation of working women and the intersections between some women’s issues. Yet this contributed to the way iterations of the woman-slave analogy became increasingly focused on white women, which marginalised African Americans and immigrant women alike. Regardless of any rhetorical or substantive tensions, the reformers of the Progressive Era persisted with this perspective upon the woman-slave analogy. At the 1893 Congress of Women, Barry condemned employers who considered labour “a to be bought and sold” at the “greatest possible profit for the purchaser[.]” Lydia A. Prescott also claimed that “virtue and slavery” could not coexist, and framed her speech around Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s definition of freedom: “‘The capacity to see what is right; the ability and will to do it; and the courage to bear the consequences.’” Since labour coercion did not enable individuals to enact this vision of freedom, reformers used abstract discourses of slavery or references to white slavery to condemn employers. 173 Many reformers viewed Gilman’s economic theory as revolutionary, but it is important to acknowledge that she communicated her new ideas in an old way – based on the woman-slave analogy – as will be discussed in Chapter Six. During the late nineteenth century, the woman-slave analogy remained a direct and clear denunciation of worker exploitation. The reformers who used the ideology of domesticity to critique labour gained mixed results, but discourses of slavery and the rhetoric of white slavery remained prominent. This draw attention to the labour of women, but in a way that limited the focus to white women to suggesting that this was the only form of oppression that yet remained.

Conclusion The woman-slave analogy permeated a variety of nineteenth-century discussions surrounding labour. Beyond the home, the tenuous position f of female operatives and seamstresses was at odds

170 Foner, Women and the American Labour Movement , 185; Ruth Milkman, “Organizing the Sexual Division of Labour: Historical Perspectives on Women’s Work and the American Labour Movement,” Socialist Review 49, no. 1 (1980): 113. 171 James J. Keanneally, “Women and Trade Unions 1870–1920: The Quandary of the Reformer,” Labour History 14, no. 1 (1973): 44. 172 Leonora M. Barry, “Report of the General Investigator” (1887), 158, in Levine, “Labour’s True Woman,” 335. 173 Leonora M.K. Lake (Barry), “Is Labour Dignified?” and Lydia A. Prescott, “The Economic Independence of Women,” in The Congress of Women: Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition , ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago: Monarch Book Company, 1893), 508 and 528-529, e-book.

190 with the economic expansion and the ideology of domesticity. Since the gendered division of labour led to the undervaluation of women’s work and lower remuneration which forced women into marriage, reformers used discourses of slavery to demand greater employment and economic opportunities. Antebellum discussions of wage slavery, free labour, and white slavery were viewed as rhetorically relevant, but the legitimacy of references to chattel slavery was sometimes questioned. When reformers used the woman-slave analogy to describe labour, they alternately acknowledged the greater exploitation of the enslaved or positioned women’s oppression as a more urgent issue. Even so, there was a greater understanding of how women’s labour exploitation interacted with other forms of oppression during the antebellum era. In the postbellum era, a cross-class and, to some extent, cross-racial emphasis on discourses of slavery was used to critique the ongoing exclusion of women from the labour market. This rhetoric had particular significance for the postbellum African American reformers who discussed the situation of freedwomen. As women lacked the vote, a defining element of citizenship, reformers used this rhetoric to describe what they viewed as the tenuous position of women in an increasingly industrialised capitalist marketplace. In the process, a variety of reformers drew attention to the multifaceted nature of women’s labour. But by the end of the nineteenth century, white reformers tended to use this rhetoric to focus on the experience of white women workers in a way that influenced the meaning of white slavery. Still, the idea that women’s labour constituted a form of slavery influenced social reformers of various persuasions well into the early twentieth century.

191 CHAPTER SIX :

SEX : “S LAVERY REDIVIVUS ”

The sale began – young girls were there, Defenceless in their wretchedness[.] … And mothers stood with streaming eyes, And saw their dearest children sold; Unheeded rose their bitter cries, While tyrants bartered them for gold. 1 FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER , “T HE SLAVE AUCTION ” (1854)

The horrors of African slavery scarcely exceeded the tortures endured by the white slaves of New York … the most casual observer must notice the cruel exactions made upon female labour by capital. “S LAVERY REDIVIVUS ,” WOODHULL AND CLAFLIN ’S WEEKLY , JULY 16, 1870

Throughout the nineteenth century, the woman-slave analogy provided a referential paradigm for conceptualising women’s oppression – from marriage and fashion, to politics and labour. This engendered enduring ideological associations between these themes and reformers’ condemnation of sexual exploitation. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper critiqued how the peculiar institution commodified the sexuality of enslaved women. Other reformers described marriage as an oppressive institution – like chattel slavery, but in similar and different ways – in a way that anticipated postbellum discussions of the marriage market and prostitution. Following the Civil War, however, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly contended that women’s oppression, collectively, was worse than chattel slavery had ever been. Although antebellum commentators had sometimes made similar assertions, the absence of chattel slavery in the postbellum era substantiated this specious argument. Therefore, women’s oppression – oppression resulting from sex, not race – became slavery redivivus – slavery relived, slavery come again. 2 The changing meaning of white slavery was central to this process. From its antebellum meaning of labour exploitation to its turn of the century association with sexual exploitation, the meaning of white slavery underwent a process of change wherein it became gendered and then sexualised. At the same time, postbellum reformers used collective memory to recall the exploitation of chattel slavery and describe the existence of enduring forms of oppression. Yet, among white reformers, an ever increasing focus on white women undermined the earlier antebellum attempts to interrogate the interdependence between different forms of oppression. Following the Civil War, antislavery rhetoric was appropriated for women’s rights purposes. Gradually, sex and race, rather than woman and slave, emerged as definitive rhetorical categories.

1 Maryemma Graham, ed. Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10. 2 Redivivus (Latin): “relived.” Trans. Hollie Thomas.

192 From the 1870s onwards, many reformers saw women (including working women) as the only oppressed group that remained. In response, discourses of slavery were used to frame women were the only “slaves” left in the Republic. Of course, this narrow attitude toward reform developed alongside the inscription of Jim Crow legislation which ensured African Americans remained largely a social underclass. When discourses of slavery were appropriated to describe the oppression engendered by sex, a more blatant and insidious form of racism emerged. Consequently, the destabilisation of attempts toward intersectionality shaped late-nineteenth- century interpretations of the intersections between race, gender, and class. These transformations presupposed the re-emergence of similar rhetoric in twentieth-century social movements. To contextualise how the woman-slave analogy changed from a comparison between women and slaves to one based on sex and race, it is necessary to briefly consider the rhetoric of the women’s liberation movement. The racial hierarchies inscribed by chattel slavery were the primary concern of twentieth-century civil rights activists and the nineteenth-century idealisation of womanhood became untenable for feminists, so race and sex became the focus of discussion. Serena Mayeri demonstrates the significance of “reasoning from race” because it enabled a historically-informed legal approach to shape feminist activism and sex equality jurisprudence during the 1960s and 1970s.3 Similarly, Lisa Marie Hogeland suggests that the “sex/race analogy” was central to the literature of women’s liberation. 4 The woman-slave analogy and its rhetorical shift therefore provided the foundations of twentieth-century activism. This chapter will consider how the changing framework of white slavery, together with a critique of the marriage market and prostitution, shaped the way the woman-slave analogy came to focus on white women. Just as the fugitive wife trope and the rhetoric of white slavery enabled a greater focus on the oppression of white women, a focus on the categories of sex and race overlooked African Americans more than the antebellum comparisons directly based on the exploitation engendered by chattel slavery. When the memory of antebellum chattel slavery was used to invoke a greater understanding of sex oppression in the postbellum era, there was little interest in the continued exploitation of African Americans. In contrast, African American reformers continued to use discourses of slavery and references to chattel slavery to demonstrate the degree to which sex and race continued to constitute interdependent forms of oppression. For the majority of reformers, however, slavery, long a euphemism for oppression, had become relevant only to women, meaning the sex oppression of white women was a primary concern at the end of the nineteenth century.

3 Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). 4 Lisa Maria Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), Chapter Six: “The Sex/Race Analogy.”

193 A Sexual Economy During the antebellum era, the woman-slave analogy was part of a broader social commentary that accepted the existence of many forms of slavery – many forms of oppression. Following the Civil War, slave emancipation and manhood suffrage fostered the misconception among white reformers that racial equality had been achieved. Where reformers such as Angelina Grimké, Ernestine L. Rose, Susan B. Anthony, Robert Purvis and others placed women’s rights as one of many human rights during the antebellum and Reconstruction eras, postbellum reformers increasingly used the woman-slave analogy to suggest that women’s oppression only remained. At the same time, the antebellum labour definition of white slavery yielded to a new meaning which encompassed prostitution, marriage, and women’s work. Yet the evident racial demarcation of white slavery had implications for the construction of early twentieth-century racial distinctions. 5 Moreover, the direct comparisons to chattel slavery that proliferated during the antebellum era were replaced by the collective memory of chattel slavery following the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century, the woman-slave analogy was used to describe the oppression resulting from sex in a way that presupposed whiteness. Antebellum interpretations of the market economy and its relationship with chattel slavery and prostitution provided the framework for this transformation. According to Adrienne Davis, the antebellum plantation controlled the lives of enslaved African American women by converting the “private relations of sex and reproduction into political and economic relations,” thus creating “a sexual political economy.” 6 Market expansion led to an increased focus on the social problem of prostitution across the nineteenth century. Neal Kumar Katyal describes how attitudes toward prostitution were based on the legal assumption of an analogy between slavery – real and metaphorical – and specific personal services; this was epitomised in the antebellum slave master and the procurer because of their comparable economic investment in female sexuality. 7 So too did late-nineteenth-century discussions of marriage critique the economic and sexual exploitation of women, and the courtship period was frequently described in terms of the marriage market. 8 A concentration on the gendered implications of the antebellum sexual economy shaped the rhetorical strategies which provided the foundations for late nineteenth-century critiques of prostitution and marriage.

5 Brian Donovan, “The Sexual Basis of Racial Formation: Anti-Vice Activism and the Creation of the Twentieth- Century ‘Colour Line’,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26, no. 4 (2003): 707-727. 6 Adrienne Davis, “‘Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle’: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in Sister Circle: Black Women and Work ed, Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 105. 7 Neal Kumar Katyal, “Men Who Own Women: A Thirteenth Amendment Critique of ,” The Yale Law Journal 103, no. 3 (1993): 792. 8 See: Sondra R. Herman, “Loving Courtship or the Marriage Market? The Ideal and Its Critics, 1871-1911,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1973): 235-252; Judith Fetterley, “‘The Temptation to Be a Beautiful Object’: Double Standard and Double Bind in The House of Mirth ,” Studies in American Fiction 5, no. 2 (1977): 199-211.

194 The abolition of chattel slavery itself became a new analogy following the Civil War. This process can be contextualised through the politics of collective memory. Frances M. Clarke and Craig Bruce Smith demonstrate the importance of the Revolutionary War as a site of memory during the Civil War, at the national centenary and beyond.9 The Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) in turn became central sites of memory. The success of abolition, if not racial equality, led reformers to hope for a similar outcome for other movements, particularly the broad women’s movement. As reformers became increasingly self-conscious about the history of American social movements, their rhetorical strategies became ever more self-reflexive. Robert N. Bellah suggests that, in times of crisis, there is a strong incentive to consider the past. 10 Therefore, late-nineteenth-century tensions surrounding race relations and gender hierarchy impelled reformers to repeatedly reference chattel slavery alongside the success of slave emancipation and the Civil War. However, the perceptions generated through collective memory more accurately reflect concerns of the present; the past remains relevant only insofar as contemporary issues are in flux. 11 The politicised use of memory can therefore provide a referential framework for political action. Collective memory shapes attitudes toward political events, so that “shared memories are not memories at all, but rather shared presumed memories or histories” which result in highly emotive discussions based on “a shared sense of anxiety and fear.” 12 In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the collective memory of chattel slavery and the Civil War existed alongside the tendency to construct sex, broadly defined, as the only extant form of oppression. This meant that, rhetorically, slavery was indeed redivivus . The woman-slave analogy informed postbellum interpretations of women’s oppression, but it also became the raison d’être for why the women’s movement should gain support. Importantly, this rhetoric remained central for those reformers, particularly African Americans, who still remained committed to understanding the existence of interdependent oppressions. Largely, however, the changing emphasis of this rhetoric ensured a more overt campaign for white women’s rights. In the absence of chattel slavery, the growing insistence on racial hierarchy encouraged a less intersectional approach to women’s rights than ever before. Turn of the century expressions of the woman-slave analogy increasingly focused on sex as the primary source of oppression.

9 Frances M. Clarke, “Old-Fashioned Tea Parties: Revolutionary Memory in Civil War Sanitary Fairs,” in Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War , ed. Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke and W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); Craig Bruce Smith, “Claiming the Centennial: The American Revolution’s Blood and Spirit in Boston, 1870-1876,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 7-53. 10 Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975, 1992), 141. 11 Barry Schwartz, “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 909. 12 James W. Pennebaker, “Introduction,” in James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), vii and xi.

195 Antebellum Markets The awareness of the sexual exploitation that occurred on southern plantations was central to the antebellum abolitionist critique of chattel slavery. Historians describe this particular antislavery predilection in terms of the “erotic South,” “voyeuristic abolitionism,” and the “family protection campaign,” but many antebellum reformers additionally viewed plantation sexual exploitation as a form of prostitution. 13 The woman-slave analogy helped describe the comparative allusions to prostitution and concubinage that shaped antislavery discussions of the systematic sexual exploitation within chattel slavery. By the nineteenth century, racial difference was the central determining factor for chattel slavery. Sexual coercion, then, emanated from the power differences that resulted from racial hierarchy. 14 Women were predominantly affected, but sexual abuse could shape the labour experience of slaves of both sexes. 15 Black and white antislavery reformers, however, focused on the experience of enslaved women. In 1850, Frederick Douglass proclaimed that millions of southern women were “consigned to a life of revolting prostitution” and forced into “slave breeding” for economic purposes: It is also known that slave women, who are nearly white, are sold in those markets, at prices which proclaim … the accursed purposes to which they are to be devoted. Youth and elegance, beauty and innocence, are exposed for sale upon the auction block; while villainous monsters stand around, with pockets lined with gold, gazing with lustful eyes upon their prospective victims. 16 The reality of racial admixture challenged the racial demarcations of chattel slavery, and the enslavement of white and mixed-race people presented a paradox in the United States. 17 The stories of individuals designated as real life “white slaves” gained immense circulation in antebellum popular culture. 18 Together, antebellum discussions of market exchange, prostitution, and

13 Ronald G. Walters, “ South: Civilisation and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1973): 177-201; Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic 28 (2008): 83-114; Julie Husband, Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield: Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth-Century Feminist Sexual Thought,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 10. 14 Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), Chapter One: “The Narrowing Meaning of Rape.” 15 See: Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Coloured Women Had to Go through a Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (1990): 45-74; Thomas A. Foster, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 445-464. See also: Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40, no. 2 (2006): 223-237. 16 “Frederick Douglass Discusses Slavery,” 1850, in Herbert Aptheker, ed. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States , Vol.II (New York: Citadel Press, 1951, 1969), 309-313. 17 See: Carol Wilson and Calvin D. Wilson, “White Slavery: An American Paradox,” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 19, no. 1 (1998): 1-23. 18 Mary Niall Mitchell, “The Real Ida May: A Fugitive Tale in the Archives,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 54-88.

196 whiteness coalesced around discourses of slavery. As Angelina Grimké pondered, did “the fathers of the South ever sell their daughters ?” 19 As a result, the tragic mulatta was both influential and controversial as an antislavery literary trope. Often condemned, especially when employed by African Americans, for its apparent attempt to engage and placate white reading audiences, Venetria K. Patton additionally suggests that the trope sometimes worked to disrupt dominant constructions of race and gender.20 This process was most apparent in female-authored slave narratives, and exemplified in Harriet Jacobs’ conclusion: “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.” 21 As discussed in Chapter Two, the literary tragic mulatta created a space in which sexual violence and legal disadvantage, in both chattel slavery and marriage, could be discussed. 22 Ultimately, the existence of the literary tragic mulatta condemned the systems – chattel slavery, marriage, and the law – which oppressed women, but in different and competing ways. Literary representations of the antebellum sexual economy often conflated sexuality and sale. Harper’s quote at the beginning of this chapter illustrated how the image of the slave auction – especially the auction block itself – was a symbol of market corruption in antislavery rhetoric. 23 African American authors used this symbol to make the liminal mixed-race experience central to antislavery literature. William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), narrated the fictional fate of ’s mixed-race, illegitimate daughter: Why stands she near the auction stand, That girl so young and fair? What brings her to this dismal place, Why stands she weeping there? 24 The antebellum auction block was thus a public display of women’s exploitation. Scholars compare the eroticised display of Hester Prynne and her child on the marketplace scaffold in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) with the “Am I Not A Woman and A Sister” antislavery

19 Angelina E. Grimké, An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (Project Gutenberg, 1836, 2010), 6-7, e-book. 20 Venetria K. Patton, Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 94-95. See also: Judith R. Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978); Deborah E. McDowell, “‘The Changing Same’: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists,” New Literary History 18, no. 2 (1987): 281-302; John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 32 (1987): 482-515. 21 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 1861, 2001), 27. See: Frances Smith Foster, “‘In Respect to Females...’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators,” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 2 (1981): 66-70. 22 See: Julie Husband, “‘The White Slave of the North’: Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of ‘Free’ Labour,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 16, no. 1 (1999): 15-17. 23 Amy Dru Stanley, “Home Life and the Morality of the Market,” in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 , ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (The University Press of Virginia, 1996), 88; Husband, Antislavery Discourse , Chapter Three: “Marketplace Politics in The Scarlet Letter .” 24 Brown, Clotel , 1.

197 token and the sale of mother and child at the slave auction.25 All these interpretations attest to the prominence of the antislavery associations between the auction block and women’s exploitation. In consequence, they reify the rhetorical significance of the relationship between chattel slavery, the market, and sexuality. Concern over chattel slavery and sexual exploitation was not limited to reformers, but the growing critique of prostitution evoked different responses. The moral reformers of the 1830s and 1840s drew attention to the problem of prostitution in northern cities.26 But even southern chattel slavery sympathisers periodically condemned sexual exploitation. “Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes,” southerner Mary Boykin Chestnut confided to her diary, “yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house.” 27 However, the coercive exploitation of the plantation was different to the expression of female sexuality that could also be associated with prostitution. Amy Dru Stanley demonstrates how prostitution evoked a “nightmare of freedom” in the Old South, because it meant some women did not exchange sex for subsistence and therefore negated the legitimating contracts of wage labour and marriage. The streetwalker, like a wage earning wife, “exposed a conflict between contract freedom and relations of dominion and dependence at home.” Following the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), prostitution gained new meaning as a social problem, as it became symbolically inseparable from ideas surrounding slavery and freedom. 28

Marriage Markets Chattel slavery and prostitution were both discussed in terms of the market, and marriage itself gained similar connotations. The concept of the marriage market, in which sexual purity was a young women’s primary “bargaining point,” existed alongside the ideal of the companionate marriage and its focus on developing an emotional bond between .29 These attitudes toward marriage were different to the point of incompatibility. The marriage market engendered “a

25 Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), Chapter Six: “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter ,” 125-150; Leland S. Person, “The Dark Labyrinth of Mind: Hawthorne, Hester, and the Ironies of Racial Mothering,” Studies in American Fiction 29 (2001): 33-48; Husband, Antislavery Discourse , 44-45. 26 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 109-128. 27 Mary Boykin Chestnut, March 4, 1861, in A Diary from Dixie: Mary Boykin Chestnut , ed. Ben Ames Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1905, 1949), 21-22. 28 Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labour, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 218-219. 29 Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 193; Estelle B. Freedman, “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behaviour, Ideology, and Politics,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982): 206.

198 ‘consumerist approach’ to sexual unions” that resulted in the corrosion of romance and trust. 30 Nineteenth-century literature used discourses of slavery to describe the influence of a market approach to courtship and marriage. During the nineteenth century, young girls were taught to acquire the “essential social graces” which ultimately helped their introduction into “the marriage market.” 31 Caroline Lee Hentz’s Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850) described the expectations for children: A child of eight years of age is old enough to be taught habits of industry and propriety. I do not confine my son, for I wish him to have a manly and independent character; but girls are very different. The domestic virtues must be cultivated in them. 32 As discussed in Chapter Two, antebellum popular literature used discourses of slavery to describe the plight of young women unwillingly forced into marriage. Hentz’s Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale (1852) depicted the heroine’s revulsion toward arranged marriage. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Missing Bride (1855) depicts the young Jacquelina, a jumping, darting little “bird with spread wings,” who is forced to marry a man she does not love – her great uncle’s illegitimate son.33 Antebellum literary critiques of arranged marriage provided the foundations for more intensive cultural commentary of the marriage market following the Civil War. The reformers of the postbellum era continued to use the woman-slave analogy to discuss women’s self-possession. Margit Stange proposes that the matrimonial was not an accurate social reality, but it was a popular idea that reflected the changes associated with the expansion of capitalism. 34 “Compelled to market themselves as slaves,” a contributor to Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly observed, “woman … is in haste to dispose of herself, as she is a perishable commodity, … whether wanted for wife or prostitute.” 35 The self-possession and autonomy lacked by married women was equally lost for women who literally sold themselves in the market economy. In 1894, suffragist Anna Howard Shaw concluded that the world was “a market-place in which women are bought and sold,” because women, upon marriage, lost their name and legal rights, and therefore “occupied the same position to her husband as the slave to his master. ”36 Just as the postbellum fugitive wife trope drew inspiration from the slave narrative and contributed to

30 Viviana A. Zelizer, “Beyond the Polemics on the Market: Establishing a Theoretical and Empirical Agenda,” Sociological Forum 3, no. 4 (1988): 621. 31 Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct , 66. 32 Caroline Lee Hentz, Linda; or, the Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1850, 2008), 30, e-book. 33 Caroline Lee Hentz, Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, the Heiress of Glenmore (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1852, 2008), e-book; E.D.E.N. Southworth, The Missing Bride; or, Miriam the Avenger (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1855, 2004), 261-262, 288, 486 and 625, e-book. 34 Margit Stange, : Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2. 35 E.S. Wheeler, “The Woman Market,” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly , February 24, 1872. 36 Anna Howard Shaw, “The National-American Convention of 1894,” in Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, History of Woman Suffrage , Vol.IV (Indianapolis: The Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 230, e-book [hereafter HWS ].

199 the appropriation of discourses of slavery, so too did descriptions of the marriage market use this rhetoric to focus on white women. This displacement of the woman-slave analogy, already underway, increasingly allowed reformers to view women’s oppression as the only form of exploitation that continued, apparently unabated, during the late nineteenth century. This vision of women’s oppression had many facets – including marriage, fashion, suffrage, and labour. Among white reformers, however, a focus on race was conspicuous due to its absence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1860 address to the New York State Legislature concluded: “The negro’s skin and the woman’s sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.” 37 As Stanton called this speech “A Slave’s Appeal,” the reference to slavery only encompassed white women, whose sex ensured her oppression. 38 In 1863, Lillie Devereux Blake stated that “the real emancipation of the sex … is still far from being accomplished.” 39 Increasingly, the erroneous perception that racial equality had been achieved following the Reconstruction amendments enabled discourses of slavery to be wholly appropriated for women’s rights purposes. The “champions of liberty,” Blake concluded in Woman’s Place To-Day (1883), had gradually claimed “personal freedom … to the labourer, to the slave, and last of all to woman, who is still held in bondage by the teachings of the past” – the first two developments ostensibly related only to men. 40 As the desire to eliminate the oppression emanating from sex increased, discussions of white women led to the marginalisation of non-white women and other oppressed groups more generally. The antebellum sexual economy and its associations between chattel slavery, the market economy, and sexuality meant that, by the end of the nineteenth century, these concepts became inextricably linked to the rhetoric of white slavery. In conjunction, the idea that women’s independence inherently corrupted gender relations transformed the economic meaning of prostitution. 41 As a result, the woman-slave analogy was central to the cultural commentary surrounding prostitution and the marriage market.

White Slavery in Flux The changing meaning of white slavery was central to this process. From the 1870s onwards, prostitution was understood by many reformers to represent the worst form of women’s exploitation

37 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “A Slave’s Appeal,” Speech to the Judiciary Committee, New York State Legislature, 1860, in Karlyn Kohrs Campbell ed., Man Cannot Speak for Her (New York: Praeger, 1989), 167-186. 38 Elisabeth Griffith, In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 101; Diane Helene Miller, “‘From One Voice a Chorus’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1860 Address to the New York State Legislature,” Women’s Studies in Communication 22, no. 2 (1999): 170-171. 39 Anonymous, “The Social Condition of Woman,” Knickerbocker , May 1863. Grace Farrell attributes this to Lillie Devereux Blake. Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 101. 40 Lillie Devereux Blake, Woman’s Place To-Day (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1883, 2001), 168, e-book. 41 Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 257.

200 within the labour market. If white slavery did not immediately lose the antebellum labour associations outlined in Chapter Five, the gendered aspect of this term increasingly became its primary focus. This enabled comparisons with the sexual economy of chattel slavery. According to Sharon E. Wood, the fear that women labouring beyond the home were in danger of becoming prostitutes created “an old image with a new gender: the white slave.” 42 In spite of the way the antebellum tragic mulatta literary trope courted the idea of a white slave, this postbellum development ensured that slavery was a concept with an indisputably new race. This was particularly prevalent within free love circles. Joanne Passett describes free lovers as “sex radicals” because the term draws a useful connection between nineteenth-century women’s rights reformers and twentieth-century feminists. Often sympathetic to antebellum abolitionism, a focus on sexuality meant sex radicals viewed matrimonial exploitation as a more concern urgent than chattel slavery. 43 Therefore, the way sex radicals used the woman-slave analogy remained remarkably similar throughout the nineteenth century. In 1855, Francis Barry wrote to The Lily : “Marriage is the slavery of woman. Marriage does not differ, in any of its essential features, from chattel slavery.” 44 A purveyor of free love publications, Barry was a regular contributor to The Lily and The Revolution and initiated a free love community of Berlin Heights, Ohio. 45 In addition to the direct references sex radicals made to chattel slavery, this group became particularly preoccupied with the idea that loveless marriages constituted prostitution during the postbellum era. Victoria Woodhull proclaimed: Those who are called prostitutes … are free women, sexually, when compared to the slavery of the poor wife. They are at liberty, at least to refuse; but she knows no such escape. “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands,” is the spirit and the universal practice of marriage .46 ’s pamphlet “Cupid’s Yokes” (1877), with its abstract discourses of slavery and similar free love argument, led to an early episode of American censorship. 47 Overall, sex radicals used the example of chattel slavery and prostitution to critique women’s lack of self-ownership and sexual autonomy. The way contributors to Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly used the woman-slave analogy further revealed the changing meaning surrounding the rhetoric of white slavery. A poem entitled

42 Ibid., 79 and 8. 43 Joanne E. Passett, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 1-2 and 13. Regarding “free love,” see: Sandra Schroer, State of “The Union”: Marriage and Free Love in the Late 1800s (Routledge: New York, 2005). 44 Francis Barry, “The Marriage Institution,” Lily , July 15 1855. 45 Passett, Sex Radicals , 59-90 and 174. 46 Victoria Woodhull, “Tried as by Fire; or, The True and the False, Socially” (n.d.), in Cari M. Carpenter, ed. Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 218. 47 E.H. Heywood, “Cupid’s Yokes: Or, the Binding Forces of Conjugal Life” (Princeton: Co-Operative Publishing Co., 1877), e-book. See: Margaret A. Blanchard, “The American Urge to Censor: Freedom of Expression Versus the Desire to Sanitise Society – From Anthony Comstock to 2 Live Crew,” William and Mary Law Review 33 (1991): 741-852.

201 “Lament of the White Slave” (1871) considered the breadth of women’s experience, from childhood and education, to marriage, domesticity and labour: I am a woman lone and desolate, Striving for freedom, O dark is my fate! Ever from childhood I’ve pined in my chains, Fettered and bleeding and worn down with pains; … It all is the same, a woman’s a slave, With small hope of freedom, except in the grave. 48 This poem demonstrated the intersecting oppressions that shaped women’s experience in a way that gendered the terminology of white slavery. On July 4, 1874, another contributor asked: “Is there any analogy between the late system of American slavery and conventional marriage?” This contributor, who repeatedly referred to husbands as the “owner” of their wives, unequivocally answered in the affirmative. Since antebellum abolitionists concluded that “ any system which rendered outrageous cruelties possible must be bad per se ,” so too should postbellum reformers. 49 Sex radicals, therefore, were prone to use discourses of slavery to present sex oppression as the worst form of exploitation. Whether or not these reformers overtly referenced chattel slavery, collective memory of the peculiar institution influenced the way they mobilised the woman-slave analogy. As the rhetoric of white slavery gained prominence, the antebellum tendency to employ the woman-slave analogy as a rhetorical flourish in a larger work receded. The postbellum era saw more elongated explanations of women’s oppression which were predicated on discourses of slavery.50 This tendency even extended to transatlantic networks. Charles Weatherby Reynell’s “Black and White Slaves” (1872) directly considered the apparent relationship between women’s oppression and the memory of American chattel slavery. To establish that “female emancipation” was not hopeless, Reynell drew elongated comparisons between the oppression of women and the recent exploitation of chattel slaves. This was based on three major points of analogy: “the alleged contentment of the slaves” was extended to women; the fallacy that “irresponsible power” was not dangerous due to the regard for one’s “own property” was viewed as equally applicable to slaves and women; and the argument that slaves were “unfit for freedom” was also attributed to women. 51

48 M. Merton, “Lament of a White Slave,” Woodhull , September 23, 1871. 49 Lyon, Woodhull , July 4, 1874. 50 See: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Degradation of Woman,” Revolution , January 15, 1868; Jane Elizabeth Jones to Parker Pillsbury, reply by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Sharp Points,” Revolution , April 9, 1868; M.T.C., “Woman’s Rights: ‘Aunt Milly,’ a Virginia Slave,” Revolution , April 22, 1869; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Women and the State,” Revolution , August 19, 1869; “The Sixteenth Amendment,” Woodhull , October 4, 1870; “Woman Suffrage: Speech by Mrs. Anna M. Middlebrook,” Woodhull , August 4, 1871; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Slaves and Women,” Journal , June 3, 1871; “Woman’s Subjugation,” Journal , July 17, 1875; Henry B. Blackwell, “The Slavery of Women,” Journal , December 11, 1875; Charlotte Perkins Stetson, “Causes and Uses of the Subjection of Women,” Journal , December 24, 1898. 51 Charles Weatherby Reynell, “Black and White Slaves,” from The Examiner (London: Office of “The Examiner,” 1872) (State Library of NSW).

202 This reasoning was used to refute gender hierarchy, but it accepted other assumptions about women, chattel slavery and African Americans. More importantly, the “black” and “white” of the title were neatly demarcated along the lines of chattel slaves and oppressed white women. The changing meaning of white slavery encompassed anxieties surrounding marriage, women’s labour and prostitution. Historians suggest that the public presence of working women led to the fear that they could become bold and sexually assertive, therefore further transgressing gendered expectations of labour. As the first city zoning sought to regulate prostitution, women faced uncertain social boundaries contingent on the spatial confusion that resulted.52 In reflection of Lori Merish’s discussion of the “worthy” and “unworthy” poor of the antebellum era, supposedly unequivocal boundaries emerged between free and unfree commodity relations. 53 Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master (1874) presents the ambiguities that resulted. When the character of Laura Stanley arrives in to seek employment, she is arrested for walking the streets alone at night. Just as curfews restricted the movement of slaves, Laura unwittingly transcends the gender and class conventions that seek to restrict her from walking where streetwalkers frequented. Laura’s character is arrested under the “pretence of protection,” even though her charge is based on the unlawfulness of women sojourning beyond domestic spaces.54 When women attempted to support themselves in an increasingly urbanised and industrialised nation, they symbolically placed themselves beyond marriage and its reciprocal sexual obligations. The concept of white slavery did not immediately lose the antebellum labour associations outlined in Chapter Five, but the gendered of the term became increasingly intrinsic to its meaning. This terminology was thus in a transition period between the 1870s and 1880s: it could still be used to describe labour exploitation as well as women’s oppression more generally. Ultimately, however, this rhetorical transformation enabled a greater focus on the exploitation of white women. In the coming decades, prostitution would come to be the dominant meaning of white slavery.

Remembering Slavery Following the Civil War, the expression of the woman-slave analogy relied on references to white slavery and the collective memory of chattel slavery. Antebellum references to chattel slavery had promoted a somewhat intersectional awareness of women’s oppression and the exploitation of chattel slavery. During the postbellum era, the process of remembering chattel slavery affirmed the

52 Wood, Freedom , 16; Stanley, From Bondage , 219. 53 Lori Merish, “Representing the ‘Deserving Poor’: The ‘Sentimental Seamstress’ and the Feminisation of Poverty in Antebellum America,” in Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women , ed. Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005). 54 Carol Mattingly, Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 105.

203 intersectional interests of African American reformers while validating the increasingly narrow interests of white reformers. As the rhetoric of white slavery became unequivocally associated with prostitution toward the end of the nineteenth century, Gretchen Soderlund suggests that it became “a racialised conception that imaginatively conflated prostitution and chattel slavery.” 55 Yet the prevalence of the woman- slave analogy throughout the nineteenth century, in the United States and beyond, suggests that the changed meaning of white slavery was neither surprising nor imaginative. A specific type of journalistic exposé emerged in conjunction with what came to be known as the “new abolitionism.” 56 W.T. Stead’s “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885), originally published in London’s Pall Mall Gazette , was the first major transnational example of this phenomenon. Stead’s focus on the “international slave trade” and the “London Slave Market” suggested a direct economic and labour basis, rather than an abstract rhetorical conception, for the woman-slave analogy.57 “The Maiden Tribute” also clearly used discourses of slavery to describe the exploitation of white women, but through references to chattel slavery and the market economy. Across the Atlantic, direct comparisons between antebellum chattel slavery and postbellum white slavery became even more influential for Progressive Era anti-vice reformers. In the United States, the increased focus on white slavery meant that, for many postbellum white reformers, the woman-slave analogy simply became less inclusive than the already flawed rhetoric of the antebellum era. When American ex-antislavery reformers became involved in the anti-vice movement at the end of the nineteenth century, they doubtlessly contributed to the use of this rhetoric.58 In addition, the memory of the earlier success of antislavery as a social movement also inspired the use of antislavery and abolition as analogies. The concept of market exchange continued to be evident in discussions of prostitution. Since white slavery was an international phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century, Mara L. Keire argues that reformers made their rhetoric nationally specific by situating the phenomenon in economic terms. American reformers used a three-point metaphor: vice as a business based on allied interests; the marketplace of red- light districts; and debt peonage (also known as ). 59 The rhetoric of white slavery, however, was not limited to economic concerns because it drew on other formative American experiences: chattel slavery, antislavery, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil War.

55 Gretchen Soderlund, “The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2, no. 2 (2011): 198. 56 Soderlund, “Rhetoric of Revelation,” 197-199; Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusaders: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887-1917 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), Chapter Two: “The New Abolitionism: The Cultural Power of the White Slavery Genre.” 57 W.T. Stead, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: The Report of the Secret Commission (Lambertville: The True Bill Press, 1885, 2007). 58 Katyal, “Men Who Own,” 805. 59 Mara L. Keire, “The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, 1907-1917,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 1 (2001): 5-41.

204 The northern collective memory of chattel slavery shaped the rhetoric of anti-vice reform, especially in the literary realm. Antebellum sex radical Mary Gove Nichols’ Mary Lyndon; or, Revelations of a Life (1854), a semiautobiographical condemnation of women’s oppression, was compared with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1853). Later novels, such as Reginald Wright Kaufmann’s The House of Bondage (1910), closely imitated Stowe’s antislavery narrative. 60 Kaufmann drew inspiration for various character names and storylines from Stowe’s original in its presentation of a white slave procurer abducting a rural white girl. 61 Other early twentieth-century captivity novels and films similarly emphasised the white slavery phenomenon. Anne Lee’s A Woman in Revolt (1913) invokes direct comparisons between antebellum chattel slavery and white slavery. When the character of Dr. Rathbourne gives a public speech about white slavery, he denounces the “white slave driver” and questions how this figure could keep “a young, helpless girl in this horrible bondage, more atrocious and indefensible than that for which the Civil War was fought.” 62 Not only did this literature produce a rhetorical binary between antebellum chattel slavery and perceptions of postbellum white slavery, but it also reified the postbellum ontological connection between sex and oppression. African Americans, in contrast, used the collective memory of chattel slavery to condemn the way racial hierarchy continued to facilitate the interdependent oppressions based on race and sex. During the Progressive Era, the ideology of “racial uplift” was prominent among African American women, especially in the club movement and civil organisations. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham suggests that racial uplift “remained locked within hegemonic articulations of gender, class and sexuality,” but it still created “discursive ground” to explore the negative stereotypes surrounding African American women. 63 This intersectional impulse appeared most clearly in the novels penned by reform women. Since African Americans continued to experience “conditions tantamount to slavery,” the “legacy of slavery” shaped their literature. 64 When African American reformers used discourses of slavery in response to rampant racism, they mobilised the rhetoric of white slavery just as they had used the tragic mulatta trope. Since the woman-slave analogy was

60 See: Passett, Sex Radicals , Chapter One: “Revelations from a Life,” 19-38. See: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (Hertfordshire: Woodsworth Classics, 1852, 1995); Mary Gove Nichols, Mary Lyndon; or, Revelations of a Life. An Autobiography (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1854, 1855), e-book. 61 Donovan, White Slave Crusaders , 36; Penelope Saunders and Gretchen Soderlund, “Threat or Opportunity? Sexuality, Gender and the Ebb and Flow of Trafficking as Discourse,” Canadian Women’s Studies 22, no. 3 (2003): 18. See: Reginald Wright Kauffman, The House of Bondage (Upper Saddle River: The Gregg Press, 1910). 62 Anne Lee, A Woman in Revolt (Desmond FitzGerald, Inc., 1913), 309 and 301, e-book. For the late twentieth- century context, see: Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-Emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourses of Trafficking in Women,” Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (1999): 24-50. 63 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 271. See: Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Shirley Wilson Logan, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). 64 Vashti Lewis, “The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper's Iola Leroy ,” Phylon 45, no. 4 (1984): 315; Patton, Women in Chains , 94.

205 used to compare the postbellum sexual exploitation of African American women with antebellum chattel slavery, half the narrative was set in the antebellum era. Mobilising the woman-slave analogy together with the collective memory of chattel slavery enabled African American reformers to interrogate the hierarchies that emanated from race and sex. The African American women writers of the Progressive Era used discourses of slavery to give meaning to these intersectional connections. Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) explores the character of Iola, the mixed-race but legitimate child of the planter aristocracy. The novel is structured by transitions between its postbellum and antebellum narratives. Prior to the Civil War, the death of Leroy Sr. leads to the discovery of Iola’s mixed-race parentage, and she becomes relegated to the “status of sexual object for which no indignity is too great.” 65 Although Iola has the “proud pose of Leroy,” the attorney Louis Bastine surmises her to be “a most beautiful creature” whose mixed-race ancestry and feminine beauty would “bring $2000 any day in a New Orleans market.” 66 For Iola, the possibility of sale and sexual assault is predicated on the market value of mixed-race women. Just as antebellum antislavery literature and female-authored slave narratives focused on mixed-race women, these characters continued to be employed to problematise the ongoing intersection between chattel slavery and freedom. Similarly, Pauline E. Hopkins used discourses of slavery to reveal the way elite white men continued to use their culturally inscribed power to take sexual advantage of African American and mixed-race women. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900) uses the metaphor of slavery to highlight the vulnerability of ethnic minorities and expose the gendered meaning of poverty. 67 Like Iola Leroy , Contending Forces was structured so the postbellum narrative drew on an antebellum backstory. These narratives considered the way physical and sexual violence continued to shape the “embodied subjectivity” of African American women. 68 The antebellum narrative features the character of Grace Monfort, the wife of a slaveholding immigrant planter. Two poor, troublemaking white “crackers” objectify Grace by speculating about her racial ancestry. Her complexion may be “creamy in its whiteness,” they still conjecture that she is not “a genooine white ’ooman [sic].” When Grace refuses the romantic attentions of rival planter, Anson Pollock, she is tied up like a slave and subjected to a brutal beating. An overseer “satiated his vengeful thirst” and then “cut the ropes which bound her,” thus depicting the power relations between master and slave rather than between the men and women of

65 Patton, Women in Chains , 94. 66 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (Boston: Beacon Press, 1892, 1987), 100. 67 Colleen C. O’Brien, “Race-ing toward Civilization: Sexual Slavery and Nativism in the Novels of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins and Alice Wellington Rollins,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 20, no. 1 & 2 (2003): 118. 68 Jennifer Putzi, “‘Raising the Stigma’: Black Womanhood and the Marked Body in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces ,” College Literature 31, no. 2 (2004): 2.

206 the planter elite. 69 Grace, like Iola, is only objectified after her race is questioned; yet unlike Iola, she disappears soon after being brutalised for her supposed act of racial passing. 70 A parallel postbellum narrative features the character of Mabelle, a mixed-race fourteen year old raped by her white uncle. Mabelle becomes the centre of financial exchange between half-brothers: “Well,” said he, “whatever damage I have done I am willing to pay for. But your child is no better than her mother or her grandmother. What does a woman of mixed blood, or any Negress, for that matter, know of virtue? It is my belief that they were a direct creation by God to be the pleasant companions of men of my race. Now, I am willing to give you a thousand dollars and call it square.” 71 Where Iola Leroy constructs gendered mixed race in terms of the market, Contending Forces considers the conflation of womanhood, slavery and prostitution. The “contending forces” are, in fact, intersectional forces. Since these mixed-race characters are rendered unable to enact the sexual autonomy reserved for white women, discourses of slavery are used to condemn how, even following the abolition of slavery, they still become part of the market economy. The continued exploitation of non-white women was a major concern in African American literature, but the main interest for turn of the century anti-vice reformers was white women’s coercion into prostitution. Historians acknowledge the inconsistency of this focus, since the sexual traffic in women of racial and ethnic minorities, particularly Asian women in California, was a much greater problem at the turn of the twentieth century. 72 Despite this reality and Jim Crow , the supposed magnitude of the white slavery issue meant it gained substantive action. White women were at the centre of Progressive Era federal legislation that sought to combated white slavery, but the issue of was simultaneously sidelined.73 Previous iterations on the woman-slave analogy had invoked ambivalent responses from politicians, but this relatively prompt legislative response suggests that the sexualised rhetoric of white slavery had gained general acceptance. In conjunction, the “erotic danger” of the white slavery panic was structured by the antebellum distinction between private and public spheres. 74 Anti-vice reformers, like Progressive Era African American reformers, often structured their rhetoric around the collective memory of

69 Pauline E. Hopkins, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Boston: The Coloured Co-operative Publishing Co., 1900), 40-41 and 69-70, e-book. 70 Patton, Women in Chains , 94; Putzi, “‘Raising the Stigma’,” 9-10. 71 Hopkins, Contending , 260-261. 72 See: Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5, no. 1 (1979): 3-29; Donovan, White Slave Crusaders , Chapter Six: “‘Yellow Slavery’ and Donaldina Cameron’s San Francisco Mission”; Karen A. Keely, “Sexual Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown: ‘Yellow Peril’ and ‘White Slavery’ in Frank Norris’s Early Fiction,” Studies in American Naturalism 2, no. 2 (2007): 129-149; Cynthia M. Blair, I've Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn of the Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 73 Barbara Holden-Smith, “Lynching, Federalism, and the Intersection of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 8 (1996): 33. 74 Christopher Diffee, “Sex and the City: The White Slavery Scare and Social Governance in the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2005): 411-437.

207 chattel slavery and the Civil War. For Clifford G. Roe, the abolition of chattel slavery anticipated the like demand for the “abolition” of the “white slave market” and its “traffic in girls for immoral demands.” 75 The rhetoric of white slavery negated ongoing intersections between race and sex, and instead positioned the sex oppression of white women as the only remaining form of exploitation. Another anti-vice reform strategy was to position white slavery as a more compelling issue than chattel slavery. Economic discussions of white slavery invariably focused on the commodification of women’s sexuality, so references to antebellum chattel slavery were used to demonstrate the depth of this problem. This was most evident in ’ A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912). Her research was based on a Juvenile Protection Association report which described narratives of sexual exploitation as white slavery. 76 Since the “new conscience” was an awareness of prostitution and the “ancient evil” was slavery itself, the monograph was structured through a referential binary between American chattel slavery and prostitution. “Chapter 1: An Analogy” expounded upon an overt comparison between chattel slavery and the “twin of slavery” – white slavery. Addams did note that it is “always easy to overwork an analogy,” yet she continued to provide an elaborate history of the antebellum antislavery movement to give immediacy to white slavery as a reform imperative. The representation of chattel slavery in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was used to demonstrate the purported similarities between the and the “rescue homes and preventive associations” of the Progressive Era. Although Addams found the “sexual commerce” in large cities to provide the “economic basis” for white slavery, she persistently returned to discourses of slavery to emphasise how “the chastity of women is bought and sold.” Addams distanced “commercialised vice” from the legal issues surrounding marriage and divorce, but she nonetheless sought to induce sentimental reflection on the subject, highlighting the “overwhelming pity” surrounding the “white slave traffic” which supposedly affected thousands of young white women.77 In the process, white slavery was described as worse than chattel slavery. This rhetorical impetus was equally evident in other anti-vice publications. The subtitle for Ernest A. Bell’s Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls (c.1910) positioned white slavery as “The Greatest Crime in World’s History” (see Figure 15). Bell concluded: “No white slave need remain in slavery in this state of Abraham Lincoln, who made the black slaves free.” 78 The way

75 Clifford G. Roe, “What Women Might Do With the Ballot: The Abolition of the White Slave Traffic,” n.d., 1 ( Collection, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University). 76 Janet Beer and Katherine Joslin, “Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams’ ‘A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil’ and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Journal of American Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 6. 77 Jane Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912, 2012), 4, 5, 9, 201 and 10-11, e-book. 78 Ernest A. Bell, Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; or, War on the White Slave Trade (Chicago: G.S. Ball, c.1910), 194, e-book.

208 prostitution interacted with the market economy was important, but the “crime” of white slavery was contextualised in terms of – and worse than – chattel slavery.

Figure 15. White slavery literature. 79

The impulse to use discourses of slavery to describe sexual exploitation directly related to the collective memory of antebellum chattel slavery as an impetus for reform. This had competing results among reformers whose Progressive Era interests no longer intersected to the same degree as in the antebellum era. Where African Americans used collective memory to interrogate the ongoing intersections between race and sex, anti-vice reformers positioned the prostitution of white women as more extreme than antebellum chattel slavery. The wider focus on the need to ameliorate sex oppression alone meant the few ongoing attempts toward intersectionality were largely undermined.

Remembering Rhetoric The influence of collective memory existed alongside a new generation of reformers who gained inspiration from the rhetoric of their predecessors. If direct textual associations are not immediately apparent, it is likely that the cultural memory of the woman-slave analogy – simply comparisons between women and slaves – influenced the way later writers used this rhetoric. Unlike the comparatively intersectional emphasis of antebellum rhetoric, however, many of these writers

79 “Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls,” Penn Libraries , n.d., accessed September 10, 2014, https://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/agents/pictures/caseitems/1000/case05_book_08.jpg.

209 epitomised the late-nineteenth-century trend wherein discourses of slavery were used solely to denounce the sex oppression of white women. Changing attitudes toward the market economy influenced the century-long preoccupation with the woman-slave analogy. Social reform of the Progressive Era was very different from the antebellum era, but separate spheres and domesticity continued to be influential ideologies. 80 This was similarly true of the woman-slave analogy, because this rhetoric remained important and even gained further prominence by the end of the nineteenth century. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Thorstein Veblen and Edith Wharton were influenced by the woman-slave analogy and the rhetoric of white slavery. Since these leading cultural commentators and authors had greater acceptance than their reform forebears, their interpretations of this rhetoric had wide circulation. A relative of the Beecher family, Gilman was influenced by the way her predecessors used discourses of slavery. Ann Mattis observes how Gilman deployed “a clever range of analogies between the service industry and marriage,” yet, like white slavery, this rhetoric was not new. 81 The Woman’s Journal published Gilman’s early discussions of economic theory, which echoed antebellum reform descriptions of married women’s domestic service. Reiterating Sarah Grimké’s condemnation of how women were seen as “the upper servant in the domestic relations of man to keep things comfortable for her lord,” Gilman saw domestic service as “the lowest grade of labour remaining” – only slightly better than feudal serfdom or chattel slavery. Gilman recalled the myth of an “ideal relation of slave and master in many southern homes” to refute any “special relations” between mistress and servant. Her belief that women could gain self-sufficiency through economic independence led her to challenge the “economic position of house-servant” – a process she understood to be based on “freedom, privilege, and right.” 82 It is necessary to consider Gilman’s thoughts on race to contextualise these shifts between more abstract discourses of slavery and direct references to chattel slavery. Late nineteenth-century racial politics, from the “yellow peril” question to her eugenicist perspectives on “race suicide,” largely shaped many of Gilman’s feminist perspectives. 83 Therefore, it becomes viable to read her concerns about domestic labour as applying only to white women. These ideas reached their pinnacle in Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898). Should women no longer be oppressed by “the slavery of economic dependence,” Gilman argued, they

80 Nancy S. Dye, “Introduction,” in Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds. Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 1-9. 81 Ann Mattis, “‘Vulgar in the Home’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Modern Servitude,” Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal 39, no. 4 (2010): 283-303. 82 Sarah M. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker (Internet Archive: American Libraries, 1837, 2010), 116, e-book; Charlotte Perkins Stetson (Gilman), “Economic Basis of the Woman Question,” Journal , October 1, 1898. 83 Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Colour in America,” Feminist Studies (1989): 415-441; Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Writing Feminist Genealogy: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Racial Nationalism, and the Reproduction of Maternalist Feminism,” Feminist Studies (2001): 271-302.

210 would be able to “love better and serve more.” 84 Her novel What Diantha Did (1910) further viewed “the position of the housemaid” as a “survival of the ancient status of woman slavery, the family with the male head and the group of servile women.” 85 The influence of Gilman’s rhetoric proved wide ranging. Communist pamphleteer Josephine Conger-Kaneko’s Woman’s Slavery: Her Road to Freedom (1911) described “the housewife of the workingman as the ‘slave of a slave’.” In a section entitled “Woman the First Slave,” Conger-Kaneko explained how Gilman’s theories had inspired her, quoting: [Gilman:] This is the position of the married woman; she is privately employed by her husband, at house service[.]… Industrially considered, she is his housekeeper, or servant, on board wages. … Is not legal possession with enforced labour and no pay slavery? Alongside the anti-vice reform focus on prostitution, Conger-Kaneko drew attention to the high populations of prostitutes in large American cities – capitalism created “the degradation to which women are reduced as ‘white slaves’.” 86 Ultimately, Gilman’s rhetoric was used to describe the oppression of white women. The rhetoric mobilised by Veblen was similarly influenced by the cultural prominence of the woman-slave analogy. As an economist, Veblen principally used discourses of slavery to structure discussions of fashion and marriage. “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress” (1894) constituted his first account of “conspicuous consumption,” a theory for which Veblen would become renowned.87 Veblen situated fashion as a prime example of this phenomenon, because fashion functioned as an “index of wealth” where dress was assigned “value.” Since fashion was delineated in terms of ownership, this signifier acted as “an exponent of the wealth of the man whose chattels they were.” 88 From this perspective, female kin became a sign of a man’s power: their inability to work rendered them analogous to the enslaved insofar as they were a sign of the man’s wealth, but functionally different because they embodied the male breadwinner’s ability to support extravagance and indulgence. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) also critiqued how the institution of marriage created a powerful “alliance” wherein a woman became “her husband’s chattel, as she was her father’s chattel before her purchase[.]” 89 Veblen’s theories therefore positioned the sex oppression of white women as the only remaining form of oppression.

84 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1898, 1998), 71. 85 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, What Diantha Did (Project Gutenberg, 1910, 2010), e-book. 86 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Does a Man Support His Wife?” 1911, in Josephine Conger-Kaneko, Woman’s Slavery: Her Road to Freedom (Chicago: The Progressive Woman’s Publishing Company, 1911), 23-25, e-book. 87 Stephen Edgell, “Veblen and Post-Veblen Studies of Conspicuous Consumption: and Fashion,” International Review of Sociology 3, no. 3 (1992): 206. For a discussion of Veblen’s central critique of gender inequality, see: Nils Gilman, “Thorstein Veblen’s Neglected Feminism,” Journal of Economic Issues 33, no. 3 (1999): 690-691. 88 Thorstein Veblen, “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress,” Popular Science Monthly XLVI, no. 2 (1894): 199. 89 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Project Gutenberg, 1899, 2012), e-book.

211 The rhetoric of white slavery influenced Wharton’s turn of the century literature. The way women supposedly made a “career” out of the marriage market was the basis of The House of Mirth (1905), and many scholars describe the character of Lily Bart as the epitome of the literary white slave. 90 Lawrence Selden asks Lily: “Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?” 91 According to Stange, marriage becomes “the slavery to which Lily is enchained,” wherein her character functions as an object of conspicuous consumption – “a valuable possession and a consumer of valuables.” 92 Lily is described as the “victim” of her culture, so much so that “the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate”; the character of Mrs. Fisher observes how she “works like a slave” to prepare her romantic conquests, but always fails to follow them through.93 Lily’s greatest failure was therefore her inability to profitably barter her own sexuality. When appearing in a tableaux vivant , Lily makes the fatal social error of “showing herself before a public assembly,” an act Kristina Brooks conflates with “the ultimate staging of flesh for purchase in America” – the slave auction.94 Her artistic recreation, moreover, necessitates appearing without a corset, a decision not interpreted for its authenticity but simply as another act of immodesty.95 Lily’s cousin Jack Stepney comments on the impropriety of “a girl standing there as if she was up at auction,” thus invoking the auction block and the market in antebellum “fancy slaves.”96 The literary white slave, Lily embodies the oppression engendered by the cultural acceptance of the market exchange of women. The limits of the woman-slave analogy again become apparent in these late-nineteenth- century writings. In Gilman’s economic theory, domestic labour can alleviate women’s oppression if it becomes ennobled enough to provide better wages. This therefore enabled the rhetorical subversion of the woman-slave analogy – women could be free. If it is somewhat viable to thus describe enslaved and labouring women, as well as prostitutes, who can at least withhold or be enumerated for labour and sexuality, the rhetorical implications largely collapse when applied to leisure-class women. The leisure-class women Veblen described were, in fact, the inversion of a

90 Maureen E. Montgomery, “Gilded Prostitution”: Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870-1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 56-57. See: Fetterley, “Double Standard and Double Bind”; Jennifer Haytock, Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2008), Chapter Two: “‘Any Change May Mean Something’: Summer , Sexuality, and Single Women.” 91 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Norton, 1905, 1990), 11. 92 Stange, Personal Property , 56. 93 Wharton, House of Mirth , 167 and 316. 94 Kristina Brooks, “, Fallen Woman: The Crisis of Reputation in Turn-of-the-Century Novels by Pauline Hopkins and Edith Wharton,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 13, no. 2 (1996): 103. 95 See: Anne-Marie Evans, “Fashionable Females: Women, Clothes, and Culture in New York,” Comparative American Studies 11, no. 4 (2013): 365-366. 96 Wharton, House of Mirth , 166-167; Brooks, “New Woman,” 103; Stange, Personal Property , 57. For “fancy slaves” and “fancy girls,” see: Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the in the United States,” The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1619-1650; Sharony Green, “‘Mr Ballard, I Am Compelled to Write Again’: Beyond Bedrooms and , a Fancy Girl Speaks,” Black Women, Gender & Families 5, no. 1 (2011): 17-40.

212 slave because they were valuable for their inability to work. This contradictory logic was epitomised in Wharton’s character, Lily Bart. The mixed-race characters in antislavery novels – Rosalie in Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons” (1842), Cassie in Uncle Tom’s Cabin , and Clotel in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) – could at least barter their sexuality for some gain. 97 In contrast, Lily’s inability to barter her sexuality represented the need for a mother-like character to bargain on her behalf of a white single girl. Insofar as the woman- slave analogy could illuminate hidden aspects of prostitution, sexual exploitation and women’s labour, it created many more contradictions in relation to leisure-class women.98 Overall, the woman-slave analogy influenced turn of the century cultural commentary in a way that ultimately gained greater acceptance than the critique of antebellum reformers. Whereas antebellum reformers generally exhibited a greater awareness of the oppression experienced by multiple groups, mainstream discussions of women’s oppression undoubtedly focused on white women by the end of the nineteenth century. The prominence this rhetoric thus acquired suggests that it became more widely acceptable by the turn of the century because it focused on white women, and because there were no longer any chattel slaves with whom to make a direct comparison.

Remembering Reform The turn of the century memorialisation of nineteenth-century reformers similarly emphasised the memory of this rhetorical paradigm. From at least 1869, reformers associated with women’s rights and suffrage, alongside their fellow abolitionists and other social reformers, were called “Lady Emancipators.” 99 When antebellum reform luminaries passed on during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, veterans reformers memorialised their compatriots. Initially, eulogies focused on how women reformers had achieved the emancipation of chattel slaves as well as women. Sarah Grimké had “the one great purpose to ‘remember those in bonds as bound with them’,” Lucy Stone recalled at an 1879 memorial. Memorialists increasingly belied the postbellum focus on a comparison based on sex and race, rather than women and slaves. Angelina Grimké laboured to eliminate the “tyranny and prejudice which have always hitherto consigned her sex to … absolute thraldom,” Elizur Wright selectively reminisced. 100 In 1911, Jeanne Roberts insisted that Julia Ward Howe

97 Lydia Maria Child, “The Quadroons,” The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings , 1842, 1997, accessed June 15, 2011, http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gcarr/19cUSWW/LB/Q.html; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin ; William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853). 98 My thanks to Professor Julie Husband for suggestions on how to tease out some of these contradictions. 99 “Emancipation of Turkish Women” (from the Messenger Franco American ), Revolution , May 21, 1868. 100 Lucy Stone and Elizur Wright, 1879, in Theodore Dwight Weld, In Memory: Angelina Grimké Weld (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1880), 25 and 23 (Massachusetts Historical Society).

213 was “in the truest sense a liberator and a reformer; she pleaded for the rights of womanhood and the highest standard of citizenship.” 101 In the tributes of younger reformers, the rhetoric of their antebellum forbears was appropriated in conjunction with a strengthening vision of racial hierarchy. Victoria Woodhull’s daughter Zula recalled how her mother “took up the part of helpless woman, who stupidly acquiesces in her position as the white slave of man.” 102 These sites of memory reiterated the belief that nineteenth-century women were enslaved and in need of emancipation. This tendency continued in the memorialisation of women formers following the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). Even Margaret Fuller, who died tragically before the nineteenth-century women’s movement really developed, was remembered in 1923 for “emancipating a class whose period of slavery was to mark its ending through her activity and her far-reaching influence.” 103 This was perhaps most prominent in recollections of Susan B. Anthony. In 1925, the New York Times Magazine emphasised that Anthony’s “slogan” was “Woman is in Chains,” while in 1956, The Christian Science Monitor listed Anthony as a great “American Emancipator,” alongside and Abraham Lincoln.104 Memorialists both accepted and reinforced the influence of the woman-slave analogy, which had defined a century’s worth of social reform against women’s oppression. The argument that sex oppression was the only remaining nineteenth-century reform that needed to be achieved shaped the anti-vice and women’s suffrage campaigns, but ensured the results primarily benefitted white women. It is worth reflecting upon how these very same arguments may have influenced the stagnation of the women’s movement following the Nineteenth Amendment. Reformers themselves were aware of much left to be done, but the rhetorical trajectory of the woman-slave analogy now backfired. Since women’s suffrage was now constitutional, and laws had been passed to combat prostitution, women were rendered no longer oppressed – no longer slaves. And so it seemed there was little left to be done.

Conclusion The antebellum expression of the woman-slave analogy provided the foundations for the late- nineteenth-century rhetoric of white slavery. Following the Civil War, however, this rhetoric gradually enabled a focus on sex which sidelined issues of race. So too did the collective memory of chattel slavery shaped the rhetorical invocation of chattel slavery and abolitionism. Where the

101 Jeanne Robert, “Julia Ward Howe as a Writer,” Review of Reviews , February 1911, 252-253, in Valarie H. Ziegler, Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 167. 102 Zula Maud Woodhull, Biographical sketch of Victoria Woodhull, n.d. (Victoria Woodhull Papers, Box 3: Manuscript Fragments, Boston Public Library). 103 Lavinia Egan, “Margaret Fuller --- Feminist and Literateur,” Equal Rights: Official Weekly of the National Woman’s Party , September 22, 1923 (Margaret Fuller Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University). 104 Susan B. Anthony, newspaper clippings, (Susan B. Anthony Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University).

214 discussion of many forms of slavery – many forms of oppression – enabled an often intersectional focus during the antebellum era, the postbellum shift to an ever greater focus on white slavery ensured the discussion of oppression was principally associated with sex. The rise of the market economy brought together the disparate rhetorical threads surrounding antebellum chattel slavery and postbellum prostitution. Overall, sex was thought to contravene women’s ability to engage with the market as thoroughly as the demands of marriage and fashion were thought to influence their entrance into the realm of politics and labour. By the end of the nineteenth century, African American reformers continued to use discourses of slavery to describe interdependent forms of oppression. The prevalence of white slavery, however, meant non-white women were largely marginalised from both a rhetorical and substantive perspective. As race was sidelined, women’s oppression was seen to coalesce most clearly around expressions of sexuality – including prostitution and the marriage market. Similarly, the woman-slave analogy influenced the way nineteenth-century reformers were themselves remembered and memorialised. The woman-slave analogy did not have as much prominence following the Nineteenth Amendment, but it was followed by a related rhetorical iteration – the race-sex analogy – which later emerged alongside the women’s liberation movement. The changing uses of the woman-slave analogy throughout the nineteenth century precipitated the twentieth-century use of this rhetorical device, as well as its transformation from the categories of “woman” and “slave” to the categories of “race” and “sex.”

215 CONCLUSION :

“L ADY EMANCIPATORS ”

If the emancipation of the negro is to be a day of , what is it to strike the bonds of ages off the minds of women? The more I dwell upon their slavery to man, the more I am astonished that there are so few S.B.A.’s and E.C.S.’ [sic] in the world, with talent and moral courage to speak for their enslaved sex. GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN , THE REVOLUTION , OCTOBER 1868

In the first place, I am a woman like Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In the second place, I belong to the race of which Frederick Douglass was such a magnificent representative. 1 MARY CHURCH TERRELL , “F REDERICK DOUGLASS ,” CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF SENECA COUNTY (1908)

This thesis has discussed the rhetorical significance of the woman-slave analogy throughout the nineteenth century. Following the Civil War, George Francis Train epitomised the cultural appropriation of discourses of slavery, and demonstrated how this could lead to a greater focus on white women’s oppression. When Mary Church Terrell compared herself with nineteenth-century reform luminaries, however, she demonstrated the intersectional tendencies that remained at the heart of African American women’s reform rhetoric. The development of the woman-slave analogy was shaped by the emergence of radical abolitionism during the 1830s, the women’s rights movement during the 1840s, the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the Civil War, and the Reconstruction amendments. During the antebellum era, comparisons between women and slaves dominated myriad social movements in a way that generated an intersectional awareness of oppression. However, the gradual transition to the categories of sex and race that took place following the Civil War encouraged a greater focus on the experience of white women. The woman-slave analogy informed the way women and men, white and black, came to understand the existence of all women’s oppression, within groups as diverse as northern reformers, proslavery ideologues and other southerners, diarists, cultural commentators, ex-slaves and novelists.

A Return to Intersectional Politics An intersectional approach to the woman-slave analogy enables the recognition that this rhetoric could be used to draw attention to many forms of oppression. This was shaped by the thematic categories of marriage, fashion, suffrage, labour, and sex. Overall, the use of the woman-slave analogy reflected the political imperatives of different and often competing groups.

1 Centennial Anniversary of Seneca County and Auxiliary Papers (Seneca Falls Historical Society), in Philip S. Foner, ed. Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976, 1992), 176.

216 There was a greater appreciation for the intersections between different forms of oppression during the antebellum era. Many individuals, black and white, and social reform organisations used abstract discourses of slavery and direct references to chattel slavery helped describe the oppression of multiple groups. Throughout the nineteenth century, proslavery ideologues and anti-suffragists respectively imitated the rhetoric of reformers to refute their arguments. In the postbellum era, however, those reformers who used this rhetoric to increasingly focus on white women did not seek to engage with the existence of interdependent oppressions to the same degree. When African Americans mobilised discourses of slavery, they drew attention to the continued intersections between oppression resulting from sex and race at the end of the nineteenth century. Gradually, the use of collective memory undermined the intersectional tendencies still evident among African American reformers and instead encouraged a focus on white women that did not bely an interest in other forms of oppression. As demonstrated in Chapter One, classical and enlightenment philosophy provided the ideological basis for comparisons between women and slaves. During the seventeenth century, a critique of marriage as slavery gradually emerged across Europe. Alongside the development of the transatlantic slave trade and abolitionism, the slavery analogy was alternately used in non-racialised contexts or in direct reference to emerging colonial institutions of chattel slavery. For Europeans, however, colonial slavery was always characterised by geographic distance. As this rhetoric began to emerge in the United States, its existence alongside the institution of chattel slavery meant that it became what can more clearly be understood as discourses of slavery. Chapter Two considered the most prominent incarnation of the woman-slave analogy, the comparison between marriage and slavery. Prior to radical abolitionism, abstract discourses of slavery were used to critique the institution of marriage and the contradictions surrounding romantic love. The emergence of the antislavery movement, together with the experiences of the reformers themselves, influenced the direct associations that would be made with American chattel slavery. While reformers positioned true marriage and companionate marriage as an ideal, they often viewed the average marriage as inherently oppressive for women. Southerners, too, engaged with this rhetoric in the context of the hierarchy of southern organic culture, but only insofar as this challenged the oppression experienced by privileged white women. African Americans also used this rhetoric with reference to marriage, but with considerably more ambivalence. When the women’s rights trope of the fugitive wife emerged during the 1860s, as a direct development on the antebellum figure and literary trope of the fugitive slave, it represented the way discourses of slavery were increasingly appropriated to describe white women’s oppression. Chapter Three brought together disparate threads of fashion critique, from antifashionists to radical and conservative dress reformers. In their pursuit of a new type of women’s dress, women’s

217 rights and dress reformers situated fashionable dress as inherently oppressive. In this context, the woman-slave analogy was largely predicated on abstract discourses of slavery, which were sometimes envisaged through the visual metaphor of the caged bird. Alternately, the reformed dress and reformed underwear offered an embodied alternative of freedom in response to this rhetoric, but these initiatives often received much condemnation. The comparison between fashion and slavery, however, was perhaps least connected with the racial overtones of chattel slavery. Only in the decade immediately prior to the Civil War would direct associations between fashion and chattel slavery emerge with any prominence. In contrast, African American reformers used discourses of slavery to frame vastly different responses to the reformed dress. The postbellum era saw a return to abstract discourses of slavery alongside a dress reform focus on emancipatory undergarments. The political discussions of surrounding women’s suffrage and citizenship framed Chapter Four. During the antebellum era, pro-suffrage and anti-suffrage arguments alike relied on direct references to chattel slavery. This continued steadily until the Civil War, when the Reconstruction amendments instigated a split in the women’s suffrage movement. Although there was a rhetorical focus on African American women during this era, postbellum racial tensions came to dominate the suffrage debate. The wording of the Reconstruction Amendments themselves impelled the use of the woman-slave analogy, while the example of African American manhood suffrage encouraged more frequent comparisons based on the categories of sex and race that led to a focus on white women’s rights. The arguments of women suffragists also employed discourses of slavery with reference to the American Revolution, and this impetus also emphasised the need for the rights of white women to be secured. This was increasingly justified because of the erroneous assumption that manhood suffrage guaranteed the rights of African Americans, and persisted until the federal passage of Nineteenth Amendment attained women’s suffrage in 1920. Chapter Five demonstrated how the woman-slave analogy was used to discuss the tensions surrounding women’s labour and domesticity throughout the nineteenth century. The antebellum concepts of white slavery, free labour, and wage slavery influenced the rhetoric of women who worked for wages beyond the home. Yet ambivalence remained surrounding the rhetorical association between labour and chattel slavery, and the exploitation engendered by each. A cross- class reliance on discourses of slavery remained crucial to critiques of women’s ideological exclusion from labour alongside a rapidly growing and industrialising economy. But this rhetoric also drew attention to the multifaceted nature of women’s labour – within the home, beyond the home, as well as in the realm of social reform itself. The woman-slave analogy provided a framework to critique the disempowerment and lack of fulfilment women found in their labours, as

218 well as to ameliorate work conditions and dignify women’s work. These developments also influenced the changing meaning of white slavery. Ultimately, the transformation of the woman-slave analogy was the focus of Chapter Six. As ideas surrounding chattel slavery, prostitution, and marriage coalesced following the Civil War, these developments were encompassed in the rhetoric of white slavery. This was informed by the growing belief among many reformers that women’s oppression was the only major unresolved form of oppression yet remaining. From this perspective, women’s oppression was maintained through marriage, fashion, disenfranchisement, low wages, and sexual exploitation. Collective memory impelled reformers to make a new analogy out of antebellum abolitionism, the Civil War and slave emancipation. This was rhetorically related to the idea of the marriage market and the increased critique of the exchange of women in marriage. The emphasis on white slavery and the marriage market rhetorically sidelined the oppressions resulting from race in a way the exploitation of chattel slavery had not been marginalised earlier in the nineteenth century. Even so, African American reformers continued to use the woman-slave analogy to emphasise the visibility of African American women – whether enslaved or free – and demonstrate how they bore the consequences of intersectional oppressions. For Lillie Devereux Blake in 1883, however, the alleviation of women’s “bondage” was one of the few social reforms the “champions of liberty” were yet to achieve.2

The Woman-Slave Analogy During the antebellum era, the woman-slave analogy was often used as a flawed but fledgling expression of intersectionality. Since antislavery reformers were acutely aware of the abuses of the plantation, the woman-slave analogy had some positive effects as a rhetorical device. Labour reformers, too, frequently acknowledged the extreme abuses experienced by chattel slaves. In spite of racial difference, the exploitation engendered by chattel slavery meant those who denounced it did not condone the oppression that it institutionalised. When the woman-slave analogy was mobilised alongside direct comparisons to chattel slavery, the enslaved were not in fact wholly overlooked. Rather, their exploitation was acknowledged and the oppression of enslaved women could even become a central concern. Following the Civil War, the abolition of chattel slavery created a fundamental shift in the use of the woman-slave analogy. The absence of this institution meant many reformers no longer appreciated the degree to which racial hierarchy continued to shape the experience of African Americans. Upon emancipation, freedpeople became subject to notions of the self-made man just like other Americans. The problems that arose from racial oppression were not seen with the same

2 Lillie Devereux Blake, Woman’s Place To-Day (New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1883, 2001), 168, e-book.

219 immediacy as chattel slavery, so when the woman-slave analogy developed into a comparisons between sex and race it became much more insidious in its foundation. In this instance, “race” – unlike “slave” – incited contempt rather than an acknowledgement of oppression. White women had been equating themselves with slaves since the beginning of American nationhood, but discourses of slavery in the postbellum era were increasingly claimed in a way that excluded African Americans – who were, ostensibly, no longer slaves. This was most apparent in the “fugitive wife” trope, the majority of the rhetoric surrounding fashion, the suffrage debate following “the Negro’s hour,” and the changing meaning – from labour to sex – of “white slavery.” The collective memory of chattel slavery, moreover, was predominantly used to prove that sex oppression was the only form of slavery left. Of course, this process was not wholly uniform, and neither was the woman-slave analogy solely mobilised within northern reform movements. The mobilisation of this rhetoric amongst proslavery southerners and cultural conservatives demonstrated the way the woman-slave analogy permeated nineteenth-century American culture. Many conservative commentators sought to reinscribe the hierarchies – based on woman and slave, or sex and race – at the foundation of this rhetoric. Anti-suffragists, moreover, imitated this rhetoric for the purpose of ridicule. Overall, however, the woman-slave analogy was much more prevalent among social reformers of all persuasions – white and black, female and male. To return to the proposition that the woman-slave analogy was a nineteenth-century attempt toward intersectionality, it is possible to determine that the antebellum expression of this rhetoric did enable social reformers to understand how different forms of oppressions intersected. This was especially exemplified in the way African American reformers mobilised discourses of slavery throughout the nineteenth century. But in the postbellum era, this became less important for many white reformers. As the woman-slave analogy yielded to what would become a race-sex analogy, the implication that sex was white and female, and race was male, anticipated the feminist debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Still, it is important to demonstrate that the woman-slave analogy, in its nineteenth-century incarnation, was not purely racist, nor habitually mobilised to solely draw attention to the plight of white women. The reformers who used this rhetoric called themselves “the abolitionists of slavery among women,” and were remembered as the “lady emancipators of America.”3 Still, it must also be emphasised that the woman-slave analogy could be – and certainly was – used in racist ways. By the end of the nineteenth century, the fugitive wife trope and a preoccupation with white slavery focused primarily on the experience of white women at the expense of a more intersectional

3 Paulina Wright Davis, “The Moral Character of Woman,” Una , June 1853; “Emancipation of Turkish Women” (from the Messenger Franco American ), Revolution , May 21, 1868.

220 commitment. The woman-slave analogy doubtlessly provided a platform through which racist and nativist sentiments were promulgated, but it also demonstrated a nineteenth-century attempt to understand the interconnected nature of oppression before there was the terminology to do so.

Conclusion The woman-slave analogy was appropriated by different and often competing groups throughout the nineteenth century. Other scholars consider the way some of these groups engaged in discourses of slavery, but such a focus does not account for the versatility of this rhetoric, nor the connections between the many ways in which reformers expressed discourses of slavery. Frequently, scholarly discussions have only considered the rhetoric of white abolitionists and women’s rights reformers. In contrast, this thesis demonstrates how the woman-slave analogy permeated attitudes towards women’s oppression among a variety of individuals and across myriad reform movements, as well as within competing political ideologies and different geographical regions. By bringing together the rhetorical strategies of these numerous and often disparate groups, it is possible to see that the woman-slave analogy was not simply a white reform woman’s rhetorical strategy. It was instead used for a multiplicity of reasons – from anti-racist, to ambivalent, to fully reinscribing racial hierarchy. The woman-slave analogy proved to consistently critique gender oppression in a culture preoccupied with race. Of course, northern social reformers employed the woman-slave analogy most prominently and prolifically, and they did use this rhetoric in a way that drew attention away from the enslaved and toward white women. Yet, in observing how social reformers – women and men, white and black – engaged with this rhetoric, a broader picture of a culture permeated by discourses of slavery emerges. Unlike antislavery and women’s rights reformers, dress reformers, sex radicals and free lovers also engaged with the woman-slave analogy, but without the same rhetorical self-awareness or thorough understanding of chattel slavery. African American reformers and slave narrators often critiqued the logical underpinnings of the comparison between women and slaves, but they did not refute it altogether; instead, they sought to emphasise the plight of enslaved and mixed-race women rather than her free, white counterpart. From the southern perspective, proslavery ideologues, plantation mistresses and diarists also engaged with the woman-slave analogy. This demonstrated a growing awareness of women’s oppression within the plantation elite alongside a willingness to overlook the exploitations that arose from slavery. Journalists and other cultural commentators, writing for both social reform periodicals and mainstream newspapers, were important promulgators of this rhetoric. Their language often filtered down to and was re-expressed in letters back to periodicals, or worked to imitate the rhetoric of reformers, even if as a form of satire or ridicule. Novelists, broadly speaking, used the woman-slave analogy to draw attention to women’s

221 oppression, but reform novelists often looked toward the liminal spaces in which oppressions based on enslaved status, race, mixed-race and gender intersected. Overall, the transformation of expression – from slavery to race, and woman to sex – pre-empted the way the race-sex analogy would emerge within twentieth-century social movements. This thesis has demonstrated that the deployment of the woman-slave analogy was more complicated than previous studies suggested, and has sought to understand the way discourses of slavery were mobilised to elucidate gender oppression during the nineteenth century. An understanding of the myriad ways the analogy was deployed leads to more complicated conclusions about its use and understanding. Long before the feminist development of intersectionality in the 1990s, antebellum reformers and cultural commentators struggled to understand how interdependent oppressions worked and interacted with each other. The postbellum focus on sex rather than race somewhat overshadowed the complex and innovative ways many antebellum reformers addressed the intersectional nature of systems of oppression and domination. The woman-slave analogy sought to interrogate gender as a social category first and foremost. In the process, however, the woman-slave analogy was employed to champion a multiplicity of perspectives which primarily asserted the existence of women’s oppression. Its mobilisation by so many discrete groups in the United States during the nineteenth century demonstrates that, beyond white women, an understanding was emerging that women were, in fact, oppressed. The rhetorical foundations of the woman-slave analogy worked to acknowledge that multiple sites of oppression existed, and very often, that women – all women – experienced the complexities that resulted from this reality.

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Hogeland, Lisa Maria. Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women's Liberation Movement . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Homestead, Melissa J., and Pamela T. Washington, eds. E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist . Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2012. hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism . Boston: South End Press, 1981.

Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies . New York: The Feminist Press, 1982.

Husband, Julie. Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Incendiary Pictures . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Jacobs, Wilbur R. Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years . University of Texas Press, 1991.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolition: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Johnson, Lemuel A. The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon: The Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature . Port Washington: National University Publications, Kennikat Press, 1969, 1971.

Jones, Jacqueline. Labour of Love, Labour of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present . New York: Basic Books, 1985.

243 Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Karcher, Carolyn L. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child . Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Keetley, Dawn, and John Pettegrew, eds. Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism . Volume 1: Beginnings to 1900 vols. Madison: Madison House, 1997.

Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand & Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Kerr, Andrea Moore. Lucy Stone: Speaking out for Equality . Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America . Yale University Press, 2007.

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Lerner, Gerda. The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967, 2004.

_____. The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History . New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

_____. The Creation of Patriarchy . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

_____. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

_____. The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké . New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Levander, Caroline Field. Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy . London: Routledge, 1984, 1993.

Logan, Shirley Wilson. "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

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Lumpkin, Katharine du Pre. The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974.

Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

244 Macfarlane, Alan. Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 . Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Makdisi, Saree. William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Matthews, Glenna. The Rise of Public Woman: Woman's Power and Woman's Place in the United States, 1630-1970 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Mattingly, Carol. Appropriate[Ing] Dress: Women's Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

Mayeri, Serena. Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

McDonnell, Michael A., Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, eds. Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

McKivigan, John R., and Stanley Harrold. Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America . Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

McMillan, Carol. Women, Reason and Nature . Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.

McWilliams, John. New England's Crises and Cultural Memory: Literature, Politics, History, Religion, 1620-1860 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Melish, Joanne Pope. Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Midgley, Clare. Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 London: Routledge, 1992.

Miller, Barbara Dianne, ed. Sex and Gender Hierarchies . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Million, Joelle. Woman's Voice, Woman's Place: Lucy Stone and the Birth of the Woman's Rights Movement . Westport: Praeger, 2003.

Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism . London: Routledge, 1991.

Miner, Craig. Seeding Civil War: Kansas in the National News, 1845–1858 . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.

Montgomery, Maureen E. "Gilded Prostitution": Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870-1914 . London: Routledge, 1989.

Moore, Clive. Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay . Port Moresby: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and University of Papua New Guinea Press, 1985.

245 Morantz-Sanchez, Regina Markell. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine . University of North Carolina Press, 1985, 2000.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazine: 1741-1850s . Volumes I-IV, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939-1957.

Newman, Louise Michele. White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States . New York: Oxford University Press, 1999

Nichols, Heidi L. The Fashioning of Middle-Class America: Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art and Antebellum Culture . Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2004.

Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982.

Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors . Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol . New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

Parker, Alison M. Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State . DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010.

Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Passett, Joanne E. Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality . Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Patton, Venetria K. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Pennebaker, James W., Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé. Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives . Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.

Perrot, Philippe. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century . Translated by Richard Bienvenu. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Perry, Lewis, and Michael Fellman, eds. Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists : Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Peterson, Carla L. "Doers of the Word": African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) . New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Piepmeier, Alison. Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America . The University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

246 Plasa, Carl, and Betty J. Ring, eds. The Discourse of Slavery: From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison . Oxon: Routledge, 1994.

Polhemus, Ted, and Lynn Proctor. Fashion and Anti-Fashion: Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment . London: Thames & Hudson, 1978.

Raimon, Eve Allegra. The "Tragic Mulatta" Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth- Century Antislavery Fiction . New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.

Reynolds, Larry J. A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Riello, Giorgio, and Peter McNeil, eds. The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives . London: Routledge, 2010.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class . London: Verso, 1991, 1999.

Romero, Lora. Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States . Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Root, Erik S. All Honor to Jefferson?: The Virginia Slavery Debates and the Positive Good Thesis . Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

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Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Scott, Ann Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1870.

Schroer, Sandra. State of "The Union": Marriage and Free Love in the Late 1800s . Routledge: New York, 2005.

Seidman, Steven. Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830-1980 . New York: Routledge, 1991.

Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution, Jacksonian America: 1815-1846 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Shefer, Elaine. Birds, Cages and Women in Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Art New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

Sinclair, Andrew. The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman . London: Jonathan Cape, 1965.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830-1870: A Brief History with Documents . United States: St Martins Press, 2000

247 Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and James Brewer Stewart, eds. Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation . Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Smart, Carol. Law, Crime and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism . London: Sage Publications, 1995.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Speicher, Anna M. The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers . New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering . Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.

Spongberg, Mary. Writing Women’s History since the Renaissance Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South . New York: Knopt, 1956.

Stancliff, Michael. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State . Routledge, 2011.

Stange, Margit. Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women . Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labour, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Steele, Valerie. The Corset: A Cultural History . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Sterling, Dorothy. Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery . New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Antislavery . New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.

Stewart, James Brewer. Wendell Phillips: Liberty's Hero . Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework . New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

Stokes, Melvyn, and Stephen Conway, eds. The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 . The University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Summers, Leigh. Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset . Oxford: Berg, 2001.

Taylor, Clare, ed. British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974.

Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

248 Thistle, Susan. From Marriage to the Market: The Transformation of Women’s Lives and Work Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Tise, Larry E. Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987, 2004.

Tracey, Karen. Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90 . University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 2000.

Vertinsky, Patricia Anne. The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Exercise and Doctors in the Late Nineteenth Century . Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.

Waggenspack, Beth M. The Search for Self-Sovereignty: The Oratory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton . Westport: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers: 1815-1860 . New York: Hill and Wang, 1978, 1997.

Warren, Joyce W. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman . Rutgers University Press, 1992.

Weiner, Marli F. Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80 . University of Illinois Press, 1998.

Weinstein, Cindy. The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature: Allegory in Nineteenth- Century American Fiction . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Weitz, Nancy. Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish . Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.

Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century . Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976.

Wertheimer, Barbara Mayer. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America . New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South . Vol. Revised Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999.

Williams, Gary. Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe . The University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Winter, Kari J. Subjects of Slavery, Agents of Change: Women and Power in Gothic Novels and Slave Narratives, 1790-1865 . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

Withey, Lynne. Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams . New York: Free Press, 1981.

Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Wood, Sharon E. The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a Gilded Age City Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

249 Wosk, Julie. Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Yee, Shirley J. Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 . Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Yellin, Jean Fagan, and John C. Van Horne, eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Zackodnik, Teresa C. Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2011.

Zaeske, Susan. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity . University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Ziegler, Valarie H. Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe . Harrisburg: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.

Book Chapters

Anderson, Bonnie S. " Frauenemancipation and Beyond: The Use of the Concept of Emancipation by Early European Feminists." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Bacon, Jacqueline. "The Liberator ’s "Ladies’ Department," 1832-37: Freedom or Fetters?". In Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity , edited by Meta G. Carstarphen and Susan C. Zavonia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.

Black, Max. "More About Metaphor." In Metaphor and Thought , edited by Andrew Ortony, 19-43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Block, Sharon. "Lines of Colour, Sex, and Service, Sexual Coercion in the Early Republic." In Women's America: Refocusing the Past , edited by Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Casteras, Susan P. ""Weary Stitches": Illustrations and Paintings for Thomas Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and Other Poems." In Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century , edited by Beth Harris. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005.

Carby, Hazel V. "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood." In The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, edited by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1982.

Chambers, Jaqueline M. ""Thinking and Stitching, Stitching and Thinking": Needlework, American Women Writers, and Professionalism." In Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century , edited by Beth Harris. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005.

250 Clarke, Frances M. "Old-Fashioned Tea Parties: Revolutionary Memory in Civil War Sanitary Fairs." In Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War , edited by Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke and W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

Davis, Adrienne. ""Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle": The Sexual Economy of American Slavery." In Sister Circle: Black Women and Work edited by Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Davis, David Brion. "Declaring Equality: Sisterhood and Slavery." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. "The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women's Oppression." In Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , edited by Zillah Eisenstein. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979.

_____. "Women's Rights and Abolition: The Nature of the Connection." In Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, edited by Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman. Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

_____. "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell , Minor , and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s." In One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement , edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler. Troutdale: NewSage Press, 1995.

_____. "Ernestine Rose’s Jewish Origins and the Varieties of Euro-American Emancipation in 1848." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. "Writing for True Womanhood: African-American Women’s Writings and the Antislavery Struggle." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Farrer, Peter. "In Female Attire: Male Experiences of Cross-Dressing - Some Historical Fragments." In Blending Genders: Social Aspects of Cross-Dressing and Sex Changing , edited by Richard Ekins and David King. London: Routledge, 1996.

Foner, Eric. "Free Labour and Nineteenth-Century Political Ideology." In The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 , edited by Melvyn Stokes and Stephen. Conway: The University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Gatens, Moira. ""The Oppressed State of My Sex": Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality." In Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory , edited by Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

Groot, Joanna de. ""Sex" and "Race": The Construction of Language and Image in the Nineteenth Century." In Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century edited by Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall. London: Routledge, 1989.

251 Harde, Roxanne. ""One-Hundred-Hours": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' Dress Reform Writing." In Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature , edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Cindy Carlson. New York: Cambria Press, 2007.

Hersh, Blanche Glassman. ""Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?" Abolitionist Beginnings of Nineteenth-Century Feminism." In Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists , edited by Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman. Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Jakobsen, Janet R. "Queers Are Like Jews, Aren't They? Analogy and Alliance Politics." In Queer Theory and the Jewish Question , edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Kelly-Gadol, Joan. "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History." In Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues , edited by Sandra G. Harding. Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1987.

Kerber, Linda K. "The Republican Mother and the Woman Citizen: Contradictions and Choices in Revolutionary America." In Women's America: Refocusing the Past , edited by Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Kerr, Andrea Moore. "White Women’s Rights, Black Men’s Wrongs, Free Love, Blackmail, and the Formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association." In One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement , edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler. Troutdale: NewSage Press, 1995.

Kraut, Alan M. "Partisanship and Principles: The Liberty Party in Antebellum Political Culture." In Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System , edited by Alan M. Kraut. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983.

MacLeod, Duncan J. "Toward Caste." In Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution edited by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.

May, Martha. "Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labour Unions and the Family Wage." In Women, Work & Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labour History , edited by Ruth Milkman. London: Routledge, 1985.

Merish, Lori. "Representing the "Deserving Poor": The "Sentimental Seamstress" and the Feminisation of Poverty in Antebellum America." In Our Sisters' Keepers: Nineteenth- Century Benevolence Literature by American Women , edited by Jill Bergman and Debra Bernardi. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Midgley, Clare. "British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Moore, Jane. "Sex, Slavery and Rights in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications ." In The Discourse of Slavery: From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison , edited by Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.

252 Nickolai, Carol A. "Decently Dressed: Women’s Fashion and Dress Reform in the Nineteenth- Century United States." In Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations: From Private to Public edited by Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood. New York: Springer, 2013.

Offen, Karen. "How (and Why) the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640-1848." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Okin, Susan Moller. "Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family." In The Family in Political Discourse , edited by Jean Bethke Elshtain. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982.

Peterson, Carla L. ""And We Claim Our Rights": The Rights Rhetoric of Black and White Women Activists before the Civil War." In Sister Circle: Black Women and Work edited by Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Plasa, Carl. ""Silent Revolt": Slavery and the Politics of Metaphor in Jane Eyre ." In The Discourse of Slavery: From Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison , edited by Carl Plasa and Betty J. Ring. Oxon: Routledge, 1994.

Resnick, Julie. "Sisterhood, Slavery, and Sovereignty: Transnational Antislavery Work and Women’s Rights Movements in the United States During the Twentieth Century." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Scholtmeijer, Marian. "The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women's Fiction." In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations , edited by Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Scott, Donald M. "Abolition as a Sacred Vocation." In Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists , edited by Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman. Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Sicherman, Barbara. "Connecting Lives: Women and Reading, Then and Now." In Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries , edited by James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "“The Throne of My Heart": Religion, Oratory, and Transatlantic Community in Angelina Grimké’s Launching of Women’s Rights, 1828-1838." In Women's Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation , edited by Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart. Yale: Yale University Press, 2007.

Stanley, Amy Dru. "Home Life and the Morality of the Market." In The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religions Expressions, 1800-1880 , edited by Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway: The University Press of Virginia, 1996.

253 Steele, Valerie. "Artificial Beauty, or the Morality of Dress and Adornment." In The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives , edited by Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil. London: Routledge, 2010.

Stevenson, Ana. ""The Abolitionists of Slavery among Women": Transatlantic Foundations of the Woman-Slave Analogy." In The British World: Religion, Memory, Society, Culture: Proceedings of the Conference edited by Marcus K. Harmes, Lindsay Henderson, Barbara Harmes and Amy Antonio (Toowoomba: University of Southern Queensland, 2012).

Thomas, Tracy A. "Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Notion of a Legal Class of Gender." In Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law , edited by Tracey Jean Boisseau and Tracy A Thomas. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Weinstein, Cindy. "The Slave Narrative and Sentimental Literature." In The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative , edited by Audrey A. Fisch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Wellman, Judith. "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks." In Women's America: Refocusing the Past , edited by Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wheeler, Leslie. "Lucy Stone: Radical Beginnings (1818–1893)." In Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers , edited by Dale Spender. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Journal Articles

Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. ""The Strangest Freaks of Despotism": Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives." African American Review 40, no. 2 (2006): 223-37.

Adéèkó, Adélékè. "Signatures of Blood in William Wells Brown's Clotel ." Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 21, no. 1 (1999): 115-34.

Bacon, Margaret Hope. ""The Double Curse of Sex and Colour": Robert Purvis and Human Rights." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CXXI, no. 1/2 (1997): 53-76.

Baptist, Edward E. ""Cuffy," "Fancy Maids," and "One-Eyed Men": Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States." The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1619-50.

Baker, Paula. "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920." American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620-47.

Baron, Ava. "Women and the Making of the American Working Class: A Study of the Proletarianisation of Printers." Review of Radical Political Economics 14, no. Fall (1982): 23- 42.

Beer, Janet, and Katherine Joslin. "Diseases of the Body Politic: White Slavery in Jane Addams' "a New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" and Selected Short Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman." Journal of American Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 1-18

254 Berkeley, Kathleen Christine. "Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, "An Advocate for Her Sex": Feminism and Conservativism in the Post-Civil War South." Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43, no. 4 (1984): 390-407.

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Published Ephemera

Cunningham, Patricia A., and Gayle Strege. "Reforming Fashion, 1850-1914: Politics, Health, and Art." Columbus: Historic Textiles & Costumes Collection, Department of Consumer and Textiles Science, Ohio State University, 2000.

Unpublished Works

Barrows, Jennifer Ann. "The Sources, Rhetoric, and Gender of Artistic Dress." PhD Thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.

Eichenlaub, Kathryn. "Putting On Her Man Pants: Social Reaction to Female Cross-Dressing and Gender Transgression in America 1850-1880." Masters Thesis, Oberlin College, 2010.

Fischer, Gayle V. "Clothes Make the Woman: The National Dress Reform Association, 1856- 1965." Masters Thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 1987.

Hallenbeck, Sarah Overbaugh. "Writing the Bicycle: Women, Rhetoric, and Technology in Late Nineteenth-Century America." PhD Thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Knight, Rosemary Ann. "Beyond Separate Spheres: Acknowledging the Agency of Nineteenth Century Corsetieres." PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland, 2012.

Melia, Margot N. "The Role of Black Garrisonian Women in Antislavery and Other Reforms in the Antebellum North, 1830-1865." PhD Thesis, The University of Western Australia, 1991.

Nutter, Kathleen Banks. ""The Necessity of Organisation": Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, the American Federation of Labour, and the Boston Women's Trade Union League, 1892-1919." PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1998.

Parker, Mary Lou. “Fashioning Feminism: The Making of the Lucy Stone League by Members and Media.” PhD Thesis, University of Oregon, 1994.

Piper, Alana Jayne. "In Bad Company: Female Criminal Subcultures in Brisbane and Melbourne, 1860-1920." PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland, 2014.

Regaudie-McIsaac, Francine Yvonne. "Three Opéras Comiques of the 1830s: Fra Diavolo , Zampa and Le Pré Aux Clercs and the Placement of Musical Soli within the Drama." Masters Thesis, The University of British Columbia, 1985.

Sommers, Samantha Marie. "A Tangled Text: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853, 1860, 1864, 1867)." Honours Thesis, Wesleyan University, 2009.

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