Alisse Portnoy. Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xii + 290 pp. $49.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-674-01922-5.
Reviewed by Carol Faulkner
Published on H-SHEAR (April, 2007)
When Angelina and Sarah Grimké began vited Catharine Beecher to recruit American their 1836-37 tour as paid agents of the American women on behalf of the Cherokee. Evarts defned Anti-Slavery Society (AAS), they provoked a na‐ the issue of Cherokee removal as a moral one, en‐ tional debate over the propriety of female lectur‐ abling women to take public action. And in their ers. Many historians view the subsequent pub‐ petitions, women emphasized their right to speak lished exchange between Angelina Grimké and on questions of religion only. As a result of this her critic Catharine Beecher as a crucial moment emphasis, the 1,500 northern women who peti‐ in the emergence of the women's rights move‐ tioned against Cherokee removal received over‐ ment. But Alisse Portnoy, an associate professor of whelming support from their male relatives and English and rhetoric at the University of Michi‐ communities. And, as Portnoy points out, only one gan, believes that gender provides only a partial politician decried their petitioning (p. 229). The explanation for the vehemence of Beecher's oppo‐ communal and familial support for women's peti‐ sition. In this engaging book, Portnoy convincing‐ tions against removal ofers a striking contrast to ly argues that the abolitionist movement, and the the response to female antislavery petitions. debate over women's proper place in that move‐ While women who petitioned against removal ment, should not be studied in isolation from the seemed to fulfll their natural, benevolent roles, broader political and discursive context of Chero‐ one Senator argued that antislavery petitioners kee Removal and colonization. "unsexed themselves" (p. 83). Portnoy begins with the movement against The dramatically diferent public perception Indian removal, which included "the frst national of anti-removal and abolition, Portnoy argues, women's petition campaign in United States histo‐ had to do with the portrayal of Native Americans ry" (p. 1). Jeremiah Evarts, who orchestrated the and African Americans in popular culture. While anti-removal campaign for the American Board of Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Commissions for Foreign Missions, personally in‐ Catharine Maria Sedgwick ofered the public ad‐ H-Net Reviews mirable Native American characters, none of the tion, believing that the aggressive and integra‐ bestselling books of the 1820s contained positive tionist tactics of immediatists made emancipation African American fgures. Even more striking, more difcult. For Beecher and his eldest daugh‐ Portnoy analyzes the dichotomous portrayal of ter, abolition depended on enlisting slaveholders both groups in the pages of the National Intelli‐ rather than alienating them. gencer, the leading newspaper in the nation's cap‐ Having ofered this context, Portnoy argues ital. The newspaper included Native Americans as that Catherine Beecher's abhorrence of women's members of a foreign nation, property owners, antislavery petitioning was not, as many scholars and political actors. African Americans, by con‐ have contended, a rejection of her earlier ac‐ trast, most often appeared in the newspaper's tivism against Cherokee removal. Critiquing both pages as stateless persons, pieces of property, or male and female abolitionists, Beecher's opposi‐ passive victims. Portnoy persuasively links the tion to Grimké's lectures fowed from more than proponents of anti-removal and colonization her conservative assumptions regarding women's through their portrayal of the objects of their role. Like her father, Catharine Beecher consis‐ benevolence. The Evangelicals and Whigs who op‐ tently advocated the creation of a "Christian posed Indian removal saw Native Americans as democracy," a society where the government and Christian citizens of other nations with legitimate leading men used their power to create a virtuous claims (in the form of treaties) on the U.S. govern‐ nation (p. 188). Only in times of crisis, Beecher be‐ ment. But these same reformers could not imag‐ lieved, should women use their mediating infu‐ ine the disappearance of "prejudices of color, prej‐ ence on the side of morality. Though Beecher udices of habit" and thus urged the removal of judged Indian removal to be an urgent matter, African Americans as the most expedient, consti‐ she saw slavery as a long-term problem to be tutional method of ending slavery and improving solved through "peaceful and Christian" methods the condition of former slaves (p. 127). (p. 222). Beecher ofered the example of the In her fnal two chapters, Portnoy analyzes British abolition movement, which "was conduct‐ the public exchange as published in Beecher's Es‐ ed by some of the wisest and most talented states‐ say on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference men, as well as the most pious men, in the British to the Duty of American Females (1837) and An‐ nation" (p. 220). gelina Grimké's Letters to Cath[a]rine E. Beecher, The strength of Portnoy's book lies in her in Reply to An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, compelling rereading of Beecher's arguments, but Addressed to A. E. Grimké (1838). Though tradi‐ the monograph is not, nor is it intended to be, a tionally seen as a debate about appropriate gen‐ social or political history of anti-removal, colo‐ der roles, Portnoy presents the dialogue as "the nization, and abolitionism. She portrays Beecher only sustained conversation between adherents as a representative of colonization, but she admits of intensely competitive, antagonistic rival organi‐ that Beecher "did not explicitly endorse the ACS in zations" (p. 205), the American Colonization Soci‐ her monograph" (p. 220). While Portnoy explains ety (ACS) and the American Anti-Slavery Society. that Beecher believed female moral authority As Portnoy reminds her readers, in the 1830s, the fowed from political neutrality, she might have ACS was far more respectable and widely sub‐ extended her analysis to Beecher's (and other scribed than the radical egalitarian AAS. Though women's) relationship to the male hierarchy of conservatives like Lyman Beecher believed they the ACS. Besides Beecher's implicit support, what could be both abolitionists and colonizationists, role did white women have in the colonization members of the AAS disagreed. Ultimately forced to choose a side, Lyman Beecher chose coloniza‐
2 H-Net Reviews movement? Did they wield the religious infuence that Beecher suggested? I hope scholars will heed Portnoy's call for in‐ vestigation into the relationship between anti-re‐ moval and antislavery. Portnoy associates propo‐ nents of anti-removal and colonization, but many immediate abolitionists also engaged simultane‐ ously in Indian and antislavery reform. Similarly, Portnoy dismisses the argument that women's anti-removal petitioning was radical or "protofeminist" (p. 60), but given the continued overlap between Indian reform and women's rights, this connection deserves further explo‐ ration.[1] Note [1]. For example, Lucretia Mott to Edmund Quincy, August 24, 1848 in Beverly Wilson Palmer, ed., Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (Ur‐ bana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 165-167; and Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 91-92.
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Citation: Carol Faulkner. Review of Portnoy, Alisse. Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates. H-SHEAR, H-Net Reviews. April, 2007.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13116
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