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Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women's Rights

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Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women's Rights Proceedings of the Third Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University Sisterhood and Slavery: Transatlantic Antislavery and Women's Rights October 25-28, 2001 Yale University New Haven, Connecticut British Abolitionism and Feminism in Transatlantic and Imperial Perspective Clare Midgley Introduction This paper seeks to throw new light on the link between abolitionism and feminism by examining the British link from two perspectives, the transatlantic and the imperial. It is divided into three parts. In the first, I survey the historiography of female abolitionism and its link to feminism from a transatlantic perspective, and then outline an alternative imperial context within which to place the link between the two movements in Britain. The second section of the paper focuses on the use of the woman-slavery analogy in the differing national contexts of Britain and America. Finally, I discuss ‘race’ and the problem of defining feminism, discussing the implications of shifting my analytical framework from ‘abolitionist-feminism’ to ‘female abolitionism as feminism’. The link between abolitionism and feminism in transatlantic and imperial perspectives 1 In 1887, American women’s suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton asserted in the History of Women’s Suffrage that the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840 had given rise to the movement for women’s political equality both in England and the United States. [see Midgley, 1992, note 24 p.249]. In the US the strong link between abolitionism and feminism was acknowledged from the beginnings of the new wave of historical scholarship which accompanied the rise of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s and 70s. However, in Britain the link between abolitionism and feminism, acknowledged by feminist Josephine Butler in the 1870s when she labeled her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Act the ‘new abolition’ movement, was ignored in feminist scholarship until Jane Rendall, in her 1983 study of The Origins of Modern Feminism, echoed Stanton in asserting that ‘the anti-slavery campaign was a highly significant one for the emergence of women in public life in both Britain and the United States’ (p.247). Her analysis of the British link was, however, hampered, as she acknowledged, by the lack of studies of women’s contributions to anti-slavery in Britain, a situation which contrasted with the body of scholarship already existing in the US (Lerner, 1967; Lutz, 1968, Hersch, 1978). This gap in scholarship on British women anti-slavery campaigners began to be filled with the publication in 1985 of a pioneering article by Louis and Rosamund Billington, which also specifically addressed the relationship between anti-slavery and feminism. Black women’s contribution to British anti-slavery discourse was also acknowledged for the first time, with Moira Ferguson’s introduction to a new edition of The History of Mary Prince, which re-located the text out of the American slave narratives with which it 2 had costumarily been placed back into its Caribbean and Britain contexts. It was at this juncture that I embarked on a PhD thesis on women anti-slavery campaigners in Britain, work which formed the basis of my 1992 book Women Against Slavery and an article on anti-slavery and feminism published the following year in Gender and History. Thus, by the early 1990s The relationship between anti-slavery and feminism in Britain was much better understood and could be integrated into general histories of feminism (eg Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780-1980 (1997)). It also became possible to make a more balanced evaluation of the similarities and differences in the relationship in Britain and the US, as in Christine Bolt’s comparative study of transatlantic feminism, Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (1993). In 1992, after my study of British women’s involvement in the anti-slavery movement was published, I contemplated undertaking a comparative study of British and American women abolitionists which would draw out their strong transatlantic links and cross- influences and the similarities and differences in their ideas and actions. This project would, I felt, also be one way of further exploring a question which was of central interest to me: the way in which white women’s campaigns around the oppression of women seen as racially and or culturally ‘other’ influenced the early development of modern western feminism. There was a developing new body of literature on which to draw here. Moira Ferguson’s Subject to Others (1992) suggested the value of literary analysis for the study of British abolitionism and feminism, highlighting the significance 3 of the woman-slave analogy to British women writers, although I felt unconvinced by some of her interpretations of the material. In addition, Vron Ware’s Beyond the Pale (1992) set out a richly suggestive framework for study, linking past to present and including material on both the US and Britain, but in its breadth of coverage inevitably lacked depth of historical contextualisation. Work on American women abolitionists was also becoming more sophisticated, offering new ways of approaching the British material and providing a richer basis for comparative work. Jean Fagan Yellin’s Women and Sisters (1989) focussed on the iconography of the movement to explore the place of abolitionist feminism in American culture, moving beyond the biographical approach of earlier studies. Literary scholars also offered new insights: Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s Touching Liberty (1993) drew on a variety of literary and political texts to explore the place of the raced and gendered body in the intersecting rhetorics of abolitionism and feminism. The exclusions of white feminist scholarship itself were addressed by Shirley Yee’s study of Black Women Abolitionists (1992). Study of American abolitionist feminists was also facilitated by the production of a steady stream of edited collections of documents, most recently by Kathryn Kish Sklar (2000). Unfortunately, similar published collections on British women anti-slavery campaigners are still lacking, though women’s pivotal role in the transatlantic network of abolitionists is highlighted in Clare Taylor’s valuable collection of letters between British and American abolitionists. 4 I did not, in the end elect to undertake such a full-length transatlantic and comparative study, partly because I felt I lacked sufficient grounding in American history to do it justice. Nobody else has yet taken on the challenge, and this reflects the way feminist historical scholarship has tended to remain within the straightjacket of national frameworks. Leila Rupp’s valuable study of international women’s organisations focusses on the period after 1880s, while Margaret McFadden’s Golden Cables of Sympathy (1999), although it does highlight the importance of women abolitionists in developing transatlantic networks which laid the ground for this groups, is a narrative overview that offers limited new interpretive insights. Similarly, non-one has yet produced a study of black women to complement Paul Gilroy’s highly influential but male-focussed study, The Black Atlantic (1993). For myself, an alternative to a comparative transatlantic study presented itself, and this was the direction I elected to pursue. I was keen to relate my work on British women and anti-slavery to an emerging body of critical feminist scholarship on western women and imperialism (Strobel, 1991; Chaudhuri and Strobel, 1991). Organising a strand on gender and imperialism at the Anglo-American conference in London in 1994, and publication that same year of Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History, opened my eyes to the fascinating new scholarship in this field. However, the focus of Burton’s book, and indeed of the bulk of such scholarship was on the period after 1860. I wished to trace Burton’s story of the link between imperialism and feminism back beyond of the ‘first wave’ organised women’s movement in Britain of the 1860s to 1914 to the period described by Jane Rendall as seeing the origins of modern feminism, the 1790s to 1850s. 5 This is the project I am now in the midst of. I am seeking to examine the extent to which Britain’s role as an imperial nation impacted on the framing of arguments in early feminist tracts from Wollstonecraft to Mill. I am exploring the nature and significance of British women’s involvement in a range philanthropic and reformist endeavours on the imperial stage. This has provided an opportunity to place women’s anti-slavery work alongside their involvement in the campaign against sati or widow burning, in British India, and their engagement with projects for the Christian education of colonised women. I am also exploring the nature of female oppression and the meaning of female emancipation in the discourse of these campaigners, throwing new light on the relationship between evangelicalism and feminism by adding an imperial dimension to the scholarly debate. I would thus like to suggest that the relationship between anti-slavery and feminism in Britain can be looked at from two complementary perspectives: the transatlantic and the imperial. Rather than seeing these as two discrete or opposed approaches, I hope in this paper to use both. Drawing on existing studies, one can pinpoint a number of key aspects of the link between abolitionism and feminism which warrant further exploration from these perspectives. These include: the woman-slave analogy in feminist discourse;
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