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Gender and Antislavery Women in the United States and Britain

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Gender and Antislavery Women in the United States and Britain THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Atlantic Connections: Gender and Antislavery women in the United States and Britain A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History School of Arts and Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Stephanie J. Richmond Washington, DC 2011 Atlantic Connections: Gender and Antislavery women in the United States and Britain Stephanie J. Richmond, Ph.D. Director: Laura E. N. Mayhall, Ph.D. The importance of antislavery activism in the rise of feminism in the US and Great Britain has long been acknowledged by historians of women in both countries. However, the historiography of antislavery women is missing important analytical elements: the role of class and attention to the words of the women themselves. Antislavery women were the first to advocate for their own rights to speak in public, participate in political debates and to challenge the ideology of separate spheres. The way in which antislavery women negotiated the restrictions on their own behavior reshaped the class-based gender roles that were being established in the first half of the nineteenth century. The way in which the middle class defined itself in each country limited how far antislavery women could bend gender roles. American women were able to make a case for their right to speak in public and participate in mixed-gender meetings much earlier than British women, mainly due to the fact that the middle class in America constructed itself in a racial and ethnic diametric. The letters, speeches and diaries of antislavery women illuminate how the leaders of the movement were able to challenge the boundaries of proper behavior and shift the margins of separate spheres to make advocacy for the slave permissible. In doing so, they realized the inequality they and all women lived under. The turning point for this realization was the 1840 World’s Antislavery Convention in London, which brought together antislavery women from both sides of the Atlantic, forging and strengthening ties between individuals and groups of women involved in antislavery work. The networks created between 1840 and 1860 aided women in their antislavery work, but also supplied a support network that allowed women to circumvent the male-dominated antislavery movement in Britain and to exchange information about women’s rights as well as antislavery issues. The lessons learned in the antislavery movement provided a strong base for feminist assertions in the second half of the nineteenth century for both American and British women. Women’s rights activists drew on the skills and spaces their antislavery predecessors had carved out for women. This dissertation by Stephanie J. Richmond fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in History approved by Laura E. N. Mayhall, Ph.D., as Director, and by Leslie Tentler, Ph.D., and Timothy Meagher, Ph.D, as Readers. _______________________________ Laura E. N. Mayhall, Ph.D., Director _______________________________ Leslie Tentler, Ph.D., Reader _______________________________ Timothy Meagher, Ph.D., Reader ii Table of Contents Abbreviation List ...................................................................................................................... v Introduction............................................................................................................................... 1 Historiography .................................................................................................................. 4 Organization and Methods.............................................................................................. 19 Sources............................................................................................................................ 24 Middle Class Gender Roles: Creating Separate Spheres and Women in Public .................... 27 Nineteenth Century Reform Movements and Radical Societies............................................. 54 Religion and the Antislavery Movement: Quakerism ............................................................ 72 Literary Women: Antislavery writers and transatlantic audience........................................... 89 1840: The World’s Antislavery Convention, London. ......................................................... 108 Transatlantic Connections: Antislavery Families and Societies........................................... 136 The division of the US antislavery movement: Garrison and female antislavery societies.. 155 Opposition to Antislavery Women ....................................................................................... 176 Antislavery and Gender Roles: The Rise of the American Women’s Movement................ 196 The Collapse of British Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity .................................. 214 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 228 Appendix A: Brief Biographies ............................................................................................ 238 Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1885) .......................................................................... 238 Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880).................................................................................... 238 Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831)..................................................................................... 239 Anne Knight (1786-1862)............................................................................................. 240 Harriet Martineau (1802-1876)..................................................................................... 240 Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880)................................................................................ 242 Elizabeth Pease Nichol (1807-1897) ............................................................................ 243 Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)............................................................................ 243 iii Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 245 Primary Sources............................................................................................................ 245 Secondary Sources........................................................................................................ 247 iv Abbreviation List The following abbreviations are used in citations throughout. BNA British National Archives, Kew, UK BL British Library, London, UK BPL Boston Public Library, Boston, MA FHL Library of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain, Friends House, London, UK FL Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA LOC Library of Congress, Washington, DC NYPL New York Public Library, New York, NY RHL Rhodes House Library, Oxford University, Oxford, UK v Introduction Beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century, women in both the United States and Britain participated in petition campaigns, wrote letters and pledged their spare time and money to a variety of causes. Radical religious groups opened the floor for many women to speak in semi-public settings for the first time; Unitarian and Quaker women were at the forefront of many of the earliest public reform movements. The efforts of the middle class to define themselves colored many of these reforming movements, with attention to creating a place for the middle class that was more refined than the working poor, but not inclined to the excesses of the elite. The antislavery movement captured by far the greatest amount of British and American women’s attention; although some women came to the antislavery movement with prior experience in reform, for many women, the antislavery movement provided their first taste of public political and social activism. Out of the active communities of women on both sides of the Atlantic grew an exchange of letters, ideas and visits that formed the base of the first transatlantic women’s movement. The peak of the transatlantic antislavery movement came between 1830 and 1848; boosted by the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 in Britain, antislavery activists in the entire Atlantic world found new energy to tackle American slavery, and many pressed for immediate abolition in both the empire and the United States. It was also during these years that women came to participate fully in the movement in the US, with Angelina and Sarah Grimké speaking to mixed crowds in public meetings, women publishing political tracts and signing petitions to government. The crowning achievement of the transatlantic movement was the 1840 World’s Antislavery Convention held in London, but “the woman 1 2 issue” rather than slavery was the center of this convention. Several dozen American antislavery activists travelled to London in June 1840 to attend the convention. Among the American delegates were women sent by a variety of women’s organizations and mixed- gender organizations from Boston and Philadelphia. Other women attended with their husbands, and many British women attended as visitors. The British & Foreign Antislavery Society, hosts of the convention, made a decision to refuse to seat the American women sent as delegates to the meeting, and instead, insisted that they sit in the Ladies’ galleries with the British women. The resulting discussion took over the entire
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