This is the published version, also available here: http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1353/rah.2000.0029

Earle, Jonathan H.

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Reviews in American History 28 (2000) 223–229 © 2000 by The Johns Hopkins University Press‘PECULIARLY WOMAN’S CAUSE’: FEMINISM, RACE,AND THE STRUGGLE FOR EQUALITYJonathan H. EarleJulie Roy Jeffrey. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in theAntislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,1998. xii + 311 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth);$18.95 (paper).Louise Michele Newman. White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Femi-nism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. vii + 261pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95(paper).In 1838, the issue of race nearly destroyed the newly-formed Female Anti-Slavery Society of Fall River, Massachusetts. The Society, founded by womenfrom some of the city’s most respected white families, was busy organizinglectures, signing petitions, and raising money when three free black women–already regular attendees at meetings–applied for membership. According toElizabeth Buffum Chace, a founding member of the Society, few of the whitemembers objected to black women attending the meetings. “But they did notthink,” Chace recorded in her diary, “it was at all proper to invite them to jointhe Society, thus putting them on an equality with ourselves.” The Societysurvived, however, after Chace and her sister “maintained [their] ground”and the “respectable young colored women” were invited to become fullmembers.1The struggle to integrate the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Fall Riverpoints directly to the major themes of two important new monographs onwomen and race, Julie Roy Jeffrey’s The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism andLouise Michele Newman’s White Women’s Rights. Both books mine substantialand original bodies of primary sources, are lucidly written, and build on theexcellent scholarship of the past quarter century. Yet each book points in anentirely different direction. Jeffrey recounts the Fall River incident as part of alarger effort to correct a myopic tendency by historians of the antislaverymovement to focus on men, even as they claim (as many of the abolitioniststhemselves did) how vital women were to the abolitionist project. By concen- REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  /  JUNE 2000224trating on unpublished letters from ordinary abolitionist women, often leftlanguishing in the well-mined collections of prominent male abolitionists, aswell as diaries and scattered organizational records, Jeffrey illustrates howwomen’s day-to-day work kept abolitionism alive. In her telling of the FallRiver incident, Jeffrey points to a largely unexplored contradiction: whyantislavery women could believe they were so intimately linked with andattuned to enslaved black women, especially mothers, and not to free blackmembers of their own communities. She writes how white women activistsoften spoke of a “special sensitivity, based on gender” to the plight of slavewomen, or as one group of Ohio abolitionists put it, “the cry of the sablemother” (p. 65).Newman, whose book is largely concerned with the years 1870-1920, takesas her subject feminism itself. Her provocative thesis goes well beyond theolder view that certain white feminists held racist or ethnocentric ideas andattempts to isolate a racial (and, indeed, racist) component within feminismitself. It thus joins a growing literature on “whiteness” and the formation ofracial identity pioneered by historians like David Roediger and Noel Ignatiev,adding a missing female element to their examinations of the links betweenracism and America’s democratic movements. Much of Newman’s argumentrests on her explications of nineteenth-century evolutionary models, and howthey affected the development of feminist ideology. In chapters focusing ontopics as diverse as the Indian reform movement of the 1880s, the popularresponse to May French-Sheldon’s African Safari in the 1890s, and MargaretMead’s failure to overcome her cultural ethnocentrism while attacking Victo-rian ideas of evolutionary assimilation, Newman sets out a detailed explana-tion of how feminism emerged as a racialized theory of gender oppression.* * *Perhaps the most rewarding of Jeffrey’s many contributions here is thesubtle and complex portrait of the grassroots army of women–black andwhite–who sustained the antislavery movement over the decades precedingemancipation. The labors Jeffrey records include many of those familiar inprevious works on antislavery: public lecturing, editorial writing, and theharboring of fugitive slaves. But she also sheds light on numerous other, morehidden laborers as well, including church quilters, fair impresarios, andnurses.The opening chapters of The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism focus on howwomen were recruited to the cause and how they acquired the skills andattitudes that moved them beyond the traditional conventions of middle-classlife. The book breaks new ground in the chapter devoted to women’santislavery fairs, a vastly understudied part of the abolitionist movement.225EARLE  /  Feminism, Race, and the Struggle for EqualityUsing evidence like the records of the Dover [N.H.] Sewing Circle, newspaperclippings, and letters, Jeffrey shows how women’s fairs helped the antislaverymovement survive while also bringing women outside their traditionalsphere into the commercial world. It has been almost 70 years since GilbertBarnes questioned the centrality of the Garrisonian wing of abolitionists, infavor of a wider movement led by evangelical Midwesterners.2  Barnes’argument–that a large percentage of abolitionists came to the movement viathe religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening–was the first step inwidening the scope of abolitionist study beyond the Boston suburbs. Theflood of abolitionist historiography inspired by the civil rights movementdeepened our understanding of the movement, especially in regard to AfricanAmerican contributions. And historians of the American working class haveadded vital studies of the antislavery rank and file, painting a picture of theabolitionist movement that was more broadly-based and less exclusivelyevangelical and middle class than was previously supposed.3  By focusing onordinary women, Jeffrey has added dramatically to a fuller understanding ofwhy people became abolitionists, the labor they performed, and the waysthey sustained the movement for three decades in the face of uncooperativefamilies, severe setbacks, and even violence. As a final corrective, we stillneed studies that more fully explain why people chose to oppose slavery,including those who would never call themselves “abolitionists” (a synonymfor “fanatics” among a vast majority of Americans). Barnes came to hisrevisionism after discovering a mysterious trunk in an Ohio attic containingthe unpublished correspondence of Angelina Grimké and Theodore Weld;Jeffrey’s sewing circles and antislavery fairs, though never actually “lost,”represent the same type of historical treasures.Jeffrey takes as her epigraph a famous quotation by Frederick Douglass:“When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, women willoccupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the slave has been peculiarlywoman’s cause.” Douglass’s sentiments were echoed, time and again, byothers toiling to rid the nation of slavery. “The Anti-Slavery cause cannot stopto estimate where the greatest indebtedness lies,” declared William LloydGarrison in 1847, “but whenever the account is made up, there can be nodoubt that the efforts and sacrifices of WOMEN, who helped it, will hold amost honorable and conspicuous position.” It didn’t happen. Even thoughwomen antislavery activists tirelessly organized lecture series (in many casestaking the stage themselves), circulated newspapers, raised money, signedpetitions, housed fugitive slaves, sewed quilts, and supported antislaverypolitical parties, men took most of the credit for ending slavery. And despitea passage in nearly every modern U.S. history textbook about the centrality ofwomen in the antislavery movement, their efforts are often subsumed under REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  /  JUNE 2000226several paragraphs about the better-known (and better documented) actionsof Garrison, Douglass, or Abraham Lincoln. This disconnect between the roleswomen played in the antislavery movement and in later written historiescontinues into the present day. The best-selling work of non-fiction on theantislavery movement last year (by a vast amount) was a biography, not ofAngelina Grimké or Harriet Beecher Stowe, but of William Lloyd Garrison.Henry Mayer’s All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slaverydwarfed the sales of all other books on related subjects, including the late PaulGoodman’s Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality andAlbert J. Von Frank’s The Trials of Anthony Burns. And despite Garrison’s ownviews, as quoted above, Mayer devotes scant pages to women in themovement (I am normally not a member of the “page counting” school ofbook reviewing, but the near total absence of women in Mayer’s lengthy booktempted me to matriculate). Jeffrey’s explanation for this type of omission iscompelling: part of it is the sources (sewing circles didn’t usually keepvoluminous records), and part of it is due to the women’s tendency to writethemselves into a separate sphere. Only a very few abolitionist women,Jeffrey argues, were willing to abandon woman’s moral voice for feministegalitarianism. In most cases, Jeffrey shows, a strong commitment to aboli-tionism severely limited women’s ability to challenge traditional genderarrangements–many activists found that their female “moral voice” againstthe evils of slavery was too potent a weapon to give up. And besides, shereminds us, to embrace abolitionism was an inherently radical act by itself,one that challenged the political, economic and social status quo in additionto traditional gender norms. The bitter (and often violent) opposition to themovement in the South and within the federal government provides ampleevidence of the movement’s ability to inspire fear and hatred among thesupporters of slavery.Louise Michelle Newman’s book also begins as a historiographic correc-tive, but then it veers off into fully revisionist territory. Although they containoverlapping actors and themes, White Women’s Rights and The Great SilentArmy of Abolitionism at first seem to be about two different countries. It’s as if,in a movie sequel, the heroes from the earlier film were lit from below to givethem a sinister, malevolent air. Where Jeffrey’s women petition, speak out,and sew out of a deep-seated sympathy for the enslaved, Newman’s postbellumwhite suffragists stress their own racial and cultural superiority to justify theirenfranchisement. But while previous studies have focused on the ethnocen-trism or racism of particular women and feminists (it is certainly not difficultto find enough racist quotations to fill several volumes), Newman accuses theideology of feminism itself of being intrinsically racialized, even built onwhite supremacy. The argument here is too subtle to suggest an unholy227EARLE  /  Feminism, Race, and the Struggle for Equalityalliance between the followers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Nathan BedfordForrest, but we nearly get there just the same.It is difficult to argue with several of Newman’s assertions. Namely, that inthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries white women in the suffragemovement formulated their views of equality within the context of highlycharged debates on race, and exploited contemporary “scientific” findingsthat Anglo-American Protestants stood atop the cultural and biologicalhierarchy. She is at her best when she analyzes and links the various women’sorganizations that pressured the U.S. Government to outlaw lynching, changeits Indian policies, or opened settlement houses to introduce patriarchal,“American” domesticity to other races. Instead of feeling capable of moralsuperiority because of a religious conversion or an ability to empathize withoppression, Newman suggests that white women cited an inherently race-specific trait to justify their benevolence. Blending religious conviction,science, and political ideology, Newman writes, white proponents of women’srights “helped create new roles for themselves that explicitly maintained theracial hierarchies that were based on the presumption that Anglo-AmericanProtestants were culturally, as well as biologically, superior to other peoples”(p. 7). This sets up an interesting paradox, one that should provoke consider-able debate: that the very key to white women’s own racial advancement (andthe reason they were justified in staking a claim to voting rights) waspatriarchy. In other words, white women’s rights activists blamed non-whites’ stunted social progress on the absence of American-style, middle-class gender relations. So at the same time they were formulating a critique ofpatriarchal gender relations, these same women urged a healthy infusion ofpatriarchy to “elevate” inferior, non-white cultures (and spare their women“primitive” horrors like foot binding, nose boring and bride sale). Thishypocrisy, Newman writes, severely limited white women’s ability to exposeand critique racism and sexism in American culture.While it is undeniably true that white women developed their argumentsfor sexual equality in a time of the nation’s nadir in race relations (a time ofrecord lynchings of African Americans, Jim Crow laws, and imperialism), thisdoes not necessarily undermine the entire feminist project. Thomas Jeffersonwrote the Declaration of Independence and at the same time deeply believedin the superiority of the white race, in a climate where these beliefs wererarely challenged. And abolitionist racial egalitarian ideology (even thoughembraced by only a small proportion of abolitionists) emerged out of aJacksonian culture that celebrated anti-abolitionist and anti-black mob activ-ity.  The question is not whether Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Mary RobertsCoolidge were “racists” by our twenty-first-century standards; they were,and we already knew that. Today a college student is as likely to learn aboutGilman’s ties to the eugenics movement as her contributions to feminism. REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY  /  JUNE 2000228Newman acknowledges in her introduction that she fears her findings couldmask racism in the culture at large or even aid the conservative backlashagainst the women’s movement. Yet her largest disservice is her slighting ofthose feminists who did overcome the withering racism of the day and toform meaningful political associations with black leaders like Ida B. Wells,Frances W. Harper, or the free black members of the Female Anti-SlaverySociety of Fall River. This is part of Jeffrey’s story, but not Newman’s.In many ways, Newman’s feminists resemble David Roediger’s antebel-lum white workers, who fashioned new “white” identities to compensate fortheir exclusion from economic and political power. In numerous influentialessays, Roediger presents white workers–even those who opposed slavery bysigning petitions or becoming free soilers–as racist and land-hungry, legiti-mizing slavery by striving only to limit its expansion.4  But in his attempt tocensure free soilers and workers for their racist views (ideas they unfortu-nately shared with a vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans), heneglects the contributions many of them made in the political struggle againstslavery in the 1840s and 50s. Restricting slavery was, for many Northerners,seen as a first step towards its eradication. Is it fair to say one could onlysincerely oppose slavery by adopting twenty-first-century style, anti-racistprinciples? Similarly, why should we demand (or even expect) nineteenth-century feminists to overthrow existing and racist evolutionary models intheir own quest for equality? Finally, does racism within a movementundermine and destroy the entire project, be it feminism or antislavery? Likeit or not, movements exist in the real world and, to achieve their goals, haveto interact with larger societies that harbor racial, gender, and class-basedbiases. To conclude that feminism–a belief in the social, political, and eco-nomic equality of the sexes–is bankrupt because it was tainted by (or eveninfused with) racism somehow misses the point.The transition from agitation (during the abolitionist movement) to organi-zation (after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment) forced suffragists toalter their political style and content in significant ways. As abolitionists, theywere often trained (and encouraged) to express their ideas in the most radicalforms possible. As organizers and feminists, they had to be far morepragmatic, especially in the conservative climate of late nineteenth-centuryAmerica. This is not to let people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who famouslycomplained that “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung” could makelaws for Lucrecia Mott and Anna Dickinson, off the hook. Convincing men,who selfishly grasped the reigns of power, to expand rights–even humanrights–to women was an extremely daunting task. That women’s suffragewasn’t accomplished by pure and anti-racist rhetoric and means is unfortu-nate, but not surprising.229EARLE  /  Feminism, Race, and the Struggle for EqualityEven with all their overlap in subject, ideology, and emphasis, Jeffrey andNewman point the field of women’s history in divergent directions. Jeffrey’sbook, an example of traditional women’s history, will make the next biogra-phy of Garrison or Douglass appear ludicrous for not emphasizing thecontributions of ordinary women abolitionists. Newman, with her explicitlypost-modern theoretical analysis, hopes her work will help spur alliancesbetween movements for feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, post-colonialism, and anticapitalism. She concludes her book by urging that we,twenty-first-century Americans “come to terms with the past in order todevelop new strategies for the future” (p. 185). There is no doubt much tocome to terms with, much of it very, very bad. Yet we also have the words ofAngelina Grimké, written in her address to the women of the South: “[G]reatnumbers cannot bear the idea of equality,” she wrote. “Prejudice against coloris the most powerful enemy we have to fight with in the North.”5  It wasprecisely this strain of antiracism, rare as it may have been, that allowed aracially-integrated Female Anti-Slavery Society of Fall River to continue itswork for abolition.Jonathan H. Earle, assistant professor of history, University of Kansas, is theauthor of The Routledge Atlas of African American History (2000) and TheUndaunted Democracy: Jacksonian Antislavery and Free Soil, 1828-1854 (forth-coming from the University of North Carolina Press).1. Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (1992), 93.2. Gilbert H. Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1833-1844 (1933).3. Edward Magdol, The Antislavery Rank and File (1986); John B. Jentz, “Artisans,Evangelicals and the City: A Social History of Abolition and Labor Reform in JacksonianNew York,” (Ph.D. diss., CUNY, 1977).4. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American WorkingClass (1991).5. Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sara and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-1836 (1991), 71-3.

'Peculiarly Woman's Cause': Feminism, Race and the Struggle for Equality

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'Peculiarly Woman's Cause': Feminism, Race and the Struggle for Equality

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