19th-century Feminism & Slavery

Abolitionism was one of the two springboards to the creation of a (white) American feminist movement (the other, oddly, was evangelicalism).  Abolitionism acted in this way for several reasons.  The most obvious is that, as a woman felt morally compelled to take public action on the issue of slavery, she became aware of how her own actions, social, standing, education, and legal rights were abridged.  Abolitionism also acted as a training ground for feminism in that it allowed women to begin by addressing a blatant and gross abuse; as activists became sensitized to manifestations of prejudice, they were better equipped to perceive and respond to the discrimination that operated against themselves.  Finally, at a time when one of the central ideals of femininity was self-abnegation, abolition work allowed women to become inured to controversy and resistance while they worked on behalf of others; consequently, when they turned their attention to the abuses under which they suffered themselves, they had the strength and experience to defy gender roles for their own benefit.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke were two of the earliest and most prominent women abolitionists whose experience in that movement developed their own feminism.  The sisters were born at the turn of the 18th century, and were most politically active, giving lectures and going in tours, during the 1830s.  Both were eventually to publish definitively feminist works, including Letters on the Equality of the Sexes.

Similarly, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were both propelled into active feminism by their exclusion - on the grounds of sex - from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London,1840.  This experience led directly to their organization of the Seneca Falls Convention of '48, and to Stanton's famous Declaration of Sentiments. 

Other acvtive abolitionists, like Maria Weston Chapman and Harriet Beecher Stowe, remained on the fringes of feminism, but were sympathetic to the cause and corresponded with activists like Lucretia Mott and Harriet Martineau.

In addition to inspiring women to espouse feminist ideals, abolition also encouraged men like William Lloyd Garrison (who boycotted the Anti-Slavery Convention out of solidarity with the exiled Mott and Stanton) and writer and ex-slave Frederick Douglass to join the cause of women.  Both men attended conferences on women's rights and published pro-women and pro-suffrage journal articles.

The one demographic missing from this picture is, of course, black women.  While there were certainly black women working for abolition (such as Harriet Tubman), few records exist of black women feminists.  The one outstanding exception is Sojourner Truth, and even she said of herself, "I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women."  Less well-known was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a poet and activist whom admirers called her "The Bronze Muse."  Truth and Harper had diametrical personal styles and histories, Harper having been born free and given a thorough education that allowed her to earn a living as a teacher and writer, and Truth having lived 40 years as a slave and never learning to read.  The two women related to the dominant white northern culture differently as well, Harper employing the elegant and flowery language of Victorian sentimental literature to appeal to her readers, and Truth finding that the pungency and directness of her black dialect was effective in shaking her audiences out of their complacent perspectives on blacks and women.

The fact that there were not more black women active in feminism may be traced to a number of causes.  Of course, the most obvious explanation was that they had the least time, money, and education of any class of Americans.  Truth put it this way:  "White women are a great deal smarter an know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything.  They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle, strutting up and down; and when the women come home, they ask for their money and take it all, and then scold because there is no food..."   The racism of white feminists, however, played at least as profound a role.  Ironically, many ardent abolitionists were also convinced racists; they believed slavery to be a sin, but disliked and feared blacks.  The hostility of those feminists who were not abolitionists was even more fierce.  Pro-slavery feminists sought to separate their cause from abolition.  Many feminist societies closed their doors to black women. 

Even Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, staunch friends of abolition, opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments, which gave black males the right to vote and to full citizenship.  The amendment used the word "man" for the first time in the Constitution in reference to suffrage, which the women naturally deplored; but they also resented the fact that ex-slaves were now elevated above themselves legally.  In Stanton's regrettable words, "It is an open, deliberate insult to American womanhood to be cast down under the iron-heeled peasantry of the Old World and to be cast down under the slaves of the New, as we shall be in the practical working of the 15th Amendment." 

Other black women were able to address feminist and abolitionist issues outside of political organizations.  Harriet Wilson and Harriet Jacobs both wrote semi-autobiographical narratives that describe the perilous and vulnerable situation of black women in the 19th century (Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, respectively).  The New York Public Library has made the texts of many Victorian black women writers available online.  In addition to the works of Wilson and Jacobs, the collection also contains Truth's Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Harper's most famous novel, Iola Leroy (the most popular novel by a black woman until Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God), as well as works by many lesser-known authors.

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was a black feminist from the post-Civil War generation.  She received an M.A. from Oberlin College, completed her education with a Grand Tour of Europe, and became the District of Columbia's first black Board of Education member.  She worked for suffrage and to end segregation in public schools.

Finally, ambitious, inspired, and expressive black women were sometimes able to put their talents to work as preachers.  While these women might not have a deliberate feminist agenda, their own evasion of gender and racial norms was an act of feminism.  Perhaps the best-known of these women was Jarena Lee, who experienced a dramatic conversion and felt called by God in the early 1800s to become a traveling preacher for the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).

Rhetoric of Anglo-American Feminism

posted by:  Melanie R. Ulrich
last updated on:  8 April, 2002