Their Right to Speak

Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates

Alisse Portnoy, Alisse PORTNOY

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674019225
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674042223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

When Alisse Portnoy recovered petitions from the early 1830s that nearly 1,500 women sent to the U.S. Congress to protest the forced removal of Native Americans in the South, she found the first instance of women's national, collective political activism in American history. In this groundbreaking study, Portnoy links antebellum Indian removal debates with crucial, simultaneous debates about African Americans--abolition of slavery and African colonization--revealing ways European American women negotiated prohibitions to make their voices heard.

Situating the debates within contemporary, competing ideas about race, religion, and nation, Portnoy examines the means by which women argued for a "right to speak" on national policy. Women's participation in the debates was constrained not only by gender but also by how these women--and the men with whom they lived and worshipped--imagined Native and African Americans as the objects of their advocacy and by what they believed were the most benevolent ways to aid the oppressed groups.

Cogently argued and engagingly written, this is the first study to fully integrate women's, Native American, and African American rights debates.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• 1 “Causes of Alarm to Our Whole Country”: Articulating the Crisis of Indian Removal
• 2 “A Right to Speak on the Subject”:Petitioning the Federal Government
• 3 “The Difference between Cruelty to the Slave,and Cruelty to the Indian”: Imagining Native and African Americans as Objects of Advocacy
• 4 “Merely Public Opinion in Legal Forms”:Imagining Native and African Americans in the Public and Political Spheres
• 5 “On the Very Eve of Coming Out”:Declaring One’s Antislavery Affiliations
• 6 “Coming from One Who Has a Right to Speak”:Debating Colonization and Abolition
• Notes
• Index