The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements

Ana Stevenson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030244668
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030244675
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book is the first to develop a history of the analogy between woman and slave, charting its changing meanings and enduring implications across the social movements of the long nineteenth century. Looking beyond its foundations in the antislavery and women's rights movements, this book examines the influence of the woman-slave analogy in popular culture along with its use across the dress reform, labor, suffrage, free love, racial uplift, and anti-vice movements. At once provocative and commonplace, the woman-slave analogy was used to exceptionally varied ends in the era of chattel slavery and slave emancipation. Yet, as this book reveals, a more diverse assembly of reformers both accepted and embraced a woman-as-slave worldview than has previously been appreciated. One of the most significant yet controversial rhetorical strategies in the history of feminism, the legacy of the woman-slave analogy continues to underpin the debates that shape feminist theory today.

© The Author(s) 2019

A. StevensonThe Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social MovementsPalgrave Studies in the History of Social Movementshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24467-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Women’s Rights, Feminism, and the Politics of Analogy

Ana Stevenson¹

(1)

International Studies Group, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

Ana Stevenson

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The analogy between woman and slave has a long historical lineage. Countless philosophers, political theorists, social reformers, legislators, and cultural commentators have been prompted to ask: Are women, in fact, slaves? This seems an extraordinary, even offensive, question to contemplate today. It strikes at the heart of ongoing debates about the heterogeneous category of “woman” as it elides the historical reality that free women were the beneficiaries of freedom; enslaved women were not, and racist gender conventions routinely disregarded the womanhood of enslaved and colonized women. But this question has nonetheless preoccupied social movements, as it constantly generated answers that have proved as clear as they have been indistinct. Generations of reformers, who grasped for the words to call attention to the great evils they sought to combat, believed that discourses of slavery created a productive and provocative site of meaning. This logic aligned far more closely with the political claims of white women than it did women of color, yet this question was not contemplated exclusively by white women. What this book describes as the woman-slave analogy obtained currency across a vast spectrum, gaining a particularly powerful hold over social, cultural, and political imaginaries across the long nineteenth century. Its meaning never truly fixed, the woman-slave analogy has provoked reflection as much as a sense of misunderstanding and frustration. Since historians and other scholars continue to struggle with the legacy and implications of analogy in feminist thought, these questions remain as relevant as ever today.

The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements offers a reappraisal of the woman-slave analogy, a rhetorical device that has provoked the interest and astonishment of historians and feminist theorists since the 1970s. At the center of such evaluations have been incisive examinations of how this comparison was, at best, structurally untenable, and at worst, deeply racist. Prior to the twentieth century, however, the validity of such claims was rarely—if ever—explored thoroughly.¹ Was the universal “woman” enslaved, or was she not? Preoccupied with this question, many reformers asked themselves: How could she be emancipated? To answer in the affirmative was to support social reform and perhaps even the radical transformation of society. But to deny the slavery of woman was often to uphold the legal, political, and social status quo, from chattel slavery to women’s subjugation. Too many theorists and commentators across the centuries have embraced discourses of slavery to analyze the condition of women for historians to dismiss the woman-slave analogy as a rhetorical impasse.

The woman-slave analogy gained particular prominence in the United States during the antebellum era, prior to the Civil War. It proliferated in a culture dominated by the antislavery movement and the “Sisterhood of Reforms”—a term that encapsulated the deep connections between antebellum social movements—to produce a worldview premised on the idea that the position of women was no better nor any freer than that of enslaved people of African descent.² The women’s rights reformer Paulina Wright Davis, for example, believed that the “analogy that exists between the conditions of women, and of the negro race in the United States, is so close, that slavery and caste apply to the one as well as to the other.”³ Such statements, however, must almost always be read with the invisible adjective white as a preface to the noun woman. But the woman-slave analogy also became enmeshed in an impulse that unified these social movements: first to identify and then to eliminate all forms of oppression. It was in this context that many reformers unreflectively described different forms of oppression as different states of “slavery.” However, both the critics and the architects of the status quo embraced comparable rhetoric. For proslavery ideologues, lawmakers, and other commentators, the specter of emancipation—for either enslaved people or women—implied the overhaul and inversion of the social fabric. A woman-as-slave worldview thus influenced a diversity of perspectives toward the woman question.

This book is the first to develop a history of the woman-slave analogy in the United States, exploring its changing meanings and implications across nineteenth-century social movements. It analyzes the ideological foundations of this rhetoric alongside the competing political projects to which it was dedicated. By tracing the transformation of the woman-slave analogy across the long nineteenth century, this book considers how and why various reformers and their contemporaries embraced or rejected a woman-as-slave worldview. In doing so, it places the ideas of those who supported women’s rights alongside those who did not. Many of the white reformers who mobilized the woman-slave analogy articulated racist, nativist, and elitist sentiments, yet others—both simultaneously and paradoxically—used this rhetoric to express a growing awareness of the connections between gender, race, and class. And those who questioned the validity of this rhetoric anticipated the conclusions of later scholarship. The woman-slave analogy emerges as a radical but fundamentally imperiled theoretical framework for debating the woman question.

The Politics of Analogy

In 1977, historian William H. Chafe remarked: “Probably no analogy has been used more frequently by both scholars and women’s rights advocates than that between sex and race.”⁴ For at least two decades prior, scholars and intellectuals across a variety of humanities disciplines, from history and literature to political science, had intermittently reflected on the politics of espousing an analogy between sex and race—or its earlier incarnation, woman and slave. Some accepted the logic of each analogy. Building on the work of Joseph K. Folsom and Gunnar Myrdal (who, in 1944, had described women’s oppression as “A Parallel to the Negro Problem”), an influential 1951 article by Helen Hacker systematically codified what she perceived as the similarities and differences between women and African Americans, finding the relationship to be “historical, as well as analogical.”⁵ Most later scholars developed a far more critical approach. This was a crucial intervention, given that the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the re-emergence of the sex-race analogy amongst feminist activists and women’s liberationists.

Key figures responded to the debate by condemning the use of analogy, especially in the emerging fields of women’s history and African-American history.⁶ Chafe appreciated the need to focus on the diversity amongst women as much as their commonalities as a class. The analogy with race, he averred, had been—and could continue to be—productive to the extent that it illuminated parallels that would expose the nature of social control. The sex-race analogy might therefore be a catalyst for instigating social change.⁷ Other historians, however, became too preoccupied with women’s commonalities as women—sometimes with little to no attention to the effects of diversity or free versus enslaved status. This coincided with a particular interest being espoused among many emerging feminist historians: to recover the lives of their nineteenth-century foremothers, from abolitionists and women’s rights reformers to suffragists. Blanche Glassman Hersh, for example, described the “double connotation” of what she termed the “slavery of sex,” a rhetorical phenomenon she observed amongst abolitionist women. But her analysis took these women’s proclamations far too literally and uncritically. This concept, Hersh argued, was used in “feminist-abolitionist rhetoric to denote the parallel positions of women and slaves: black women were enslaved by chains and codes; all women were the slaves of creed and custom, imprisoned within the traditional concept of woman’s sphere.”⁸

Pioneer feminist historian Gerda Lerner presented the misuse of analogy as an ethical dilemma for feminist historians. This was a crucial methodological intervention for the analysis of nineteenth-century women reformers, as the archival recovery of their lives revealed that their embrace of the woman-slave analogy had been prolific. Lerner herself was an early biographer of Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké, the sisters from South Carolina, who had become influential abolitionists and women’s rights reformers during the 1830s. Both embraced the woman-slave analogy with vigor, making Lerner all too aware of their particular rhetorical proclivities. The “slave comparison,” as she described it, “obviously was a rhetorical device ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Women’s Rights, Feminism, and the Politics of Analogy
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Back Matter