Slavery in the International Women's Movement, 1832–1914

Memory Work and the Legacy of Abolitionism

Sophie van den Elzen

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009411912
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this book, Sophie van den Elzen shows how advocates for women's rights, in the absence of their 'own' history, used the antislavery movement as a historical reference point and model. Through a detailed analysis of a wide range of sources produced over the span of almost a century, including novels, journals, speeches, pamphlets, and posters, van den Elzen reveals how the women's movement gradually diverged from a position of solidarity with the enslaved into one of opposition, based on hierarchical assumptions about class and race. This inclusive cultural survey provides a new understanding of the ways in which the cultural memory of Anglo-American antislavery was imported and adapted across Europe and the Atlantic world, and it breaks new ground in studying the "woman-slave analogy" from a longitudinal and transnational comparative perspective. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Reviews
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 From Transnational Movement to Global Memory: Abolitionism and the Culture of Reform
• 2 Fictions, 1832–1852: Sentimental Antislavery and the Sisterhood
• 3 Archives, c. 1848: Parisian Calls for ‘Universal Emancipation’
• 4 Periodicals, 1866–1914: Slavery and the Woman Question
• 5 Histories, 1881–1914: Feminist Internationalists and the Antislavery Origin Myth
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index