All reform depends upon you: Femininity, authority, and the politics of authorship in women's antislavery fiction, 1821--1861

In this dissertation, I argue that fiction provided white antislavery and proslavery women writers with a significant public space in which to articulate their ideas about the need to destroy (or uphold) the institution of slavery. 1 Living in a culture that often discouraged white, middle-class women from extensive public commentary on "political" subjects and virtually excluded women from public platforms, these activists turned to fiction as an appropriately "feminine" means of offering sustained reflections about slavery and abolition. This dissertation also argues that white antislavery and proslavery women writers' fiction offered a problematic but nonetheless significant challenge to the racial and gendered order of the antebellum era. Representing their enslaved female characters as virtuous citizens and faithful anti- and proslavery advocates, these writers questioned a social order that unrelentingly subordinated such women to (morally inferior) white men. Finally, in this project I maintain that proslavery and antislavery women writers articulated and developed a unique form of difference feminism in their fiction. In their stories and novels, these authors insisted that morally clear-sighted women's (and not morally unsound men's) ideals needed to shape public policies and political decisions about slavery. Getting their male family members and friends to think rightly on the slave question effectively would ensure that these men would fight for its continuation, without women themselves having to become involved in the actual business of politics.;1Throughout this dissertation, the terms "antislavery" and "abolitionist" are used interchangeably. Each historian working on abolitionism and the antislavery movement uses these terms differently, with some (as I have chosen to do here) using them synonymously, and others using the terms to make arguments about different groups within the fight to end slavery. In his 2003 monograph Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and Antislavery Politics, for example, Michael Pierson uses "antislavery" to describe more socially conservative, politically oriented members of the movement and "abolitionist" to indicate more radical individuals. That distinction is not one that I am drawing upon here. See Michael Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).