Anti‐Slavery and Feminism in Nineteenth‐Century Britain

In seeking to demand equal rights with men while revaluing the ’feminine’ and to foster political alliances among women whose present positions are manifestly unequal, contemporary feminists confront difficult dilemmas. In this essay I bring a historical perspective to bear on these issues through an exploration of women’s participation in the British anti-slavery movement and its links to the development of feminism in the period between the 1780s and the 1860s. Drawing on my research into women anti-slavery campaigners in Britain, I explore two different but interrelated boundaries which women’s involvement in anti-slavery created both opportunities for, and obstacles to, crossing.’ The first boundary separated the private circles of homes and families from the public and political arenas outside; it was a gender-based boundary which women abolitionists and feminists attempted in various ways to cross.2 The second boundary divided women by assigning them to different and unequal social categories; separating white from black and ‘free’ from enslaved, it was a racially defined boundary which female antislavery campaigners attempted to some extent to challenge.3 This essay is arranged in four sections. In the first I trace the uneven development of the link between anti-slavery and feminism in Britain. In the following sections I successively explore the meanings of the terminology of ‘duties’ and ‘rights’, of feminine ’privilege’, and of sisterhood in which white middle-class British women abolitionists couched their opposition to the enslavement of black women. Finally, I discuss some of the issues this study raises concerning ‘maternalist’ and ’egalitarian’ strands in both abolitionism and feminism. In exploring these issues the essay as a whole raises questions about the nature of feminism, the meanings of sisterhood, and the precise historical interconnections between domestic and colonial politics and ideology.