Abstract
Maria Weston Chapman and her sisters disliked speaking in public, but found a natural outlet in writing and publishing their opposition to slavery. Creative writing is a liberating experience, suitable for female abolitionists who were unable or disinclined to take part in public life, and anti-slavery writing became a personal, existential quest for liberty by sensitive and introspective women. Countless numbers wrote novels, poems and tracts demanding abolition and, later, political privilege, but a good writer needs training, and the gifted Westons were well suited to the task.
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Notes
R. Thompson, ‘The Liberty Bell and other Anti-Slavery Gift Books’, New England Quarterly 7, (1934) 154–68; N. Canaday, ‘The Anti-Slavery Novel Prior to 1852 and Hildreth’s ‘The Slave’ (1836)’, College Language Association Journal 17, pt 2 (Dec. 1973) 175–91; K. Sanchez-Eppler, ‘Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition’, Representations 24 (Fall 1988) 28–59.
J.G. Whittier fell out with Maria Weston Chapman and would not write for her, but Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote four poems and J.R. Lowell eleven, including his sonnet, ‘O thou great friend to all the sons of man’ (1846). Henry Longfellow wrote at least one poem, as did Maria Lowell and Samuel Longfellow, minor poets, and T.W. Higginson, a literary and political agitator. See Thompson, ‘The Liberty Bell and other Anti-slavery Gift Books’, 164–5.
Eliza Follen is remembered for her ‘Three little kittens’. See J.R. Oldfield, ‘Anti-Slavery Sentiment in Children’s Literature, 1750–1850’, Slavery and Abolition 10, (May 1989).
See The Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child ed. M. Meltzer and P. Holland, (Amherst, Mass., 1980); L. Chambers-Schiller, ‘A Good Work among the People’ in Yellin and Van Horne, Turning the World Upside Down, op. cit.
Not until the Grimké sisters began work with Theodore Weld on Slavery as it Is. The Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1840) did American women reach the standards set by Harriet Martineau and Mme de Staël. See B. Fladeland, Abolitionists and Working Class Problems in the Age of Industrialization [Harriet Martineau] (London, 1984); M. Berger ed., Mme de Staël on Politics, Literature and National Character (London, 1964).
C.M. Eckhardt, Fanny Wright in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1984); M. Lane, Frances Wright and the Great Experiment (Manchester, 1972); E. Brigland, The Indomitable Mrs Trollope (London, 1953).
B. Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth; Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (Old Westbury, NY, 1974); C. Capper, ‘Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer. The Conversations in Boston’, American Quarterly 39 (1987) 491–528. Margaret Fuller’s book, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845) indicated her conversion to anti-slavery views.
F. Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline. The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia, 1941); M. Caskey, Chariot of Fire, Religion and the Beecher Family (New Haven, Conn., 1978); A. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Oxford, 1969); A. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1978).
K.J. Mussell, ‘Gothic Novels’ in M.T. Inge ed., Handbook of American Popular Culture (Westport, Conn., 1978); L. Bayer-Berenbaum, The Gothic Imagination (Associated University Presses, 1982); C.A. Howell, Love, Mystery and Misery, Feeling in Gothic Fiction (London, 1978); D. Punter, The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London, 1980); D.B. Davis, Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 (Ithaca, 1957); K. Halttunen, ‘Gothic Imagination and Social Reform. The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’, New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin ed. E. Sunquist, (Cambridge, 1986); J. Radway, ‘The Utopian Impulse in Popular Literature. Gothic Romances and Feminist Protest’, American Quarterly 33 (Summer 1981) no. 2, 140–62.
For Aphra Behn, the first woman to portray the black man, see Moira Ferguson ed., First Feminist; British Women Writers 1578–1799 (Bloomington, 1985); W. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings. British Anti-Slavery Literature of the 18th Century (Chapel Hill, 1942); D. Punter, The Literature of Terror; N.V. McCullough The Negro in English Literature (Ilfracombe, Devon, 1962).
S.P. Conrad, Perish the Thought. Intellectual Women in Romantic America 1830–50 (Secausus, NJ, 1976); E. Moers, Literary Women (New York, 1977); M. Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage, Literary Domesticity in 19th Century America (New York, 1985); J.F. Yellin, Women and Sisters. The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1989); J. Radway, ‘The Utopian Influence in Popular Literature’; B. Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’, American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966) 151–74; S. Samuels, ‘The Family, the State and the Novel in the Early Republic’, American Quarterly 38, (1986) 381–95; J. Dobson, ‘The Hidden Hand. Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three mid-19th Century American Women’s Novels’, American Quarterly 33 (1986) 223–41.
William Beckford and Matthew Gregory Lewis, West Indian nabobs, wrote Gothic novels. Beckford’s work linked ‘Gothic’ literature and architecture with West Indian wealth from slave-grown sugar: F. Peck, A Life of Matthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); B. Alexander, England’s Wealthiest Son [William Beckford] (London, 1962); B. Fothergill, Beckford of Fonthill (London, 1979). Ironically, early women’s colleges were also built in the Gothic style: L. Gordon, ‘Female Gothic. Writing the History of Women’s Colleges’, American Quarterly 37, (1985) 299–304.
N. Rance, The Historical Novel and Popular Politics in 19th Century England (London, 1975); E. Leisey, The American Historical Novel (Norman, Okla., 1950); Sir Walter Scott’s interest in the Gothic is seen in his historical novels; he courted literary Creoles like ‘Monk’ Lewis and George Ellis: D. Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London, 1970); C. Oman, The Wizard of the North. The Life of Sir Walter Scott (London, 1973).
Frances Greene wrote for the Envoy and the Liberty Chimes, anti-slavery annuals published in Rhode Island in the 1840s. See also B. Welter, ‘The Merchant’s Daughter: A Tale from Life’, New England Quarterly (March 1969) 3–32.
T. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Southern Methodist University Press, 1985); Eric Sundquist ed., New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Cambridge, 1985); G. Brown, ‘Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, American Quarterly 38, (1986) 668–74.
M.B. Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. B.A. Williams, (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); The Diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven, Conn., 1981); E. Muhlenfeld, Mary Boykin Chesnut (Louisiana, 1981).
R.D. Webb to S. May, 1858, in Taylor, British American Abolitionists, 429.
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© 1995 Clare Taylor
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Taylor, C. (1995). The Liberty Bell. In: Women of the Anti-Slavery Movement. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23766-1_6
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