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‘Slavery is … Allied to the Injustice to Women’: Morality, Equality and Citizenship

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Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education
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Abstract

This chapter studies Bodichon’s viewpoint on the questions of slavery and women’s suffrage. I begin with a discussion of her most salient writings on these themes. The chapter moves on to explore, in line with Bildung’s idea of travelling as sources of self-alienation, the role travel letters between Bodichon and her family and friends played in providing her with a site for articulating her learning as effected by the encounter with the unknown in America. Next, I explore the fundamental role letters played in the development of the first campaign in favour of women’s suffrage, in terms of logistics and as feminist platforms. I suggest that letters permitted Bodichon to contribute to this campaign from wherever she was. Notwithstanding, demonstrating the limits of Bildung’s notion of self-alienation as read through the lens of Foucault’s concept of power, throughout this chapter I tease out the problematic implications of Bodichon’s resulting (feminist) viewpoints.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bodichon’s diary-letters to her family, Baltic Steamer, Mississippi, 11 December [1857], in An American Diary 1857–1858, ed. by Joseph W. Reed, 63, London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1972.

  2. 2.

    Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Educational Place and Space: The Unconventional Education of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891)’, History of Education Researcher 89 (May 2012): 7–17.

  3. 3.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘The Eighteenth Century’ (1796–1797), 81f, reprinted in Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. by Marianne Cowan, 127, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963.

  4. 4.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘[unknown title]’ (1797), reprinted in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, ed. by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel, Vol. 1, 343, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960–1981, quoted in Christoph Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory of Bildung Dedicated to Wolfgang Klafki for his 70th Birthday’, Journal of Curriculum Studies 30/1 (1998): 43–60.

  5. 5.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (c.1791–1792), reprinted in The Limits of State Action, ed. by John W. Burrow, 72, Indianapolis: Liverty Fund, 1993.

  6. 6.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, [unknown title] (n.d.), reprinted in Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 13, 188, Berlin: B. Behr, 1903–1920, quoted in David Sorkin, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810’, Journal of the History of Ideas 44/1 (1983): 55–73.

  7. 7.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘[unknown title]’ (1792), reprinted in Humboldt, Werke in Fünf Bänden, Vol. 1, 64, explained in Lüth, ‘On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Theory’, 53.

  8. 8.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘History of the Fall and Decline of the Greek City States’ (1807–1808), 188–218, in Cowan (ed.), Humanist Without Portfolio, 81.

  9. 9.

    Especially in On the Study of Antiquity and Especially the Greeks, published in German in 1793, John W. Burrow, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Burrow (ed.), The Limits of State Action, xxxviii.

  10. 10.

    Sorkin, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt’, 59–60.

  11. 11.

    Josef Bleicher, ‘Bildung’, Theory Culture Society 23 (2006): 364–5.

  12. 12.

    Jan Masschelein and Norbert Ricken, ‘Do We (Still) Need the Concept of Bildung?’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 35/2 (2003): 139–54.

  13. 13.

    Lars Løvlie and Paul Standish, ‘Introduction: Bildung and the Idea of a Liberal Education’, in Educating Humanity: Bildung in Postmodernity, ed. by Lars Løvlie, Klaus P. Mortensen and Sven E. Nordenbo, 6, 10–1, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

  14. 14.

    Paul Standish, ‘Preface’, in Løvlie, Mortensen and Nordenbo (eds.), Educating Humanity: Bildung in Postmodernity, vii.

  15. 15.

    Øivind. Varkøy, ‘The Concept of Bildung’, Philosophy of Music Education Review 18/1 (2010): 85–96.

  16. 16.

    Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978–1988); Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980). For a more detailed explanation see Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Bildung: Education, Feminism and Agency in Letters’, in Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte un/diszipliniert? Aktuelle Beiträge aus der jungen Forschung, ed. by Alexia Bumbaris et al, 41–65, Innsbruck, Studien Verlag, 2016; Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing: Her Epistolary Articulation of Bildung’, History of Education 45/3 (2016): 285–303.

  17. 17.

    Her American letters were published in 1972: Reed (ed.), An American Diary.

  18. 18.

    Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Of Those who are the Property of Others, and of the Great Power that Holds Others as Property’, The English Woman’s Journal 10/60 (February 1863): 370–81.

  19. 19.

    Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Slavery in America’, The English Woman’s Journal, 2/8 (October 1858): 94–100.

  20. 20.

    Bodichon, ‘Of Those who are the Property of Others’, 374.

  21. 21.

    Eugène Bodichon, Considérations sur l’Algérie (Paris, 1845) and De l’humanité (Bruxelles, 1866). For an in-depth discussion of the ethnic categories and cultural distinctions that underpinned French colonial discourse in Algeria (including Dr Bodichon’s contribution to it) see Patricia M.E. Lorcin, Imperial Identities. Stereotyping, Prejudice and Race in Colonial Algeria (London, New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1995).

  22. 22.

    Bodichon, ‘Slavery in America’, 98.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 99.

  24. 24.

    Ibid.

  25. 25.

    Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Slavery in the South Part III’, The English Woman’s Journal 8/46 (December 1861): 261–6.

  26. 26.

    Bodichon, ‘Slavery in America’, 97.

  27. 27.

    Bodichon, ‘Slavery in the South’, 265.

  28. 28.

    Bodichon, ‘Slavery in America’, 96.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 97.

  30. 30.

    Ibid.

  31. 31.

    Bodichon, ‘Of Those who are the Property of Others’, 379.

  32. 32.

    In order to back her arguments, in another article she resorted to quoting and discussing influential thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer and comparing the political rights of women in Austria and Sweden, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Authorities and Precedents for Giving the Suffrage to Qualified Women’, The Englishwoman’s Review 2 (January 1867), 63–72, reprinted in Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, ed. by Candida A. Lacey, 118–32, New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.

  33. 33.

    Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Great Unrepresented’, Blackwood’s Magazine 100 (September, 1866): 367–79.

  34. 34.

    In 1873 she published another article in the form of a dialogue between a man and a woman with a view to putting forward her arguments in favour of women’s suffrage and neutralizing prejudices against it: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘A Conversation on the Enfranchisement of Female Freeholders and Householders’, The Englishwoman’s Review 14 (April 1873): 105–11, reprinted in Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, 133–8.

  35. 35.

    Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women (London: Chambers of the Social Science Association, 1866), reprinted in Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, 104–11.

  36. 36.

    Bodichon, Reasons for, 105.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 109.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Objections to the Enfranchisement of Women Considered (London: J. Bale, 1866), reprinted in Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, 112–7.

  40. 40.

    Bodichon, Reasons for, 107.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 108.

  42. 42.

    Ibid.

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Ibid.

  45. 45.

    Ibid.

  46. 46.

    Ibid.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 109–10.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 108.

  49. 49.

    Bodichon, ‘Authorities’, 122.

  50. 50.

    Bodichon, Reasons for, 110.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 111.

  52. 52.

    Bodichon, Objections, 112.

  53. 53.

    Ibid, 113.

  54. 54.

    Ibid.

  55. 55.

    Ibid, 114.

  56. 56.

    Ibid, 115.

  57. 57.

    Ibid.

  58. 58.

    Ibid.

  59. 59.

    Ibid, 116.

  60. 60.

    Ibid.

  61. 61.

    Bodichon, Reasons for, 111.

  62. 62.

    Bodichon, Objections, 117.

  63. 63.

    Kristi Siegel, ‘Intersections: Women’s Travel and Theory’, in Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. by Kristi Siegel, 2, New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

  64. 64.

    Frédéric Regard, (ed.), British Narratives of Exploration. Case Studies of the Self and Other (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 4.

  65. 65.

    Siegel, ‘Intersections’, 7.

  66. 66.

    Ruth Y. Jenkins, ‘The Gaze of the Victorian Woman Traveler: Spectacles and Phenomena’, in Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, 15.

  67. 67.

    Jenkins, ‘The Gaze of the Victorian Woman Traveler’, 17, 19; Siegel, ‘Intersections’, 3–4.

  68. 68.

    Sukanya Banerjee, ‘Lady Mary Montagu and the “Boundaries” of Europe’, in Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, 36.

  69. 69.

    Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters: Performative Self-Formation in Epistolary Narratives’ Women’s History Review 22/2 (2013): 225–38; Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing’, 10.

  70. 70.

    Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 235–9.

  71. 71.

    Bodichon to Julia Smith, [Austria, 1850], Burton, Barbara Bodichon, 33.

  72. 72.

    Diary-letters, [New Orleans], 27 December [1857], Reed (ed.), An American Diary, 72.

  73. 73.

    Ibid.

  74. 74.

    Ibid.

  75. 75.

    Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, 6; Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing’, 9–14.

  76. 76.

    Diary-letters, [New Orleans], 27 December [1857], Reed (ed.), An American Diary, 72.

  77. 77.

    Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, 6; Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing’, 9–17.

  78. 78.

    Diary-letters, [New Orleans], 11 February [1858], Reed (ed.), An American Diary, 99. See Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, 9; Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing’, 13.

  79. 79.

    Diary-letters, [New Orleans], 11 February [1858], Reed (ed.), An American Diary, 99.

  80. 80.

    Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s Travel Letters’, 8–9; Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing’, 12–6, 18.

  81. 81.

    Siegel, ‘Intersections’, 5.

  82. 82.

    See, for example, Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974); Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery. The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Christine Bolt, Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings. The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  83. 83.

    Kristi Siegel, ‘Women’s Travel and the Rhetoric of Peril: It is Suicide to be Abroad’, in Siegel (ed.), Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, 55–72.

  84. 84.

    Bodichon’s diary-letters to her family, Baltic Steamer, Mississippi, 11 December [1857], in Reed (ed.), An American Diary, 60–3.

  85. 85.

    Janet G. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 117–8, 122.

  86. 86.

    Elizabeth J. MacArthur, Extravagant Narratives: Closure and Dynamics in the Epistolary Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3–9, 31–2.

  87. 87.

    Altman, Epistolarity, 122.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., 123.

  89. 89.

    Ibid.

  90. 90.

    Ibid.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 123–4.

  92. 92.

    Gerrit Loots, Kathleen Coppens and Jasmina Sermijn, ‘Practising a Rhizomatic Perspective in Narrative Research’, in Doing Narrative Research, ed. by Molly Andrews, Corinne Squire and Maria Tamboukou, 117–9, London: Sage, 2008.

  93. 93.

    For a history of the postal service in the United States, see, for example, Wayne E. Fuller, The American Mail. Enlarger of the common Life (Chicago and London, Chicago University Press, 1972).

  94. 94.

    Mathew Davenport-Hill to Bodichon, 8 September 1859, Cambridge University, Girton College Archives, Girton College Personal Papers (GCPP) Bodichon 12/7. I have not succeeded in securing permission to quote from this letter.

  95. 95.

    Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Slave Preaching’, The English Woman’s Journal 5/25 (March 1860): 42–8.

  96. 96.

    Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing’, 13.

  97. 97.

    For example, Bodichon to Dorothea Dix, Loch Long Scotland, 18 August 1858, Harvard University, Houghton Library, Dorothea Lynde Dix Papers 1802–1887, MS Am 1838, Box 2 Folder 65.

  98. 98.

    See, for example, Bodichon to Caroline Dall, Alger, Afrique, February 1862, Massachusetts Historical Society, Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers.

  99. 99.

    Bodichon to Emily Blackwell, [Algeria], 11–13 February 1862, Harvard University, Schlesinger Library, Elizabeth Blackwell Collection, Box 13 Folder 185.

  100. 100.

    See, for example, Bodichon to Caroline Dall, 5 Blandford Square, London, 21 June [early 1860s], Massachusetts Historical Society, Caroline Wells Healey Dall Papers.

  101. 101.

    Bodichon to Evans, [Algeria], 26 April [1859], Yale University, Beinecke Library, George Eliot and George Lewes Collection, Box 7.

  102. 102.

    David A. Gerber, ‘Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self-Presentation in Personal Correspondence’, Journal of Social History 39/2 (2005): 315–30.

  103. 103.

    Gerber, ‘Acts of Deceiving’, 327.

  104. 104.

    Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Letter Exchange in the Life of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon: The First Female Suffrage Committee in Britain Seen through her Correspondence’, in Exchanges and Correspondence. The Construction of Feminism, ed. by Claudette Fillard and Francoise Orazi, 188–213, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020.

  105. 105.

    Bodichon to ‘Aunty’ [Dorothy Longden], New Orleans, Saturday, 26 December [1857], in Reed (ed.), An American Diary, 73.

  106. 106.

    Pam Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), 16–7, 216.

  107. 107.

    Simon-Martin, ‘Letter Exchange in the Life of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’, 188–213.

  108. 108.

    Ibid.

  109. 109.

    Bodichon to Helen Taylor, Society for Promoting the Employment of Women In connexion with The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 19, Langham Place, London, W., 9 May 1866, London School of Economics, Mill-Taylor Collection 12/40.

  110. 110.

    Helen Taylor to Bodichon, 9 May 1866, London School of Economics, Mill-Taylor Collection 12/41 (draft version) and Papers of Barbara McCrimmon related to Barbara Bodichon, 7/BMC/B1, Women’s Library (most probably the sent version).

  111. 111.

    Bodichon to Helen Taylor, 20, Upper Berkeley Street, W., [May 1866], Mill-Taylor Collection 12/43.

  112. 112.

    Bodichon to Helen Taylor, Society for Promoting the Employment of Women In connexion with The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 19, Langham Place, London, W., 9 May 1866, London School of Economics, Mill-Taylor Collection 12/40.

  113. 113.

    Helen Taylor to Bodichon, 9 May 1866, London School of Economics, Mill-Taylor Collection 12/41 (draft version) and Papers of Barbara McCrimmon related to Barbara Bodichon, 7/BMC/B1, Women’s Library (most probably the sent version).

  114. 114.

    See Duncan Campbell-Smith, Masters of the Post. The Authorized History of the Royal Mail (London: Penguin, 2011).

  115. 115.

    Christopher Browne, Getting the Message. The Story of the British Post Office (London: Alan Sutton, 1993), 21.

  116. 116.

    Marie-Françoise Berneron-Couvenhes, ‘La concession des services maritimes postaux au XIXe siècle. Le cas exemplaire des Messageries Maritimes’, Revue économique 58 (2007/1): 259–76; Marie-Françoise Berneron- Couvenhes, ‘French Mail Contracts with Private Steamship Companies, 1835–1914’, Business and Economic History Online 2 (2004): 1–9; John Perry, ‘Marrying the Orient and the Occident: Shipping and Commerce between France and Algeria, 1830–1914’, MA dissertation, Ohio State University, 2011; Annick Lacroix, ‘La Poste au douar. Usagers non citoyens et Etat colonial dans les campagnes algériennes de la fin du XIXe siècle a la Seconde Guerre mondiale’, Annales HSS 3 (juillet-septembre 2016): 711–39.

  117. 117.

    Bodichon to Evans, Algeria, 21 November/8 December 1856, Beinecke, Box 7. See Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘“More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express”: Barbara Bodichon’s Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self-Projections’ Gender & History 24/3 (2012): 581–99.

  118. 118.

    Bodichon, ‘Slave Preaching’, 43.

  119. 119.

    Jennifer M. Saul, Feminism. Issues and Arguments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 269.

  120. 120.

    Ibid.

  121. 121.

    Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Plan for a Comparative Anthropology’ (1795), 380f, in Cowan (ed.), Humanist Without Portfolio, 125.

  122. 122.

    Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse’ (1986), reprinted in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, 51–80, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.

  123. 123.

    Ana Marcela Montanaro Mena, Una mirada al feminismo decolonial en América Latina (Madrid: Dykison, 2017), 98.

  124. 124.

    For a discussion of the ethnocentrism of hegemonic feminism within postcolonial theory see also, for example, Mohanty, Russo and Torres (eds.) Third World Women; Trinh T. Minh-ha (ed.) ‘She, the Impropriate/d Other’ (special issue), Discourse, 8, Fall-Winter (1986–1987): 1–128; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1987); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313, Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1988; Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, Dialogue and Difference. Feminisms Challenge Globalization (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005). For a discussion of the ethnocentrism of hegemonic feminism within Latin-American decolonial theory see, for example, Liliana Suárez Navaz and Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo (eds.), Descolonizando el feminismo. Teorías y prácticas desde los márgenes (Valencia: Cátedra Ediciones, 2008); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010); Karina Bidaseca and Vanesa Vázquez Laba (eds.), Feminismos y poscolonialidad. Descolonizando el feminismo desde y en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Godot, 2011); Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Diana Marcela Gómez Correal and Karina Ochoa Muñoz (eds.), Tejiendo de otro modo. Feminismo, epistemología y apuestas descoloniales en Abya Yala (Poyapán: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2014); Karina Bidaseca (ed.), Feminismos y poscolonialidad 2 (Buenos Aires: Godot, 2016).

  125. 125.

    Bodichon, ‘Of Those who are the Property of Others’, 89.

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Simon-Martin, M. (2020). ‘Slavery is … Allied to the Injustice to Women’: Morality, Equality and Citizenship. In: Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41441-2_6

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