R eaders familiar with Susanna Rowson as the author of Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) do not think of her as an abolitionist. But in 1805 Rowson articulated an anti-slavery position in Universal Geography, a textbook addressed to schoolgirls such as those she herself taught at the Young Ladies Academy in Boston. Condemning those who viewed sugar and slavery as a winning equation that would make them rich, Rowson denounced the "purchase and sale of human beings," and insisted that anyone "enlightened by reason and religion" would oppose the "horrid trade," and see it as she did, as "a disgrace to humanity." 1 At other points in the text, she condemned both the slave drivers in the West Indies, who "exercise[d] the most unpardonable barbarity and tyranny" over "unresisting sufferers," and North American slave owners, whose characters, she argued, registered the obvious negative effects of their immoral practice. 2 It is worth asking how Rowson arrived at this position, particularly because an anti-slavery stance is not recognized as part of her political vision and seems at odds with less progressive perspectives expressed elsewhere. Though her concern with gender persists throughout her career, Rowson's feminism does not for the most part appear to be marked by questions about the intersections of gender, race and power, questions which became important in the mid-nineteenth-century women's movements around abolition, and which thoroughly reshaped late twentieth-century feminisms. The limits of Rowson's feminism, particularly around issues of difference including race and class, have been noted. Marion Rust, for example, describes her "ostracism," her "determined reluctance" to represent the world from the perspective of any disempowered individuals other than the young white women to whom she wrote, and Laura Doyle argues that Rowson is
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