5 Immediatism, Dissent, and Gender: Women and the Sentimentalization of Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Appeals

Abstract

This chapter distinguishes between anti-slavery arguments developed by dissenting women in Britain and America between the 1790s and the 1850s. While women on both sides of the Atlantic asserted the propriety of their intervention in anti-slavery discourse, British women working in the tradition of rational dissent began, in the 1790s, by arguing that abstention from the consumption of slave-made goods would have an economic impact that would undermine the profitability of slavery and thus bring about its demise. American women instead emphasized their concerns with moral purification to which their abstention would testify, thereby setting a religious example for the necessary conversion that would speed the ending of slavery. Ultimately, the sentimentalization of women's anti-slavery discourse dominated, leaving behind the economic arguments of the early rational dissenters.

Women and Abolitionism in the United States: Recent Historiography

“… Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism , 4; Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling , 134–170; Sánchez‐Eppler, Touching Liberty , 21; and Lasser, “Immediatism, Dissent, and Gender,” in Clapp and Jeffrey, Women, Dissent and Anti‐Slavery , 111–131.…”

“… Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism , 134–150 and 169–170; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence , 46–47; Lasser, “Immediatism, Dissent, and Gender,” 111–113; and Jeffrey, Great Silent Army , 14–52.…”