Slavery in the International Women's Movement, 1832–1914: Memory Work and the Legacy of Abolitionism (Slaveries since Emancipation)

By: Sophie van den Elzen

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Synopsis: In this book, Sophie van den Elzen shows how advocates for women's rights, in the absence of their 'own' history, used the antislavery movement as a historical reference point and model. Through a detailed analysis of a wide range of sources produced over the span of almost a century, including novels, journals, speeches, pamphlets, and posters, van den Elzen reveals how the women's movement gradually diverged from a position of solidarity with the enslaved into one of opposition, based on hierarchical assumptions about class and race. This inclusive cultural survey provides a new understanding of the ways in which the cultural memory of Anglo-American antislavery was imported and adapted across Europe and the Atlantic world, and it breaks new ground in studying the “woman-slave analogy” from a longitudinal and transnational comparative perspective. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.