Nevertheless, women’s activism grew more intense over the next two decades, making the abolitionist movement a much stronger and more ramifying entity on the eve of the Civil War. In 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society divided over women’s role in the movement, with some conservative reformers refusing to support female lecturers or leaders. Yet even some male abolitionists were chagrined by women’s activism before the Civil War. The Southern Literary Messenger referred to abolitionist women as “politicians in petticoats” who needlessly stirred up trouble on the slavery issue. Truth said that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.”īy the 1840s, black and white women served as antislavery lecturers, editors, fundraisers and organizers. After escaping to freedom in 1826, Sojourner Truth dedicated herself to the abolitionist cause. Lydia Maria Child, a popular writer, alienated many of her former fans with her 1833 Appeal in Favor of the Class of Americans Called Africans. By the next decade, American women led an array of abolitionist petition drives to state and federal governments, turning the antislavery cause itself into a hotly contested social matter. British and American women began writing abolitionist essays in the 1820s, making women’s roles much more visible in the antislavery struggle. But women’s involvement in the abolitionist movement changed drastically during the 1820s and 1830s, reorienting both antislavery activism and reform culture. Though they were not formally admitted to the earliest abolitionist societies in America, both black and white women shaped antislavery discourses by aiding fugitive slaves and circulating antislavery literature. Women were always an important part of the abolitionist movement in and beyond the United States. By owning control of her image–the “shadow”–Truth could “sell” herself to end slavery. The imprint on the verso features the sitter’s famous statement in bright red ink as well as a Michigan 1864 copyright in her name. Even though she never learned to read or write, abolitionist and escaped slave Sojourner Truth used her image to raise support for the anti-slavery movement. The temperance movement led to the 18th Amendment to the Constitution.
0 kommentar(er)
