Antislavery in the Transnational Movement for Women's Rights, 1832-1914: A Study of Memory Work

This is a study of the circulation of the cultural memory of colonial slavery and abolitionism in the nineteenth-century transnational movement for women’s rights. This dissertation studies French, Dutch, and German women’s rights discourse of the period 1832-1914 across various media and genres, including novels, periodical articles, and historiography. Drawing on these materials, it reconstructs how European women’s rights activists selectively appropriated representations and stories from the antislavery movement, and how they circulated and adapted these to serve political and movement-internal needs. This study builds on current theory in memory studies regarding processes of transnational memory and the agency involved in them. It suggests that internationally-oriented women’s rights advocates (feminist internationalists) performed memory work to create a transnationally shared usable past in which memories of antislavery played a significant part. This study shows that it was not just English and American, but also Continental European women’s rights advocates who made use of and promoted a sense of connection to this history. This new transnational lens demonstrates that the appropriation of the history of slavery and antislavery for this new cause was an active process which offered organizational and rhetorical advantages to women across the fledgling movement . Chapter 1 describes the cultural impact of the Anglo-American movement against slavery in the French, German, and Dutch contexts. It argues that motifs and narratives from this movement, and particularly women’s role in it, were important themes in the organized and ‘literary’ feminism of the 1830s and ‘40s. It shows how these themes play out in works of George Sand, Flora Tristan, and Luise Mühlbach. Chapter 2 studies the collaborations between English Quaker Anne Knight and French socialist Jeanne Deroin. It describes the memory work these women performed in the years around 1848. The chapter shows they worked together to assemble and circulate a cosmopolitan archive of memories of Garrisonian antislavery. Chapters 3 and 4 consider memory work as a collective process. Chapter 3 studies the memory of antislavery in Continental women’s rights periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century. It discerns five ‘nexuses’ of comparison and debate around which memory work was performed: the woman-slave nexus, woman-abolitionist nexus, class struggle nexus, racial difference nexus, and the white slave trade nexus. Chapter 4 describes the popularisation of the ‘antislavery origin myth’ among the international movement for suffrage. Using the relational databasing service Nodegoat, it shows the centrality of this narrative, which dated the origins of feminism back to the 1840 World Antislavery Convention, in a wave of transnational movement histories which appeared from 1881-1914, as well as other popular materials. Together, the chapters demonstrate the salience of antislavery to the transnational women’s rights movement. This rhetorical salience, however, was by no means rooted only in feelings of solidarity. Rejection of and hostility towards the cause of the (formerly) enslaved were also structural parts of this discourse. This study offers a story which is in equal parts about creative remembrance and structural forgetting, about transnational bridge-building and wilful exclusion.