Who Can Change the World?: Gendered Agency and Non-Resistance in American Abolitionism

Abstract

In her memoir Eighty Years and More, Elizabeth Cady Stanton traces her feminist awakening to London in 1840, when the World’s Antislavery Convention fell into disarray over whether to allow female delegates from the United States to be seated alongside their male counterparts. Despite the central role women had played in the advancement of abolitionism, British and American abolitionists alike argued vehemently against women’s inclusion in the convention. As an observer pointed out, “it appears that we are prepared to sanction ladies in the employment of all means, so long as they are confessedly unequal with ourselves.” This “woman question,” as they called it, was new to British abolitionism, but it had been alive in American for years. The conflict that inspired Stanton’s activism was merely the aftermath of a contentious schism in America’s national antislavery organization earlier that year. This schism divided abolitionists into two camps: political abolitionists, who opposed women’s participation, and nonresistant abolitionists, who advocated for women in the movement. Although both groups remained deeply committed to the cause, their methods and philosophies diverged sharply in the years that followed.

Historians attribute this schism to two insoluble disagreements: the question of requiring political participation at the ballot box, and “the woman question,” a stand in for conflicts over women’s place in abolition and in society. These issues are often presented as two parallel but separate conflicts that worked to divide the movement. Indeed, as abolitionists relitigated the split at the World’s Antislavery Convention in London, the various speakers could not even come to an agreement over the true cause of separation, with Wendell Phillips maintaining it was the question of political action, and James Birney blaming it on the distracting “the woman question.”  However, upon inspection of abolitionist newspapers and published letters between abolitionists, a cohesive ideological divide emerges that unifies these disparate conflicts. As political abolitionists embraced a gendered ideology of political agency and social change, influenced by the mythos of the American Revolution, they redefined abolitionism as a fight rightfully led those who already had the vote. Nonresistant abolitionists, however, defined abolitionism as a moral battle for the nation’s soul – one that could be fought by any moral agent, regardless of their political agency. Thus, political abolitionists promoted political action at the ballot box but excluded women as agents of change in the movement, while nonresistants extended full rights to women within their organizations but eschewed politics entirely. Put succinctly, the abolition movement fractured over the question of how to change the world, and consequently, who had the power to change it. To understand the gendered concept of political agency that defined this conflict, I will engage with the intertwined concepts of virtue, race, and gender in American discourse in the antebellum period.