By focusing on male leaders of the abolitionist movement,
historians have often overlooked the great grassroots army of women
who also fought to eliminate slavery. Here, Julie Roy Jeffrey
explores the involvement of ordinary women--black and white--in the
most significant reform movement prior to the Civil War. She offers
a complex and compelling portrait of antebellum women's activism,
tracing its changing contours over time.
For more than three decades, women raised money, carried petitions,
created propaganda, sponsored lecture series, circulated
newspapers, supported third-party movements, became public
lecturers, and assisted fugitive slaves. Indeed, Jeffrey says,
theirs was the day-to-day work that helped to keep abolitionism
alive. Drawing from letters, diaries, and institutional records,
she uses the words of ordinary women to illuminate the meaning of
abolitionism in their lives, the rewards and challenges that their
commitment provided, and the anguished personal and public steps
that abolitionism sometimes demanded they take. Whatever their
position on women's rights, argues Jeffrey, their abolitionist
activism was a radical step--one that challenged the political and
social status quo as well as conventional gender norms.