“Degrading Servitude”: Free Labor, Chattel Slavery, and the Politics of Domesticity

Stevenson, Ana

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24467-5_5

Ana Stevenson⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

This chapter considers the many and competing ways in which women reformers embraced the woman-slave analogy to illuminate the many facets of women’s work, both within and beyond the home. Women labor reformers used this rhetoric to highlight the exploitation of wage-earning women. Some working women, however, rejected any comparison between their own condition and chattel slavery, whereas others embraced this comparison in order to reject labor exploitation in its many forms. Women’s rights reformers analyzed the confines of domesticity and the contested nature of women’s public presence in reform and the literary marketplace. African-American women, however, stressed the abuses of chattel slavery and the differing lived experiences of women of color. Following the abolition of chattel slavery, however, the exploitation of white women emerged at the center of ongoing debates about women’s work.

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Notes

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2.
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3.
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4.
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5.
Foner, “Free Labor,” 100–101.
6.
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7.
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8.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 67; Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xvii.
9.
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10.
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11.
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28.
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32.
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33.
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34.
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35.
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36.
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37.
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38.
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39.
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40.
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41.
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42.
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43.
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44.
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45.
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46.
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47.
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48.
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51.
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52.
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53.
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54.
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56.
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57.
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58.
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59.
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60.
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61.
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64.
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65.
Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolition: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
66.
Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), Chapter 6.
67.
Angelina Grimké to J.G. Whittier and Theodore Weld, 20 August 1837, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld, and Sarah Grimke, 1822–1844, Vol. II, eds. G.H. Barnes and D.L. Dumond (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965), 40.
68.
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69.
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70.
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71.
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73.
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74.
Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women’s Oppression,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 139; Foner, “Free Labor,” 108.
75.
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76.
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79.
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98.
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101.
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102.
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103.
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105.
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106.
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107.
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108.
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109.
Meditations, 57–58.
110.
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111.
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
112.
Thistle, From Marriage to the Market, 21–26.
113.
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114.
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115.
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116.
Many antislavery women boycotted slave-made goods in the hope of undermining the market for such southern produce while also instilling and enacting antislavery morals, see: Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolition, 20–21; Peterson, “Doers of the Word”, 120.
117.
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118.
Michael Stancliff, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State (New York: Routledge, 2011), 52–53.
119.
Peterson, “Doers of the Word”, 120–135.
120.
Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 45.
121.
Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 35.
122.
Ibid., 37.
123.
Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 8.
124.
Peterson, “Doers of the Word”, 48; Carleton Mabee, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 182.
125.
Phyllis Marynick Palmer, “White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 152.
126.
Painter, Sojourner Truth; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Revised Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999), 5, 11.
127.
Painter, Sojourner Truth, Chapter 18. See also: Mabee, Sojourner Truth.
128.
Teresa C. Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011), Chapter 3, 268, 94–95.
129.
“Women’s Rights Convention: Sojourner Truth,” Anti-Slavery Bugle, 21 June 1851.
130.
Ibid.
131.
Peterson, “Doers of the Word”, 54; Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit, 103–104.
132.
Sojourner Truth, Mob Convention in New York, 6–7 September 1853, HWS: I, 567–568.
133.
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 175–177; Jeffrey E. Smith, “‘Turning the World Upside Down’: The Life and Words of Frances Dana Gage,” in Feminist Frontiers: Women Who Shaped the Midwest, ed. Yvonne Johnson (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2010).
134.
“Reminiscences by Frances D. Gage: Sojourner Truth,” HWS: I, 115.
135.
Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit, 98; Painter, Sojourner Truth, 129, 169–175.
136.
Peterson, “Doers of the Word”, 50.
137.
Since 1849, Frances Dana Gage’s writings had appeared with regularity in Pittsburgh’s Saturday Visiter, ed. Jane Grey Swisshelm. Painter, Sojourner Truth, 121–124.
138.
“Reminiscences by Frances D. Gage: Sojourner Truth,” HWS: I, 115.
139.
Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit, 96–97; Caroline Field Levander, Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
140.
Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 52–55.
141.
“Reminiscences,” 115–117.
142.
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 171.
143.
Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 53.
144.
Painter, Sojourner Truth, 177.
145.
Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit, 100–102.
146.
Robert Smalls, American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission Interviews, South Carolina, 1863, in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 374–375.
147.
Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 93.
148.
Truth, American Equal Rights Association, 9 May 1867, HWS: II, 193–194.
149.
Zackodnik, Press, Platform, Pulpit, 119.
150.
Ibid., 110, 116–121.
151.
“Who Are Our Friends?” Revolution, 15 January 1868.
152.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897 (New York: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 254, 240–241.
153.
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 110–111; Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45.
154.
George Francis Train, The Great Epigram Campaign in Kansas: Championship of Women (Leavenworth: Prescott & Hume, 1867), 32. See: Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 93–101. “Rads” refers to the Radical Republicans who were sympathetic to antislavery principles and African American men’s enfranchisement.
155.
Parker Pillsbury, American Equal Rights Association, 10 May 1867, HWS: II, 220.
156.
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chapter 5.
157.
DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 118, 136; DuBois, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman,” 141–143.
158.
E.C.S., “Infanticide and Prostitution,” Revolution, 5 February 1868.
159.
This account draws on: DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, Chapter 5; DuBois, “The Nineteenth-Century Woman,” 139–144.
160.
Marie Le Baron, “The Yellow Ribbon,” 1876, to the tune of “Wearing of the Green,” in Danny O. Crew, Suffragist Sheet Music (Jefferson: McFarland & Company 2002).
161.
Emily Parmley Collins to Susan B. Anthony, 1879, HWS: III, 807.
162.
Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (New York: Schocken Books, 1873/1977), 16, 21–24.
163.
Tara Fitzpatrick, “Love’s Labor’s Reward: The Sentimental Economy of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Work’,” NWSA Journal 5, no. 1 (1993): 36.
164.
Alcott, Work, 430–431.
165.
Martha Coffin Wright to Ellen Wright Garrison, 14 July 1871, Garrison Family Papers, Series IX: Wright Family—correspondence, Box 301, Sophia Smith Collection.
166.
“The Scare-Crows of Sexual Slavery,” American Society of Spiritualists, August 1873, in Selected Writings of Victoria Woodhull: Suffrage, Free Love, and Eugenics, ed. Cari M. Carpenter (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 204.
167.
Abigail Scott Duniway, “Personal Reminiscences,” in “Yours for Liberty”: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway’s Suffrage Newspaper, eds. Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2000), 11.
168.
Husband, Antislavery Discourse, 107.
169.
“Sister Slaves,” Harper’s Bazaar XI, no. 16 (1878): 256–258; B.O. Flower, Fashion’s Slaves (Boston: The Arena Publishing Co., 1892), 10–11.
170.
Susan B. Anthony, “Status of Woman, Past, Present, and Future,” Arena 17 (May 1897): 902. For the history of galley slaves, see: Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapter 2.

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Stevenson, A. (2019). “Degrading Servitude”: Free Labor, Chattel Slavery, and the Politics of Domesticity. In: The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24467-5_5

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