Slavery in the International Women's Movement, 1832–1914
Memory Work and the Legacy of Abolitionism

An exploration of how the international women's movement made the history of antislavery part of its usable past.

Sophie van den Elzen (Author)

9781009411967, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 2025

304 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.61 kg

'Sophie van den Elzen offers readers a thoughtful and carefully researched inquiry into the ongoing significance of the woman/slave analogy and early nineteenth-century American antislavery campaigns as founding moments in the historical memory of the international women's movement. Her premise is that cultural memory work, by emphasizing some aspects of the historical past and blocking out others, may actually shape subsequent action.' Karen Offen, author of The Woman Question in France, 1400-1870 and Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920

In this book, Sophie van den Elzen shows how advocates for women's rights, in the absence of their 'own' history, used the antislavery movement as a historical reference point and model. Through a detailed analysis of a wide range of sources produced over the span of almost a century, including novels, journals, speeches, pamphlets, and posters, van den Elzen reveals how the women's movement gradually diverged from a position of solidarity with the enslaved into one of opposition, based on hierarchical assumptions about class and race. This inclusive cultural survey provides a new understanding of the ways in which the cultural memory of Anglo-American antislavery was imported and adapted across Europe and the Atlantic world, and it breaks new ground in studying the “woman-slave analogy” from a longitudinal and transnational comparative perspective. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. From Transnational Movement to Global Memory: Abolitionism and the Culture of Reform
2. Fictions, 1832–1852: Sentimental Antislavery and the Sisterhood
3. Archives, c. 1848: Parisian Calls for 'Universal Emancipation'
4. Periodicals, 1866–1914: Slavery and the Woman Question
5. Histories, 1881–1914: Feminist Internationalists and the Antislavery Origin Myth
Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]