| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Julie Roy Jeffrey. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 311. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.

Since the 1970s, historians have tended to look at the participation of women in the U.S. antislavery movement as a way of understanding the roots of the women's suffrage movement, which emerged out of abolition during the late 1840s. Julie Roy Jeffrey builds on and extends the analysis provided by this earlier scholarship to offer a comprehensive study of women's participation in the abolitionist movement from the 1830s through the Civil War. More important, she presents a new way of framing female abolitionist activism. Instead of viewing their individual and organized activities as a prelude to feminism, she analyzes women abolitionists on their own terms. This is a critical departure from previous interpretations, for, as Jeffrey rightly points out, despite the fact that women's public activities on behalf of the cause implicitly and explicitly challenged conventional gender norms, most of these women did not go on to participate in the emerging women's movement. The fact [however] that they embraced the unpopular cause of abolition was a radical stance in itself, regardless of whether or not they later supported equality between the sexes. To analyze women's abolitionist activities apart from the suffrage movement allows historians to explore the meaning of women's activism as well as to recognize the diverse interests and motivations of women who signed petitions, organized and participated in female antislavery societies, wrote for the cause, gave speeches, lobbied legislators, and attended political events. . . .

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