Book Review

Both these works demonstrate how the new scholarship on gender and race is reshaping the study of the struggle against slavery and for racial equality in nineteenth-century America. Julie Roy Jeffrey's The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism exceeds the author's understated goal of building a "comprehensive picture of the involvement of ordinary women in the abolitionist movement from the 1830s to the Civil War"; this fine, definitive, and exhaustively researched book locates women as central actors in the antislavery struggle, emphasizing how their efforts both transcended and transformed the parameters of the emergent public sphere. Jane Rhodes's Mary Ann Shadd Cary offers an extraordinary and richly contextualized biography that highlights the engagement and agency of a little-known African American activist who challenged the obstacles gender and race posed for her. Together, these books begin to rewrite antislavery history by recognizing the critical roles of neglected people.

1

Organized chronologically, Jeffrey's book complements recent studies that have focused primarily on urban and northeastern women activists. Jeffrey details the extraordinary efforts of rank-and-file women to publicize and popularize their cause in the face of sustained and sometimes physically threatening resistance. Spurred by their sense of moral mission, women from a wide variety of backgrounds developed effective societies in which they engaged with the market both to boycott slave-grown produce and to merchandise products of their own manufacture created to raise money for, as well as interest in, their cause. Ordinary women understood the struggles within the national organizations and churches that created sectarianism in the 1840s and 1850s but maintained their focus on ending slavery and uplifting free African Americans. More than two generations of women followed a multiplicity of paths as they wrote, spoke, and acted for antislavery, both within and outside the religious institutions and political cultures of the era.

. . .