Book Review

Canada and the United States

Since Gerda Lerner and Aileen S. Kraditor published their pioneering works on the subject in the 1960s, many historians have studied the intersections between abolitionism and feminism. Their work sheds light on how the rhetoric of liberation raised abolitionist women's consciousness and poses important questions about the relations of power between white and black women involved in the movement. Despite white abolitionist women writers' racism, Jean Fagan Yellin argues, black and white women developed mutually rewarding collaborations and worked together "to establish an American sisterhood and to activate that sisterhood in the public arena" (see Yellin's introduction to Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1987], p. xxxiii). Lyde Cullin Sizer contributes to our understanding of this sisterhood by examining the written works of a select group of the most popular and prolific nineteenth-century women writers. Whereas the subjects of this study rarely collaborated, Sizer argues that the great body of their collective work suggests that—like the Grimkés, Sojourner Truth, and others who were more actively engaged in the work of liberation—they, too, shared a vision of an interracial, interclass sisterhood.	1
Sizer follows the careers of nine northern women writing during the Civil War era: Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Gail Hamilton, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The result is a collective literary biography, or "an intellectual portrait," as Sizer describes it, of two generations of women writers whose writing was shaped by the experience of war (p. 13). Whereas the older generation was dominated by the sentimental style and abolitionist sentiments of Stowe and Child, the political work of the younger generation ranged more broadly and was characterized by the more realistic styles of Harper, Davis, Phelps, and Alcott, who condemned racism, industrial capitalism, and women's disfranchisement, among many other things. Coming of age during the war, Harper, Davis, Alcott, Hamilton, and Phelps wrote with a new confidence, collectively creating what Sizer calls a "rhetoric of unity" that they hoped would bring women together across region, race, and class to shape the postwar nation (p. 12). If the influence of this literary sisterhood was limited and fleeting, Sizer suggests that it was the gravity of the issues they addressed that is to blame rather than northern women writers' limited ability "to see beyond their class or race" (p. 281).	2
The society in which Sizer's subjects wrote was deeply divided. When middle-class white women like Child (An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans [1833]) and Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin [1851]) launched their antebellum careers writing in support of the abolition of slavery, they were acutely aware of the transgressive nature of women expressing their political opinions and often prefaced their political statements with apologies to their readers. As an African-American woman, Harper (Iola Leroy [1893]) understood even more profoundly the limits of her social power when she spoke and wrote in opposition to slavery and racism and encouraged African Americans to fight racial injustice. With less reticence than their predecessors, Fern (Ruth Hall [1854]) and Alcott (Little Women [1868] and Work [1873]) wrote in support of women workers, and Davis (Life in the Iron Mills [1861]) and Phelps (Gates Ajar [1868]) exposed the exploitations of industrial capitalism and condemned the economic suffering of women in the postwar era.	. . .