| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network. By Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. xvi, 283 pp. $39.95, ISBN 1-55849-363-8.)

Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women's Political Identity. By Susan Zaeske. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xvi, 253 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2759-2. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5426-3.)

Each of these books contributes importantly to historians' ongoing reevaluation of the antislavery movement from the standpoint of grass-roots activism. Unlike historians who have focused on formally organized antislavery societies, Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven analyzes "the informal structure sustaining grassroots antislavery activity" (p. 227) through studying women's labors, particularly in writing and sewing for the cause, petitioning state and national legislatures, conducting fund-raising fairs, and maintaining "a web of friendships and informal contacts" (p. 206) among abolitionists. Susan Zaeske's interest is in abolitionist women's national petition campaigns, beginning in the 1830s and continuing into the Civil War years. Through them, she finds, antislavery women "seized the radical potential of one of the few civil rights they were understood to possess" (p. 1), sought to "reshape public opinion and influence national policy" (p. 1), and in the process "transformed their political identities" (p. 4). In singling out the rank-and-file women who did much of the day-to-day labor of the abolitionist crusade, both books build on the insights of pioneering historians such as Gerda Lerner, Dorothy Sterling, and Dorothy Porter Wesley, while also adding significantly to the findings of recent historians such as Shirley Yee, Debra Gold Hansen, and Julie Roy Jeffrey.

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