WORKING TITLE: Into the Mouths of Babes: Domestic Abolitionists' Literary Subversions

DESCRIPTION: Into the Mouths of Babes analyzes the convergence of discourses about slavery, gender, and children in juvenile literature from 1830 to 1865. This project, based on close textual analysis of archival and historical recovery work, examines the multifaceted nature of domestic abolitionism, a discourse that nineteenth-century women created to voice their political sentiments when cultural imperatives demanded their silence. It contains an introduction, four primary chapters, a conclusion, a bibliography of the recovered primary works, an extensive secondary bibliography, and an index.  Length: 280 pages.

While conducting archival research in collections such as the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, I recovered approximately one hundred abolitionist juvenile texts by nineteenth-century women writers. My analysis reveals that these women asserted their anti-slavery sentiments through the voices of victims (slave children and mothers), white mother-historians, and abolitionist children in juvenile literature, a genre available to female authors of the period. Chapter 1, "Domestic Abolitionists and Their Publishers" profiles the recovered abolitionist women authors and situates their works in the context of the available and recovered information about sectarian and commercial publishers who ventured to publish abolitionist sentiments. Chapter 2, "Sentimentalized Victims and Abolitionist Tears" argues that domestic abolitionists created a hybrid genre (that I call the sentimental juvenile pseudo slave narrative) that embraces strategies popular in contemporary juvenile narratives, domestic novels, and slave narratives. By imbuing these separate genres with sentimentality, these women foreground slave children and their parents whose narratives spur listeners to tears. However, under the cover of sentimentalism, these authors encode agendas of activism to counter slavery's threat to two American ideals: the child's innocence and the sacred mother-child bond. Situated in the cultural context that "permitted" women to write histories and to teach them to their children, "Abolitionist Mother-Historians" (chapter 3) discusses how these authors challenged the permissible using the unique figure of the abolitionist mother-historian. These fictional mothers attack slavery's corruption of religious and political ideals and attempt to correct its distortions of American history. In the final chapter, "The Juvenile Abolitionists," I argue that in the mid-1840s, domestic abolitionists counteract anxieties about slavery's contamination of American society and culture with images of reform-minded, abolitionist children who attempt to restore American familial, religious, and political ideals. Moved to action by either the victim's or the abolitionist mother-historian's voice, the young protagonists engage in activities that replicate in fiction the behavior found in the recovered records of actual juvenile anti-slavery societies. I have also found that in the pre-1850 texts, only boy protagonists speak, while girls are spoken about. However, after 1850, every recovered text casts a girl as the primary force for restoring American ideals, possibly suggesting the growing acceptance of women's activism.

RATIONALE AND AUDIENCE: For women struggling to find an abolitionist voice while maintaining the codes of gender and respectability, writing children's literature was an acceptable strategy to counteract the opposition.  Several critics and historians document nineteenth-century women's literary production and women's involvement in abolitionist politics; however, no one has explored how domestic abolitionism provided writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Barclay, and Eliza Follen with the opportunity to both write within and transcend the ideology of separate spheres. Although ante-bellum women published extensively, social codes often limited them to writing histories and novels that inscribed them in the private sphere. By seizing the opportunity to write abolitionist juvenile literature, domestic abolitionists maintained their identities as exemplary mother-educators, preserved their claims to "femininity," and simultaneously entered the political arena.

My analysis of the intersection of female authorship, abolitionist politics, and children's literature will both complement and extend existing scholarship. Discussions about popular literature, women's nineteenth-century literary productions, women's history, and women's participation in the abolitionist movement occur in works such as David Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance, Philip Fisher's Hard Facts, Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs, Nina Baym's American Women Writers and The Work of History: 1790-1860, Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters: the Antislavery Feminists in American Culture, and Yellin and John Van Horne's edited collection, The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America. Scholarship about nineteenth-century children's literature often focuses on the insight this genre offers about the century's changing perception of childhood, and scholars who have studied racial issues have focused on images of African American children in twentieth-century literature. However, only a few have produced short articles which show a budding awareness of abolitionist children's literature. Drawing on this research, this project extends the scholarly conversation and directs critical attention to a fascinating group of ante-bellum women authors who strategically manipulated literary forms and figures to voice their abolitionist views.

This book aims to fill the important gap in our understanding of women's literary productions about race and gender, which in turn extends the discussion of canon expansion. This book will, therefore, interest teachers, scholars, and researchers engaged in discussions of children's, women's, and African American literatures; feminism; canonicity; the history of the book; and the history of the ante-bellum period.

Competition: Due to the extensive recovery work, this volume has no direct competition. To date, no books identify this significant body of literature or offer materials that complicate the portrait of nineteenth-century attitudes towards slavery, motherhood, childhood, and gender. This book reconstructs missing information about women's biography and literary production in nineteenth-century America, i.e. offering teachers, scholars and students access to these ignored cultural documents and giving voice to these women and their writings. Consequently, Into the Mouths of Babes extends the boundaries of historical and literary criticism (especially about abolitionist literature and race), and most importantly, raises questions about the existence of other potentially significant literature by women.