Chapter 3 offers a materially focused consideration of the practical minutiae of memory work among nineteenth-century women’s right advocates. It considers the collaboration between English Quaker Anne Knight (1786–1862) and Parisian socialist Jeanne Deroin (1805–1894), which began in the aftermath of the events in Paris in 1848. The chapter argues that following the February Revolution and abolition of slavery, Knight and Deroin, both ardent women’s rights advocates, promoted memories of antislavery to inform the usable past of a transnational women’s rights community. Through their transatlantic networking, their circle compiled and made available an archive of memories and materials of Garrisonian abolitionism, reprinting, for instance, William Lloyd Garrison’s declaration of principles for the National Anti-Slavery Convention from 1833. By circulating these materials, they promoted a cosmopolitan outlook on abolition and women’s emancipation which contrasted both with the national orientation of Parisian women’s rights colleagues and with that of prominent Republicans, who sought to commemorate abolition as a victory of French Republicanism.

This chapter traces the emergence of published women’s rights demands in Western Europe and America. While this history begins with seventeenth-century French debates and broadened through the eighteenth century, it was in the immediate run-up to, and then during the course of, the French Revolution that arguments for women’s civil and political rights flared up and arrived at their modern expression. From Condorcet to Olympe de Gouges, many more writers of both sexes advocated les droits des femmes, demanding legal, educational, economic, and social equality with men. Early expressions of these claims sometimes met with scorn and disbelief, particularly from influential German philosophers, but the claims would nevertheless resurface periodically and gain momentum throughout the nineteenth century, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1870–1 (and eventually in 1917 Russia), and the women’s suffrage campaigns in the West. Many advocates of women’s rights in France and in the English-speaking world, including Sarah Grimké, made common cause with abolitionists (of Black slavery) and with early social reformers and socialists. As democratic ideas slowly made headway, claims for women’s inclusion and equal rights grew louder and more insistent, ultimately fostering attitudinal changes and proposals for legislative action in many nation-states.