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Summary

Chapter 5 studies memory work in the international movement for women’s suffrage at the turn of the century. The 1880s saw the rise of official international women’s rights advocacy organisations, which became increasingly focused on the campaign for women’s suffrage. The chapter explores how, in the quest to legitimate their movement, feminist internationalists produced a body of comparative histories which narrated the rise of the feminist movement as a transnational phenomenon. Movement leaders formulated a powerful concept of international ‘sisterhood’ which implicitly relied on a narrow conception of the nature of the struggle for women’s rights and its advocates. Focusing on retellings of the ‘antislavery origin myth’ of organised feminism, this chapter shows how the memory work performed in these ‘movement histories’ contributed to this process and gives a sense of the life of these histories, tracing their reception in different popular media of the time, including national exhibitions.

In this book, Sophie van den Elzen shows how advocates for women's rights, in the absence of their 'own' history, used the antislavery movement as a historical reference point and model. Through a detailed analysis of a wide range of sources produced over the span of almost a century, including novels, journals, speeches, pamphlets, and posters, van den Elzen reveals how the women's movement gradually diverged from a position of solidarity with the enslaved into one of opposition, based on hierarchical assumptions about class and race. This inclusive cultural survey provides a new understanding of the ways in which the cultural memory of Anglo-American antislavery was imported and adapted across Europe and the Atlantic world, and it breaks new ground in studying the “woman-slave analogy” from a longitudinal and transnational comparative perspective. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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5 - Histories, 1881–1914

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Slavery in the International Women's Movement, 1832–1914

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5 - Histories, 1881–1914

Summary

Slavery in the International Women's Movement, 1832–1914