Besides discussing previous scholarship on gender and the rhetoric of slavery, the introduction provides a historical overview and historiography of the nineteenth-century international women’s movement, particularly illuminating interpersonal and cultural connections with organised antislavery. The introduction also outlines an understanding of the woman–slave analogy as part of the international women’s movement’s memory culture. It sets up a common-sense conceptual framework that guides the rest of the book, introducing the terms usable past and the (collective) memory work involved in creating it, as well as the umbrella term memories of antislavery, narratives which were circulated transnationally both during the campaign to end slavery and afterwards.

The final chapter considers the legacy of memories of antislavery in first-wave feminism. It looks at the impact of these memories on the rhetoric of ‘sisterhood’ and the role these memories played in what has come to be called ‘imperial feminism’. Finally, it reflects on how feminism affected the historical transmission of the cultural memory of slavery and abolitionism, which is still a potent model of reform today.