Women's Rights Emerges within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830-1870: A Short History with Documents

by Kathryn Kish Sklar

Combining documents with an interpretive essay, this book is the first to offer a much-needed guide to the emergence of the women's rights movement within the anti-slavery activism of the 1830s. A 60-page introductory essay traces the cause of women's rights from Angelina and Sarah Grimké's campaign against slavery through the development of a full-fledged women's rights movement in the 1840s and 1850s and the emergence of race as a divisive issue that finally split that movement in 1869. A rich collection of over 50 documents includes diary entries, letters, and speeches from the Grimkés, Maria Stewart, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Weld, Frances Harper, Sojourner Truth, and others, giving students immediate access to the world of abolitionists and women's right advocates and their passionate struggles for emancipation. Headnotes to the documents, 14 illustrations, a bibliography, questions to consider, a chronology, and an index are also included.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism, School, Gender Studies, College, Race

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 24, 2000

About the author

Kathryn Kish Sklar is a Professor of History, co-director of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender, and co-director of the Center for the Teaching of American History at Binghamton University.

Kathryn Sklar's research centers on women in social movements in the United States, comparatively considered with British and German women. Her publications focus on the Antebellum and Progressive eras. She is particularly interested in how women's participation in social movements illuminates large questions in U.S. and comparative history, such as those associated with political culture, class formation, state formation, and the construction of gender, religious and ethnic identities.
--from the author's website

Reviews

[Vonze · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the women's history book that I've been needing to read for years, I just didn't know it until now. I always wondered how women's rights came about. I figured maybe it had something to do with Rosie the Riveter-type ladies taking over their husbands' jobs and refusing to give them up. However, with this book, I learned that the women's rights movement began much earlier.

The book is clear and very organized, I recommend it for those who are curious about women's U.S. history.

[Care · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the Salem Witch Trials book in this series a lot better. I read both for an American history course and this one was a disappointment compared to Godbeer's book. I'd recommend that one but not this. This one was much less insightful and was just a regurgitation of fact rather than a critical study of history.

[Sam Diener · Rating 5 out of 5]

It contains a very useful introduction and a superb selection of documents. In particular, I was amazed to read the impressive awareness of intersectionality between anti-racism and anti-sexism on display in the writings of the Grimkes in the 1830s. The documents highlight the degree to which feminist awareness and feminist struggles in the U.S. emerged out of anti-racist struggles.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting topic in a short and easy to read book, with lots of actual documents in the back.

[Kieran Saucedo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book.

Sklar presents a convincing argument for the suffrage movement being borne of the anti-slavery movement. She does well at documenting all the ways in which women participated in this movement prior to their conception of an independent suffrage movement, and I particularly enjoyed her focus on the Grimké sisters and the trailblazing nature of their early lectures. She never says it explicitly, but she seems to agree with Kraditor's belief that the suffrage movement was also borne of discontented women striving for autonomy — i.e. borne of women who found their femininity as a barrier for greater political action, and consequently turned to political action that explicitly vouched for destroying said barriers.

Her discussion of the American abolition movement as comparatively more radical than the British abolition movement, and therefore more accepting of the radicalism of women's rights activism, was interesting, though I would have been interested in hearing about some of the more conservative, non-Garrisonian elements of the American abolition movement and their perspectives on women's rights.

[Lily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great exploration of the period

[Susan Gammon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative and I loved the actual transcribed supporting documents.