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Elzen shows how advocates for women's rights, in the absence of their 'own' history, used the antislavery movement as a historical reference point and model.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.

‘Sophie van den Elzen has given us a fascinating study of how abolitionism provided a model for early feminism. Drawing creatively on a wide range of sources in several languages, she shows how women activists in nineteenth-century Europe looked to the enslaved, but above all to abolitionists in staking out their own claims to liberation. Theoretically refined and grounded in detail, this is a tour de force. Highly recommended for everyone interested in the history of feminism or the role of cultural memory in emancipation movements.’

Ann Rigney - Utrecht University