Womens participation in the public sphere was constrained in various ways, even in liberal circles. Anne Thompson (wife of George Thompson), in conjunction with her teenage daughters and African American freedom seekers, engineered an intervention at the Great Exhibition that creatively silenced anti-abolitionists within a social space. After Louisa and Amelia Thompson married and pursued activist and writing careers, they built on such experiences in ways that represent their astute perception of performative dramatugy and ways to strategically intervene in social politics. In Amelia Chessons work life and marriage, this led to a career as the first female performance critic for a British daily newspaper. She honed her ability to describe not only theatre and music performances but also the entire mise-en-scène of complex events. Extensively networked through her own and her familys activist connections, her work as a journalist, political organiser, friend of fellow abolitionists, and matrixed liberal subject reveals a complex reformulation of how the public and private realms have been previously understood.

Chapter 5 concentrates solely on Black female transatlantic tours. Due to the gendered nature of adaptive resistance, a separate chapter is necessary to chart the ways they endured a double embodiment on the Victorian stage to campaign against slavery. I argue that Ellen Craft and Julia Jackson used different versions of adaptive resistance that were conditioned by gender as well as race. Craft used silence as a performative tool, an exploitation of antislavery networks, and even created her own communal networks that were based on racial pride. While in public she exploited her reputation as a “white slave,” in private she was outspoken and was tireless in her enthusiasm to promote abolitionist and other reformist causes. In contrast to Craft’s silent public performance, Julia Jackson lectured several times on the British stage alongside her husband, which possibly made her the first Black American woman to speak publicly about her experience as an enslaved individual. African American women were central to the Black protest tradition in Britain and maintained antislavery sentiment throughout the nineteenth century, decades after the British Empire had legally abolished slavery.