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Many nineteenth-century women got their first taste of political activism in small-town societies advocating temperance and other moral causes. Alongside national organizations with charismatic male leaders, these grassroots efforts by ordinary women helped to bring about social reform, change the meaning of political action and, in the process, redefine gender roles. Significantly, women moved from behind-the-scenes moral suasion into the political arena at a time when the question of slavery in the United States was developing from a humanitarian concern into a hotly contested partisan issue. Society met women's entrance into political antislavery with mobs, riots, and sharp debate. In Sister Societies, Beth Salerno documents ties of kinship and friendship that drew women into the more than 200 exclusively female antislavery societies scattered across the free states. These societies were home to a surprising degree of diversity. Whether black or white, churchgoing or come-outer, radical or conservative, members found temporary unity in a common cause and the bonds of womanhood. Though some of the antislavery societies were short-lived, others persisted from the 1830s through the Civil War. As women's activism evolved during these decades, members practiced quiet forms of resistance such as sewing clothing for fugitive slaves, embroidering antislavery slogans on linen goods, and boycotting the products of slave labor. At the same time, they increasingly engaged in public protest by signing petitions, sponsoring conventions, circulating antislavery propaganda, and raising funds for the cause. Salerno looks closely at the ways in which members defined their work as political or moral, as well as how the surrounding society viewed it, to fine-tune our understanding of a critical moment in the history of women's activism.
Caroline, known as “Lina” to her family, has always lived in the shadow of her older brother William Herschel’s accomplishments. And yet when William invites Lina to join him in England to assist in his musical and astronomical pursuits—not to mention to run his bachelor household—she accepts, finding a new sense of purpose. William may be an obsessive genius, but Lina adores him, and aids him with the same fervency as a beloved wife. When William decides to marry, however, Lina’s world collapses. As she attempts to rebuild a future, we witness the dawning of an early feminist consciousness—a woman struggling to find her own place among the stars.
GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS' 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing! The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures. Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”