The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers

Abstract

Anna M. Speicher's study of five women abolitionist lecturers—Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley Foster, Sallie Holley, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké—offers a valuable addition to the growing literature on women abolitionists. Following Robert H. Abzug, she grounds their reform activism in religious vision, and like Ann Braude she emphasizes religion's potential to inspire social radicalism. Speicher also extends Lawrence J. Friedman's suggestion that abolitionist community was rooted in intimate personal relationships. Speicher thoroughly engages the existing scholarship. Rejecting arguments by Gerda Lerner and Blanche G. Hersh that minimize the role of religion or interpret reform as a surrogate for religion, she contends that a liberal theology moved her five subjects to lifelong social activism in pursuit of racial and gender equality. Faith and action were interrelated— each nurturing the other—but they were, she insists, distinct. Nor should these five women's resistance to institutional Christianity be construed as a rejection of religion per se. Jean Fagan Yellin and Shirley J. Yee emphasize racial tensions among abolitionist women, and Spei cher grants that white abolitionist women obscured the harsh realities of slavery and racism in appropriating the slave label for the cause of women's rights. But their doing so, she says, allowed them, unlike most white abolitionists and like black activists, to see that true freedom for African Americans required the elimination not simply of chattel slavery but also of prejudice and discrimination. Other historians have emphasized the tensions between women's rights and abolitionism, but Speicher argues that her five abolitionist leaders won support for abolitionism, were crucial figures around whom the antislavery community coalesced, and were led by their religious perspectives to regard women's rights and abolitionism as inseparable. And to those feminist scholars who, like Lerner, would criticize the Grimkés for their apparent withdrawal from political into domestic commitment after Angelina's marriage to Theodore Weld, Speicher responds that an enlarged definition of “political” allows one to see the sisters as lifelong activists.

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