Racial Transcendence, Bonds of Sisterhood, and the Politics of Consumption: Gendered Responses to the Antebellum Reform Impulse

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2011
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
This project examines the early years (1824-1833) of the American free produce movement in northern cities. Free produce supporters utilized boycotts of slave goods and the substituted consumption of goods made with free labor to economically compel southern slaveowners to free their slaves. This movement was primarily supported by women, who utilized an imperial rendering of domesticity and domestication in order to purify their bodies, homes, and nation against the evils of slavery through the abstention of slave made goods. In addition, these women justified the impropriety of the political nature of activism within the movement by crossing racial boundaries to identify enslaved women as their "sisters" and conduct and justify their radical actions through their prescriptive religious and moral duty to stop the suffering of others. In addition, free produce is examined within the context of broader antebellum reforms, especially the resettlement efforts of the American Colonization Society, further illuminating connections between consumption, morality, citizenship, and the beginnings of U.S. territorial expansion.
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