When Alisse Portnoy recovered petitions from the early 1830s that nearly 1,500 women sent to the U.S. Congress to protest the forced removal of Native Americans in the South, she found the first instance of women's national, collective political activism in American history. In this groundbreaking study, Portnoy links antebellum Indian removal debates with crucial, simultaneous debates about African Americansabolition of slavery and African colonizationrevealing ways European American women negotiated prohibitions to make their voices heard.
Situating the debates within contemporary, competing ideas about race, religion, and nation, Portnoy examines the means by which women argued for a "right to speak" on national policy. Women's participation in the debates was constrained not only by gender but also by how these womenand the men with whom they lived and worshippedimagined Native and African Americans as the objects of their advocacy and by what they believed were the most benevolent ways to aid the oppressed groups.
Cogently argued and engagingly written, this is the first study to fully integrate women's, Native American, and African American rights debates.
Alisse Portnoy is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature and Faculty Associate in the Program in American Culture, University of Michigan.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Terminology
Introduction
1. "Causes of Alarm to Our Whole Country": Articulating the Crisis of Indian Removal
2. "A Right to Speak on the Subject": Petitioning the Federal Government against Removal and Slavery
3. "The Difference between Cruelty to the Slave, and Cruelty to the Poor Indian": Imagining Native and African Americans as Objects of Advocacy
4. "Merely Public Opinion in Legal Forms": Imagining Native and African Americans in the Public and Political Spheres
5. "On the Very Eve of Coming Out": Declaring One's Antislavery Affiliations
6. "Coming from One Who Has a Right to Speak": Debating Colonization and Abolition
Notes
Index
What People are Saying About This
By situating women's collective activism in the context of the problematic public policy issues of Indian removal, colonization, and the emergence of abolitionism, Their Right to Speak is that rare book in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This first-rate study makes significant contributions to the history of antebellum reform, political culture in the Jacksonian era, and rhetorical analysis.
Nancy A. Hewitt
In a delightfully written work, Alisse Portnoy examines the debates over women's petitioning in the larger context of Indian removal, colonization, and abolition politics. She provides a new and persuasive interpretation of the now classic debate between Catharine Beecher and Angelina Grimké over antislavery activism. In fine detail and with great sophistication, she combines close readings of particular texts -pamphlets, petitions, novels, slave ads -with a sweeping narrative of social movements and national policies regarding Indians and African Americans. Their Right to Speak is a tour de force. Nancy A. Hewitt, Rutgers University
Michael A. Morrison
By situating women's collective activism in the context of the problematic public policy issues of Indian removal, colonization, and the emergence of abolitionism, Their Right to Speak is that rare book in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. This first-rate study makes significant contributions to the history of antebellum reform, political culture in the Jacksonian era, and rhetorical analysis. Michael A. Morrison, Purdue University