ABSTRACT
After 1852, white women entered the debate over slavery in ever larger numbers. They argued in women’s magazines, in novels and (often anonymously) in learned journals. Of course, white men, black men and black women were still, as they had been all along, thrashing out the issue in Congress, in state houses, in pamphlets, in newspapers, in town halls, on college campuses, from pulpits and in the streets.1 But the frantic success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the fame (or notoriety) of its author opened up the discussion for genres associated with women, particularly fiction.2
