ABSTRACT
Transatlantic connections across emancipation movements in the turbulent years of the 1840s and 1850s were fostered by activists across several distinct campaigns. In this chapter, I illustrate how intersections between equality movements, which were organised nationally, coalesced outside of the nation: in this instance, through the connections between transatlantic women’s networks and antislavery campaigns. I uncover interwoven histories of British and U.S. female activism, journalism, and letter writing. I examine British women authoring letters of protest alongside the ex-slave, author, orator, and women’s rights advocate, Frederick Douglass and his work with British female campaigners, in particular, Anna and Ellen Richardson and Julia Griffiths. In its transatlantic reach, this chapter combines consideration of the creative writing, journalism, and letters of British women’s rights leaders, Amelia Opie, Elizabeth Heyrick, and Harriet Martineau with U.S. feminist campaigners, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucrecia Mott and the American author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s appeal to British women to enter into debates about U.S. slavery. The chapter’s focus upon personal networks highlights the intersections between different mid-nineteenth-century liberation movements while also demonstrating how those campaigns were strengthened precisely because they were able to surpass the boundaries of nations and national cultures.
