'When Children Are Not Glad'

Sympathy, Performance, and Power in Abolitionist Children's Literature

Abstract

In antebellum American society, neither women nor children were seen as full citizens, and neither group possessed any direct political power, consigned as they were to the private, domestic sphere. And yet, many women produced stories ostensibly written for children that packed a quite radical political argument: abolitionism. This essay hopes to add to existing work on abolitionist women's writing by exploring how the literature abolitionist women wrote expressly for child readers provided a unique opportunity for both the writer and the reader to advance the abolitionist cause. This literature became a device for women to teach their children about slavery, as well as a forum for speaking to each other, even across racial divides, about the abolitionist cause. This essay will pay special attention to how female authors of abolitionist children's literature performed a conservative notion of their gender identity - mother and moral teacher - in order to call for progressive change. Additionally, the focus these women placed on young enslaved characters forces readers to recognize how slavery prohibited the newly-formed, but deeply important, nineteenth-century ideals of childhood and the performance of this identity. Thus, abolitionist children's literature had a twofold power: it used the unique features of the child's identity to elicit sympathy and make a persuasive argument against the slave system, both of which provided a "safe" space for women to contribute their political expression.