The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement.

The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 1998. Pp. xiv, 311. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-4741-0; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2436-4.)

The abolitionist movement is often studied through the lives and thoughts of its leadership. By searching through the records of female antislavery societies and the personal papers of rank-and-file women members, Julie Roy Jeffrey investigates the broader scope of the movement and brings antislavery into the realm of social history in a promising way. In the process, the book examines how abolitionism affected the lives of ordinary women and how women in turn influenced the abolitionist movement.

Jeffrey's focus on how abolitionist commitment transformed women's lives, coupled with a chronological organization, allows her to chart the difficult process by which many women entered into public life. Antislavery women, she points out, had to learn argumentation, master factual information, discover effective public speaking styles, and confront hostile men. While this learning curve is familiar from biographies of individual abolitionist women, Jeffrey's analysis of so many "ordinary" women who underwent the same process proves that abolition caused a much broader social transformation than we could earlier assert. Jeffrey shows other impacts as well. Holding abolition fairs trained women in the economics of the marketplace, just as fairs and antislavery organizational correspondence built up a community that helped women overcome the isolation of rural life or the unpopularity of being an abolitionist. On a more individual level, abolition clearly provided rank-and-file women with a purpose for their lives. Finally, while Jeffrey repeatedly cautions readers about the often racist beliefs of white abolitionist women, her book allows us to speculate about how abolition fostered biracial cooperation that arguably broadened the social horizons of black and white women. By highlighting the names, words, and actions of largely unknown figures, Jeffrey convincingly proves the breadth of change that antislavery commitment demanded as it "took women beyond the boundaries of what the culture at large defined as womanly" (p. 55). Rather than focus on how the intellectual arguments of abolition created a woman's rights movement, this work demonstrates that the day-to-day work of abolition pushed women to expand their public presence and to learn the skills they would need to thrive there.

If abolition changed women's lives, then women also influenced the abolition movement, and at one level Jeffrey's work serves as a judicious synthesis of earlier work on women's contributions. Jeffrey recounts how women circulated petitions, organized female abolition societies, held fairs and raised funds, wrote and circulated literature, spoke in public, and bought only "free produce." But there are also major contributions here, including Jeffrey's point that women remained active in the 1840s and 1850s within the church-based and political branches of abolition. Jeffrey's discussion of how women in the supposedly "conservative" religious wing of the movement publicly opposed their anti-abolition ministers forces a reconsideration of the many antislavery avenues women took after 1840. Additionally, Jeffrey's evidence of significant relief work by white women on behalf of fugitive slaves hints at the importance of women as a link between white and black communities.

Jeffrey's extensive research into the lives of ordinary women confirms much that has been said in shorter venues and adds intriguing new interpretations of its own as it broadens our considerations of abolition to include the articulate female majority in its rank and file. Useful to scholars, the book should also be accessible to advanced undergraduates because of its underlying chronological organization and brief summaries of important events in the history of abolition.

MICHAEL D. PIERSON

University of Massachusetts, Lowell