Slavery and Abolition

This chapter focuses on the historic relationship between feminism and antislavery. Wollstonecraft lived and worked during a period in which abolitionism emerged as a mass popular political movement. The centrality of concepts of freedom and slavery to Wollstonecraft’s formulation of the rights of women can be read in the ways in which she harnessed this discourse within her writing. This chapter explores some of the key social, cultural, political, imperial and economic factors which led to the formation of organised abolitionism in Britain. It considers the impact on antislavery thought and action of religious dissent, the cult of sensibility, radicalism, revolution, the reformist complex, and shifts in ideas about the nature of empire. It argues that women played an important role within the antislavery movement and that antislavery in turn shaped the development of the campaign for women’s rights. In doing so it raises critical questions about both the historic and contemporary relationship between feminism and issues of race and class.