Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, this study investigates how white and Afro-Caribbean women writers have responded to feminist, abolitionist and post-emancipationist issues. It aims to reveal a relationship between colonial exploitation and female sexual oppression.

This anthology brings together the writings of the earliest black women writers in the East and West Caribbean, Bermuda, Canada, the USA and England. The selections span the American Revolution to the decade following the Civil War. The nine writers included, both slave and free, represent a variety of genres, regions, professions, and political perspectives. Their words suggest the rich cultural history embedded in the writings, and provide a glimpse into the lives of women coping with extreme racism and sexism. As black women, survival guides the construction of their texts and their public...

Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900 focuses on women writers and their struggle to protect animals from abuse in the transition from preindustrial to Victorian society. Looking critically at the work of Sarah Trimmer, Susanna Watts, Elizabeth Heyrick, Anna Sewell, and Frances Power Cobb, Moira Ferguson explores the links between Britain's evolving self-definition and the debate over the humane treatment of animals. Ferguson contends that animal-advocacy writing during this period provided a means for women to register their moral outrage over national problems extending far...

This book examines the poems of three Englishwomen--washerwoman Mary Collier, middle-class feminist polemicist Mary Scott, Bristol milkwoman Ann Yearsley, and Scottish dairywoman from Ayrshire, Janet Little. It questions how national identity might have influenced gender and class affiliations, and, reciprocally, how gender might have determined a nationalist impulse, particularly as it played out during the revolutionary period (1770-1800) in which most of the texts were written.

Daughter of a black slaveholder father, Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites were among the first educators of slaves and free African Caribbeans in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Antigua. These members of the "free colored" community who married white men and played an active role as educators, antislavery activists, and Methodist evangelicals were also among the first African Caribbean female writers. This exceptional volume offers for the first time a collection of their writings. Because the records of the Hart sisters are rare and original testimony from black...

First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their...