For at least the past three decades, scholars have argued that slavery's abolition would not have happened without interracial collaboration between politically-minded women. From 1830-1865, an interracial and transnational group of women insisted that the struggles for women's liberation and abolition were linked. They rooted their activism in their shared passion for religion, writing, reading, and teaching. They defended their activism from those who called their actions unbecoming for women by saying that their efforts were part of their duty as women and mothers. The abolitionist mother did not want her child to bear witness to the atrocities of slavery and therefore would do what she could to end it. In this talk, Dr. Jaimie Crumley will show that the efforts of the anti-slavery women in Massachusetts demonstrate the distinctively feminist contours of antebellum abolitionism. Further, she will assert that learning from the successes and failures of antebellum female anti-slavery societies can inform contemporary feminist organizing.

Bio: Jaimie D. Crumley, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. She is the 2022-2023 Research Fellow at Old North Illuminated in Boston, MA. Jaimie studies race, gender, and religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Northeastern United States. Her dissertation, "Tried as by Fire: Free African American Women's Abolitionist Theologies," situates eighteenth and nineteenth-century Black women as proto-Black feminist abolitionists who rooted their politics in Biblical theology. Jaimie has received research fellowships from the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, the Institute for Citizen's and Scholars, the Boston Athenaeum, and the American Congregational Library.

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This program is hosted by the Reading Public Library in partnership with other area libraries.