THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

ace in many of its associations and because the movement stressed the importance of
individual purity, free produce challenges an abolitionist historiography that remains
deeply influenced by the idea of “separate spheres.” 57 Indeed, there are a lot of binaries
in abolitionist historiography: male or female activism, politics or moral suasion, violent
or peaceful measures. Women’s activism remains defined by peaceful means such as
petitions to Congress, anti-slavery fairs, and moral suasion. Such a definition, however,
precludes any hint of radicalism except as those activities led to the call for women’s
rights. Much of the scholarship on abolitionist women in general remains segregated and
marginalized in a history of anti-slavery that is still interpreted by its male activists. 58
While the field of abolitionist studies is, as Manisha Sinha argues, “much richer” as the
result of new research focusing on women and African Americans, it is at the same time
“considerably more fragmented.” 59 The free-produce movement offers an opportunity to
synthesize the various divisions within the historiography of abolitionism and highlight
the radicalism of women activists.
57 See Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s
Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Julie Roy Jeffrey,
“Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic 21
(2001), 79-93.
58 For example, see the recent body of John Brown scholarship: John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of
Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001); David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War,
and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Vintage, 2006). For a notable exception in Brown scholarship, see
Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz, “‘Could I not do something for the cause?’: The Brown Women, Antislavery
Reform, and Memory of Militant Abolitionism,” PhD diss., Indiana University, 2009. For another
perspective on gender and violent abolitionism, see Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race,
Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
59 Manisha Sinha, “Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism,” in Prophets of
Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John
Stauffer (New York: The New Press, 2006), 37.
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