Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children's Abolitionist Literature

Into the Mouths of Babes: An Anthology of Children's Abolitionist Literature

de Rosa, Deborah

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0275979512
ISBN13: 9780275979515
Publisher: Praeger
Published: Jul 1 2005
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.69
Height: 1.38 Width: 6.34 Depth: 9.52
Language: English

While most people know that Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book Uncle Tom's Cabin spurred on abolotionist sentiments in the North, not many are aware of the vast abolitionist literature of children's books, poems, short stories, and essays. Many of these volumes were not written by seasoned authors, but by women whose primary roles were as mothers who functioned as domestic abolitionists, and have been lost to the ages. Here, De Rosa recovers a collection of these writings, illustrating the domestic abolitionists' efforts

While most people know that Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book Uncle Tom's Cabin spurred on abolitionist sentiments in the North, not many are aware of the fast abolitionist literature of children's books, poems, short stories, and essays. Many of these volumes were written by domestic women, not seasoned authors, and have been lost to the ages. Here, De Rosa recovers a collection of these writings, illustrating the domestic abolitionists' efforts when cultural imperatives demanded women's silence. These women asserted their anti-slavery sentiments through the voices of victims (slave children and mothers), white mother-historians, and abolitionist children in juvenile literature, one of the few genres available to female authors of the period. This collection restores the voices of these little known authors and shows how their voices helped to influence children and adults of the period.

For women struggling to find a voice in the abolitionist movement while maintaining the codes of gender and respectability, writing children's literature was an acceptable strategy to counteract the opposition. By seizing the opportunity to write abolitionist juvenile literature, domestic abolitionists maintained their identities as exemplary mother-educators, preserved their claims to femininity, and simultaneously entered the public arena. By adapting literary strategies popular in nineteenth-century juvenile narratives, domestic novels, and slave narratives to document slavery's violation of religious, economic, and political principles, these women spoke out against and institution that stood in marked contrast to the beliefs they held so dear. This anthology aims to fill the important gap in our understanding of women's literary productions about race and gender and illustrates the limitations of a canon that excludes such voices.

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