Strained sisterhood : gender and class in the Boston female anti-slavery society /

The first thorough study of the influential Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS). Although short-lived (1833-40), the organization provided crucial funding for the antislavery movement, distributed scores of antislavery tracts and books, and offered a rare, racially integrated forum for some of the most dynamic female abolitionists in New England. Hansen places the history of the BFASS in the context of Boston's changing social and economic order, and finds that the growing divisions so evident in Boston's social structure were duplicated by the BFASS's membership. Although the breakup of the society traced the path followed by the male-dominated American and Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Societies, the author details how the divisions in the BFASS membership distinguished it from other similar societies. Most important, Strained Sisterhood recounts the divergent definitions of womanhood that helped drive the BFASS apart and serves as a useful corrective to those studies that promote the idea of "women's solidarity based upon gender alone." Advanced undergraduates and above. D. Yacovone; Massachusetts Historical Society

In this work, Hansen demonstrates that many of the class, religious, and sociocultural differences that limit female solidarity today were evident more than a century ago. Antebellum Boston is the setting for this study of the conflicted and short-lived (1833-40) Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. This book (based on Hansen's dissertation) contributes respectably to studies of women's divergent views of their roles as women and as reformers. It examines the socioeconomic climate in which women of various classes lived at the time and takes apart the membership of the antislavery society. This book is appropriate for undergraduate/graduate history and women's studies collections. Recent related titles include Jean Fagan Yellin's Women and Sisters (Yale Univ. Pr., 1989) and Shirley J. Yee's Black Women Abolitionists ( LJ 3/15/92).-- Linda Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ. at Edwardsville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.