“Slavery Redivivus”: Free Love, Racial Uplift, and Remembering Chattel Slavery

2019 ◽  
pp. 257-300
Author(s):  
Ana Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Chattel Slavery

Subversive Satanic Women in Decadent Literature and Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Faxneld
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Free Love ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The Demonic

Chapter 7 discusses Decadence as a highly visible counter-discourse, which popularized tactics of counter-reading. Félicen Rops’s enthusiastically debauched engravings and paintings of Satanic women are examined. Next, J.-K. Huysmans’s novel Là-bas (1891) is considered, especially the female Satanist Mme Chantelouve who is portrayed in it. She is a self-governing woman with modern ideas about free love and described as hysterical. Hysteria carried connotations of feminism, and the independent Chantelouve can be seen as a caustic caricature of an emancipated New Woman. Certain bohemian females were undaunted and approached her as an object of identification. Finally, Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s highly ambivalent attitude towards the demonic feminine is read in view of his œuvre at large, which makes it difficult to understand his at times quite ghastly descriptions of female Satanists as a simple condemnation. At times unwittingly, Decadents contributed to a destabilization of gendered categories and ideals.

The Protestant Establishment in Action

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Leaves Of Grass ◽  
Free Love

The Watch and Ward Society was very effective at enforcing Protestant mores, especially through lobbying efforts and work as an extralegal police force that strove to enforce the state’s anti-obscenity laws. The anti-vice society employed three closely related strategies to combat the arguments of free love and free speech activists and to suppress the sale of obscene material. First, reformers lobbied state legislatures to pass more effective anti-obscenity statutes. Second, they demanded that the police enforce the laws, and they investigated book and magazine vendors to aid the police in their work. Finally, they pressured publishers and bookstore owners to refrain from selling objectionable materials. Examining the controversy over the publication of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1882–83 illustrates the organization’s effectiveness.

A Typology of Moral Progress

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Buchanan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Moral Reasoning ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Premarital Sex ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The World ◽  
Moral Point

This chapter identifies a number of developments that are candidates for moral progress: abolition of the Atlantic chattel slavery, improvements in civil rights for minorities, equal rights for women, better treatment of (some) non-human animals, and abolition of the cruellest punishments in most parts of the world. This bottom-up approach is then used to construct a typology of moral progress, including improvements in moral reasoning, recognition of the moral standing or equal basic moral status of beings formerly thought to lack them, improvements in understandings of the domain of justice, the recognition that some behaviors formerly thought to be morally impermissible (such as premarital sex, masturbation, lending money at interest, and refusal to die “for king and country”) can be morally permissible, and improvements in understandings of morality itself. Finally, a distinction is made between improvements from a moral point of view and moral progress in the fullest sense.

Receptions of Rome in Debates on Slavery in the U.S.A.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Malamud
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Black Struggle ◽  
Roman Antiquity ◽  
Intense Debate

American abolitionists not only invoked the Roman allusions and comparisons employed by the revolutionary generation’s fight for liberty from the British crown, but also adapted or subverted them in service of the black struggle for freedom. Rather than rejecting Roman society outright because it was a slaveholding society—the primal “Roman error” from their perspective—many abolitionists instead deployed figures and images from Roman antiquity in their own struggles against the despotism of chattel slavery. Supporters of emancipation and black civil rights, this chapter shows, thus engaged in an intense debate over the correct reception of ancient Rome with proslavery Southerners, who argued that slavery in both Rome and America enabled liberty and civilization. Bringing the discussion into the present day, this chapter offers a contemporary example of arguments over the correct reception of ancient Rome in relation to American slavery and the American Civil War.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daina Ramey Berry ◽  
Nakia D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States ◽  
Kinship Bonds

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

scholarly journals Race and Politics in the United States

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-179
Author(s):  
Howard A. Palley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Thomas Jefferson ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Race And Politics ◽  
Inalienable Rights

Abstract The Declaration of Independence asserts that “All men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Nevertheless, the United States, at its foundation has been faced with the contradiction of initially supporting chattel slavery --- a form of slavery that treated black slaves from Africa purely as a commercial commodity. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom had some discomfort with slavery, were slaveholders who both utilized slaves as a commodity. Article 1 of our Constitution initially treated black slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representation in order to increase Southern representation in Congress. So initially the Constitution’s commitment to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” did not include the enslaved black population. This essay contends that the residue of this initial dilemma still affects our politics --- in a significant manner.

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