Abolitionism and Inactivity in Uncle Toms Cabin Essay -- Uncle Toms

The debate raging in the years 1836-1837 over womens proper duties and roles in regards to abolitionism was publicly shaped earlier by two opposing forces on the one hand, sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimke, abolitionists and champions of womens rights and on the other, Catharine Beecher, who opposed suffrage and womens involvement in abolitionism and argued in favor of womans place in the home. afterward the printing of Angelina Grimks pamphlet Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States (1836), Grimk and Catharine Beecher engaged in a written debate over womans public role in regards to the bondage issue. Beecher responded to Grimks assertions that Southern women should actively protest the system of slavery in her Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (1837), in which she claimed that women, true to their naturally subordinate natures, were not hold out to interfere in such matters. In light of these facts, it is surprising to note that Harriet Beecher Stowe was Catherine Beechers sister. How could the author of Uncle Toms Cabin be related to the same woman who wrote Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism-- an anti-abolitionist document which pleaded with women to keep their thoughts on slavery to themselves? In Uncle Toms Cabin, Stowe not only frames both sides of the debate, but also actively incorporates it into her female characters and into her narrative voice, fictitiously dramatizing the issues with which Grimk and Beecher were concern fifteen years earlier. Uncle Toms Cabin, if racist by modern standards, is at least clearly anti-slavery Stowes intent in writing the novel, as she states in her Preface, is to awaken beneficence and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us (Stowe xviii). In her... ...atest need of positive and active role models. In only portraying Northern women who were at last able to act (and with Stowes praise), she ends up perpetuating beliefs that Southern women were naturally unsuited to engage in the aboliti onist cause. Works CitedBeecher, Catharine. Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism. The Limits of Sisterhood The Beecher Sisters on Womens Rights and Womans Sphere. ed. Jeanne Boydston et. al. Chapel Hill U of North Carolina P, 1988. 125-129Cain, William E., ed. Nathaniel Hawthornes The Blithedale Romance. Boston Bedford Books of St. Martins P, 1996.Grimke, Angelina. Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimk Selected Writings 1835- 1839. ed. Larry Ceplair. NY Columbia U P, 1989. 36-89.Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Toms Cabin. NY Bantam Books, 1981.