This essay reconstructs the unexplored history of a group of women who claimed a
place for themselves in the male-dominated public sphere of Toronto in the early 1850s. The
history of these women, who took a public stand on the issues of slavery, abolition and the
fugitives escaping to Canada, does not fit seamlessly into the history of the struggle for
women's rights nor the history of women's philanthropy. While the anti-slavery women
engaged in some of the same activities as these better-known subjects of women's history,
they brought a distinctive set of social and political concerns to their activism. Troubled by
the influx of destitute fugitive slaves arriving in Canada from the United States, the potential
extension of slavery on the North American continent, and the implications these
developments could have for the free Christian nation they were building in Canada, these
women took advantage of the public sphere to voice and act on their concerns about the
moral progress of society, especially in their city. They constructed a distinctly feminine
political culture that represented themselves and their activities as conforming to the canons
of femininity and domesticity, while it enabled the women to secure access and influence for
themselves - albeit limited access and influence - in the public sphere.
With aspirations to influence public opinion, but without formal positions of
authority in the public sphere, these women called upon the moral authority that nineteenth century
society ascribed to women to underwrite their public activities. Feminine moral
authority affirmed the righteousness of the values and beliefs that underlay their public
activities, and it justified their attempts to persuade others to espouse similar beliefs. It was
the foundation upon which these women tried to build a collective political culture and speak
on behalf of all Canadian women in the public sphere. Construed as gender-specific, this moral authority rested, however, not only on the distinction of gender, but also on a
combination of social attributes and cultural distinctions that included the distinction of race.
While there is no doubt that positions of authority in the public sphere of mid-nineteenth century Toronto were dominated by white men, the inroads the women achieved
and the roadblocks they confronted suggest that the public sphere was undergoing
considerable change in the early 1850s. To be sure, their attempts to influence the formation
of public opinion were indicative of larger social and political changes underway in
Canadian society — changes that historians have only begun to consider.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/4570 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Leroux, Karen |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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