The Trouble with White Women

by Kyla Schuller

  The suffocating heat of summer turned into the frost of winter, and still Jacobs had yet to rise to standing. Through illness, frostbite, unconsciousness, and the assault of the elements, Jacobs remained in the attic year after year. By the time her friends were able to secure her safe passage north out of Edenton’s harbor it was June 1842. She had spent seven years in the living grave.4

  Seven years hidden in a crawl space so small Dr. Norcom never suspected she was hidden a mere block from his house in town. Jacobs wryly called the crawl space her “loophole of retreat”: an ambiguity that creates a means of escape.5

  Once north, Jacobs joined her brother John Jacobs, who had also freed himself, in the western New York abolitionist movement. The pair frequented the Anti-Slavery Office and Reading Room, which had opened the previous year above the offices of Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper in Rochester, about fifty miles west of Seneca Falls. Jacobs was eventually appointed agent of the Reading Room, and on Thursdays, she joined a circle of abolitionist women “to sew, knit, read, and talk for the cause.”6 While the reading room venture didn’t last two years, Jacobs’s desire to participate in the movement continued unabated, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 left her and others vulnerable to capture in the streets of her now home, New York City. The North was no longer a refuge.

  Jacobs decided that sharing her story was the most significant contribution to dislodging slavery’s increasing stranglehold on the country that she could make. Many whites, North and South, persisted in believing that slavery was a civilizing institution that provided care and protection for people too primitive to provide for themselves. Her narrative would illuminate the suffering that enslaved women endured—for they were used as breeders to create more human “property”—and the extraordinary lengths they went to in order to escape bondage.

  Yet to tell the truth in service of the cause would open her up to scorn and shame. Dr. Norcom began sexually abusing Jacobs when she was fifteen. She had managed to avoid his ultimate design: installing her in the isolated house he had built just for the purpose of sequestering her four miles away from the watchful eyes of his jealous wife and Jacobs’s protective grandmother. But her safety came at great personal cost. Jacobs thwarted his attempts to make her his full-time concubine, nearly a decade prior to her retreat into the crawl space, through a “deliberate calculation.”7 To avoid being shut away for Norcom’s pleasure and profit, she became the mistress of a prominent white man in town, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, and he fathered her two children.

  Jacobs needed a writer who understood the delicacy of her task. She wanted simultaneously to expose the sexual abuses enslaved girls and women suffered while also forming alliances with white women in the North. This would be a tricky maneuver, for these readers would initially be more likely to judge, rather than empathize with, her choice to strike up an extramarital relationship with Sawyer in order to avoid her enslaver’s grasp. Jacobs had been reading and writing since childhood, thanks to one of the Norcom daughters, but she didn’t feel up to the task of composing her own narrative for print. In the early 1850s, no Black woman in the United States had yet published a short story, novel, or autobiography; Frances Harper’s short story “The Two Offers” wouldn’t appear until the end of the decade.

  In New York, Jacobs worked as a nanny for Cornelia Grinnell Willis and Nathaniel Parker Willis. Nathaniel was the most prominent magazine writer of the era and, as founder of the magazine now known as Town & Country, was well connected to the literary world. When Cornelia suggested that Harriet Beecher Stowe could be entrusted with bringing Jacobs’s story to the public, Jacobs thought they had identified an ally. Stowe had published the blockbuster Uncle Tom’s Cabin the prior year. The antislavery novel had already sold three hundred thousand copies; over the course of the nineteenth century, only the Bible sold better. Stowe elicited tears of sympathy for the slave, and white women of the North sobbed in chorus, turning against the institution of slavery. Many commentators would later declare that the novel—and white women’s tears—led to the Civil War, thus flushing the sin of slavery from the nation. And, despite Stowe’s position as a white woman writer coming from a prominent New England reform family, Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t shy away from confronting white men’s sexual abuse of enslaved women.

  Jacobs asked her close friend Amy Post, a prominent white Quaker activist who had attended the Seneca Falls Convention five years earlier, to approach Stowe about writing Jacobs’s narrative. Stowe’s response would change the course of Jacobs’s life and of American women’s writing. Once more, Harriet Jacobs took decisive action. But this time, it would be to take control of her own story.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe was the most popular writer and best-known abolitionist in the nineteenth-century United States. Through decades of deft storytelling in the sentimental vein, she translated the traditional domain of white women’s authority—the home and the heart—into a method of political power. Whereas Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were best known for approaching women’s rights and abolition via the apparatuses of the state, such as petitions, elections, and amendments, Stowe and other sentimental writers fought for social change through appealing directly to readers’ emotions, hoping to inspire a change of feeling.

  Public opinion widely afforded white men of the emerging middle class the faculties of reason and rationality that authorized them to monopolize business and politics. At the same time, it simultaneously restricted white women to the role of “angel of the house.” Their alleged purity and delicacy of feeling would guard the family from the morbid calculations and dangerous self-interest of government and the marketplace. Nation- and empire-building was bloody work, and commentators regularly smoothed the contradictions of civilization by assigning white women the task of absorbing and softening its violence. This gave white women an important, though largely obscured, public position. When white women first gained roles outside the home in the United States and the British empire, it was on account of white feminist advocates who stressed their role as civilizers who would spread refined feeling, the arts of bourgeois domesticity, and Protestant-capitalist self-discipline. Stowe and her sister, the white feminist writer Catharine Beecher, were among the most prominent figures who grabbed ahold of white women’s assigned roles as domestic angels and stabilizers of civilization, expanding them into a platform for influence that reached far beyond the house and into the nation.

  In best-selling housekeeping manuals, novels, and short stories, Stowe and Beecher argued that women had a special purview of their own: the emotional realm. In their vision, women’s capacity for sympathy was not primarily of private, interior significance. Instead, their delicacy of feeling was their public value, and it formed the foundation of true civilization. Civilization, as one of Stowe’s fictional characters attests, meant a nation that was “noble, simple, pure, and religious; and women can do more towards this even than men, for women are the real architects of society.”8 Deeply felt tears enabled middle-class white women to cast their housecleaning and sewing aside and emerge into the public sphere—as the civilizers of the nation.

  If women were the real architects of civilization, then tears and the sentimental fiction and poetry that elicited them were their building blocks. Stowe argued that sympathy with the travails of the less fortunate ought to guide all public and private decisions—and this emotional identification depended upon reading about the brutality they experienced. Yet readers’ outpouring of tearful sympathy wasn’t primarily intended to improve the condition of the oppressed. Instead, commentators widely touted that learning of others’ suffering cultivated the character and moral authority of the person who did the crying. As a genre, sentimental writing like Stowe’s displays the anguish of the marginalized to build the character and influence of the more privileged. “Sentimentality,” James Baldwin memorably wrote of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, traffics in “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion,” d
isguising the “catalogue of violence” lurking at its core: Black pain, splayed across the page, becomes a mere foil for white (women’s) power.9

  The public value accorded to white women’s tears today flows forth from these earliest days of white feminism. Luvvie Ajayi, Brittney Cooper, Robin DiAngelo, and others have explained how white women weaponize their tears, using their overwhelmed reaction when they are called out for their racism to center themselves as the true victims of racism.10 When white women are confronted with the possibility they can be perpetrators, and not only victims, of oppressive actions and they burst out crying, antiracist work grinds to a halt. A white woman sobs, and the room falls to her feet. These tears seemingly perform a self-baptism. They cleanse the sufferer of any past wrongs and invest her with a martyred authority flowing from the realm of allegedly indisputable truth: her own hurt feelings.

  Some of the sanctifying innocence widely afforded to white women when they cry can be traced back to an original wellspring: the inkpot of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  In 1850, slavery was expanding, rather than retreating, in the United States. Stowe, like Jacobs, was compelled into action by the Fugitive Slave Law. In the spring of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband Calvin was appointed professor of theology at Bowdoin College in Maine. As the couple traveled east from Cincinnati to their new home, they stopped for a week with each of Stowe’s siblings. At the Boston house of her abolitionist brother Edward Beecher and his wife Isabella, she was immersed in talk of the pending law, which would make harboring a self-emancipated person a serious crime and effectively turn every police squad in the country into a slave patrol. Edward and Isabella were outraged that the North would no longer provide refuge for the formerly enslaved. Stowe, for her part, remained silent, absorbing the conversations. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in September as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1850, Isabella reached out to her sister-in-law to goad her into action.

  “Hattie,” Isabella wrote, “if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”11 The forty-year-old Stowe was a prominent writer who had been publishing essays and short stories in national periodicals for a decade.

  Isabella’s letter became Stowe’s charge. A personal tragedy also spurred her to act. Her sixth child had succumbed to cholera just before their move, and she felt that the pain of watching her child die gave her new insight into how enslaved mothers feel when their children are sold away from them. Through her talents with the pen, Stowe would “make this whole nation feel” the evils of slavery as she now did—though she had to wait until her seventh child was old enough to let her sleep. A year later, the infant was out of her bed, Stowe’s capacity to write returned, and she dashed off a note to her editor at the National Era magazine: “Now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.… I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.”12

  Harriet Beecher Stowe. (Courtesy of the State Archive of Florida)

  But what kind of revolution would be inspired by white women’s feelings? Would the focus on their feelings about Black lives render white women the true heroes of abolition? Turning to sentimentalism to rouse public opinion against slavery risked rendering the enslaved mere objects of sympathy, a passive cast of characters absorbing abuse while white readers enjoyed the cathartic, and ultimately self-serving, spilling of tears.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe was born to a famous, and at times infamous, family of reformers. She proposed a clear method for joining them in the abolitionist movement: sketch a story that would portray slavery “in the most lifelike and graphic manner possible.”13 Fiction carefully drawn, she knew, could pry open the heart. Nonetheless, she faced a significant obstacle in rendering slavery palpable on the page. Stowe had never been to the plantation South. Though she lived in Cincinnati for nearly twenty years, located just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, she had boarded a boat across the river’s mile-long span only once, seventeen years earlier. And she had never traveled farther south, a not uncommon situation for middle-class white women in particular, given the horse-drawn carriages and crater-filled dirt roads that congealed into mud that characterized the transportation system of the nineteenth-century United States. Given her lack of firsthand experience, how could she create vivid scenes of places and characters entirely foreign to her?

  Stowe, however, was confident in her command of the material. “I have had ample opportunities for studying” the “negro character,” she informed her editor. Stowe’s biographer Joan D. Hedrick reveals who served as the novelist’s primary specimens: her servants. Hedrick surmises that Stowe’s position of power over the only formerly enslaved people whom she knew personally “radically compromised her perceptions.”14 The result in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a mixture all too common among white abolitionists—a fierce antislavery argument propped up by racist portrayals of African Americans as naïve, highly impressionable dependents in desperate need of white women’s guiding hand.

  Stowe extracted significant amounts of material from her cook, “poor Eliza Buck,” who had formerly been enslaved in Virginia and Kentucky, and on a Louisiana plantation. Buck conjured “scenes” for Stowe of both agency and utter dispossession. She told of brutal plantation whippings and the serious injuries that resulted, injuries that she would sneak out after nightfall to tend. She also told Stowe of the children she bore, fathered by her Kentucky master, which may well have shocked the writer and certainly inspired her pity. “You know, Mrs. Stowe, slave women cannot help themselves,” Buck retorted.15

  If Stowe’s sense of propriety was shaken, she learned nonetheless that sexual abuse was an intrinsic part of enslavement for women. The global slave trade, which captured individuals in Africa and imported them to Europe and the Americas, had ceased in 1808. Yet its end had ratcheted up Southern planters’ demands on enslaved women’s bodies in the United States, for the only way slavery could persist was by keeping women pregnant. However discreetly Stowe’s novel approached the topic, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the first texts to whisper about the rape of enslaved women directly into the ears of readers lounging comfortably in Northern homes—an aspect of the novel that most likely encouraged Harriet Jacobs’s trust.

  Stowe’s goal for Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to show “the best side” of slavery “and something faintly approaching the worst,” perhaps aiming to turn readers against the institution while seemingly giving it a fair shake. But hinting at the worst was necessary to her goal to elicit rivers of tears. To approximate slavery’s most outrageous abuses, she dispatched her main character, the eponymous Uncle Tom, to a Louisiana cotton plantation. This setting was entirely beyond her ken. Stowe could easily gather the perspective of enslavers: their accounts spilled out from newspapers, journals, and books across the expanding nation. But her blockbuster-in-progress, which aimed to animate the slave’s plight in vivid detail, depended on knowledge that was much harder to obtain and, therefore, all the more important to broadcast. “Stowe’s access to information was as important as her ability to cast details in an imaginative frame,” her biographer Hedrick emphasizes.16 Wishing to gain further the viewpoint of the enslaved, Stowe approached Frederick Douglass, a man she had never met.

  “In the course of my story, the scene will fall upon a cotton plantation. I am very desirous, therefore, to gain information from one who has been an actual labourer on one,” Stowe wrote to Douglass. “Such a person as Henry Bibb, if in the country, might give me just the kind of information I desire.” The prior year, Bibb had self-published a popular account of his life on a Kentucky plantation and his dramatic escape from slavery. She enclosed a list of questions for Bibb with the “request that he will at earliest convenience answer them.” Stowe held nothing back in making her demand. Her need for details seemingly entitled her to request specific information from two of the country’s best-known self-emancipated slaves,
as if she were ordering from a menu. Her letter to Douglass concluded with an imperious attempt to persuade him that two of his deeply held convictions were wrong. She insisted that Christian churches were not generally proslavery and that colonization schemes to send Black Americans to Africa were highly advisable.17

  Bibb, for his part, was already in Canada founding the nation’s first Black newspaper. Douglass, as far as we know, never replied. Eliza Buck, the occasional person escaping enslavement on the Underground Railroad who posted at Stowe’s house, Stowe’s brother Charles who had traveled to Louisiana, and a few published firsthand accounts of slavery remained her primary sources of the plantation South.

  Today, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has become synonymous with the misfortune of its protagonist Uncle Tom, though the meaning of the now epithet—a cringing, subservient Black man eagerly falling to his knees at a white man’s bidding—arises from hundreds of stage adaptations of the tale, not from Stowe’s novel. The book conveys the suffering of the enslaved and articulates a method for lifting slaves out of the status of property. True to its sentimental agenda, however, the most significant figures are not enslaved characters like Uncle Tom. The principal actors are the white women who alternately enslave them and help set them free.

  White people, and white women especially, Uncle Tom’s Cabin seeks to impress on the reader, have the power to mold the character of Black people. History and biology have combined to elevate whites into the position of parents while Blacks remain vulnerable youth, as if mostly blank, still-malleable slates waiting for further inscription. Uncle Tom, for example, is described as possessing “the soft, impressible nature of his kindly race, ever yearning toward the simple and childlike.” For Stowe, Anglo-Saxons have by contrast accumulated racial vigor on account of being “born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence” under civilization. It is thus the duty of white women, as she sees it, to impress new influences into Black souls and flesh.18