SOURCE: “Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1780s,” in ELH, Vol. 61, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 341-62.

In the following essay, Coleman examines late eighteenth-century British texts discussing slavery and women's rights, and notes that even liberal-minded white writers sought to preserve what they viewed as the essential boundaries between whites and blacks.

In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemmic from the 1790s: white abolitionism and English women's protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with some critics arguing that a relatively benign “cultural racism” in the eighteenth century came to be supplanted by a more aggressive biological racism.¹ Patrick Brantlinger, for instance, characterizes late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing as more “positive” and “open-minded” about Africa and Africans than the racist and evolutionary accounts that were to follow in the wake of Victorian social science...