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Gender, Genre And Slavery: The Other Rowson, Rowson's Others, Eileen Elrod

English

Readers familiar with Susanna Rowson as the author of Charlotte Temple (1791, 1794) do not think of her as an abolitionist. But in 1805 Rowson articulated an anti-slavery position in Universal Geography, a textbook addressed to schoolgirls such as those she herself taught at the Young Ladies Academy in Boston. Condemning those who viewed sugar and slavery as a winning equation that would make them rich, Rowson denounced the “purchase and sale of human beings,” and insisted that anyone “enlightened by reason and religion” would oppose the “horrid trade,” and see it as she did, as “a disgrace to humanity.”1 …