Abstract
Part of the work facing antebellum antislavery women writers in the U.S.—both black and white—was to enlist the sympathies of white women on behalf of enslaved African-American women. This was complicated, and critical, in a culture structured in part by the absolute dualism between "black" slavery and "white" freedom and by racialist notions of biological difference.1 Nor was a belief in inherent racial differences limited to racist proslavery ideologues, who naturalized the enslavement of Africans by enshrining notions of the moral and physical superiority of whites over blacks. Identity as being in part a condition of biological inheritance was the premise of proslavery and antislavery writers, most notably during the 1840s and 1850s. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance, whose spectacularly popular Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (1852) launched a powerful assault on the institution of slavery, also promoted racialist and colonialist views.