Segregation,racism and white women reformers: a transnational analysis, 1840–1912

This article tracks continuities between early nineteenth-century female abolitionism and the role of white women reformers in Britain in the campaigns against segregation and lynch law in the USA, and on behalf of black rights in British colonies in the early twentieth century. It argues the value of a transnational perspective to these questions. More particularly, it explores the working out of the ‘maternalist’ legacy of female abolitionism, and the increasing problematising of ‘blackness’ and ‘Africanness’ in the perspectives of a circle of white women reformers in Britain.