Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction By Holly M. Kent

Abstract

Holly M. Kent’s Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right: Gender and Power in Women’s Antebellum Antislavery Fiction offers an account of women’s abolitionist fiction written between 1821 and the eve of the Civil War that recalibrates readers’ understanding of the gendered history of rational dem ocratic citizenship. The imaginative, emotional, and sentimental affects that have long been gendered female in Western thought and dismissed as irrational are, in the literature Kent analyzes, instrumental tools of feminine political action in the decades leading up to the Civil War.