How Abolitionists Put the Body at the Center of the Fight Against Slavery

The campaign to undo slavery drew reformers, radical activists, and enslaved people themselves to end what many viewed as the greatest evil of their time. Abolitionists advanced arguments about the essential sameness of all human bodies and the immorality of human suffering with a special focus on the plight of enslaved mothers. Their efforts created a liberatory politics of the body that included aiding refugees who crossed state lines, insisting that all people shared “one blood,” and recognizing that slave-produced cotton, rice, sugar, and coffee materially linked the bodies of consumers and enslaved laborers. Slavery’s defenders, meanwhile, countered with arguments about distinct human races and trumpeted specious evidence of bodily differences published in mainstream medical textbooks and drawn from medical dissections and cranial measurements.

In this lecture, Kathleen M. Brown will draw from her recent book, Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity, to argue that despite the eventual end to slavery, the racism embedded in medical science left a pernicious legacy that continues to imperil Black bodily sovereignty, health, and equality.

Biography

Kathleen M. Brown is the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also a faculty affiliate of Africana Studies, the History and Sociology of Science, and the Center for Research on Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and the lead faculty historian on the Penn & Slavery Project. In 2021-2022 she was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Brown’s research interests center on intersectional questions of race, gender, sexuality, and labor in colonial North American, Atlantic, and early U.S. contexts. She is the author of two prize-winning books, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996) and Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (2009). She has recently completed a history of abolition, Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), that considers how the campaign to end slavery entangled activists in a complex process of undoing longstanding practices and habits of the body central to that institution. Undoing Slavery incorporates research in legal and medical history to provide a historical understanding of the human body at the center of debates about Black citizenship and the regulations of Black people’s movements, labor, and reproductive capacity.

Assigned Reading

Kathleen Brown, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)