Sojourner Truth has become an icon. This former slave, who traveled across the northeastern United States in a horse-drawn carriage to speak out against slavery, is certainly a pivotal figure in transforming mid-nineteenth-century American democracy and elevating the status of women as well as slaves in this country. But she was not alone in her quest for equality for all blacks and for women of all races. This course is designed to look beyond the iconic Truth, to rediscover and reinvestigate the work of black and white women who, against all odds, became active in public policy debates and transformed the nineteenth century into a "century of reform." Through an investigation of the strategies of these nineteenth-century black and white female abolitionists, we'll try to gain a better understanding of the ongoing relationship between suffering and American citizenship, spectatorship and the self. We'll study the "performative" nature of identity, and the categories such as race, gender, and American-ness through which we usually understand ourselves. In an effort to understand abolitionist women's work, we'll consider the shifting historical circumstances of the transatlantic world that they tried to reform. We'll pay particular attention to those women who staged their resistance to slavery and racism from 1825 through 1865, analyzing the women's various avenues toward publication as well as their actual anti-slavery essays, speeches, letters, poems, short stories, slave narratives, tell-all books, and autobiographical novels. How did these women perform their abolitionist activism, in print and at the podium, and what can we learn from their practices, to apply to our own era? Our theoretical readings and archival adventures will help us illuminate these women's performances and their legacies in a world that still sustains global slavery and fosters what many call the "new abolitionism." Our readings will include works by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Lydia Maria Child, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and a host of lesser-known anti-slavery lecturers and essayists. (Not available to students who have completed LSHS 377.)