Topic + Source Exploration: Group 4 - Stowe's Women and Children

Members: Alyssa, Ahmad, Kelsey, Fabian

Profiles of Stowe's women and children from The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853):

Mr. and Mrs. Shelby

Eliza

Miss Ophelia

Marie St. Clare

Topsy

The Quakers

Stowe's final letter to readers in the last serialized issue of Uncle Tom's Cabin (no spoilers)

Note who Stowe addresses as the primary audience of Uncle Tom's Cabin. What does she hope that these young readers have gained from her didactic novel? 

From Gillian Brown's "Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah" 

"Slavery disregards this opposition between the family at home and the exterior workplace. The distinction between work and family is eradicated in the slave, for whom there is no separation between economic and private status. When people themselves are "articles" subject to "mercantile dealings," when "the souls and bodies of men" are "equivalent to money" (II, 317), women can no longer keep houses that provide refuge from marketplace activities. Slavery, according to Uncle Tom's Cabin, undermines women's housework by bringing the confusion of the marketplace into the center of the family shelter, into the kitchen. The real horror that slavery holds for the "mothers of America" to whom Stowe addressed her antislavery appeal is the suggestion that the family life nurtured by women is not immune from the economic life outside it (II, 316)" (505).
"More than the tragedy of the slave mothers who "are constantly made childless by the American slave trade" (II, 316),the security of free white American mothers and the family institution they guard concerns Stowe. While the slave economy doesn't threaten American mothers with selling their children, it does limit their authority and efficacy when it creates households with "no time, no place, no order" (I, 304)" (506). 

"In fashioning her abolitionist protest as a defense of nineteenth-century domestic values, Stowe designates slavery as a domestic issue for American women to adjudicate and manage. The call to the mothers of America for the abolition of slavery is a summons to fortify the home, to rescue domesticity from shiftlessness and slavery. Someone has to get in the kitchen with Dinah to eliminate hurryscurryation. The chaos in Dinah's kitchen signifies the immanence of the dissolution of domesticity's difference from the marketplace. Hence abolishing slavery means, in Stowe's politics of the kitchen, erasing the sign and reminder of the precariousness of the feminine sphere" (506).

"The ultimate adversary to mothers and housekeepers is not slavery, not even capitalism, but the masculine sphere of the marketplace. The most effective way to save the home from the marketplace, to prevent domesticity from consorting with either slave power or money power, is to abolish the marketplace altogether" (511). 

"The ideal kitchen in Uncle Tom's Cabin functions smoothly under the aegis of 'motherly loving kindness' (I, 196). Rachel Halliday's kitchen in the Quaker settlement that shelters runaway slaves, is, like Ophelia's, 'without a particle of dust'; but more than orderliness, its 'rows of shining tins, suggestive of unmentionable good things to the appetite' indicate the value of abundance and generosity in Stowe's utopian domestic economy...The spirit of mother-love creates a domesticity in the image of paradise: a world before separations, a domestic economy before markets" (512-13). 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin urges a departure from the passivity assigned women by culture, a departure that is also a return home, to the ideal matriarchal home...Abolition in Uncle Tom's Cabin is accordingly conveyed and understood through mothers" (516). 

"Finally, violence in Uncle Tom's Cabin not only is executed by the slave economy and masculine desire that endanger the family and home, but is embedded in the very foundation of home. For Stowe, only a house divided, a house divested of men, markets, and desire, can be a home" (523).