CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION: WHITE ABOLITIONISM AND ENGLISH WOMEN'S PROTEST WRITING IN THE 1790s BY DEIRDRE COLEMAN In this paper I wish to examine two overlapping areas of middle-class polemic from the 1790s:white abolitionism and English women's protest writing. A certain polarization has crept into recent discussions of abolitionism, with some critics arguing that a relatively benign "cultural racism" in the eighteenth century came to be supplanted by a more aggressive biological racism.' Patrick Brantlinger, for instance, character- izes late eighteenth-century abolitionist writing as more "positive" and "open-minded" about Africa and Africans than the racist and evolution- ary accounts that were to follow in the wake of Victorian social science; in his view, the Victorians must bear responsibility for inventing the myth of Africa as the Dark ContinenL2 But while abolitionism may have taken its roots in philanthropy and a new-found enthusiasm for the universal rights of man, the many tracts it spawned contradict such a clear-cut distinction between the earlier and later periods. In its luridness and violence, late eighteenth-century anti-slavery rhetoric points directly, for instance, to the systematic colonization of Africa; it is also rich in the sorts of phobias and bogeys more commonly associated with the later nineteenth century, such as miscegenation, cannibalism, and an essen- tialist stereotyping of sex and race, such as the perception of white woman's sexuality as a form of degenerate black sexuality. The close association of woman in this earlier period with slavery, luxury, sexual license, and violent cruelty intersects problematically with the second area of oppositional rhetoric I wish to examine: women's protest writing. In seeking to capitalize upon fashionable anti-slavery rhetoric for their own political objectives, women only increased the general murkiness of abolitionist rhetoric, an effect most evident in their employment of the emotive but cliched analogy between their own disenfranchised lot and the plight of enslaved Africans. While these late eighteenth century women both anticipate and confirm Frederick Douglass's claim, in mid nineteenth-century America, that "the cause of the slave has been peculiarly woman's cause," their writings also reveal clearly why any political link between white women and black people ELH 61 (1994) 341-362 O 1994 by The Johns Hopkills University Press 341 Coleman, Deirdre. Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolotionism and English Women's Protest Wrtiting in the 1790s. ELH 61:2 (1994), 341-362. © The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reproduced with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.