Tender Traffic: Abolitionists, Female Emigration Societies, and Domestic Labor Markets

This paper compares women’s emigration societies and domestic employment agencies based in London, Boston, Cape Town, and St. Ann’s Bay. I analyze the Atlantic circulation of domestic wage workers between 1820 and 1870, the period of British and American women’s most coordinated and successful antislavery activism. Transatlantic reformers challenged slavery and prostitution as twin forms of “unholy traffic” in female bodies. The American Female Moral Reform Society built all-female “offices of direction” (employment agencies), purporting to save poor, fugitive, and immigrant women from sexual trafficking by shuttling them to domestic workplaces. Though managers considered paid domestic labor a rescue from slavery and prostitution, they enacted similar forms of commodification: public bodily scrutiny, geographic displacement, and family separation. Black abolitionist women such as Nancy Prince created employment agencies of their own in New England and, after Britain's 1833 abolition of colonial slavery, Jamaica.

Meanwhile, British feminists such as Maria Rye, Caroline Chisholm, and Louisa Twining organized emigrant societies that transported girls and women from workhouses to colonies throughout the empire. Their domestic labor would stabilize settler colonies by replicating the imperial British home. Emigrant matrons, also active in the movement to abolish Atlantic slavery, saw the waged domestic labor market as a way to replace the labor of emancipated women. How did migrants shape new markets in waged domestic labor, resist coercion, and interact with colonized and formerly enslaved women ?

The paper draws on the established historiography on intimacy and empire in transatlantic women’s movements, while knitting it together with the new history of capitalism.