Gender and Abolitionist Texts: Corpus Linguistics Analysis of Annual Reports and Abolitionist Literature

Women abolitionists in the 1830s produced an enormous body of antislavery literature and annual reports recording their efforts to end slavery. The language they used drew heavily on the sentimentalism and has often been dismissed as overwrought. By analyzing the language women used in their fiction and nonfiction writing, it may be possible to determine how antislavery efforts fed into growing dissatisfaction with women’s position in society and detect early changes in thought about race and racism.  By comparing fiction and nonfiction writing, it may also be possible to track whether works of fiction were influencing how women reported their own activities or if the reports of activities were shaping fictionalized accounts of slavery and freedom. Corpus linguistics and basic statistical analysis allow for a closer analysis of the texts than traditional historical methods of close reading permit, and go beyond counting words to study co-occurrence and compare language use in this set of texts to standard language use in the 1830s. By using digital tools, we can challenge historical assumptions about the connections between antislavery and women’s rights as well as gain a deeper understanding of the connections between race and gender discrimination in the early nineteenth century.