The Newberry Seminar in U.S. Religious History

Co-Sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago Divinity School

Thursday, April 8, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm

"Ethiopia Shall Stretch Out Her Hand:" Female Colonization Support and the Making of an American Evangelical Empire

Karen Fisher Younger, Pennsylvania State University

In the late 1820s, white women began a more systematic, organized and public campaign in support of the colonization of freed blacks to Africa. These women advocated the tenets of traditional concepts of womanhood, urged the merits of non-sectarian evangelicalism, and encouraged the effort to reconcile the civic with the spiritual realms in an amalgam of Christianity and traditional republicanism. They also inextricably fused female obligation to the advancement of America's global mission and helped construct the emerging religious discourse that advocated the necessary and integral place of women in education and missionary activity. But, perhaps, female colonization supporters' most enduring influence is that they helped normalize the foreignness of African American women and men and contributed to a political environment unwilling to consider a multiracial society or include African Americans in their vision of an American democratic society.

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