Transformative Work: An Antislavery Petition at the National Exhibition of Women’s Labour, 1898

Abstract

This chapter investigates the meaning of an obscure exhibit at the Dutch National Exhibition of Women’s Labour (The Hague, 1898): an illuminated copy of a women’s antislavery petition from 1855. The chapter asks what frames of reference this exhibit mobilised, reconstructing its significance for visitors by examining references to the antislavery movement in a range of women’s reform periodicals and in a feminist bestseller: Hilda van Suylenburg (1897), which had been published by the president of the exhibition, Cécile Goekoop-de Jong van Beek en Donk, the year before. The chapter shows that the appropriation of the history of antislavery by organised feminism, a dynamic well known in the English and American contexts, was part of Dutch feminist culture as well. Not the straightforward celebration of Dutch women’s activism it appears, the exhibit rather draws on a transnational culture of imperial feminism. The chapter ends with a reflection on the collective blindness to the realities of colonial slavery and the struggle for abolition that folk stories about antislavery fostered.