Moira Ferguson – författare

Against the historical background of slavery and colonialism, this study investigates how white and Afro-Caribbean women writers have responded to feminist, abolitionist and post-emancipationist issues. It aims to reveal a relationship between colonial exploitation and female sexual oppression.

"An invaluable resource to scholars interested in feminist thought. . . . " —Ruth Perry"Anyone interested in women's history or feminist thought must read this book." —Lillian Faderman"Moira Ferguson has selected wisely from well-known and little-known figures and from fiction, polemic and poetry to illustrate the long and diverse history of feminist reflection up to and including Mary Wollstonecraft. . . . Good reading for scholars and a fine book for classroom use." —Natalie Zemon Davis"The selections resonate with exceptional force." —Fides et Historia" . . . impressive new product, fit for classroom and study, student and scholar." —The Scriblerian" . . . excellent anthology . . . without a doubt at all an immensely important addition to the growing library of Feminist Studies." —Anglo-American Studies" . . . this anthology is a valuable guide." —The Year's Work in English StudiesFor this anthology tracing the origins of feminist thought in Britain, the editor chose 28 important writers from Margaret Tyler (1578) to Mary Anne Radcliffe (1799).

This is the first anthology to bring together the writings of the earliest black women writers in the East and West Caribbean, Bermuda, Canada, the US and England. The selections span the American Revolution to the decade following the Civil War. The nine writers included, both slave and free, represent a variety of genres, regions, professions, and political perspectives. Their words suggest the rich cultural history embedded in the writings, and provide a glimpse into the lives of women coping with extreme racism and sexism. As black women, survival guides the construction of their texts and their public images. Each employs diverse strategies of resistance, evasion, displacement, omission and accommodation. With an introduction that contains copious biographical details about each writer and a brief chronology preceding each text, Nine Black Women is a unique collection of original works.

Mary Prince was the first black British woman to escape from slavery and publish a record of her experiences. In this unique document, Mary Prince vividly recalls her life as a slave in Bermuda, Turks Island, and Antigua, her rebellion against physical and psychological degradation, and her eventual escape to London in 1828.First published in London and Edinburgh in 1831, and well into its third edition that year, The History of Mary Prince inflamed public opinion and created political havoc. Never before had the sufferings and indignities of enslavement been seen through the eyes of a woman--a woman struggling for freedom in the face of great odds.Moira Ferguson's edition of the book added an introduction, annotations, and appendices. The book has found popularity both in the classroom and with the general public. Recently, an adaptation of the memoirs of Mary Prince appeared as one segment of "A Skirt Through History," a six-part feature film series produced by the BBC. Mary Prince's story has also been the centerpiece of BBC radio broadcasts.In this revised and expanded edition of The History of Mary Prince, Ferguson has added new material, based on her extensive research in Bermuda and London. The book includes new details of Mary Prince's experiences as a freewoman in England, the transcripts of several libel cases brought against her, and the reactions of British society, as seen in prominent periodicals of the day, against the original publication of The History of Mary Prince. This new material brings greater depth and detail and serves to more fully illustrate and contextualize the life of this remarkable woman.Moira Ferguson is James E. Ryan Professor of English and Women's Literature, University of Nebraska.

Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780-1900 focuses on women writers and their struggle to protect animals from abuse in the transition from preindustrial to Victorian society. Looking critically at the work of Sarah Trimmer, Susanna Watts, Elizabeth Heyrick, Anna Sewell, and Frances Power Cobb, Moira Ferguson explores the links between Britain's evolving self-definition and the debate over the humane treatment of animals. Ferguson contends that animal-advocacy writing during this period provided a means for women to register their moral outrage over national problems extending far beyond those of animal abuse, effectively allowing them to achieve a public voice as citizens. The writers in question represent multiple genres, time frames, and political approaches. Taken together, their productive lives span more than a century. They are ideologically divided on animal protection, and their political identities range from conservative Anglican Tories to radical reformers. Through their plural discourses on animal advocacy, these women actively participated in an ongoing humanitarian struggle that forged a connection between Englishness and kindness to animals, intensifying as industry and empire advanced, and effectively linked gender with national identity and self-definition. Their concerns resonate in a global as well as a national context; cruelty to animals emerges as a metaphor for imperial predation. In this sense, the writings constitute a gendered response to an evolving colonial discourse about others. Moira Ferguson is James E. Ryan Professor of English and Women's Literature, University of Nebraska. Her books include Subject to Others: Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834; Colonialism and Gender: Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid; East Caribbean Connections; and The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself.

Shows how eighteenth-century women's literature redefined nation and culture in class and gendered terms.This book examines the poems of three Englishwomen-washerwoman Mary Collier, middle-class feminist polemicist Mary Scott, Bristol milkwoman Ann Yearsley, and Scottish dairywoman from Ayrshire, Janet Little. It questions how national identity might have influenced gender and class affiliations, and, reciprocally, how gender might have determined a nationalist impulse, particularly as it played out during the revolutionary period (1770-1800) in which most of the texts were written.

Daughter of a black slaveholder father, Anne Hart Gilbert and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites were among the first educators of slaves and free African Caribbeans in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Antigua. These members of the "free colored" community who married white men and played an active role as educators, antislavery activists, and Methodist evangelicals were also among the first African Caribbean female writers. This exceptional volume offers for the first time a collection of their writings. Because the records of the Hart sisters are rare and original testimony from black women of the time, they will be of great interest to the modern scholar. Autobiographical and biographical narrative, along with antislavery tracts, hymns, devotional poetry, and religious documents vividly reveal the lives of these courageous women. Their writings illuminate the complex of racial, spiritual, and class- and gender-based divisions, as well as attitudes, of Anglophone Caribbean society. Moira Ferguson's introduction situates the Hart sisters in historical context and explains how their writings helped establish a specific black Antiguan cultural identity.

First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their class position, religious affiliation and evolving conceptions of sexual difference, constructed a colonial discourse about Africans in general and slaves in particular. Crucially, the feminist propensity to align with anti-slavery activism helped to secure the political self-liberation of white British women. A fascinating and detailed text, this volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students researching colonial British female writers, early feminist discourse, and the anti-slavery debate.

First published in 1992, Subject to Others considers the intersection between late seventeenth- to early nineteenth-century British female writers and the colonial debate surrounding slavery and abolition. Beginning with an overview that sets the discussion in context, Moira Ferguson then chronicles writings by Anglo-Saxon women and one African-Caribbean ex-slave woman, from between 1670 and 1834, on the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves. Through studying the writings of around thirty women in total, Ferguson concludes that white British women, as a result of their class position, religious affiliation and evolving conceptions of sexual difference, constructed a colonial discourse about Africans in general and slaves in particular. Crucially, the feminist propensity to align with anti-slavery activism helped to secure the political self-liberation of white British women. A fascinating and detailed text, this volume will be of particular interest to undergraduate students researching colonial British female writers, early feminist discourse, and the anti-slavery debate.

Argues that Paule Marshall's work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents.From Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) to The Fisher King (2000), Paule Marshall's novels, novellas, and short stories include a rich cast of unforgettable men, women, and children who forge spiritual as well as emotional and geographical paths toward their ancestors. In this, the first critical study to address all of Marshall's fiction, Moira Ferguson argues that Marshall's work collectively constitutes a multigenerational saga of the African diaspora across centuries and continents. In creating a space for her characters' interrupted lives and those of their elders and ancestors, Ferguson argues, Marshall trains a spotlight on slavery's wake and engages her fiction in the service of healing deep global wounds.