On the Path to Citizenship : A Conceptual Historicist Reading of Antebellum Women's Protest Literature

This essay introduces a new approach to the history of pro‐ test literature, and to literary history writing in general. My case studies investigate three antebellum American works by women that express discontent with women’s condition: the “Declaration of Sentiments” of the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (published in 1861, but written probably between 1852 and 1857). Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s theory and practice of conceptual history, the essay includes an analysis of the semantic field of citizenship in these works with an aim to explore the textual politics of their protest within the con‐ ceptual and ideological context of antebellum America.