History: Faculty Publications

Visions of America

Document Type

Contribution to Book

Publication Date

10-30-2025

Publication Title

The Ashurst Sisters: Nurturing Rebellion Across the Nineteenth Century

DOI

10.1007/978-3-032-00785-8_7

ISBN

978-3-032-00784-1

Abstract

Victorian reform networks connecting Britain and America intensified during the 1850s–1880s as the Ashurst family deepened their transatlantic activism. William Ashurst Sr.’s 1853 American journey strengthened personal connections with prominent abolitionists and women’s rights advocates, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Henry C. Wright, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. Following William and Elizabeth Ashurst’s deaths, their daughters Caroline, Matilda, and Emilie sustained these transatlantic reform networks while navigating personal transformations. During the American Civil War, the Ashurst women collaborated with Mentia Taylor and African American activist Sarah Parker Remond in the Ladies London Emancipation Society, publishing abolitionist pamphlets despite divided British public opinion. Matilda’s daughter Elizabeth “Ashurst” Biggs contributed significantly through her anti-slavery novel White and Black, praised alongside Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work. Social gatherings during Garrison’s subsequent visits to Britain in 1867 and 1877 cemented these familial connections, expanded their collective activism to women’s suffrage and anti-regulation campaigns, and showcased how entertaining could be politicized. This chapter illuminates how Victorian reform networks operated across national boundaries, demonstrating the interconnection between anti-slavery activism, Italian unification efforts, and early women’s rights movements.

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