WOMEN AND SISTERS Antislavery Feminists in American Culture <i> by Jean Fagan Yellin (Yale University Press: $25; 226 pp.) </i>

In this study of the 19th-Century alliance between feminists and the antislavery movement, Jane Fagan Yellin focuses on a central symbol for the allied protest: a medallion depicting a black woman in bondage holding out her chains to the female figure of justice. It bore the legend, “Am I not a woman and a sister?” and the biblical quote, “Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.”

Yellin examines the work of four women, two white--Angelina Grimke and L. Maria Child--and two black--Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs--whose aim was to make visible the suffering of women and slaves in a society that had closed its eyes. The method for opening eyes was imagery. The symbols of the movement gave voice to those without power--and often gave offence to the establishment. Abolitionist newspapers were criticized for the violence of the images they printed, and certainly the involvement of women in such enterprises was considered indecorous.

Through analysis of images in the speeches and writings of these women, Yellin traces the growing power and appeal of their protest. As the images grew more widely recognizable, however, Yellin shows how a natural cultural phenomenon exerted its dismantling force: The feminist abolitionist images were appropriated into the cultural mainstream. Identifying imagery lifted from the womens’ movement in such works as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” and Hiram Powers’ sculpture, “The Greek Slave,” Yellin demonstrates that the more common a symbol becomes, the less it belongs to its original patrons and the more it loses its original meaning.