· Touching Liberty, Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body by Karen Sánchez-Eppler (’77) I found this book when I googled Karen’s name. I remembered a beautiful poem she wrote over forty years ago when she was in high school. So I thought she might have written a book. She has written several. Here, Karen examines pre-Civil War rhetoric concerning the body during a time when one’s own body could belong to someone else either through slavery or through marriage. Paradoxes abound as women become Abolition activists. Karen makes her case through the study of Helen Jacobs, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickenson. Karen’s thorough analysis of Helen Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl uncovers the unique complexities for slave women, whose bodies were doubly their master’s possessions. Karen shows how the poetry of Walt Whitman strives to mediate and merge the polarities within the body politic. In Emily Dickenson’s poetry, Karen shows that through reoccurring images of bondage and liberty, the self reflects the problems of the nation. In her Coda, Karen pulls together the ideas of the book with the image of the topsy-turvy doll. Look beneath the skirts of the black doll, and you have a white doll. I had one of those dolls as a child, and it would make my little-girl brain explode, an effect which the interplay of concepts surrounding body, self, identity, personhood, public, private, and freedom often had on my grown-up brain.
