What rold did women play in the anti-slavery movement? Who were the leaders in the movement?

Question

What rold did women play in the anti-slavery movement? Who were the leaders in the movement?

Answer 1

Many of the early suffragists, such Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were  Abolitionists before working towards women rights.  

Answer 2

In the USA originally it was Quakers.  The details you can look up yourself.

Answer 3

Try looking up the history of the Underground Railroad.

Answer 4

Women were very active in the abolitionist movement.  The first female anti-slavery lecturers in the UK were Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who spoke at five to six meetings a week, each in a different town, travelling by stage, horseback or wagon.  They frequently had to skip meals and take their nourishment at the tea parties their admirers expeced them to attend at every stop.  At Worcester, they spoke to more than 1,000 people while hundreds more stood outside.  In Woonstock Falls, the beams of teh gallery began to crack under the crowd, and when no one would leave, Sarah had to close the meeting.

In 1833, Lydia Maria Child, who had had an enormous success with her book on household management The Frugal Housewife, published a book called An Appeal In Favour of That Class of Americans Called AFricans.  It was one of the first antislavery books to be published in America, and was also one of the boldest, arguing that the races should be able to mix freely when traveling,at the theatre and at church, and when choosing marital partners.  It shocked her traditional readers, and while she continued to write, the general public never snapped up her books as they had before.

In the early 1830s, when the abolition movement was just beginning, the male leaders presumed that women would take part just as they had in the Revolutionary War - by rearing abolitionist children and by leading the boycott of slave-produced products.  But boycotting had been easier in an era when housewives could make most of their own food.  The difficulties and deprivations that came with avoiding slave-labour goods were so great, only the Grimkes seemed capable of sticking to their principles.  The boycott, one ardent abolitionist admitted, banned from the dinner table "almost everything good".  But women found other ways of getting involved.  They went to lectures and joined sewing circles where people made items for fund-raising fairs while listening to one member reading from an anti-slavery tract.  

Women also began circulating aboliton petitions, which they forwarded to John Quincy Adams, the crusty ex-president who had returned to Congress as an outspoken opponent of slavery.  Collecting signatures involved brfaving slammed doors and racial slurs, and it was an enormous psychological strain for middle-class women, particularly since the job was never-ending. (Having collected signatures for the banning of slavery in Texas, the women would be sent out again to Washington D.C. or Missouri).  Even the onstoppable Lydia Child called petitioning "the most odious of tasks."  But it was a powerful force in politicizing Northern womanhood.  In 1836, 20 percent of the adult women in Lowell and 38 percent in Lynn, Massachusetts, signed antslaverly petitions.

The aboltionist movement came to rely heavily on the money raised by women.  Maria Weston Chapman,a merchant's wife from Boston, was a particular genius at fund-raising and began what became a national phenomenon - antislavery fairs. Women made fancy scarves and doilies with antislavery messages.  They sold penwipers demanding their users "wipe out the blot of slavery" and needlework bags depicting a black man under the lash.  Lydia Child made a cradle quilt for one fair that was embroidered with the words "Think of the black mother when HER child is torn away".  Embroidered linens boasted mottos like "May the point of our needles prick the slaveholders' consciences."

Maria Chapman was also the editor of antislavery magazines and newspapers, and such a fierec behind-the-scenes organizer that many regarded her as William Lloyd Garrison's chief lieutenant.  

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law.  The act made it easy for Southerners to reclaim former slaves who had fled to the North, or even kidnap free black people and drag them back across the border.  It struck terror into the Northern black community.   "Many ffamilies who had lived in New York City for twenty years, fled from it now." wrote Harriet Jacobs "many a poor washerwoman who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada."

The Fugitive Slave Law helped bring forth Uncle Tom's Cabin, which did more than any other piece of literature to ombilize Northern sentiment against slavery.  

Uncle Tom's Cabin was an extraordinarily powerful book.  The characters were one-dimensional, but its depiction of the "peculiar institution" is still affecting.  The book became the most popular novel of the 19th century.  Its sequel, Dred, sold over 100,000 copies in a single month, the equivalent of perhaps a million today, given the difference in population.  "Mrs Stowe, who was before unknown, is as familar a name in all parts of the civilised world as that of Homer or Shakespeare" wrote Putnam's Magazine in 1853.  It may have been only a legend that Abraham Lincoln called her "The Little Woman who wrote the book that made this great war".  But she was definitely the little woman who mobilized the antislavery sentiments of average Americans, particularly other women.

Lydia Maria Child helped an escaped slave called Harriet Jacobs turn her experiences into one of the frankest and most astonishing memoirs of an African American life in bondage. Jacobs was the granddaughter of a free black woman.  harriet's owner refused to let her grandmother purchase her freedom, but Harriet's mistress taught her to read, and she believed that she would be set free in her mistress's will.  Instead she was bequethed to a three-year-old niece, whose father sexually molested Harriet.  Jacobs ran away, but she was unable to get out of the area, and wound up hiding for seven years in her grandmother's attic.  "The garret was only nine feet long and seven feet wide" she wrote.  "The highest part was three feet high and sloped down abruptly to loose board floor.  There was no adminstration for either light or air."  Finally she had an opprotunity to escape to the north.

Jacobs's story, like most of the fugitive slave memoirs, was directed at the female hert, which responded to the mother torn from her children, the young girl sullied by a lecherous old man.  Chid, the editor, hoped that it would rouse Northern women to "the sense of duty in the exertion of moral influence ont he question of slavery".

The only female ex-slave who pursued a career as a public speaker was Sojourner Truth.  Tall, with a low, powerful voice, she became celebrated for her direct and colourful language.  In a famous encounter in Indiana, pro-slavery hecklers accused her of being a man - an accusation frequently thrown at women who spoke in public.  The hecklers insisted Truth show her b*****s to the women in the audience.  Instead, Truth bared her breast to the entire room, and accorind to the Boston Liberator, told the men in the audience that she "had suckled many a white babe, to the exlusion of her own offspring, and she quietly asked thiem,a s she disrobed her bosom, if they too wished to suck."  She went to Indiana to hold rallies when a lwa forbade blacks from entering the state, and when rebel sympathisers threatened to burn down the hall where she was to appear, Truth said "Then I will speak upon the ashes."

Answer 5

When a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote and published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" that was the one single book that turned people against the "Fugitive Slave Act."  Thus creating Abolitionism, which as we know is one of the prerequisites that led up to the Civil War. http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/civi...

Other women have dressed up as male soldiers to fight for the cause of their side. Some even served as spies for the Union. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/civilw...

Still, others served as spies for the Confederacy http://womenshistory.about.com/od/civilw...

Some served as nurses.  http://womenshistory.about.com/od/civilw...  We're all familiar, those of us born in America and those foreigners who have studied American History are familiar with Clara Barton, who was the organizer of the American Red Cross http://womenshistory.about.com/gi/dynami...

Harriet Tubman a very remarkable woman http://womenshistory.about.com/od/harrie...

I only mentioned the Civil War because I believe anti-slavery is tied in with it.