Prejudice Inside the Cause: Black Women in the Female Anti-Slavery Societies

Sarah Grimké (1792-1873), date of image unknown (Collections of the Library of Congress).

In 1835, when African American women began to attend the Massachusetts Female Anti-Slavery Society, the group nearly disbanded over the decision to make the society interracial. That is one of the episodes in a National Park Service essay on how prejudice and racism shaped the lives of Black women in the anti-slavery societies of the 1830s. It is part of a series, A Great Inheritance: Examining the Relationship between Abolition and the Women’s Rights Movement, written by a Cultural Resources Diversity Internship Program intern at Women’s Rights National Historical Park.

Black women in the Philadelphia society

Female anti-slavery societies in the 1830s gave women their first formal political role in the abolitionist movement. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) formed in the wake of the first American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) convention, and like the AASS it was organized as an interracial group. Its African American delegates included the Forten-Purvis women and the Douglass women, who were founding members and held several leadership positions.

Three generations of Forten-Purvis women belonged to PFASS. Charlotte Forten, her three oldest daughters and her future daughter-in-law Mary Wood all signed its charter, which Margaretta Forten helped draft. They hosted anti-slavery meetings, wrote essays and poems for reform newspapers such as the Liberator and the Atlantic Monthly, worked as agents of the Underground Railroad and attended conventions in Philadelphia and New York City as delegates. Grace Douglass was a founding member and delegate. Her daughter Sarah sat on the board of managers and on fund-raising fair committees, served as PFASS librarian and recording secretary, and coordinated a primary school for Black children in Philadelphia. The two Douglasses also created several reform and literary societies for African American women.

These were wealthy, educated families, prominent among Philadelphia’s elite African Americans, and the essay says their experience was the exception rather than the rule for free Black women in the 19th century. Their middle-class standing gave them opportunities otherwise withheld, but it did not wholly shield them from prejudice. Sarah Forten experienced racial discrimination herself but recognized that her family’s position protected her from many such experiences, since they rarely traveled far or went to public places unless sure that admission was free to all. Charlotte Forten’s granddaughter, Charlotte Forten Grimké, wrote of how apparent trifles wear down and discourage those who meet them, teaching even a child suspicion and distrust, including toward white allies.

Racism inside the movement

Racism was common in the northern anti-slavery movement. The Western New York Female Anti-Slavery Society divided when African American women were admitted as members. Historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn cites such cases as a reason Black women set up racially separate societies instead of integrated ones.

African American women also carried the pressure of representing the “ideal” free Black woman: keeping a home, being a model of domesticity, devoting themselves to campaigns to free and advance African Americans, and mirroring the white middle class. The thinking was that by embracing white middle-class values Black Americans would prove their equality and end prejudice. White abolitionists told free Black people to educate themselves and to conduct themselves with measure and industry so as to “rise” to the standing of white Americans, advice that, the essay says, shows a belief in Black inferiority. Historian Lawrence J. Friedman describes the resulting gap in feeling between white Americans and Northern free Black people in the 1830s, and the essay adds that white abolitionists were paternalistic, relating to Black Americans much as a missionary does to an intended convert.

Prejudice did not go entirely unchecked, though. Several people, Black and white, wrote and spoke against racism, publicly and privately, and the essay picks three as examples.

Three women who spoke out

Maria W. Stewart. The essay calls her the first recorded American woman to speak publicly. Born a free African American woman in New England, she gave at least four public lectures between 1832 and 1833. At Franklin Hall in Boston on September 21, 1832, she said that, though she might be wrong, she thought the condition of free African Americans in the North little better than southern slavery. She drew special attention to prejudice against Black women: employers who personally had no objection to hiring a well-recommended Black girl said they would lose public patronage if they did, so that scarcely any girl could rise above the condition of a servant. Widowed three years into her marriage to James W. Stewart, she was cheated out of his inheritance by unscrupulous lawyers and left impoverished, which led to her career as an author and speaker. Tired of public ridicule and abuse, she gave her farewell address in September 1833 and moved north to New York.

Front page of Maria Stewart’s Meditations, 1879; the essay notes that no photographs of her exist (courtesy of the Library of Congress).

Sarah and Angelina Grimké. The sisters were born into an aristocratic slave-owning family in South Carolina, condemned slavery, joined the anti-slavery movement and moved north to Philadelphia. As former slave owners they were important allies, and the essay says they became the first American-born women to make a public speaking tour. Criticized for taking part in political campaigns, they answered that men and women are created equal and that to deny women’s duty to act was to deny their right to act. Angelina Grimké’s Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, written in 1837, asked white women to treat Black women as equals: to visit them, to invite them into anti-slavery, temperance and moral reform societies, maternal associations, prayer meetings and reading companies, and to sit with them in the pew set apart for Black worshippers rather than among the white aristocracy. It also addressed Black women, asking their indulgence and help in overcoming a prejudice it called a folly and a sin.

The sisters were concerned with racism among the Quakers too. After moving to Philadelphia they defied segregated seating in the Society of Friends by sitting on the bench set apart for Black members. In 1839, when asked to provide information on prejudice in the American Society of Friends, Sarah Grimké asked Sarah Douglass for her testimony, and the letter and Douglass’s reply were published in the pamphlet Society of Friends: Their View of the Anti-Slavery Question, and Treatment of the People of Color.

Angelina Grimké Weld (1805-1879), date of image unknown (Collections of the Library of Congress).

Lucretia Mott. An abolitionist, women’s rights advocate and public speaker, Mott viewed African Americans as equals, which the essay says set her apart from other abolitionists, and she recognized racial prejudice as injurious as slavery. She formed personal relationships with Black men and women, among them her fellow PFASS members the Forten-Purvises and the Douglasses, and tried to widen her circle. In 1833 she wrote that she had organized six anti-slavery meetings for people of color and planned three more. In an 1838 letter to Phoebe Willis, which the essay offers as acknowledging the importance of interracial relationships, she wrote that she could not persuade the Black residents nearby to scatter through the country, and that it was natural for them to stay together while white people excluded them from all other society.

Lucretia Mott (Collections of the Library of Congress).

The 1838 split

Stewart, the Grimké sisters and Mott spoke publicly against slavery and prejudice and for women’s equality despite hostility toward women lecturers. In doing so, the essay says, they reshaped the idea of the woman’s sphere and gave future women’s rights advocates a history of challenging social codes. Public speaking by women was controversial and revolutionary even inside the abolitionist movement, itself considered radical.

At the AASS meeting of 1838, women’s public role was a pivotal issue that contributed to the Society’s split. A vote to admit all persons to act with the body passed narrowly, 180 to 140, and women were then elected to leadership positions, though that too met strong opposition. The issue, together with other radical beliefs such as denouncing the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, fragmented the abolition movement. Even so, the essay concludes, the explicit inclusion of women signaled growing support from men and women for women’s public activity within it.

Sources

• National Park Service, A Great Inheritance: Prejudice, Racism, and Black Women in Anti-Slavery Societies, by a Cultural Resources Diversity Internship Program intern at Women's Rights National Historical Park, part of the series A Great Inheritance: Examining the Relationship between Abolition and the Women's Rights Movement; rewritten in hubnx's own words.