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Essay on The Presence of Women in the Abolitionist Movement
In colonial-era North America, the Society of Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers, stood almost alone in professing that slaveholding was incompatible with Christian piety. The Age of Enlightenment and the American Revolution, however, led more Americans to equate the slaves’ right to freedom with the colonists’ demand for independence. Consequently, Northern states began the gradual emancipation of their slaves.
Although the federal government prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1787 and banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, antislavery agitation dropped off due to the increasing profitability of Southern slavery. Most remaining, antislavery sentiment became channeled through the African Colonization Society, a group founded in 1816 to return blacks to their home continent. During the 1800's when the anti-slave movement began the main champions for the ending of slavery other than slaves themselves were white women.
White women sympathized and even helped slaves; one notable example was the Underground Railroad, where some white women risked their homes and possibly even their lives to help slaves escape to the North. Some white women stood side by side in full public view with slaves proudly demonstrating their support for the anti slavery movement. On the surface it would seem that white women and slaves would have very little if anything at all in common. However, such an assumption would be far from the truth.
The abolitionist movement was about human suffering and human rights, the quest for justice, liberty, equality and freedom resounded within the hearts and minds of women who silently longed to be free themselves. While it was whites that enslaved Blacks, it was primarily white men who involved themselves in the business of buying and selling slaves, it was white men who owned the property and the land that the slaves toiled on day and night.At the same time, white women had few if any rights. White women felt as if the same shackles that bound the slaves bound them as well.......
