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Women In The Abolition Movement

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Women and the Abolition movement of the Nineteenth Century. Although the Women’s Rights Movement started as a fracture in the Abolition Movement of the early nineteenth century, neither movement would have made nearly as much headway without women at their core. Most women involved in the Abolition Movement in its beginning were wives, daughters and sisters of prominent members of society in the Northern states. They were women who organized and formed local anti-slavery societies where they lived. These societies would raise money, print articles in local newspapers and some even would speak in public. They mostly put together small groups on a local level. Although most were from wealthy or middle class families who could afford to donate…show more content…
Daughters of an affluent slave owner in Charleston South Carolina, they began by speaking to female audiences. Soon after, they were giving speeches to men and women. These speeches created controversy everywhere the Grimke sisters went. In 1837 in Massachusetts, an association of the state’s most popular Congregational church issued a statement condemning any women “who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers.” Attacks made against them spurred the Grimke’s to make the equality of women a more important part of their message. They began to write and speak about women’s rights as well as abolitionism, a decision which would soon help to split the abolition movement. The abolition movement would slowly divide itself between the radical activists and the more conservative members who believed that women had no place in the public realm. This division in the Abolition Movement would actually manifest itself at the 1840 National Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. When Abigail Kelley, a woman abolitionist, was elected to serve on the convention’s business committee, the conservative abolitionists walked out of the meeting. They withdrew from the movement to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which excluded
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