The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was founded in December 1833, a few days after the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society (in Philadelphia), and dissolved in March 1870 following the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was founded by eighteen women, including Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M'Clintock, [1] Margaretta Forten, her mother Charlotte, and Forten's sisters Sarah and Harriet. [2] [3]
The society was a local chapter affiliated with the American Anti-Slavery Society created the same year by William Lloyd Garrison and other leading male abolitionists. The PFASS was formed as a result of the inability of women to become members of the male abolitionist organization. This predominantly white though racially mixed female abolitionist organization illustrates the important behind-the-scenes collective roles women played in the abolitionist movement. It also exemplifies the dynamics of gender and race within American patriarchal society that emphasized the cult of true womanhood (or cult of domesticity) in the nineteenth century.
Historians often cite the PFASS as one of the few racially integrated anti-slavery societies in the antebellum era, rare even among female anti-slavery societies. PFASS membership typically came from middle-class backgrounds.
The best known white female abolitionist affiliated with the PFASS is Lucretia Mott. Other white women who were mainstays of the interracial organization included Sarah Pugh and Mary Grew, respectively the president and corresponding secretary of PFASS for most of its existence. [4] Angelina Grimké, a noted female abolitionist, also joined the organization. White female members were mostly Quakers; historian Jean R. Soderlund maintains thirteen of the seventeen founding white women founders were Hicksite Quakers. Free black females helped organize the society as well. Prominent individuals included Grace Bustill Douglass and Sarah Mapps Douglass, Hetty Reckless, and Charlotte Forten (wife of notable abolitionist James Forten) and her daughters, Harriet, Sarah, and Margaretta . These women represented the city's African American elite. [5] Historian Shirley Yee states that seven of the eighteen women who signed the PFASS constitution were black, and ten black women appear regularly in society records. Furthermore, many black women members consistently served in leadership roles. [6]
Sarah Forten was a co-founder of the Society and served on its board of managers for three consecutive terms. Margaretta Forten was a co-founder of the Society and often served as recording secretary or treasurer, as well as helping to draw up its organizational charter and serving on its educational committee. [7] She also offered the Society's last resolution, which praised the post-civil war amendments as a success for the anti-slavery cause. [2] Through holding key offices, historian Janice Sumler-Lewis claims the efforts of the Forten women enabled this predominantly white organization to reflect a black abolitionist perspective that oftentimes was more militant. [8]
Historian Julie Winch suggests that the free black middle-class females in Philadelphia initially organized female literacy societies prior to their membership in the PFASS. She argues these literacy societies offered black middle-class females opportunities to educate themselves and their children as well as to develop the necessary skills for community activism. According to Winch, it was hardly coincidental that members of the literacy societies also enrolled in the PFASS, and these societies were an integral part of the antislavery crusade. [9]
Writer Evette Dionne notes that this amount of integration and cooperation in a society among black and white women would have been quite rare even in a free city like Philadelphia. Black members contributed to writing the constitution and establishing the organization's priorities. [10]
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In the 1830s, the PFASS largely focused on circulating antislavery petitions, holding public meetings, organizing fundraising efforts, and financially supporting community improvement for free blacks. Between 1834 and 1850, the PFASS sent numerous petitions to the Philadelphia state legislature and to Congress. The PFASS pressed the Pennsylvania legislature to allow jury trials for suspected fugitive slaves. They petitioned Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and prohibit the interstate slave trade. Black female leaders in the PFASS served on committees that coordinated these drives. During this period when women had not yet been granted the right to vote, petition drives were one of the few forms of political expression available to women. Petition campaigns drew women out of their homes and into their neighborhoods where they conducted massive grassroots propaganda campaigns. Face-to-face communications and door-to-door efforts by women not only challenged social norms of femininity but it also "moved the antislavery movement from a predominantly moral to a predominantly political focus". [11] Petitions like these eventually caused the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the gag rule.
The refusal of Congress to consider these petitions as well as fear of mob violence led to a shift in strategies in the 1840s. As the society matured, it reduced efforts to circulate petitions and increasingly devoted time to fundraising. The primary PFASS fundraiser was an annual fair in which handcrafted items such as needlework with abolitionist inscriptions and antislavery publications were sold. For example, the well-known piece of abolitionist literature, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet was printed and sold at the 1846 Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Fair. PFASS meetings consisted of coordinating activities for the fair and organizing sewing circles. By the 1850s, the fairs became elaborate occasions. In addition to selling items, the fairs featured speeches by well known abolitionists that attracted large audiences willing to pay admissions fees. [12] The society's successful fundraising efforts enabled it to secure power and influence in the state anti-slavery society. Throughout the entire period, the PFASS provided a large proportion of all funds donated to the state society. From 1844 to 1849, funds raised by the Philadelphia women covered approximately 20 percent of the state anti-slavery society budget and accounted for 31 to 45 percent of donations. Hence, women were able to keep a high profile and assert their authority in leadership roles within the statewide abolitionist movement. [13]
Financially supporting the free black community was also an aspect of the activities within the PFASS. Led primarily by its black female membership, the PFASS financially supported Sarah Douglass's school for free black girls. According to political scientist Gayle T. Tate in her book, Unknown Tongues: Black Women's Political Activism in the Antebellum Era, 1830-1860, the society continued its financial support with annual contributions throughout the 1840s. [14] Tate maintains the Forten women's leadership and support led to the continuous contributions to the school. This reinforces the contention that black women played in integral leadership role within the PFASS.
The PFASS also raised money for clothing, shelter, and food to aid fugitive slaves. Black women members under the leadership of Hetty Reckless worked closely with the Vigilance Association of Philadelphia, an all-male benevolent society that aided fugitive slaves. Reckless "persuaded society members to contribute to community projects and to make donations ... to provide fugitives with room and board, clothing, medical assistance, employment, financial aid, and advice concerning their legal rights." [15] However, white female members of the society were quite divided over whether aid to fugitive slaves counted as true antislavery work. Lucretia Mott believed this activity was not the role of the PFASS. [16] This division illustrates a difference in abolitionist agendas that began to emerge among the two races. [17] Unlike their white female counterparts, black women, in an effort that Tate labels "pragmatic abolitionism," viewed subversive strategies like aiding fugitive slaves as compatible with the open challenges preferred by white abolitionists. [18] White female abolitionists, on the other hand, tended to view these actions as "potential distractions from the main goal of fighting slavery." [19]
As women played a pertinent role in the abolitionist movement, white and black members of the PFASS supported the radical idea of granting women the right to vote and to perform traditionally male roles such as speaking in public. [20] Writing in the late 1970s, historian Ira V. Brown identifies the women of the PFASS as playing a key role in the development of American feminism or what she labels as the "cradle of feminism." Brown primarily focuses on the society's white female leadership and the key roles these women played in the eventual birth of the women's movement beginning at the Seneca Falls Convention. [21] More recent additions to the historiography of female abolitionist societies incorporates the collective role of free black females. Shirley Yee asserts that black female community activists like those in the PFASS helped shape black women's community activism for later generations, especially in the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. [22]
The American Anti-Slavery Society was an abolitionist society founded by William Lloyd Garrison and Arthur Tappan. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, had become a prominent abolitionist and was a key leader of this society, who often spoke at its meetings. William Wells Brown, also a freedman, also often spoke at meetings. By 1838, the society had 1,350 local chapters with around 250,000 members.
James Forten was an American abolitionist and businessman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A free-born African American, he became a sailmaker after the American Revolutionary War. Following an apprenticeship, he became the foreman and bought the sail loft when his boss retired. Based on equipment he himself had developed, he established a highly profitable business. It was located on the busy waterfront of the Delaware River, in an area now called Penn's Landing.
Robert Purvis was an American abolitionist in the United States. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and was likely educated at Amherst Academy, a secondary school in Amherst, Massachusetts. He spent most of his life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1833 he helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Library Company of Colored People. From 1845 to 1850 he served as president of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society and also traveled to Britain to gain support for the movement.
Charlotte Louise Bridges Grimké was an African-American anti-slavery activist, poet, and educator. She grew up in a prominent abolitionist family in Philadelphia. She taught school for years, including during the Civil War, to freedmen in South Carolina. Later in life, she married Francis James Grimké, a Presbyterian minister who led a major church in Washington, DC, for decades. He was a nephew of the abolitionist Grimké sisters and was active in civil rights.
Sarah Parker Remond was an American lecturer, activist and abolitionist campaigner.
The Religious Society of Friends, better known as the Quakers, played a major role in the abolition movement against slavery in both the United Kingdom and in the United States. Quakers were among the first white people to denounce slavery in the American colonies and Europe, and the Society of Friends became the first organization to take a collective stand against both slavery and the slave trade, later spearheading the international and ecumenical campaigns against slavery.
The first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was held in New York City on May 9–12, 1837, to discuss the American abolition movement. This gathering represented the first time that women from such a broad geographic area met with the common purpose of promoting the anti-slavery cause among women, and it also was likely the first major convention where women discussed women's rights. Some prominent women went on to be vocal members of the Women's Suffrage Movement, including Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, and Lydia Maria Child. After the first convention in 1837, there were also conventions in 1838 and 1839
Sarah Mapps Douglass was an American educator, abolitionist, writer, and public lecturer. Her painted images on her written letters may be the first or earliest surviving examples of signed paintings by an African American woman. These paintings are contained within the Cassey Dickerson Album, a rare collection of 19th-century friendship letters between a group of women.
Margaretta Forten was an African-American suffragist and abolitionist.
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Harriet Forten Purvis was an African-American abolitionist and first generation suffragist. With her mother and sisters, she formed the first biracial women's abolitionist group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She hosted anti-slavery events at her home and with her husband Robert Purvis ran an Underground Railroad station. Robert and Harriet also founded the Gilbert Lyceum. She fought against segregation and for the right for blacks to vote after the Civil War.
Amy Hester "Hetty" Reckless was a runaway slave who became part of the American abolitionist movement. She campaigned against slavery and was part of the Underground Railroad, operating a Philadelphia safe house. She fought against prostitution and vice, working toward improving education and skills for the black community. Through efforts including operating a women's shelter, supporting Sunday Schools and attending conferences, she became a leader in the abolitionist community. After her former enslaver's death, she returned to New Jersey and continued working to assist escaping slaves throughout the Civil War.
Grace Bustill Douglass was an African-American abolitionist and women's rights advocate. Her family was one of the first prominent free black families in the United States. Her family's history is one of the best documented for a black family during this period, dating from 1732 until 1925.
The history of African Americans or Black Philadelphians in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has been documented in various sources. People of African descent are currently the largest ethnic group in Philadelphia. Estimates in 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau documented the total number of people living in Philadelphia who identified as Black or African American at 644,287, or 42.2% of the city's total population.
Sarah Pugh was an American abolitionist, activist, suffragist, and teacher. She was involved with promoting the free produce movement, including a boycott on sugar produced by slave labor. She was a leader of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society from its earliest days in 1835 until it closed in 1870. Along with Lucretia Mott, Pugh was one of the delegates to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London who were denied their seats because they were women.
The Fall River Female Anti-Slavery Society was an abolitionist group in Fall River, Massachusetts, formed in 1835. It was the second female anti-slavery society in the city. One of its founding members was Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806–1899).
Sarah Louisa Forten Purvis (1814–1884) was an American poet and abolitionist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She co-founded The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society and contributed many poems to the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator.
Thankful Southwick was an affluent Quaker abolitionist and women's rights activist in Boston, Massachusetts. Thankful was lifelong abolitionist who joined the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1835 with her three daughters. She was present at both the 1835 Boston Mob and the Abolition Riot of 1836. During the 1840 schism in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Thankful sided with the Westons, Chapmans, Childs, Sergeants, and other radical Garrisonians to reestablish the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. She also later joined the New England Non Resistance Society.
Charlotte Vandine Forten (1785–1884) was an American abolitionist and matriarch of the Philadelphia Forten family.
The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society was a female abolitionist organisation in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid 19th century. This society was a significant influence on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott.
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