On International Women’s Day, this year, I happened to be in Vienna. There, you may be interested to learn, it is the tradition for women to receive bouquets of flowers on the day. I was delighted to find the information panels on the trams emblazoned with the message ‘Happy International Women’s Day’ whilst a depiction of Amelia Earhart, ' female pioneer in aviation’ buzzed across the screen. I couldn’t help reflecting, however, on how difficult it is to select a suitable image that encompasses the full measure of women’s influence beyond glamorous pilots. Perhaps this is why so few women have made it into the history books apart from the obvious examples of Royalty and criminals… A case which I often cite when discussing the invisibility of women in history, is that of the female anti-slavery societies which only now are receiving the attention they deserve.
In 1824, Elizabeth Heyrick had published the first of her powerful and influential pamphlets, railing against the injustice of a situation where slavery still existed in British colonies. In the same year, she and two other women had also established a short-lived periodical entitled ‘The Hummingbird’, which brought together articles highlighting the iniquity of the continuation of slavery, whilst only the trade had been outlawed in Britain. The women boldly declared: ‘The time is gone when the energies of the female sex were wasted upon laborious and everlasting tasks of needle-work, and their literature was confined to cookery books’ [The Hummingbird, Dec. 1824]. Others clearly agreed.
In April 1825, a woman named Lucy Townsend, the daughter of an evangelical clergyman, founded the first women’s anti-slavery group at her home in West Bromwich, near Birmingham. Hitherto, women had been subscribers to the main anti-slavery organisations but had been excluded from full membership. This new venture attracted women from as far afield as London and Manchester, and Elizabeth Heyrick of course travelled from Leicester. At the meeting, a committee of ‘District Treasurers’ was formed and Elizabeth was appointed as the District Treasurer for Leicester. It was planned that the new group, under the title of ‘The Female Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves’ [later the Ladies’ Negro Friendly Society], would set out to spread a sense of the injustice of slavery and in particular awaken ‘a deep and lasting compassion’ for female slaves. The committee of District Treasurers was to meet quarterly and there would also be an annual general meeting which would be open to all members.
Elizabeth lost no time in returning to Leicester and establishing the Leicester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society two months later. Her friend, Susannah Watts, would set up a similar society in Oakham, Rutland in the same year. The membership lists for these groups, which are recorded in the annual reports of the Birmingham Society, indicate that they predictably attracted women from prominent Quaker families as well as the wives and daughters of local gentry, but there were also teachers and even Susannah’s maid, Mary Brown. The fairly steep subscription fee of twelve shillings per annum would have deterred many, but nonetheless, by 1828, Leicester was one of the larger groups with a membership of fifty-eight. It is a measure of the great success of the Birmingham group in its original aims that by 1833, there were over seventy-three such societies around the country.
The significance of these groups in uniting women of a like-minded nature cannot be overstated. The benefits derived from them included the most obvious – that of fundraising. In Leicester and elsewhere, the women raised money by sewing and selling anti-slavery bags decorated with a reworking of Josiah Wedgewood’s original representation of a slave. In the new image, the kneeling slave was replaced with a female slave in chains with the legend ‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’ The image also appeared upon other items like brooches and snuff boxes. Poems, including some by Susannah Watts, which highlighted the horrors of slavery, were also distributed and sold. The profits from such ventures quickly led to an unexpected financial importance for the women’s groups, who found themselves amongst the larger donors to the central funds of the national abolition organisations run by men.
Nor were the efforts of the women in these societies confined only to fundraising. Groups organised lectures and petitions and successfully publicised their campaigns. In Leicester, Elizabeth and her friends went round the town urging grocers to abstain from selling sugar produced by slaves in the West Indies. Such was their success that Susannah proudly recorded in her scrapbook: ‘In the town of Leicester, by the zeal and activity of a very few individuals alone, nearly a quarter of the population viz 1,500 families have been so impressed by the subject, as to engage themselves to abstain from the use of West-Indian sugar.’ Elsewhere, there was similar commitment to the cause. In Worcester, women were reported to have further strengthened the boycott by urging women to refuse to buy from bakers who used slave-grown sugar.
Significantly, the societies also offered a ready market for the distribution of pamphlets like those of Elizabeth Heyrick. Although her pamphlets were published anonymously, she was well known amongst the women’s groups and this may well account for the fact that her name endured long amongst women whilst largely forgotten amongst male abolitionists. At a time when most male abolitionists favoured a gradual end to slavery that would threaten no sudden change, Elizabeth’s bold call for the immediate abolition of slavery struck a chord with her female readers. Women, in empathy with the female slaves, were understandably far less equivocal than the men, in heeding Elizabeth’s demand for immediate abolition. In 1827, the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society was the first to reinforce Elizabeth’s cry, declaring with some humility: ‘We ought to obey God rather than Man…On principles like these, the simple need not fear to confront the sage; nor a female society to take their stand against the united wisdom of this world’. The few men who had come to the same conclusion now saw the women’s groups as a valuable ally. It was in April 1830, that the Birmingham Ladies Society resolved to press the matter further. Declaring that they would donate fifty pounds to the National Anti-Slavery Society, only if they gave up the word ‘gradual’ from their title, they unwittingly set a match to the ensuing conflagration. After a riotous national conference in May, the ‘Society for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions’ at last shed all reference to ‘gradual mitigation’ and ‘amelioration’ from its title. It was a small victory for the women but a significant one - and the Society duly received its fifty pounds.
When slavery in the British Empire was finally abolished in 1833, it was under terms which would have gravely disappointed Elizabeth. She had died two years previously, but in a life committed to pursuing justice and relieving the oppressed, she had always maintained the need for compensation to the slaves themselves rather than their former masters. Nonetheless, the impact of the women’s societies upon the movement and the role they played in hastening the process should not be overlooked. Adam Hochschild, one of the few historians to have acknowledged the important role played by the female anti-slavery groups, quotes in his book ‘Bury the Chains’, a rare example of a male activist who appreciated the women’s contribution:
‘Ladies Associations …did everything. They circulated publications; they procured the money to publish; they dunned and talked and coaxed and lectured; they got up public meetings and filled out halls and platforms when the day arrived; they carried round petitions and enforced the duty of signing them… In a word they formed the cement of the whole Anti-Slavery building - without their aid we never should have kept standing.’
Perhaps too, a more unexpected side-effect of the female anti-slavery movement was that women first felt themselves empowered collectively. The subsequent stimulus to the women’s rights movement is a subject for another time…
