Through campaigning against slavery, women of the nineteenth century developed a taste for politics and for power that led directly to the battle for women's rights. By Anna Farthing and Veronica Simpson.

As exhibitions, museums and movies rush to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery, their focus deifies the few (usually white) men who stood up against this barbaric trade in humans, while the extraordinary role of women who fought for abolition seems to be overlooked. In fact, it was women who took this battle to the streets, harnessed public feeling on the subject and pushed for stronger and more immediate action. What’s more, their experience of using their campaigning and economic power to positive ends gave them a taste for politics – a field that had previously been denied them - and sowed the seeds of suffragism both in the UK and America.

Though the UK, famously, outlawed the trading of slaves in 1807, slavery as a practice continued until at least 1833, and women were increasingly vocal in their opposition to it. In 1824 Elizabeth Heyrick, a dedicated social reformer, published her pamphlet Immediate not Gradual Abolition. In her pamphlet Heyrick argued passionately in favour of the immediate emancipation of the slaves in the British colonies. This differed from the official policy of the Anti-Slavery Society at the time, who believed in a gradual process that might take thirty years.  Heyrick believed that women were ‘especially qualified…to plead for the oppressed.'  Such was the strength of feeling among Heyrick and her female peers that in 1825, she, together with Anne Knight, Mary Lloyd and Elizabeth Pease began forming Anti-Slavery Societies all over the UK. By 1831 there were 73 of these women's organisations campaigning against slavery and raising funds to help the cause.

Heyrick's pamphlet was distributed and discussed at these meetings. In 1827 the Sheffield Female Society became the first anti-slavery society in Britain to call for the immediate emancipation of slaves. Other women's groups quickly followed but attempts to persuade the leadership of the Anti-Slavery Society initially failed.

Despite this – or perhaps because of it - the feeling among women’s societies intensified, and in early 1830, the Female Society for Birmingham submitted a resolution to the National Conference of the Anti-Slavery Society calling for the organisation to campaign for an immediate end to slavery in the British colonies. In order to persuade the male leadership to change its mind on the issue, the society threatened to withdraw its funding of the organisation. The Birmingham women’s group was one of the largest donors to central funds, and also had great influence over the network of ladies’ associations, which supplied over a fifth of all donations.

The threat worked: at the national conference in May 1830, the Anti-Slavery Society agreed to drop the words ‘gradual abolition’ from its title. The following year the Anti-Slavery Society presented a petition to the House of Commons calling for the ‘immediate freeing of newborn children of slaves’.

It’s hard to imagine the degree of opposition experienced by the women who aligned themselves with the abolitionist cause. The role of women in society was strictly proscribed at this time in – and politics was seen (by men) as no place for the ‘fairer sex’.

When the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was set up in 1783, it was an exclusively male organization. Some of the leaders of the anti-slavery movement such as the movement’s so-called ‘hero’, William Wilberforce, were totally opposed to women being involved in the campaign. In a letter written in January 1826, Wilberforce criticised women's involvement in the Anti-Slavery Society. ‘For ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions - these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture. I fear its tendency would be to mix them in all the multiform warfare of political life.’

Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet, when it first appeared, was pounced on by the leadership of the anti-slavery organisation, who attempted to suppress information about its existence. Wilberforce himself gave out instructions for leaders of the movement not to speak at women's anti-slavery societies.

However, the sheer weight of the women’s groups’ contribution to abolitionist funds made it imperative that the leaders take note of their wishes.

This wasn’t women’s first taste of how much collective clout they could wield via their purses. Previously, they had deployed this potent weapon elsewhere, by urging women everywhere to boycott slavery-related products – primarily sugar.

By early 1792, 300,000 people were refusing to eat slave grown sugar.  Special sugar bowls were produced that declared their contents were not slave grown.

Women were also encouraged to make, buy and sell icons of abolitionism.  The image of the enslaved African, kneeling and pleading ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ or ‘Am I not a Woman and a Sister?’ was one of the first mass campaigning icons, reproduced large and small in print, on badges, on china, in embroidery, in carving, even on stained glass.  Television presenter Moira Stuart in her recent British documentary reminds us that this supplicant image is problematic and patronising but, nonetheless, proceeds from sales of these icons went directly to campaign funds.  The precursor, surely, of the now ubiquitous charity t-shirt or rubber wrist band?

Through the realisation that they could influence the political process in pursuit of a greater moral good, a sense of sisterhood emerged which transcended class divides. After all, it was the working class women who worked hardest to raise funds and walk the streets with their petitions. Jane Smeal, leader of a women’s group in Glasgow, wrote to Elizabeth Pease in 1836, persuading her friend to switch her fundraising attentions away from her educated, moneyed peers and divert them to the working classes. She wrote: ‘The females in this city who have much leisure for philanthropic objects are I believe very numerous - but unhappily that is not the class who take an active part in the cause here - neither the noble, the rich, nor the learned are to be found advocating our cause. Our subscribers and most efficient members are all in the middling and working classes but they have great zeal and labour very harmoniously together.’

This sense of sisterhood between black and white women was also fostered when white abolitionist activist women began transcribing the narratives of enslaved black women to highlight the horrors of the practice.   We do not know what was edited in the telling of the tale; much of the sexual oppression experienced by enslaved women is alluded to rather than described.  But one of the things that most horrified the campaigners was the separation of mother from child, and thus this trauma figured large in the published accounts of slaves’ stories. Lasting friendships were struck, such as that between ex-slave Mary Prince and her biographer, Susanna Strickland.  As late as the 1850s, women escaping the Fugitive Slave Act in America were being welcomed into British women’s houses.  During her lecture tour with her husband William, Ellen Craft was accompanied to the stage in Bristol by ‘twelve ladies of Clifton.’

The women's anti-slavery societies were disbanded after the Abolition of Slavery Act was passed in 1833. However, several of the women who had obtained experience in these societies now turned their attention to other issues including factory reform, child labour, the end of the Corn Laws and the campaign for parliamentary reform.

In 1840 attempts were made to stop women delegates from taking part in the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London. This inspired Anne Knight to start a campaign advocating equal rights for women. One of her campaigning tactics was to use gummed labels printed with feminist quotations, which she attached to the outside of her letters – the first political ‘sticker’ slogan campaign? In 1847 she published what is believed to be the first ever leaflet on women's suffrage.

Two American delegates, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, like the British women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, were refused permission to speak at the meeting. Stanton later recalled: ‘We resolved to hold a convention as soon as we returned home, and form a society to advocate the rights of women.’ However, it was not until 1848 that Stanton and Mott organised the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls. Stanton's resolution that it was ‘the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise’ was passed and became the focus of the group's campaign over the next few years.

Sadly none of the brave women who fought for the rights of the enslaved, and then for women, were alive when women’s voting rights were finally granted. It took until 1920 for the US to recognise equal voting rights for women, and a further eight years for the same voting status to be granted to women as to men in the UK.

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