Abby Kelley Foster

American abolitionist

• Born: January 15, 1810
• Birthplace: Pelham, Massachusetts
• Died: January 14, 1887
• Place of death: Worcester, Massachusetts

A tireless opponent of slavery, Foster traveled and lectured widely to promote the establishment of antislavery societies. Her election to the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 prompted a schism in the abolitionist movement over the issue of women’s equality, but she recruited many women to the abolitionist cause who went on to prominence in the suffrage movement.

Early Life

Abby Kelley Foster was born Abigail Kelley, the fifth of seven children of Wing Kelley, a New England farmer descended from recent Irish immigrants, and Diana Daniels, whose family came to Massachusetts from England during the early eighteenth century. Both her parents were Quakers, and Abigail was steeped in Quaker morality and asceticism as a child. A few months after she was born, her family moved to a one-hundred-acre farm in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she spent her childhood assisting her parents in running the farm. The family periodically attended Quaker meetings at Uxbridge, but because this was some distance from their home, Abby’s mother undertook most of the religious education of her children.

In 1822, Abby’s father sold the Worcester farm and moved his family to a 167-acre farm near the town of Tatnuck on the outskirts of Worcester. Abby attended the one-room school in Tatnuck and a private girls’ school in Worcester. With dreams of becoming a teacher, she required additional education. Her parents could not afford to send her away to school, but an older sister lent her the tuition money to attend the New England Friends Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island.

Abby enrolled in the boarding school in 1826 and again in 1829, spending the interim at home earning more money for her tuition. Meanwhile, she received an unconventionally thorough education that included writing and rhetoric as well as mathematics, botany, astronomy, and bookkeeping. In 1830, she returned to the Worcester area and began teaching, using some of her earning to pay for two younger siblings to attend the boarding school. She continued teaching in 1835 after she moved with her parents to a new farm in the town of Millbury, six miles from Tatnuck. By the spring of 1836, her father’s finances were stable, and her youngest sister’s last year of schooling was paid for. Abby moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, about an hour’s travel north of Boston, to begin teaching in a Quaker school there.

Life’s Work

Abby was introduced to the abolitionist movement by members of Lynn’s Quaker community. She joined Lynn’s Female Anti-Slavery Society shortly after her arrival there and helped to sew and sell pincushions, aprons, and other articles to raise money for state and national antislavery societies. In the summer of 1836, she gathered signatures for a petition to the U.S. Congress to abolish slavery in the national capital, Washington, D.C.

Inspired by Angelina and Sarah Grimké, the first women to lecture before mixed-gender audiences, Abby began to participate more vocally in the public debate over slavery. Despite an angry mob that pelted the windows of the meeting hall with stones, she made her first speaking appearance before women affiliates of the American Anti-Slavery Society in May, 1838. A few months later, she was among the first women admitted to membership and appointed to committees in the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Abby’s activities reflected growing agitation among antislavery women, as well as some men, that women should be accorded equal status in abolitionist organizations. Resistance to this idea also intensified, however, with opponents contending that extending equality to women would alienate potential supporters and damage the cause of abolition. The matter finally boiled over at the society’s May, 1840, meeting when Abby was nominated to serve on the business committee. After a majority of delegates approved her nomination, Lewis Tappan led an exodus of nearly three hundred men from the meeting in protest. The result of the walkout was the formation of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and a schism within abolitionism over the question of women’s equality. In the decades that followed, many abolitionists would blame Abby for causing the schism.

After the 1840 meeting, Abby continued the efforts she had begun in the previous year to establish an antislavery society in Connecticut. She traveled and lectured throughout the state, even when hostile townspeople heckled her for being a woman who spoke publicly. Despite these challenges, her commitment to abolitionism strengthened. Dismayed by the organization’s abandonment of its earlier antislavery leadership, Abby left the Society of Friends in 1841. She joined other abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, in Dorr’s Rebellion—a successful effort to remove the word “white” from voting provisions in the Rhode Island constitution in 1842.

Meanwhile, Abby’s renown as a lecturer spread, and she was invited to appear before other antislavery audiences. Throughout the 1840’s and early 1850’s, she lectured, helped build abolition societies, and solicited subscriptions for abolitionist newspapers in New York, Pennsylvania, and western frontier states, including Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. She shared many of these tours with fellow abolitionists, free blacks, and former slaves, including Sojourner Truth, Sarah Parker Remond, Charles Lenox Remond, and Stephen Symonds Foster. Foster was a former ministry student and fiery lecturer for the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society whom Abby married on December 21, 1845.

In April, 1847, the Fosters purchased a farm in Tatnuck. Abby gave birth to their daughter, Paulina Wright Foster—whom they nicknamed Alla—during the following month. Their farm served as a station on the Underground Railroad during the 1850’s. During Abby’s travels on behalf of the abolitionist movement, her husband often remained at home to care for Alla.

Abby recruited several future suffragists to the abolitionist movement. In 1848, Lucy Stone became an antislavery lecturer after graduating from Oberlin College. Susan B. Anthony met Abby in upstate New York and also became a lecturer during the 1850’s. Abby herself participated in the first two National Woman’s Rights Conventions in Worcester in 1850 and 1851. She also helped establish the New England Woman Suffrage Association, the first regional organization of its kind in the United States, in 1868. However, Abby diverged from these other women’s rights activists by continuing to emphasize abolitionism over woman suffrage until the 1870’s.

Problems with the health of both Abby and her daughter limited Abby’s travels during the late 1850’s. During the Civil War, Abby formed the Women’s Loyal National League with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to collect signatures for a petition to Congress for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. She returned to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1865, serving on its executive committee and urging its members that despite the end of the Civil War, their work was not complete without a constitutional amendment guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote.

After the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing African American men the right to vote, was ratified in early 1870, Abby directed her energies toward the temperance and woman suffrage causes. Between 1872 and 1880, she and her husband refused to pay taxes on their Tatnuck farm as protest against Abby’s inability to vote. However, they abandoned the protest when Stephen’s health began to fail. He died at the farm on September 8, 1881. Abby sold the farm in 1883 and moved into a Worcester boardinghouse, where she spent her last years writing her memoirs of the abolitionist movement. On January 14, 1887—one day short of her seventy-seventh birthday—she died of asthenia in Worcester. The home that she had shared with her husband and daughter, now called Liberty Farm, became a National Historic Landmark on May 30, 1974.

Significance

All too often forgotten in histories of abolitionism, Abby Kelley Foster was one of its most dedicated voices—one that helped carry the antislavery message to western frontier states far removed from the abolitionist hotbeds of the Northeast. Despite the fact that gender issues prompted the 1840 schism in the movement, Abby’s persistence then and after indicates that the causes of racial integration and sexual equality could reinforce each other. However, Abby also had conflicts with woman suffrage activists, as well as abolitionists, by seeking to ensure the right of African American men to vote before women got that right.

Foster made a place of her own within the public sphere of the nineteenth century. She pursued a social and political vision that, despite her respective disagreements with each movement, nonetheless moved both African Americans and women toward greater equality.

Bibliography

Greene, Richard E. “Abby Kelley Foster: A Feminist Voice Reconsidered, 1810-1887.” In Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities, edited by C. James Trotman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Concise overview of Foster’s life that seeks to transcend the conflicts between the abolitionist and women’s rights movements by describing Foster as a universal reformer.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Emphasizes the community of women abolitionists of which Foster was a part and their importance to the daily maintenance of antislavery societies.

Sterling, Dorothy. Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Detailed study of Foster, the abolitionist world in which lived, and those who populated it.