Elizabeth Buffum Chace

• Elizabeth Chace
• Born: December 9, 1806
• Died: December 12, 1899

Abolitionist, feminist, and penal-reform leader, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to an old Quaker family. She was the fourth of seven children—five daughters and two sons—of Arnold Buffum, a farmer and hat manufacturer, and Rebecca (Gould) Buffum. A precocious child, she could read at the age of three or four and delighted her grandparents by reading them newspaper accounts of congressional proceedings. She was encouraged to use her father’s extensive library at their home in Smithfield, Rhode Island, and received formal schooling in Smithfield and in Pomfret, Connecticut, where the family lived for several years after 1816. At Pomfret she was ridiculed for using Quaker speech and wearing Quaker dress, and she thus learned early “to endure persecution for conscience’ sake.” In 1826, after a year in Providence at the Friends’ Boarding School, she joined her family in Fall River, Massachusetts, where she taught school. In June 1828 she married Samuel Buffington Chace, a Quaker from a cotton-manufacturing family.

During the early years of her marriage, Chace was busy raising her five children (George Arnold, Adelia Bartlett, Susan Elizabeth, John Gould, and Oliver), but all five died in childhood, and she threw herself into antislavery work, becoming vice president of the Fall River Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1836. Like many other antislavery reformers, she came from a family of abolitionists; her grandfather, parents, husband, two sisters, and two brothers-in-law were all involved in the cause, and her father was a founder and the first president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. A follower of the militant Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, she was involved in developing methods of agitation, including preparing petitions and canvassing door-to-door, and insisted that abolitionists work not only for an end to slavery but for full rights for blacks and for an end to racial prejudice. The Chaces moved in 1840 to Valley River, Rhode Island, where Samuel Chace ran a cotton factory and assisted fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad. Elizabeth Chace organized antislavery activities in the area until 1843, when she had the first of five more children (Samuel Oliver, Arnold Buffum, Elizabeth Buffum, Edward Gould, and Mary), three of whom survived. The youngest was born in 1852. Samuel Chace, unlike many husbands of his day, encouraged his wife’s career and assisted in running the home and raising the children. He died in 1870.

After Emancipation, Elizabeth Chace agreed with Wendell Phillips that the abolitionist societies should remain active and work for black political rights. She was local vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1865 until it was dissolved in 1870 and was elected vice president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1867. In 1877 she and her daughters resigned from the Rhode Island Woman’s Club because it refused to admit blacks.

In the antebellum period, Chace and other Quaker abolitionists had become alienated from the Society of Friends because of its refusal to take a stand against slavery. In 1843 Chace resigned her membership. Her Quaker upbringing, she said, had given her a “love of truth,” and it was “love of truth which led me out.” She took up spiritualism for a time after the death of her children. In 1867 she was a founder of the National Free Religious Association, of which she was elected vice president in 1881.

Chace’s “truth” included the conviction that women must be emancipated. She signed the call to the first national women’s-rights convention in 1850 and became a leader of the early feminists. She was a founder in 1868 of both the New England Woman Suffrage Association and the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, serving as president of the latter from 1870 until her death. When the women’s movement split in 1869 over support of the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised black men but not white or black women, she sided with those who endorsed the amendment, joining Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association.

For Chace, women’s rights and abolition were the central aspects of a general reform of society that included welfare and prison reform (especially for women and children), temperance, pacifism, and diet, health, and household reform. She urged the hiring of matrons to serve in women’s prisons (on the grounds that only women could understand the needs of other women) and the appointment of women to prison boards to effect the moral regeneration of the inmates. In 1870 Chace was appointed by the Rhode Island Legislature to the Board of Lady Visitors, an advisory group that uncovered a number of abuses in the prison system.

Chace investigated state almshouses, mental asylums, and reform schools, and in 1884 helped establish the Rhode Island Home and School for Dependent Children, ending the state’s practice of housing orphans in the same institutions with juvenile delinquents. She had long been concerned with the conditions of female mill workers and insisted that her husband establish part-time schools for his employees, yet she retained some of the attitudes of her class, viewing as “ungrateful” the workers’ demand for a ten-hour day. Like many other feminists, she saw alcoholism as a major cause of poverty, crime, and the abuse of women and children, and she became an ardent temperance worker. She disliked conventional medicine (which, she thought, contributed to the deaths of her children) and public-school education (her surviving children were tutored at home).

Chace has been called a “quintessential feminist-abolitionist,” who combined a “perfectionist zeal with a female-oriented vision.” Aristocratic and morally inflexible, she sought to free people to develop their potentialities and had little to do with those who did not share her concerns. She was not without paradoxes, however; although she held unusually liberal racial views for her time she upheld conventional prejudice against the Irish and had a maternalistic attitude toward working-class women.

A woman of deep moral conviction, Chace inspired and supported other reformers for over six decades. An invalid in her last years, she held suffrage meetings in her bedroom and wrote articles and letters for the Woman’s Journal and other periodicals. She died at ninety-three of lung congestion in Central Falls, Rhode Island. The minister and suffragist Anna Garlin Spencer conducted the funeral service. Chace was buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence.

Chace’s Anti-Slavery Reminiscences (1891) and Two Quaker Sisters; From the Original Diaries of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lucy Buffum Lovell (1937) contain autobiographical material. See also L. B. C. Wyman (Chace’s daughter) and A. C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 2 vols. (1914). Significant insights into Chace and other feminist abolitionists are found in B. G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (1978). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1929) and Notable American Women (1971).