THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

anti-slavery information. 56 In 1828, the Anti-Slavery Society issued a fuller set of
guidelines for establishing ladies’ associations. Interestingly, those rules used the
resolutions adopted by the Ladies Association for Liverpool as a model. Like the earlier
guidelines, the Anti-Slavery Society urged women to focus on the dissemination of
information about slavery and the collection of subscriptions through their district
representatives. Men, however, were encouraged to submit petitions and use the press
and public meetings to distribute anti-slavery information. 57 The Anti-Slavery Society’s
guidelines might have been an attempt by the male anti-slavery leadership to establish
unity in goals and structure and to direct women’s work nationally.
The national society’s Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations presented three aims
appropriate for women’s associations: dissemination of information about slavery,
dissemination of information about the financial protections given by Parliament to the
products of slavery, and abstention. The second was not mentioned as a goal by the
ladies’ associations; rather, it was primarily a goal of the male societies. The pamphlet
also urged women to visit homes only where they were welcome, which stands in sharp
contrast to the district plan outlined by the ladies’ association themselves. Ladies’ Anti-
56
Anti-Slavery Ladies Association (London: Knight and Bagster, n.d.); Anti-Slavery Society
(London: Ellerton and Henderson, n.d.).
57 Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations (London: Bagster and Thomas, [1828]). The tract includes a
plan of association based on resolutions adopted by the Ladies’ Association for Liverpool and its
Neighbourhood in Aid of the Cause of Negro Emancipation. See Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations, 6. In
their first report, the Ladies’ Association for Liverpool noted that the resolutions were adopted at a meeting
on January 17, 1827. See The First Report of the Ladies Association for Liverpool and Its Neighbourhood
in Aid of the Cause of Negro Emancipation (Liverpool: George Smith, 1828), 13. See also Midgley,
Women against Slavery, 48-49; Clare Midgley, “‘Remember Those in Bonds, as Bound with Them’:
Women’s Approach to Anti-Slavery Campaigning in Britain, 1780-1870,” in Women, Empire, and
Migration, ed. Joan Grant (Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England: Trentham Books, 1996), 73-102.
72