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

Chandler’s work serves as an important bridge between the British free-produce
movement and its early American counterpart. When Chandler reprinted and commented
on Elizabeth Heyrick’s work in the “Ladies’ Repository,” she consciously placed herself
within an Anglo-American tradition of female free-produce activism. Her work on the
“Ladies’ Repository” provided an opportunity to work with the two leading abolitionist
editors of the period: Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison. As a Hicksite
Quaker, Chandler was influenced by the free-produce testimony of Elias Hicks as well as
the seemingly more mainstream ministry of eighteenth-century Quakers John Woolman
and Anthony Benezet. Chandler’s literary work was further shaped by the free-produce
activism of fellow Hicksite Quakers Lucretia Mott, Lydia White, and Hannah
Townsend. 10 In Chandler’s literary work, these American influences — Quaker and non-
Quaker alike — merged with British free-produce rhetoric. Rather than the quiet, Quaker
activist described by many historians, Chandler played a prominent role in reinterpreting
British free-produce rhetoric for an American movement, urging women to ever higher
levels of activism. 11
with Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writings, 7 th ed. rev. (Philadelphia: E.H.
Butler and Co., 1857).
10 While preparing his memoir of Chandler, Lundy consulted Mott and Hannah Townsend
Longstreth. The two women were the only individuals Lundy consulted other than Elizabeth’s brother,
Thomas, and her uncle, Lemuel Howell. In a letter to Thomas, Lundy noted that Mott had seen the work in
progress “and expressed . . . satisfaction with it.” The Chandlers’ uncle Lemuel Howell ultimately
published the completed volume. See Benjamin Lundy to Thomas Chandler, February 16, 1836, RTD,
304-305.
11 See Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 21. Chandler did produce much of her work
anonymously, which along with her occasional self-effacing comments has led historians to describe her
(like Lucretia Mott) as a quiet Quaker. Chandler is generally accorded an early and minor role in American
abolitionism. For example, in addition to Jeffrey’s work see Hersh, The Slavery of Sex, 7-10; Salerno,
Sister Societies, 21-23. For a more extensive discussion of Chandler within the context of women’s antislavery
activism, see Alma Lutz, Crusade for Freedom: Women of the Anti-slavery Movement (Boston:
96