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

Department” harbored radical potential. The Liberator, for example, had an African
American readership and published writing by African American as well as white
abolitionists; thus, rhetoric published in the “Ladies Department” challenged traditional
ideology that privileged white, upper-class gender ideals. Female literary spaces
expanded opportunities for women reformers and challenged cultural assumptions about
the relationship between women and politics. 43
The “Ladies’ Repository” and the “Ladies’ Department” were essential forces in
promoting women’s activism. In January 1829, Philadelphia women established the
Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton, the city’s
first female free-produce society and one of the earliest female anti-slavery associations
in the United States. 44 The group’s initial meeting attracted thirteen women; the group’s
membership increased to more than one hundred in subsequent months. At the December
meeting of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the male
delegates of the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, announced the formation of the
women’s association. The men of the Free Produce Society compared the American
women to the laudatory example of British women, noting their distribution of tracts,
work-bags, and albums, as well as their labors in visiting every home in some of the
43 Jacqueline Bacon, “The Liberator’s ‘Ladies Department,’ 1832-1837: Freedom or Fetters?” in
Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity, ed. Meta G. Carstphen and Susan
C. Zavoina (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 5.
44 Alice Adams notes the presence of three Ladies’ Societies in North Carolina in 1825 and 1826:
Kennett (1825-1826), Jamestown (1826), and Springfield (1826). Most likely these were manumission
societies, which emphasized general but gradual emancipation and foreign colonization. See Adams, The
Neglected Period, 265, 137-138.
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