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

For the first time, Quaker women joined with non-Quakers in an integrated association
committed to reform of American society through the abolition of slavery and the racial
uplift of all African Americans. 45
Like its British predecessors, the PFASS gave structure to women’s activism.
The PFASS sponsored public addresses by white and black abolitionists including Robert
Forten, Robert Purvis, James Cornish, Charles Burleigh, Benjamin Lundy, Lewis Tappan,
and George Thompson to recruit new members. Between 1835 and 1838, the PFASS
brought more than one hundred new members into the society. 46 The PFASS also
purchased and distributed anti-slavery literature, raised funds, and gathered signatures for
petitions to Congress. 47 In 1837, for example, the women of the PFASS organized a
signature campaign, dividing Pennsylvania into districts to better coordinate their work
with other women’s associations including the ladies’ anti-slavery society in Pittsburgh.
Anna M. Hopper suggested the women divide Philadelphia into similar districts. 48 Like
the British women, the Philadelphia women pledged to collect and disseminate accurate
45 See Nancy A. Hewitt, “The Fragmentation of Friends: The Consequences for Quaker Women in
Antebellum America,” in Witnesses for Change: Women over Three Centuries, edited by Elisabeth Potts
and Susan Mosher Stuard Brown (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 94; Wellman,
The Road to Seneca Falls, 102; Bacon 1986, 93-94.
46 See for example, August 11, 1835, December 8, 1836, and April 13, 1837, Minutes of the
Female Anti-Slavery Society, Reel 30, PFASS, HSP. See also Soderlund, “Priorities and Power,” 69-71.
Sarah Pennock Sellers described her mother Mary Pennock Sellers as “much enthused by [Thompson’s]
splendid oratory.” Mary Sellers convinced her schoolteacher, Sarah Pugh, to attend Thompson’s lecture.
“[I]n consequence [Pugh] became a worker in the anti-slavery cause.” Sarah Pennock Sellers, David
Sellers, Mary Pennock Sellers (n.p., 1926), 47.
47 See for example, Lucretia Mott Phoebe Willis, March 1, 1834. Mott lamented that there seemed
to be little more that women could do other than to subscribe to anti-slavery periodicals.
48
May 18, 1837 and July 14, 1837, Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society,
Reel 30, PFASS, HSP.
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