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

labour produce . . . as far as practicable.” 14 After much debate, the resolution was
replaced by a weaker version that instead recommended forming a committee to identify
sources of free-labor produce. In her diary Mott noted, “Many [delegates were] unsound
on abstinence from Slave products.” “Our Free Produce society,” she concluded, “will
have to double their diligence & do their own work — and so will American
Abolitionists generally — & especially women.” 15 For Mott, Pugh, and other abstainers,
abolitionism began with abstention, the personal pledge of commitment to the slave.
When the BFASS refused to acknowledge the female delegates, the group rejected not
only the women representatives but a core principle of transatlantic abolitionism, one
which had been a vital part of the movement since the eighteenth century.
Abstention, along with petitioning, was one of the most popular, and consistent
forms of female anti-slavery activism. Considering women’s free-produce activity as an
important part of the transatlantic campaign against slavery broadens the period of
women’s activism to the eighteenth century, more than forty years prior to the
organizational activity of the 1830s that traditionally serves as the starting point for
histories of women’s abolitionism. The eighteenth-century abstention movement linked
domestic consumption and slavery and established women as key activists in the
abolitionist campaign. Women’s free-produce associations established in the 1820s
influenced the development of women’s anti-slavery societies in the 1830s. Expanding
14 Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention Called by the Committee of the British and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and Held in London, from Friday, June 12 th , to Tuesday, June 23 rd , 1840
(London: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1841), 437.
15 Tolles, Slavery and “The Woman Question”, 39-40.
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