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

forms of female activism that reinforced the status quo. Instead they recruited across
religious, racial, and class lines, ultimately re-envisioning women’s activism.
Requited Labor Convention and the American Free Produce Association
The momentum provided by groups such as the PFASS, the Anti-Slavery
Convention of American Women, and the Society of Friends in the early to mid-1830s
led supporters of free produce to organize the Requited Labor Convention in the spring of
1838. Planned by members of the Clarkson Anti-Slavery Society and the PFASS, the
Convention represented American free-produce activists’ first attempt to organize a
national movement against slave-labor products. In this regard, the Requited Labor
Convention marked a significant shift in the American free-produce movement. The
delegates to the Convention hoped the association would impress upon their fellow
abolitionists the importance of moral consistency and improve the supply of free-labor
goods. Integrated by gender and race, the American Free Produce Association
represented a watershed moment in the free-produce movement as well as the abolitionist
movement. 66 The AFPA reflected “the fusion of moral passion and political demands”
identified by historian Beth Salerno as unique to women’s anti-slavery associations in the
1830s. In the synthesis of the moral and the political, women were able to “build bridges
66 Lawrence B. Glickman makes a similar observation in his study of the American free-produce
movement describing the Requited Labor Convention of 1838 as “the high-water mark of the free produce
movement.” See Glickman, Buying Power, 74. Glickman, however, places the Requited Labor
Convention solely within the context of the nineteenth-century free-produce movement failing to highlight
the many ways in which the Convention reflected the character of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s.
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