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

the chronology of women’s activism has implications beyond writing women back into
the eighteenth-century movement against the slave trade and slavery. Historians
traditionally treat the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and the nineteenth-
century American abstention movements as distinct temporal and geographic moments.
Recognizing women’s role in the abstention movement highlights the protracted
transatlantic battle for emancipation. 16 Even when prominent abolitionists like Garrison
substituted polite responses for true support for free wool, and despite the declining
influence of abstinence after the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, women
remained active in the free-produce movement through the American Civil War,
representing nearly one hundred years of female consumer activism against the products
of slave labor.
Abstention from the products of slave labor developed in the mid-eighteenth
century as American Quakers worked to separate the Society of Friends from slavery.
American Quaker John Woolman, a man described by historian Thomas Drake as “the
most Christlike individual Quakerism has ever produced,” led the reformation of the
16 Historian Steven Hahn challenges the traditional argument of two emancipations in the United
States – one as a result of the Revolution and the other as part of the Civil War. Hahn suggests viewing
emancipation “as a connected and remarkably protracted process, one far more protracted than anywhere
else in the Americas” will lead to “a major reconceptualization of emancipation,” which has significant
implications for our understanding of nineteenth-century social and political history. For example, Hahn
argues that understanding emancipation as a protracted process blurs the sectional lines of conflict, which
have traditionally shaped the debate about emancipation, and instead recognizes the boundaries of slavery
as national rather than sectional. Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1-53. The free-produce movement underscores the national, rather
than sectional, boundaries of slavery in the United States by highlighting northern economic support of
slavery through the purchase of slave-labor goods.
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