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

on American abolitionists to send “your best, soundest, and clearest-headed Anti-slavery
men.” Female delegates, Sturge claimed would hinder rather than aid the cause. And if
any female delegates did attend the convention, he warned, “they will have to encounter
the strong feeling against it, which exists here, standing alone.” 11 Sturge and the
members of the London Committee clearly hoped to forestall any debate over the woman
question.
As the female delegates arrived in London in the days before the convention, the
London Committee made repeated efforts to convince Lucretia Mott and the other
women to accept their exclusion from the convention. On June 6, Joseph Sturge dined
with Mott, who noted in her diary that he “begged submission of us to the London
Committee.” Mott and the other women attempted to change Sturge’s mind but “found
he had prejudged & made up his mind to act with our New Organization,” referring to the
recently formed American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. On June 10 and 11, the
women met again with members of the London Committee and others who had been sent
to convince the women to accept the decision to exclude them as delegates. When a
black delegate from Jamaica told Mott “it would lower the dignity of the Convention and
bring ridicule on the whole thing if ladies were admitted,” she replied that “similar
reasons were urged in Pennsylvania for the exclusion of colored people from our
meetings — but had we yielded on such flimsy arguments, we might as well have
abandoned our enterprise.” The analogy between race and gender was a familiar one. In
11 Liberator, May 8, 1840; Emphasis in original. See also Lewis Tappan to Theodore Weld, May
4, 1840 in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844, Gilbert
H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), II: 834; Kennon “‘An
Apple of Discord,’” 248-249.
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