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

of the free-produce movement (with a few notable exceptions) is that historians have
tended to accept Wendell Garrison’s appraisal of the movement. 6 “The Abolitionists
proper,” Garrison claimed in 1868, “although always stigmatized as impracticable, never
mounted this hobby as if the battle-horse of victory.” According to Garrison, “The
Quakers not alone, but distinctively, cherished the sacred flame of free produce.” 7
Undeniably, Quakers formed the moral core of the British and American free-produce
movements. Yet, framing research in this way has limited opportunities to understand
the dynamic relationship between abstention and abolitionism and gender and commerce.
As a result, the eighteenth century movement is divorced from later developments,
suggesting that issues raised in the first abstention campaign had little to do with later
developments.
Analyzing the free-produce movement from the late-eighteenth through the mid-
nineteenth century highlights the transformation in women’s activism in this period.
Over the course of more than seventy years of free-produce activism, women’s abstention
went through three phases. 8 In the 1790s, women’s abstention focused on the immediate
domestic circle. Women who abstained from slave-grown sugar made a political
6 For those exceptions, see especially Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil”; Robertson, Hearts Beating
for Liberty, ch. 3. Faulkner argues that “historians need to account for a strategy that attracted the most
committed, most diverse, and arguably most radical abolitionists.”
7 Wendell Phillips, “Free Produce Among the Quakers,” Atlantic Monthly 22 (1868), 493. While
Garrison claims that non-Quakers supported free produce, nearly all of his text focuses on the efforts of
Quaker abstainers.
8 See Sklar, “The World Anti-Slavery Convention,” 302-303, n.6 Sklar defines three levels of
women’s political culture: “group activity that extends beyond family groups; group activity that expresses
a female consciousness or awareness of women’s actions as women; group activity with the explicit goal of
advancing the rights or interest of women.” Sklar notes that “[not] all women partook of the same political
culture.” In her comparison of British and American women’s political culture, Sklar argues that historians
need to “speak plurally . . . when we speak of more than one polity.”
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