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

statement, yet, because women’s politics were primarily confined to friends and family
and did not involve formal organizing, women’s political statements against slavery
generally did not raise questions about their appropriate sphere. Indeed, debates about
women’s participation focused instead on questions of motivation. Could women forgo
the temptations of the “world of goods” and make the moral choice? Could the market
serve as a moral corrective? The line distinguishing private and public and male and
female spheres of influence was fluid in this period. Women’s participation in the first
abstention movement was never assured. Female consumption could confirm or deny the
morality of the market and the female consumer. Women’s moral renunciation of slave-
labor products contrasted sharply with the lurid tales of white colonial women reported in
the House of Commons and repeated in countless eighteenth-century publications.
Female moral consumption confirmed the hopes of abstainers that women and the market
could be used to reform society.
The second phase of women’s abstention began with publication of Elizabeth
Heyrick’s Immediate Not Gradual Abolition. The rise of evangelical Christianity with its
emphasis on individual action, perfectibility, and female morality, encouraged the
development of women’s reform work in the early nineteenth century. Unlike the
benevolent groups that preceded them, women’s reform societies sought to restructure
society rather than ameliorate its evils. In the 1820s, women established gender-specific
societies to support reforms such as temperance and abolitionism. In Britain and the
United States women established abolitionist and free-produce societies. Asserting the
morality of their cause, free produce supporters promoted abstention as first and foremost
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