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

a moral tactic, a means of purification from the contamination of slave-labor goods. In
this regard, nineteenth-century abstention reflected its eighteenth-century roots.
However, Heyrick exploited the radical potential of abstention by linking the tactic to
slave rebellion, working-class reform, and women’s agency.
The third phase of women’s abstention work developed in the late 1830s in the
United States. Free produce supported women’s involvement in the American
abolitionist movement even as opponents criticized women such as Angelina and Sarah
Grimké for assuming the public role of male reformers. However, Lucretia Mott and the
Grimkés used free produce to commit what historian Carol Faulkner has described as acts
of “racial rebellion.” 9 Challenging women to view slave-labor produce as the products of
the labor of their “own children, brothers, and sisters,” female abstainers assumed a
principled stance against the products of oppression. 10
It is in this third phase that the differences between American and British
abstention and abolitionism become most apparent. In the late 1830s, British and
American reformers established national associations committed to the abolition of
slavery and abstention from the products of slave labor. The British associations —
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, British India Society, and the African
Civilization Society — encouraged women to subscribe to the groups but limited their
participation in the work of the associations. In contrast, the American Free Produce
9 Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil,” 392.
10 Anti-Slavery Convention of Women, Proceedings . . . 1839, 7.
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