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

women possessed these characteristics, the true woman was deemed morally superior to
man and was expected to wield virtuous influence over husbands, brothers, and sons
through her guidance and example. 30 As the naturalized primary consumers of domestic
goods, women were seen as important role models for abstention from slave-grown
products. Nineteenth-century women, however, used assumptions about female nature to
expand their participation in the boycott of slave-labor products. While grassroots
organizing was essential to abstention in both the 1790s and the 1820s, nineteenth-
century women redefined such organizing efforts. Rather than merely expressing their
political views in the marketplace and at the tea table, women canvassed their
neighborhoods, organized boycotts, distributed anti-slavery literature and lists of free-
labor grocers, and established associations to support abstention and anti-slavery.
Nineteenth-century women’s abstention work in Britain also challenged the male anti-
slavery leadership’s support for gradual abolition as women’s associations led the call for
the immediate abolition of slavery. 31
In the 1820s and 1830s, American abolitionists attempted to transfer British
success to American soil. Benjamin Lundy, editor and publisher of the Genius of
Universal Emancipation, reprinted Heyrick’s work and promoted women’s anti-slavery
30 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966),
151-174. An extensive literature examines the concept of “separate spheres.” For two of the most helpful,
see Linda Kerber, “Separate Worlds, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,”
Journal of American History 75 (1988), 9-39; Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?: A
Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” The Historical Journal 36 (1993),
383-414.
31 Claire Midgley compares eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women’s free produce
activism. See Claire Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780-1870 (London:
Routledge, 1992) and Claire Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790-
1865 (London: Routledge, 2007), 41-64.
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