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

Unlike earlier histories of abstention, this dissertation studies the free produce
movement within its transatlantic context from 1791 through 1848. 60 Earlier histories of
free produce tend to focus either on the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and British or
American abstention only tangentially referring to the transatlantic connections.
Exploring abstention from its eighteenth-century origins to the formal start of the
women’s rights movement reveals the transformation in female activism in the Atlantic
world. In the eighteenth century, women’s abstention focused on the immediate domestic
circle as women convinced friends and family to abstain from slave-grown sugar. In the
1820s, as Elizabeth Heyrick revitalized the free produce movement and linked it to
immediate abolition, women moved beyond the domestic circle to form gender-
segregated societies to support their abolitionist reform work. In the late 1830s, women’s
abstention work transformed once again as American women used segregated and
integrated free-produce and anti-slavery associations to assert their identification with
African Americans.
Women’s market activities on behalf of the slave served as rites of community
often crossing generational, gender, geographic, and on occasion, class and racial
barriers. In the confluence of domesticity, reform, and market activities, women
developed formal and informal networks of support for the anti-slavery cause.
60 Though he does not discuss the free-produce movement specifically, Steven Hahn suggests the
importance of an extended temporal and geographical discussion of emancipation: “. . . emancipation and
its consequences were international in their unfolding and significance. But the ‘two emancipations’ and
‘sectional conflict’ models that have dominated the historiography of the United States may well have
prevented us from taking the full measure of this. . . . The difficulty with such an approach is that a crucial
international dynamic of change, communication, and influence may then be overlooked. . . . Slavery and
emancipation in the United States, that is, not only developed in an international context, but also shaped
and were shaped by that context.” Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, 19-22.
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