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

Supervising Professor: Sam W. Haynes
ABSTRACT
“THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT”: WOMEN,
CONSUMPTION, AND FREE PRODUCE
IN THE TRANSATLANTIC
WORLD, 1791-1848
Julie Holcomb, PhD
The University of Texas at Arlington, 2010
Abstention from slave-labor products, along with petitioning, was a popular and
consistent form of anti-slavery activism for British and American abolitionists, especially
women. Despite renewed interest in the British and American free-produce movements,
historians continue to focus on either eighteenth- or nineteenth-century British or
American abstention, only briefly referring to the transatlantic and generational
connections between the movements. Limiting questions about free-produce in this way
overemphasizes the connection between abstention and the Society of Friends and
privileges the nineteenth-century period of the movement. While Quakers were the
primary proponents of abstention from slave-labor products, attempts by both Quakers
x