Read Part One HERE
In this post I will focus on a woman named Eliza Starbuck Barney. She lived from 1802 - 1889. Her parents were Quakers Joseph and Sally Gardner Starbuck from Nantucket, Massachusets. Local schools offered girls equal opportunities for education with those of their brothers. During her studies Eliza developed an enduring interest in natural sciences, agriculture and history. Eliza met Nathaniel Barney, ten years her senior, and they married in 1820. Nantucket abolished slavery in 1773, and thereafter African Americans worked as tradespeople, labourers, sheep and livestock raisers, and as whalers and mariners.
Eliza was a cousin and close friend of abolitionist, suffragist and Nantucket native, Lucretia Coffin Mott. She and her husband kept up a life-long correspondence with Lucretia and her husband James, in which they often discussed the anti-slavery movement.
Eliza and her husband welcomed a runaway slave named Frederick Douglass and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison into their home when they were visiting the island to attend a Massachusetts Anti-Slavvery Society Convention.
Not only active in the anti-slavery movement. Eliza was also a supporter of the temperance movement and involved in the equal rights and womens' suffrage movements. In 1839 and 1840, she served a secretary of the Nantucket's Anti-Slavery Society and in 1851, with both her daughter and husband at her side, she attended the first womens' suffrage convention held in Massachusetts. Eliza died in 1889.
Read Part Sixty-Nine HERE
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