EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ELIZABETH PEASE NICHOL P/94

                                               Read Part One HERE

In this story I will continue to focus on a woman named Elizaeth Pease Nichol. She lived from 1807 - 1897. In 1840, Elizabeth travelled to London to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention, as did her friend Eliza Smeal Wigham, who was secretary of the Edinburgh Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. 

Before the convention started, Joseph Sturge, the British organiser, told the six women delegates they would not be allowed to participate. Leading Anti-Slavery members had rebuked him for thinking this "insane innovation, this women-intruding delusion," should be allowed. At the time, women attended were required to sit in segregated areas out of the sight of male delegates. 

The matter became contentious because some of the male delegates from the United States supported the women's participation while others spoke of the men's right to exclude women. Consequently, the American women delegates had to join the British women observers in a segregated area.

Elizabeth maintained the connections she had made at the World Anti-Slavery Convention and remained active in the movement for the abolition of slavery through correspondence with international abolitionists such as American Maria Weston Chapman. These letters with like-minded thinkers provide valuable insight into personal communications between women in the movement, not locally but internationally, and we can see just how committed these women were, from small towns and cities across the country and around the world, to a unified goal of emancipation

After moving to Edinburgh, Elizabeth became the treasurer for the Edinburgh chapter of the National Society for Womens' Suffrage. 

In 1853, she married Dr John Pringle and moved to Glasgow. 

Elizabeth died in 1897. 

Read Part Ninety-Five HERE