EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ABBY KELLEY P/111

                                                               Read Part One HERE

In this post I will continue to focus on a woman named Abby Kelley. She lived from 1811- 1887. In 1845, Abby receivd a request from the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society, asking her to attend the annual meeting of the society and to present their program at conventions throughout Ohio during the summer.

On June 5, Abby arrived at the annual meeting, which was held in the New Lisbon's Disciples' Church. She lectured to an audience of 500 people, mostly Quakers and blacks, who filled the church to overflowing. Many people had to be content with sitting on benches outside.

Even those opposed to abolition of slavery often spoke of Abby's power as a speaker. In May 1845, the New York Herald, an anti-reform newspaper, praised her address at an American Anti-Slavery Society meeting.

In the summer of 1845, Abby attended an annual Quaker meeting at Mount Pleasant, Ohio. These were not abolitionist Friends, but were Orthodox Quakers. Abby waited for most of the day before speaking. She had hardly begun her lecture when she was ordered to stop disturbing the meeting. She tried to go on, but the men physically carried her out of the building.

Read Part One Hundred And Twelve HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ABBY KELLEY P/110

                                                               Read Part One HERE

In this post I will continue the story of Abby Kelley. She lived from 1811 - 1887. Abby's career as a lecturer began in 1838, when she gave her first speech for the American Anti-Slavery Society to an audience of men and women at Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia. She would go on to become one of its most popular speakers and its most successful fundraiser. Through her influence, many women became abolitionists and supporters of women's rights.

Frederick Douglass, a slave who escaped to freedom and fought to free his people from bondage, sometimes joined Abby on the lecture tours. She liked to work with black speakers, who could give first hand accounts of the horrors of slavery.

Abby went to Seneca Falls, New York, in 1843 to give an abolitionist lecture, and initiated a chain of events that founded a congregation and a host for the First Women's Rights Convention five years later.

Read Part One Hundred And Eleven HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: ABBY KELLEY P/109

                                                                Read Part One HERE

In this story I will focus on a woman named Abby Kelley. She lived from 1811 - 1887. Abby was born in Pelham, Massachusetts. She was raised as a Quaker and in 1826, she was sent to the New England's Friends Boarding School. Then she worked as a teacher for a few years.

Abby began to read William Lloyd Garrison's paper, the Liberator, and became a devoted abolitionist.. She was elected secretary of the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society, and she was one of the founding members of the New England Non-Resistance Society, which supported non-violent social reform.

At a time when society demanded that women be silent, submissive and obedient, Abby was vocal, assertive and headstrong. Despite harassment and ridicule, she never compromised her belief that all people are created equal and deserve to be free. 

Read Part One Hundred And Ten HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800; ELIZABETH BULTITUDE P/108

 

                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this story I will focus on a woman named Elizabeth Bultitude. She lived from 1809 - 1890. Elizabeth was born in Hardwick, Norfolk, England. She came from a large Wesleyan Methodist family and they were poor. She had a spiritual experience when she met Samuel Atterby, who was a Primitive Methodist. She joined that denomination in 1829.

Elizabeth's talents for preaching were spotted and she was given a "note" which gave her the church's authority to preach. She did not find it easy although she noted that in all her time of preaching she only failed to turn up on two occasions. In both cases it had been due to rain which meant that turnout would be poor and it was unwise to preach outside in torrential rain.

Male preachers were poorly paid and women preachers were paid just half that amount. When she was preaching at Soham in 1847 she was criticised for the poor quality of her dress. In reply she noted that even if she spent all of her money on clothes she would not be able to meet any standard of smart attire.

She retired in 1862. There were at least 40 itinerant women preachers and no one in the church gave them a senior position or paid them. Women did not stop preaching but Elizabeth is considered to be the last one who became itinerant to preach. After her the only authorised preachers were male. Elizabeth was the last of a group of women who preached with authority. Her church did not prevent women being preachers -  it just stopped authorising any more.

Elizabeth died in Heigham in 1890 after a long illness.

Read Part One Hundred And Nine HERE

 

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: BETSY MIX COWLES P/107

                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this story I will continue to focus on a woman named Betsy Mix Cowles. She lived from 1810 - 1876. Like many women who participated in the abolitionist cause, Betsy became interested in women's rights as well. While serving as principal and superintendent of a girls' school in Canton and Massilon, Ohio in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Betsy also served as the president of the first Womens' Rights Convention in Ohio at Salem in 1850, which reflects her prominence and the respect she had earned by this time.

Delegates learned that later in 1850, the state of Ohio was planning to convene a new constitutional convention, and the women wanted to have input into what rights women would be granted within the new Constitution of 1851. Later that year, Betsy attended the Akron Womens' Rights Convention and gave a speech about the inequalities in the wages of men and women and became a member of the executive committee of the newly formed Ohio Womens' Rights Association.

By the late 1850s, Betsy became interested in higher education for women teachers and normal schools, which specialised in educating women specifically for the teaching professsion. From 1856 through 1858, she was supervisor of practice teachers at the McNeely Normal School in Hopedale, Ohio. In 1858 she was an instructor at the Illinois State Normal School in Bloomington.

Betsy server as superintendent of public schools in Painesville, Ohio from1858 to 1860, then taught for two years in Delhi, New York.

In 1862, she retired to Austinburg, because of an eye ailment, end then completely lost sight in one eye in 1865, ending her careeer in education. 

Betsy died in 1876.

Read Part One Hundred And Eight HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: BETSY MIX COWLES P/106

                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this story I will continue to focus on a woman named Betsy Mix Cowles She lived from 1810 - 1876. Betsy became actively involved in a number of abolitionists organisations, often serving in leadership positions. Beginning in 1835, she served as the secretary of the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society, which was one of the largest in the state with more than four hundred members. In 1846 and 1847 Betsy helped produce anti-slavery fairs and attended anti-slavery fairs and meetings in Boston, Massachusetts.

Betsy began speaking in public about the evils of slavery, and gained a reputation for her ability to articulate the importance of the anti-slavery cause. Not everyone approved of her popularity, however, Many people believed that women should not speak in public, and she was openly criticised for her speeches. Despite this concern, she continued to participate in the anti-slavery movement and opened her home to fugitive slaves as a station on the Underground Railroad in Ohio.

African American were not treated as equals to white people in the new state of Ohio (1803). Enacted in 1804 and 1807, Ohio Black Codes were meant to discourage Blacks from moving to Ohio. One of these laws required Blacks to pay a $500 bond signed by two White men within 20 days of arrival in order to remain in the state. Betsy spoke out against the Black Laws, and resigned one teaching position when the school at which she was working refused to admit black students.

Read Part One Hundred and Seven HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: BETSY MIX COWLES P/105

                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this story I will focus on a woman named Betsy Mix Cowles. She lived from 1810 -  1876. Betsy was the eighth child of Giles Hooker Cowles and Sally White Cowles. In 1811 the Cowles family settled in the town of Austinburg in Ashtabula, the most norteastern county in Ohia, where her father was a minister.

In the later 1820s, Betsy and her sister began opening infant schools, advocating the creation of programs to instruct the very young. In 1827 she began teachig in area schools, and in 1832 she studied in New York City, as part of the infant school movement. When Betsy was 28, she was one of the first students in the Ladies Course at Oberlin College and a member of the third graduating class in 1840.

Betsy did not marry and supported herself as a teacher and principal, and as one of the first women to serve as a school superintendent, which was very rare in the mid-19th centurty. She was involved in establishing a number of public schools and normal schools in the Ohio towns of Austinburg, Massillon, Canton, Hopedale and Painesville, as well as in Bloomington Illinois.

Read Part One Hundred And Six HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: SUSAN PAUL P/104

                                          Read Part One HERE

In this post I will focus on a woman named Susan Paul. She lived from 1809 - 1841. Susan was the youngest daughter of Baptist minister Thomas Paul and his wife Catherine Waterhouse Paul. Her father was an outspoken social activist who introduced his daughter to the anti-slavery movement and many of the movement's most prominent leaders, including David Walker and Lydia Maria Child.

Susan was a primary school a teacher and began her abolitionist career in 1833 with the New England Anti-Slavery Society, a group that was significantly more receptive to women than other anti-slavery societies.At that time she was invited to participate in a meeting of that sociey. She did not speak at that meeting but led a group of about 30 African American childdren from her school in song.

That same year, an assembly of men from the New England Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison, visited Susan's classroom, and were overwhelmed by the musical performances that Susan's students provided. Known as the Juvenile Choir of Boston, Susans African American students ranged from ages three to ten and sang patriotic and anti-slavery songs. By teaching her students songs about slavery, Susan was able to inform young African American children about Northern abolitionism and expand the African American anti-slavery movement.

After the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was formed as an auxiliary of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, Susan became one of the first African American members of the group.

In 1837, she was one of two black women delegates at the Anti-Slavery Convention in New York

Susan, together with Jane Putnam and Nancy Prince founded a temperance society in the 1830s.

Unfortunately, Susan died of tuberculosis at the age of 32, in 1841.

Read Part One Hundred And Five HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: MARTHA STEARNS MARSHALL P/103

                                                      Read Part One HERE

In this post I wil focus on a woman named Martha Stearns Marshall. She lived from 1726-1793. Martha and her husband Daniel Marshall converted to Christianity during the First Great Awakening. The couple migrated from New England to Virginia, where they were introduced to Baptist beliefs. Concluding that Scripture taught believers' baptism, Martha and her husband were soon baptised and joined a Baptist Church, and Daniel was licensed to preach. But both Martha and her husband were preachers and Martha's zeal apparently equalled that of her husband. In 1755, Martha and her husband, together with her brother Shubal Stearns and his small congregation in Virgina, moved to North Carolina. The group settled at Sandy Creek and established a Baptist Church, which became the most influential Seperate Baptist Church in the South, and Martha often stood alongside her brother Shubal to preach at church meetings. Around  1760 Martha and her husband moved to nearby Abbott's Creek and founded a new church, and in 1771 they moved to Columbia County, Georgia, where they establised in Kiokwee Creek, Richmond County, the first missionary Baptist Church. In all these churches Martha provided excellent leadership.

Martha died in 1793.

Read Part One Hundred and Four HERE

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: SARAH MAPPS DOUGLASS P/102

                                                               Read Part One HERE

In this story I will continue to focus on a woman named Sarah Mapps Douglass. She lived from 1802 - 1882. Sarah repeatedly stressed the need of African American women to educate themselves. In 1831 she had helped to organise the Female Literary Society and on the eve of the Civil War she founded the Sarah M.  Douglass Literary Circle.

After the passing of her husband in 1861, Sarah devoted her time to anti-slavery activities and continued teaching. Throughout her abolitionist career she gave as well numerous lecturers.

After the Civil War Sarah became a leader in the Pennsylvania Branch of the American Freedman's Aid Commission, which worked to protect and provide services to the former slaves in the South.

Through the 1860s and 1870s Sarah continued her work of reform, lecturing, raising money for Southern freedmen and women, helping to establish a home for elderly and indigent black Philadelphians and teaching at the Institute for Coloured Youth. 

Sarah died in 1882.

Read Part One Hundred and Three HERE