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Debra Gold Hansen, Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Page 527, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486285
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Sister Societies opens in 1834 with an account of New Hampshire women braving a threatening mob to hear an antislavery lecture. “The Concord women found the power to challenge the mob in their association with each other,” author Beth A. Salerno writes. “Together they could take on not only local troublemakers but the most powerful economic and political institution in the country” (p. 3). Although histories of female abolitionism abound, Salerno contends that women's antislavery work was far more extensive and diverse than previously known and that too little attention has been paid to the experiences of smaller groups such as the society described above. To prove her point, Salerno has, through painstaking research in antislavery archives and publications, identified over two hundred antislavery female associations formed between 1832 and 1855.
Salerno's illuminating study chronicles the evolution of women's antislavery work, beginning with sympathies for colonization and the free-produce movement in the early 1800s and culminating in vigorous grass-roots antislavery organizing and activity in the 1830s. Subsequent chapters review the impact of the movement's 1839 and 1840 controversies on local women's groups and document the founding of female antislavery societies in the West after 1840. Here the author compares women's groups in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin with their predecessors in the East and finds that, despite generational, organizational, and tactical differences, they followed a parallel cycle. As soon as the movement attracted significant numbers, “divisions over political action, church membership, and, ultimately, women's rights rapidly ensued” (p. 147). The book concludes with abolitionist women's final efforts to help slaves during the Civil War.
