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1848:  Abby Kelley Foster Lectures in Harrisburg
1848  By the late 1840's, Harrisburg was attracting regular speakers in support of abolitionist doctrine.  For more than ten years the town had supported a small but active Anti-Slavery Society, and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, with high profile members Robert Purvis, Lucretia Mott and Miller McKim had been organized here.  While the leaders of Harrisburg's African American community and a few white abolitionists, such as the Rutherford and Graydon families and Church of God minister John Winebrenner supported these speakers, most of the local citizenry was apathetic or even outright hostile to these events.

In 1847 Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison spoke at the courthouse, but a rowdy crowd outside of the building disrupted the event by throwing firecrackers, rotten eggs and bricks.  Abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster faced an even larger challenge, not only because of the strong societal taboo against female speakers, but also because she advocated equal rights for African Americans and women, a view many abolitionists were not yet ready to embrace.

The North Star, Frederick Douglass' newspaper, supported Foster and her equal rights views, and defended her right as a woman to speak out and to become politically and socially involved.  When the Philadelphia newspaper U.S. Gazette made the following scathing mention of Foster's activity, The North Star reprinted it:

"Abby Kelley has been lecturing in Harrisburgh on abolition.  We wonder if she knows how to broil a steak or knit stockings."

In reply, The North Star said

We have ever noticed that when a female gives evidence of a superior mental cultivation--that she had lived to some purpose, above and beyond the everyday animal routine of menial duties--that she aspired to drink of the fountain of knowledge--to take the place in the scale of intellectual being, which it was designed by her Creator that she should till, she is met with sneers like the above from the "lords of creation." 

...When we hear of the eloquence, the learning, the statesmanship, of a distinguished man, who ever thinks of asking, Can he hold a plough?  Can he saw wood?  Can he drive a team?  Can he plant potatoes, or hoe corn?  Oh no!  it is assumed to be the natural position of man to triumph in the conflict of mind; to him is assigned an exclusive monopoly of the deep treasures of learning; eloquence is his birthright, and fame his just reward.  But whenever one of the other sex ventures beyond the sphere assigned for the mass--whenever she displays natural talents highly cultivated, and the gifts which God has bestowed upon her improved, enlarged, elevated--it is received as something what ought to be frowned upon--as an assumption of prerogatives belonging not to her.  But this feeling is wearing away with the progress of society--with a juster appreciation of woman's duties, and their influence upon all the relations of life."

While many abolitionists looked only to the end of slavery, Foster, Douglass and others were looking beyond that issue.  They saw how the rights of African Americans and the rights of women were not inseparable, and that the question was not really about the legitimacy of slavery, but about whether basic human rights were applicable to all. 

Source:  Rochester, NY, The North Star, March 17, 1848.
Links:  For more on Abby Kelley Foster, see http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/pwwmh/ma42.htm 

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This page was updated July 19, 2004.