In the exciting and frequently dangerous years of abolitionism prior to the Civil War, Abby Kelley, a young white woman, born in 1811 in Massachusetts, was the embodiment of commitment to the cause of antislavery and equal rights for black people.

At a time when the popular press demanded silence and submission from women, she spent more than two decades on the lecture platform, bringing her vibrant message to farmers and shopkeepers alike.

Chief money-raiser and organizer of the abolitionist movement, she was the most radical member, believing that the whole nature of society had to be changed in order to eliminate slavery and racism.

Although she was labeled a "Jezebel," Abby Kelley successfully made other women aware of their capabilities. She sought out potential women leaders, bringing Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and other lesser-known women into public life. Lucy Stone remarked that Abbey Kelley earned for us all the right of free speech, while to Frederick Douglass her youth and simple Quaker beauty, combined with her wonderful earnestness, her large knowledge and great logical power bore down on all opposition, wherever she spoke, though she was pelted with foul eggs and no less foul words from the noisy mobs which attended us(the abolitionist campaigners)

She was to William Lloyd Garrison "the moral Joan of Arc of the world." (Garrison was the editor of the Liberator, a weekly paper dedicated to the immediate abolition of slavery and equal opportunities for black people. It was initially Garrison's writings that inspired Abby to become involved with the movement.)

Abby married StephenFoster, an abolitionist from New Hampshire, in 1845 and had a daughter in 1847. After staying home for a few years with her new baby, Abby and Stephen once again hit the abolitionist trail. They also opened their home "Liberty Farms" to slaves who were escaping through the "Underground Railroad."

Kelley Foster and her husband still managed to voice their displeasure
with Abby's inability to vote--from 1874 to 1879 and refused to pay property taxes on their attractive Federal-style farmhouse, Liberty Farm. Auctioned off by the state several times, friends repeatedly purchased the house and then gave Liberty Farm back to the Fosters.

Liberty Farm
Photograph courtesy of Preservation Worcester.

Abby Kelley's life is a testament to one of the earliest feminist experiences, for she was not only a foremost abolitionist leader, but a loving wife and mother---a woman of extraordinary determination.

At her funeral, Samuel May, spoke of her legend:
"Few Americans can be named...who did so much for the abolition of American slavery as did the woman whose worn-out frame lies before us. She was one of the few whose words startled and aroused the land; who compelled attention; who made the guilty tremble; who forced sleeping consciences to awake; and forbade that they should sleep again until slavery ceased. We all have heard of self-sacrifice. In Mrs.Foster we saw it. From the hour when she left her chosen work of teaching, and through all her life, a period of fifty years, she laid herself a willing offer upon the altar of humanity and truth, of her country's and of mankind's highest and enduring welfare. She took on herself the sorrows, pains, heart-anguish, stripes and wounds of her suffering sisters and brothers."

Information from "Ahead of Her Time" by Dorothy Sterling, 1991,
W.W. Norton & Company, New York

For more information about Abby Kelly, please visit these sites.
http://www.nps.gov/boaf/foster~1.htm
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/pwwmh/ma42.htm

Contributed by: CeeCee