Among the more well-known Boston women who attended William Ellery Channing’s Federal Street Church were abolitionists Maria Weston Chapman (1806-85) and Eliza Lee Cabot Follen. Chapman, a founder of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, was a supporter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the famed abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. An inspired organizer and fundraiser, Chapman ran twenty-two yearly anti-slavery fairs in Boston beginning in 1834. One of her colleagues in this venture was Lydia Maria Child (1802-80) whose 1833 publication, An Appeal in Behalf of that Class of Americans called Africans, was the first book to advocate an immediate end to slavery. Chapman’s fairs became a model for women in other parts of the country to raise money for the abolitionist cause. Chapman also published several important anti-slavery tracts including How Can I Help Abolish Slavery? and Right and Wrong in Massachusetts. With Garrison, Maria Chapman supported women’s full participation in abolitionist work—including public speaking, which had been condemned in a pastoral letter from the Congregational ministers of Massachusetts as being outside women’s God-ordained sphere. In 1840, Chapman was elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787-1860) was best known for her anti-slavery writings including Anti-Slavery Hymns and Songs and A Letter to Mothers in Free States. In A Letter, Follen wrote, “…what can women,—what can we mothers do?…you can do everything; I repeat, you can abolish slavery. Let every mother take the subject to heart, as one in which she has a personal concern. In the silence of the night, let her listen to the slave-mothers crying to her for help….” Much of Follen’s writing was designed for children, including songs, poems, and stories that carried a moral lesson.
