Abby Foster

“All the great family of mankind are bound up in one bundle. When we aim a blow at our neighbor’s rights our own are by the same blow destroyed. Can we look upon the wrongs of millions—can we see their flow of tears and grief and blood, and not feel our hearts drawn out in sympathy?” 

—Abby Foster

Born this day in 1810: Abigail Kelley Foster (1810–1887), radical abolitionist and women’s rights leader who shook up the status quo

Foster was born Abigail Kelley in Pelham, Massachusetts. She was raised a Quaker and educated in Quaker schools. She also began teaching in a Quaker school, but gave up her teaching career in 1839 to lecture full-time for the abolitionist cause. Foster was a dynamic speaker and radical in her views, which included criticism of the church, the government, and even the Constitution. Her extreme views—and especially the fact that she would address mixed audiences—often incited violence. Nevertheless, she kept up an exhaustive speaking schedule, eventually including other causes into her talks, such temperance, suffrage, dress reform, and financial independence for women.

In 1845 she married a fellow abolitionist, Stephen Symonds Foster. A marriage of equals, they took turns lecturing and tending to their farm and their children. Sometimes they lectured together. On several occasions they refused to pay taxes on the farm as protest against Foster’s lack of vote. Whenever the farm was seized and auctioned off, it would be purchased by supporters and returned to them.

Foster’s prominent position in the abolition movement led to some schisms, some involving the role of women in the movement and others involving her criticism of the church’s attitude toward slavery. Like many woman abolitionists, the hostility she met when trying to advocate for rights for African Americans led her to become increasingly involved in the women’s movement. She was a role model for future feminist leaders, including Lucy Stone, who said of her:

Mrs. Foster, for more than thirty years, stood in the thick of the fight for the slaves, and, at the same time, she hewed out the path over which women are now walking toward their equal political rights.

 —Lucy Stone 

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Carry Nation

With Bible reading and "hatchetation" the 6-foot tall,
175-pound Carry Nation made an impression.

Born this day in 1846: Carry Nation (1846–1911), temperance advocate most remembered for her hatchet-wielding assaults on illegal barrooms

The temperance movement in the United States was motivated as much by a desire to reduce alcolohol-related domestic violence and poverty as it was by the reform era from which it sprang. The same was true for the activism of Carry Nation. Nation was born Carry Amelia Moore in Kentucky in 1846. In 1867 Nation, a teacher, married  a doctor named Charles Goyd.  Goyd was an alcoholic, and before many years passed she fled the marriage with her young daughter. Goyd soon died of complications from his alcoholism. Nation remarried in 1877, to David Nation, a minister and lawyer. The family eventually settled in Kansas. Carry Nation worked as a prison visitor, hoping to spread the Gospel and abstinence to criminals.

In 1890 Kansas loosened its prohibition laws, making access to liquor more readily available. As it was, alcohol was easy to obtain at drug stores, and illegal joints operated openly. In 1892 she founded a local branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She made it her mission to shut down illegal barrooms. With a small posse of vigalntes from the WCTU, Nation would enter an illegal barroom. When prayers, hymns, and exhortations would not convince bar owners to shutter their businesses, Nation, armed with bricks and—more famously, a hatchet—proceeded to smash up the place. Since the places were not legal, she argued that she had license to wreck them. She destroyed barrels of liquor, furniture, glasses, bottles, mirrors, and lewd pin-ups of women. In her work Nation also established a shelter for wives of alchololics and raised funds to support it.  

Nation became quite the celebrity. Lecture fees, publication of temperance journals, and especially sales of silver brooches shaped like a hatchet helped support her—to the tune of $300 per week—and pay the many fines she was charged. She was at times shot at, beat up, and often arrested (30 times), but remained defiant. The WCTU awarded her a medal as the “Bravest Woman in the World.” Eventually, though, the movement soured on her vigilantism. The suffragists, too, shied away from her support. After she retired from public life she ran a school from her home, which also served as a boarding house for homeless women.

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