Frederick Douglass wrote, “When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages.”...

Douglass was absolutely correct in his prediction, which is not surprising given that he was an early advocate of equality for women, attending, for example, the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The abolitionist movement provided a forum for women's political participation at a time when they were denied such a forum by law. Legally, women could not vote, and culturally, a "separate spheres" culture dictated that a woman's proper place was managing the household. But...

Douglass was absolutely correct in his prediction, which is not surprising given that he was an early advocate of equality for women, attending, for example, the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The abolitionist movement provided a forum for women's political participation at a time when they were denied such a forum by law. Legally, women could not vote, and culturally, a "separate spheres" culture dictated that a woman's proper place was managing the household. But women could form clubs and other organizations that advocated against such societal ills as slavery, Indian removal, and alcohol abuse. Another reason that women played a major role in the abolitionist movement was that it revealed the inequalities that women faced. Women abolitionists found themselves closed out of antislavery meetings and organizations, and this angered them to the point that they began to openly advocate for their own rights, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton did at Seneca Falls. Many of the leaders we associate with the abolition movement were women, including Lucretia Mott, the Grimké sisters, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As for the debate between the Grimkés and Catherine Beecher, the latter argued that abolitionist demands for immediate abolition were inflaming the South and actually making it more likely that slavery would continue. She looked at the issue as a political matter, whereas the Grimke sisters saw it as a fundamentally moral question. They thought, like William Lloyd Garrison, that the republic could not persist in allowing slavery, which was a mortal sin. She believed in gradual emancipation, an approach that had once been shared by many, North and South, but became less viable as the sectional conflict over slavery worsened after 1837, when Beecher's letter criticizing immediate abolition was published. But overall, the prominent role played by women in the abolition movement remains one of its most remarkable aspects.