A Time for Silence: William Lloyd Garrison and the “Woman Question” at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention

Abstract

The World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 is remembered most as the event that inspired Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to organize the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention. Few scholars, however, have analyzed the debate proceedings that ultimately resulted in women's exclusion from the convention. An analysis of the convention proceedings questions Wendell Phillips' strategy of speaking on behalf of the women, arguing instead that William Lloyd Garrison's strategy of silence was the more rhetorically astute response to the exclusion of women. Garrison's silent protest not only attracted more attention to the women's rights cause, but also inspired women to speak on their own behalf.

Sex Trafficking of Women. Civil Society Activism Against Sexual Slavery Between the 19th and the Early 20th Century

“…When the World Anti-Slavery Convention was coming to an end, a general meeting was organized in which Garrison delivered a speech advocating for woman's rights and universal suffrage (Maynard, 1960). After the convention, in protest the discrimination suffered and, in a context, favourable to the defence of women's rights that in the U.S. had begun at the decade of 1830, the abolitionists activists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady resolved to hold a women's national convention (Hogan, 2008). Mott and Cady, together with other Abolitionists and campaigners for women's rights, Mary M'Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright and Jane Hunt, organized the historic Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.…”