My optimism about finding politically active female abolitionists like Mary Davis in the Old Northwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, was not motivated by the secondary literature. Historians of Western antislavery mostly assumed that the reigning third-party abolitionism in this region precluded women’s participation. I read books, articles, dissertations, and theses on the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, and the Republican Party in the Old Northwest, but my efforts were not rewarded with information about women’s participation.4 Moreover, the burgeoning literature on women abolitionists, rich with gender analysis and nuanced cultural insights, tended to focus on Eastern Garrisonian women, who rejected third-party politics.5 Western women abolitionists in general have either been subsumed in larger studies of Eastern female antislavery societies or ignored altogether.

 My research for this paper, therefore, began at a foundational level. I wanted to know the extent and nature of women abolitionists’ participation in third parties. But I also wanted to explore how these women understood their political activity; did they see it as challenging the male-dominated system or simply as an expression of their “moral” concern with slavery? I also hoped to discern male abolitionists’ attitude toward women’s political activism. I scrutinized a variety of mostly Liberty-party newspapers, and supplemented this with material excavated from various Midwestern archives. While my research failed to turn up a plethora of politically outspoken and active women like Mary Davis, and almost no African American women, I did find that many Western women abolitionists were politically knowledgeable and interested in third-party politics. This interest was, in part, connected to the “the feminizing of the public sphere” described by Mary Ryan. Women entered politics through pageantry and symbolism, but impacted this masculine sphere nonetheless.6 I also discovered that the unique regional character of the Old Northwest, with its blend of Southern, Northern, and immigrant populations and its frontier roots, impacted the magnitude of women’s political participation. The debate over discriminatory legislation aimed at African Americans, known as Black Laws, for example, forced abolitionists in the West to confront political processes directly and vociferously, thus enticing women into the public arena in new ways. The West also seemed to develop more mixed-sex antislavery societies, often informally linked to the Liberty party, that resulted in increased female participation in politics. Finally, and most important, less conflict between political and non-political abolitionists allowed women to participate in third parties without directly challenging the political status quo or publicly associating themselves with women’s rights.

 The precarious unity of American abolitionism ended in 1840 when antislavery societies across the nation divided over the question of women’s role in the movement and the appropriateness of creating an abolitionist third party. In the wake of the breakup, women were confronted with several equally problematic alternatives, the evangelical abolitionists were led by ministers who explicitly opposed women’s equal place in the movement, the Garrisonians were associated with women’s rights advocates deemed “fanatical” by the general public, and the Liberty party was housed in the forbidding arena of masculine politics. Historians have assumed that these unappealing options resulted in many women simply abandoning the movement for other more conventional reform efforts. As Julie Roy Jeffrey has suggested, however, women’s participation in 1840s abolitionism, particularly third-party politics, became increasingly elusive and therefore overlooked by historians.7 Indeed, female activism in the Western Liberty party offers a compelling example of the subtle but important position of women in third-party politics.

 The Western Liberty party, and the Western antislavery movement in general, proved relatively hospitable to women in part because it welcomed both moral suasionists and more politically oriented abolitionists. Western antislavery activists in fact boasted about the more congenial atmosphere that prevailed among abolitionists in their region of the country. “Our third political party [and yours] in the East, they don’t compare at all,” declared Ohioan W.B. Irish in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison. Though not a Liberty man himself, Irish admired the amicable environment that permeated the Western wing of the party, “The women’s rights question never disturbed us here, we were not so ungallant as to deny them an equal footing on the broad platform of equal rights. . . . Your new organized political parties are full of bitter invective against old organizations. Not so here.”8 Although Irish exaggerated the extent to which harmony predominated in the West, there is evidence to suggest that the categories of “moral” and “political” antislavery overlapped significantly, thus resulting in a more united western movement. “The midwestern antislavery movement was,” according to historian Leslie Schwalm, “relatively free of the hostility which existed in the East between moral and political factions of the national movement.”9 This tolerant atmosphere seemed to peak during the tenure of the Liberty party in the 1840s.

 Even within some individual families in the West both moral and political abolitionism coexisted peacefully. Joshua Giddings (a Whig) was the leading political abolitionist in the Old Northwest but his eldest daughter, Maria, openly embraced the anti-political disunionist position of the Garrisonians. While some Eastern radicals like Abby Kelley offered a stark contrast between the “debased” Giddings and the “glorious” Maria, father and daughter proved to be more accommodating.10 Their friendly debate regarding the advisability of disunionism suggests that they respected one another’s positions. Maria, in fact, “had a radicalizing influence upon her father’s reform ideas,” according to Douglas Gamble.11

 Some antislavery organizations also managed to welcome both radical Garrisonians and political abolitionists. The Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle, led by the outspoken Sarah Otis Ernst, advocated all types of abolitionism. It donated the proceeds from its lucrative fairs, for example, to the local vigilance committee, the uncompromising Anti-Slavery Bugle, and political abolitionists.12 It also sponsored “a series of annual antislavery conventions . . . [that] managed to bring together moderate and radical antislavery political figures, proabolition church leaders, and Garrisonians.”13 Although Ernst firmly supported the Garrisonians, she recognized that her more politically oriented colleagues only tolerated the radicals. Sometimes this precarious balance proved difficult, especially for the rather melodramatic Ernst, but the Cincinnati Sewing Circle survived for 17 years. During these nearly two decades of activism, the refined and orderly Sewing Circle exposed women to key legislative issues at the state and national levels.

 Indeed, Western women abolitionists, especially within mixed societies, found themselves increasingly confronted with, and even encouraged to participate in, political debates. Unlike most mixed societies in the East, coed antislavery groups in the West often worked cordially with third parties, or at least energetically encouraged their male members to vote antislavery (with the exception of some Garrisonian groups which disavowed voting). The Green Fork, Indiana, Antislavery Society, which boasted several women on its executive committee, discussed the relationship between abolition and politics and concluded that any “patriot” could only vote for avowed abolitionists.14 The Walnut Creek Antislavery Society, which also included women on its executive committee, rejected the Democratic and Whig parties because of their “proslavery character” and demanded that abolitionists withdraw from them.15 Wayne County abolitionists invited both male and female abolitionists to form “Liberty associations” in towns across the state to ensure a Liberty party victory in the elections.16

 Women abolitionists and female antislavery societies took advantage of this exposure to political debates as well as the overlap between moral and political abolitionism in the Old Northwest to vocalize their political convictions. Often these convictions were explicitly framed within a moral context. It is no coincidence that the Western Citizen carefully located an editorial by Mary Davis analyzing the Whig political convention in her hometown of Peoria, directly below a more traditional “female” article also by Davis entitled, “Duty of the Christian Abolitionist.”17 In 1844, the Putnam County Female Anti-Slavery Society made clear their political preference when they resolved that “as the Liberty party makes the unchanging principles of truth and justice their object, we will use our influence to further their progress.”18 Perhaps fearing that this might appear too openly political for a female group, they established their moderate credentials by explicitly distancing themselves from women’s rights: “ambition for office with anti-slavery females,” they declared, “is incompatible with their purity of motives.” A year later this same group of women became increasingly bold. They passed a sarcastic resolution praising the state legislature for finding the time, “amidst the pressure of business, to manifest their zeal in the anti-slavery cause, by forming themselves into a Colonization Society.” The women cleverly redefined colonization to suit their purpose, concluding, “whereas, we have long been agents for the Underground Railroad, designed, as all know, for the colonizing of the slaves with their own consent, therefore . . . we rejoice in [the politicians’] benevolent design, and . . . we cordially invite them to cooperate with us.”19 The Henry County Female Anti-Slavery Society of Indiana proved more bold still. With no moral defense of their actions, they declared: “All laws making a difference between man and his neighbor on account of color, must emanate from corrupt legislation, and therefore we will use our endeavors by petitions or otherwise as may seem best calculated to effect the object, to have them swept from our Statute Books.”20

 Having impressed some of their male colleagues with their outspoken commitment, Western women abolitionists soon found themselves invited to join the growing custom of female participation in political party conventions. Women’s presence in the masculine world of the Liberty party was not without precedence, many women had engaged in a range of political activities prior to 1840. As Christopher Padgett has pointed out, women were politicized in the antebellum period “by the same cultural currents that shaped the republic generally.”21 They read newspapers, heard sermons, talked with visitors, and began receiving more formal political information through education. This politicization led to action. Even conservative benevolent women set aside their dislike of corrupt partisan politics and used their social prominence to lobby legislative bodies in the 1820s and ‘30s. Their evangelical sisters, “caught up in the excitement of political campaigns,” attended “rallies, clambakes, barbecues, and pole-raisings, joined in processions, waved their handkerchiefs, made flags, carried banners and generally acted as political support groups.”22 Indeed, “feminine symbols and female audiences” were introduced into politics by the Whigs, and became “commonplace in the political rallies of both parties.”23 Among abolitionists, women’s participation in the petition campaign placed them squarely in the political arena, to the dismay of many.24 Regardless of its impact, women’s participation in politics paved the way for those female reformers who would become active supporters of the Liberty party in the 1840s. Male antislavery editors, especially those associated with the Liberty Party, occasionally used the pages of their newspapers to encourage women’s attendance at party meetings. Throughout the 1840s the Ohio Philanthropist, Michigan Signal of Liberty, Indiana Free Labor Advocate & Anti-Slavery Chronicle, Illinois Western Citizen, and Wisconsin American Freeman, asked women, “Ladies, will you meet with us?”25 Sometimes these invitations were carefully phrased to connect female attendance to a moral imperative and thereby engender as little opposition as possible. “The ladies are especially invited to attend, they will hear the most interesting details ever presented to them, without a word to wound their feelings,” explained one Michigan Liberty man.26 “Come en masse to the Convention,” implored Liberty organizers in Kendall County, “with your wives and daughters, and let it be evinced to the world, that where the heart is in the work, all obstacles are easily surmounted.”27 Other times Liberty men linked women’s attendance to more practical issues such as fundraising and education: “There will be a meeting of the friends of the Liberty Party in Princeton. . . . Let the women be sure and come . . . as we want to make some arrangements for the raising of funds and distribution of Tracts.”28

 Sometimes female antislavery societies timed their meetings to coincide with the annual Liberty conventions, thus allowing women to attend the “masculine” political meetings under the guise of a separate female organization. The Du Page County Ladies Anti-Slavery Association met conjointly with the Liberty Association and even organized a fair to follow the gathering, almost as if to emphasize the women’s traditional and auxiliary position.29 In Illinois, the State Female Anti-Slavery society often met at the same time and even in the same location as the male organization. At the 1845 meeting in Alton, for example, the men gathered at a local Baptist church while “the female convention met downstairs in the same building.”30 It would have been a simple act to close the women’s meeting early and join the political debate upstairs. These carefully planned mutual meetings sometimes resulted in the male-dominated political gatherings learning to appreciate the contributions of women abolitionists. Those men attending the 1847 Liberty party meeting in Farmington, Illinois, probably witnessed women abolitionists resolving to work faithfully to erase “the odious black laws” from the state’s law books.31 Delighted with the commitment and passion of their female coadjutors, the Liberty party men passed a resolution praising their labors: “We deem the efforts of women no less important or efficient in the cause of our enslaved countrymen, than those of men, and therefore we earnestly desire them to organize in all their localities and put forth exertions for the spread of our sentiments through the State.”32

 Despite these conjoint meetings and the occasional calls for female attendance at their meetings, Liberty party advocates failed to document and publish a record of female participation, so it is unclear the extent to which women acted on these invitations. Historians of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan abolitionism have argued that women’s participation in Liberty meetings was probably minimal.33 However, according to Linda Evans, extant Liberty convention records suggest that women did attend these meetings and were counted as members.34

 Some leading Liberty men in the Old Northwest openly advocated women’s direct participation in politics: “We know not why female readers are not as much interested in every public question as men,” declared Theodore Foster, the editor of the Signal of Freedom. “Their happiness and welfare, social, pecuniary, and civil, depend as much on the administration of government, as do those of men. We know not why their capacity for comprehending and acting in important matters is not equal to that of the other sex.”35 Two years later Zebina Eastman, the editor of the Chicago Western Citizen, employed the example of Revolutionary war women to defend the participation of women in antislavery politics against male criticism. “The women of this country have as great an interest in its welfare as the other sex,” he asserted. “Our grandmothers of the revolution . . . entered heart and soul into the strife. . . . When a brave matron took down her husband’s rifle, and with eagle aim, sent a bullet through the head of some straggling Hessian . . . it was accounted to her patriotism. . . . But when the women of the present day, with motives equally pure and patriotic, raise their voices against evils which are preying upon the nation’s vitals, why then, forsooth, they are out of their element, and talking about what is none of their business!”36

 Most male and female abolitionists, however, were reluctant to advocate women’s political participation so openly. Instead, they encouraged women to use their special female “influence” to affect “the tide of public opinion.” “Woman has influence, and directing that influence in the proper channel, she can effect mighty things,” declared Mary Davis.37 “Who shall set bounds to the influence of an intelligent and virtuous female?” asked one correspondent to the Signal of Freedom in 1845. “You need not make a great public parade, but you can consistently, and without overstepping the bounds of etiquette, plead with your sons, husbands, brothers, and friends, the cause of the poor slave.”38 While this technique of appealing to women through traditional gender stereotypes may seem anything but radical, it was a practical approach that encouraged women to use whatever tools they had at hand to impact the political system.39 And many female abolitionists insisted that women not only push their loved ones to embrace the antislavery movement, but persuade men to vote for the Liberty party. This tactic, women telling men how to vote, was actually more radical than it appears at first glance. After all, it implied that women understood the political system and knew better than men what was best for the nation! It is not surprising that it was primarily women who made this direct plea for female abolitionists to impact the political system. Bureau County female abolitionists roused their sisters to “exert their entire influence in favor of the Liberty party.”40 The Putnam County Female Anti-Slavery Society insisted that it was the “duty of all females to inform themselves on the political affairs of the country” and “use their influence over their husbands, brothers, and associates . . . to vote for none but those who will . . . aid the cause of humanity.”41 The Indiana-based Henry County Female Anti-Slavery Society openly avowed to “be the powers behind the ballot by influencing their husbands, fathers, and brothers.”42 This summons sometimes swayed women abolitionists, who took the message very seriously. Young Mary Sheldon, a student at Oberlin College in 1848, wrote in her composition book: “What has woman to do with politics? What can she do more than occasionally to attend a convention or mass meeting, and wave her handkerchief or hand to cheer the politician?” Sheldon answered her own question: “Let her become acquainted with government and the characters of the leading men of the nation. Let her influence be felt by her friends as on the side of justice and right. Hers it is to frown upon oppression and vice . . . and to strengthen the weak and vacillating mind to do the right.”43

 Western women entered the political realm quietly, but they came well informed. They read newspapers, debated with their neighbors, and listened to political speeches. They learned about the Texas war, the constitutional debates over slavery, the Black Laws, and they knew the local candidates’ positions on all of these issues. “Who that has half a grain of sense,” wrote a young woman abolitionist regarding the Mexican war, “know that it was our own people that provoked [the Mexicans] to war, and it was the denial of the rights of citizenship to thousands of Americans that annexed Texas.”44 Huldah Wickersham, a leading Indiana abolitionist, displayed her knowledge of the strength of third-party abolitionism in a letter to an English friend, “It is supposed that the Liberty votes for a president will be in the one hundred thousand. We have not yet heard the exact # from every state, but there is reason to believe that the increase is 30,000 . . . since the last Liberty ticket was voted.”45 Oberlin resident Betsy Hudson exhibited impressive political erudition as she attempted to convince her Garrisonian friend, Betsey Mix Cowles, of the superior position of the Liberty party by encouraging her to read a popular book on the constitution and slavery with an “unbiased mind.” Hudson also asked her friend if she would accept an “article on the importance of Political Action” in the antislavery pamphlet Cowles was constructing.46 Some female advocates of the Liberty party even openly criticized male leaders of the organization: “I regret to see,” wrote Mary Davis to the Western Citizen, “on the part of the liberty men of this region, (some of them at least) so great a disposition to fall in with those who so recently were their most bitter opponents, as have been the editor of the Democratic Press of this place.”47

 One of the most important areas that Western women applied their political knowledge to was the region’s Black Laws. These pernicious codes, prevalent in the Old Northwest, restricted the freedoms of African-Americans and, in some states, even forbid their presence. Because these laws so clearly and unjustly circumscribed the lives of free citizens, women abolitionists felt comfortable denouncing them in private and public letters and laboring through the political system to eliminate them. “I expect thee has heard of the Black law in Ohio,” Michigan abolitionist Ann Thomas wrote to her brother. “If this is not drawing the cord tight enough to break I shall wonder.”48 The Henry County Female Anti-Slavery Society declared in relation to the especially loathesome Illinois Black Laws that “we will use our endeavors . . . to have them swept from our Statute Books.”49 Western women’s interest in Black Laws was so well known that an Eastern male abolitionist collecting data on the topic wrote to Ohio activist Betsey Mix Cowles, asking her to document the political history of these laws in her state. “Remembering that in the fall of 1846 you . . . collected many facts bearing on the object of the proposed work, I beg you to forward me copies of whatever you may have or can honestly lay your hands on that will aid me in the collection of facts,” wrote Timothy B. Hudson.50

 One of the political avenues women used to eliminate Blacks Laws was petitioning. While historians have agreed that women’s antislavery petitioning declined with the rise of third parties in the 1840s, I have found that many Western women continued to actively petition their state and national legislatures in regard to Black Laws and issues of racial discrimination. Both the Putnam County and Peoria County female antislavery societies vigorously circulated anti-discriminatory petitions in 1842 and 1843.51 The Illinois State Female Anti-Slavery Society vowed to use the petition to repeal the state’s Black Laws in 1847 and Mary Davis even offered to print and distribute free copies of the petition to anyone.52 Henry County women petitioned the Indiana state legislature to repeal an 1831 code “requiring black emigrants to post bond and security for their good behavior.”53 There is evidence to suggest that Black female abolitionists also participated in petition drives to eliminate these racist laws, perhaps even influencing white women to become more active in this arena.54

 Historians of women’s abolitionism, beginning with the pioneering work of Gerda Lerner, have long since recognized the importance of petitioning as a political activity. Recently, however, they have begun to broaden our definition of the “political” to include a diverse range of activities which clearly pulled women into the public sphere. The antislavery slogans they sewed into pillows and purses, the cakes they made to sell at antislavery fairs, the poems they wrote for publication, and the songs they constructed for their children to sing, these all had a political content and a political meaning for female activists. But let us not ignore the more traditional arena of party politics because we assume women’s absence. Though often subtle and vaguely documented, women did participate in the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican parties as an expression of their antislavery convictions. This did not necessarily lead them to advocate women’s rights or women’s suffrage, but it did challenge the prevalent association of politics with masculinity.

 Western women found that the “feminine” arena of morality overlapped with the “masculine” political domain in the context of third-party abolitionism. They did not abandon antislavery because it became increasingly associated with the Liberty party, as historians have assumed, instead they retooled and quietly entered the fray alongside their male colleagues. They did so with an understanding that their presence in the political system made the public uncomfortable and agitated male politicians. But they often justified this ripple in the status quo by arguing, as did women abolitionists across the North, that the moral question of slavery demanded their untraditional activities.

2.  See the following letters from Davis to the Western Citizen: “Great Whig Convention at Peoria,” 11 July 1844; and “Independence Day at Galesburgh,” 25 July 1844.

3.  Mary B. Davis, “For the Western Citizen,” Western Citizen, 27 July 1847.

4.  See, for example, Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Vernon L. Volpe, Forlorn Hope of Freedom: The Liberty Party in the Old Northwest, 1838-1848 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990). Some exceptions to this trend include: Linda J. Evans, “Abolitionism in the Illinois Churches, 1830-1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1981); Douglas Gamble, “Moral Suasion in the West: Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1831-1861” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1973); John W. Quist, “‘The Great Majority of Our Subscribers are Farmers’: The Michigan Abolitionist Constituency of the 1840s,” Journal of the Early Republic 14 (Fall 1994): 325-58; and Leslie Schwalm, “The Antislavery and Reform Activities of Women in Wisconsin” (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1984).

5.  The literature on women abolitionists is extensive. For a brief sampling of more recent publications see all of the articles in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and The Politics of Antislavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); and Jean Fagan, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

6.  See Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 137. Julie Jeffrey’s incisive recent book on women abolitionists explores women and third-party politics, but she does not explicitly delineate between Eastern and Western women: Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

7.  Jeffrey, Silent Army, 136-7.

8.  W.B. Irish to William Lloyd Garrison, 25 April 1845, Boston Public Library, MS A.1.2 v. 15 p. 28.

9.  See Schwalm, “Women in Wisconsin,” 1. Peggy Seigel argues that Indiana reformers considered moral and political antislavery to be linked: “Moral Champions and Public Pathfinders: Antebellum Quaker Women in Eastcentral Indiana,” Quaker History 81 (1992): 87-106. Douglas Gamble asserts that the harmony among Western abolitionists was short-lived: “Their unity was also temporary, though, and when abolitionists in the West did divide, it was over basically the same issues which split the eastern movement.” Gamble, “Moral Suasion in the West,” 118.

10.  Abby Kelley to Betsey Mix Cowles, 8 November 1846, Papers of Robert S. Fletcher, Box 5, Folder 9, Myra Cowles Papers, Oberlin College.

11.  Douglas A. Gamble, “Joshua Giddings and the Ohio Abolitionists: A Study in Radical Politics,” Ohio History 88 (Winter 1979): 37-56.

12.  See the correspondence between the Weston sisters and Sarah Otis Ernst in the Boston Public Library, particularly 1 February 1852, MS A.9.2.26 p. 8.

13.  John R. McKivigan, The War against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830-1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 134-5.

14.  “Green Fork Anti-Slavery Society,” Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 11 March 1843.

15.  “Walnut Creek,” Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 29 April 1843.

16.  “Political Convention,” Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 20 May 1843.

17.  M.B.D., “Great Whig Convention at Peoria” and “Duty of the Christian Abolitionist,” Western Citizen, 11 July 1844.

18.  “Putnam Co.,” Western Citizen, 3 October 1844.

19.  “Putnam County Female A.S. Society,” Western Citizen, 8 April 1845.

20.  “Female A.S. Meeting,” Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 8 August 1843.

21.  Christopher Dean Padgett, “Abolitionists of all Classes: Political Culture and Antislavery Community in Ashtabula County, Ohio, 1800-1850” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1993), 225.

22.  Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 32-3.

23.  Ryan, Women in Public, 136.

24.  On women’s role in the antislavery petition campaign see Gerda Lerner, “The Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 112-28; Beth Salerno, ”Networks and Spheres: Female Anti-Slavery Societies in the United States, 1820-1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2000); and the following by Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled’: Method and Ideology in Women’s Antislavery Petitioning,” in Abolitionist Sisterhood and “Needles, Pens, and Petitions: Reading Women into Antislavery History,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt (New York: Garland, 1998), 125-55.

25.“To the People of Oakland County,” Signal of Liberty, 18 July 1842.

26.“Antislavery Lectures,” Signal of Liberty, 28 April 1845.

27.“Kendall County,” Western Citizen, 8 February 1844.

28.“Notices,” Western Citizen, 22 February 1844.

29.“Notice,” Western Citizen, 13 June 1844.

30.Evans, “Illinois Churches,” 66.

31.Mary B. Davis, “For the Western Citizen,” Western Citizen, 27 July 1847.

32.“Farmington Convention,” Western Citizen, 27 July 1847.

33.See Evans, “Illinois Churches,” 66-73; Quist, “Michigan Abolitionist Constituency”; and Schwalm, “Women in Wisconsin,” 32. For an alternative view see Ardath Hagaman’s sophisticated Honors paper: “Women of the Old Northwest in the Antislavery Movement,” Student Papers, 1941, Department of History, University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

34.Evans, “Illinois Churches,” 70.

35.“Editorial Chapter,” Signal of Liberty, 25 March 1844. For more on Theodore Foster and the Signal of Liberty, see John Edgar Kephart, “A Voice for Freedom: The Signal of Liberty, 1841-1848” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1960).

36.“Political Influence of Women,” Western Citizen, 4 March 1846.

37..B.D., “For the Western Citizen,” Western Citizen, 24 August 1847.

38.“A Chapter for the Ladies,” Signal of Liberty, 11 August 1845.

39.Some historians interpret this traditional appeal to women through “moral” avenues as evidence that women’s participation was seen as ancillary. See Quist, “Michigan Abolitionist Constituency,” 336.

40.Emily S. Colton, “Constitution of the Female A. S. Society of Princeton, Bureau Co., Ill.,” Western Citizen, 9 November 1843.

41.“Putnam Co.,” Western Citizen, 3 October 1844.

42.Gwendolyn J. Crenshaw, “Bury Me in a Free Land”: The Abolitionist Movement in Indiana, 1816-1865: The Catalog (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1986), 50.

43.“Women and Politics,” 20 September 1848, Composition Book, 1842-1853, Box 1 Folder 2, Mary Sheldon Papers, Oberlin College Library.

44.“Sarah” to Joel McMillan, 10 October 1847, Alice McMillan Papers, Collection 591, Ohio Historical Society.

45.Huldah Wickersham to Elizabeth Pease, 26 November 1844, MS A.1.2 v. 14 p. 25, Boston Public Library.

46.Betsy Hudson to Betsey Mix Cowles, 27 February 1846, Papers of Robert S. Fletcher, Box 5, Folder 9, Oberlin College.

47.Mary B. Davis, “For the Western Citizen,” Western Citizen, 15 June 1847.

48.Ann Thomas to Nathan Thomas, 2 April 1839, Nathan Thomas Papers, Bentley Historical Library.

49.“Female A.S. Meeting,” Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 8 August 1843.

50.Timothy B. Hudson to Betsey Mix Cowles, 20 January 1848, Betsey Mix Cowles Collection, Oberlin College [original at Kent State University Library].

51.Merton Dillon, “The Antislavery Movement in Illinois, 1809-1844” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1951).

52.“Petitions, Female Anti-Slavery Meeting,” Western Citizen, 3 August 1847; and M.B.D., “For the Western Citizen,” Western Citizen, 24 August 1847. Deborah Van Broekhoven argues that women’s petitions after 1840 became less deferential and placed more emphasis on “the responsibilities of female citizenship.” “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled,’” 193.

53.Crenshaw, Abolitionist Movement in Indiana, 50.

54.See Schwalm, “Women in Wisconsin,” 27-8.