“What was the role of female writers in abolishing slavery?”
Women were not able to vote and little influence on the political scene; regardless of this, they played an important role in the abolition of the Slave Trade and slavery in the British colonies. In the early years, women were not direct activists and were not expected to take part in politics. Lady Margaret Middleton helped persuade William Wilberforce to take up the cause but could not become actively engaged herself. However women found their own ways to campaign. They wrote imaginative literature on slavery, such as Hannah More's publications. In 1792 Mary Birkett Card wrote 'A Poem on the African Slave Trade' and, as the campaign became more popular, many women, from all walks of life, (including Georgina, the Duchess of Devonshire and Bristol milk-woman Ann Yearsley) published anti-slavery poems and stories. These were aimed at a wide readership. Former slaves such as Phyllis Wheatley wrote their own poems and accounts that were extremely influential. (quoted in “The Abolition Project”)
However as the main food purchasers, women played an important role in organizing the sugar boycotts of the 1790s, after the bill for the abolition of the Slave Trade was defeated in Parliament in 1791. Over 300,000 people joined a boycott of sugar which had been grown on plantations that used the labor of enslaved people. The Abolition Act, passed in 1807, abolished the Slave Trade but not chattel slavery. A child born to an enslaved person was still a slave. It was abolitionist women who played an important role in keeping the anti-slavery movement alive in the 1820s. It was also newly formed women's groups who pushed for total abolition in the British Empire; women like Elizabeth Heyrick. Women's societies were almost always bolder than those of the men. In the 1820s and 30s, they once again stopped buying