Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman: Motherhood as a Subversive Activity in Nineteenth Century Rhode Island

Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman: Motherhood as a Subversive Activity in Nineteenth Century Rhode Island Elizabeth C. Stevens* In 1890, eighty-four-year-old Elizabeth Buffum Chace sat down to record her memories of the pre-Civil War antislavery movement. The veteran reformer was then in her twentieth year as president of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association and her name had become synonymous with advocacy on behalfofwomen and children in the state ofRhode Island. In harking back to her work in the antebellum antislavery movement , Chace was setting down for posterity an account ofher first political activism, work that had transformed her life in the decade ofthe 1 830s from that ofa pious young Quaker matron to an outspoken opponent ofsouthern bondage and northern racism. Her political activity in the antislavery movement, the close bonds she shared with co-workers and the ostracism she experienced from within the Society ofFriends were the hallmarks that would shape the next sixty years of her life as a public reformer. When it came time to dedicate her antislavery memoirs, Chace did not, as might have been expected, dedicate them to her father, Arnold Buffum, first president ofthe New England Antislavery Society, who had converted her to Garrisonian immediatism in 1832; neither did she dedicate the volume to the great William Lloyd Garrison, whom she revered as a saint, and whom she knew as a devoted colleague in reform for decades before his death in 1879. She did not dedicate her memoir to her four sisters, with whom she founded the Fall River Female Antislavery Society in 1835. Instead, she chose to dedicate her Antislavery Reminiscences to her three surviving children. She hoped, she wrote, "that they and their children may gather therefrom some lessons of adherence to principle and devotion to duty, at whatever cost ofworldly prosperity or advancement" (Chace,^4ni/Slavery ). Chace's dedication is significant, because it highlights a central fact of Chace's life—she was a mother. I would argue that for Chace and for other 19th-century antislavery activist mothers, motherhood was an extremely important aspect of their lives, that they considered childrearing on a par with their work in the public sphere, and that, most importantly, they created lives in which the distinction between public and private was blurred beyond recognition—that is, they saw no contradiction between Elizabeth C. Stevens has a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University. 38Quaker History public and private work because their mothering fueled their activism and their public work distinctly influenced their childrearing. They saw both domestic childrearing and public work as an integral whole, not as two separate and distinct areas oflife. Female antislavery activists, who broke with established churches, rejected many of the prevailing tenets of the American political system, and who decried voting under a corrupt Constitution , still gave passionate allegiance to their culture's reverence for motherhood. ' Prior to her conversion to Garrisonian immediatism in the mid- 1830s, Elizabeth Buffum Chace had led the life ofapious Quaker matron. She was born in Providence in 1806 and spent much ofher childhood at the farm of her paternal grandparents in Smithfield, Rhode Island. Elizabeth Buffum's father, Arnold Buffum, and mother, Lydia Gould, traced their families' memberships in the Society of Friends back for generations. Elizabeth Buffum Chace herselfwas proud to claim a Quaker near-martyr among her New England ancestors. Her childhood in a Rhode Island Quaker enclave nurtured her emotionally and spiritually. Just months before her death in 1 899, she wrote of the "dear old meeting house" that she had attended as a child and observed that she was raised to "consider" herself "especially privileged in having been bom in the Society ofFriends." She matriculated at the Friends Boarding School in Providence for one year in 1824-25, during which time her family moved to the newly industrializing town of Fall River, Massachusetts (Chace, "Old Quaker Days," 659-660). In Fall River, Elizabeth Buffum met and married Samuel Buffington Chace, a textile manufacturer, whose sister had been a classmate at the Friends' boarding school (Wyman and Wyman, 1 : 22-24).2 After her marriage, Elizabeth Buffum Chace was active in the...