Page:Sketches of representative women of New England.djvu/39

 riage to such a man seemed to her the realizazation [sic] of an ideal, and so it proved. But there was one condition: three entire years must be devoted to the sacred cause. So the travelling and lecturing went on. T^p and down, from Maine to Ohio, always with some woman for a travelling companion. Miss Kelley toiled almost without rest. One summer she spoke every day for six weeks and sometimes twice a day. The meetings (some of them large conventions) were often held in groves, and it was this severe strain which broke the voice, before so strong and clear.

In December, 1845, Abby Kelley and Stephen S. Foster were married. For a year or two previously they had consented to receive the small salary then usually paid to lecturer's. They felt that they owed something to the new relation and duties they were soon to assume. Mr. Foster had also realized something from an anti-slavery work which he wrote about that time. With this small sum the husband and wife purchased a farm in the suburbs of Worcester, Mass., which continued to be their home till Mr. Foster's death in 1881. But their public work was not given up. Mr. Foster was usually absent during the winter on lecturing tours, while Mrs. Foster made several long campaigns in the West, besides often attending conventions or giving lectures nearer home. When asked how she could bear to leave her little daughter, she would reply, "I leave my child in wise and loving hands and but for a little, while the slave mothers daily have their daughters torn from their arms and sold into torture and infamy."

Never was mother more devoted, more self-sacrificing than she. Had she been less noble, less brave, less tender of her child, she would have remained at home to enjoy her motherhood at the expense of other mothers. She once exclaimed, "The most precious legacy I can leave my child is a free country!"

It was about this time that the woman's rights cause came up as an independent reform. Mrs. Foster had fought the battle for the right of women to speak in public, and had gained it for herself and for all women. Now came the broader question of the right to vote, which involves all other rights. She was earnest in its advocacy, and came to see that it was a much more comprehensive reform than even the anti-slavery movement. But she felt that her life was consecrated to the slave, and that her failing voice and broken health must be husbanded for that service. Yet she was thoroughly identified with the suffrage movement, and was recognized, with the Grimkes, as the pioneer who, with bleeding feet, smoothed the path through which the women of the suffrage movement might lead their sex to the light.

Mrs. Foster's last public work was devoted to raising money for rousing public sentiment to the necessity of carrying the Fifteenth Amendment. With the other loyal friends of the freedmen, she felt that freedom without the ballot was an empty name. She could no longer speak from the platform, but her earnest pleading in private rarely failed to convince her listener that justice was the only safe course for the nation to pursue. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars were contributed through her to be spent in holding meetings throughout the North and in publishing and distributing documents for the enlightenment of the public. This amendment at last carried, she felt that she had at last earned a discharge from the army of workers.

Those who listened to Abby Kelley in the days of her young womanhood have told me of her wonderful power. This consisted, I imagine, in her intense earnestness, in her utter self-forgetfulness and consecration. Her language was of Quaker simplicity, unadorned with figures or imagery. She never wrote her speeches, and rarely spent any time in their preparation; but the eloquence of a heart on fire, words lighted at the altar of Cod's truth, were hers. Her audience felt that she "remembered those in bonds as bound with them." Such a passion for freedom, such unselfish devotion, could not fail to inspire admiration and win converts.

Though Miss Kelley's features were not beautiful, she had an attractive personality. Her lithe, graceful figure was crowned with a head of fine outlines, well poised on a beautiful neck, and covered with abundant dark brown hair, hardly gray, even at her death. The Quaker