
Quahog.org > Facts and folklore > Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wymanby Elizabeth C. Stevens Unstoppable mother and daughter activists. ![]() Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806-'99) and Lillie Chace Wyman (1847-1929) were lifelong public activists. Elizabeth Buffum was born and bred a Quaker and grew up in the Quaker enclave of Smithfield, Rhode Island. She was converted to radical antislavery activism in the 1830s after her 1828 marriage to manufacturer Samuel B. Chace of Fall River, himself a Quaker. Her first five children died during childhood, and she gave birth to five more; Elizabeth's youngest child, Mary, was born in 1852 when Elizabeth was forty-five years old. Elizabeth moved back to Rhode Island in 1839, when her husband took over management of the Valley Falls Mills on the Blackstone River. At first she lived on the Cumberland side of the river, but in 1858, she moved to a spacious home in what is now Central Falls. In her homes Chace created domestic arrangements that incorporated her public antislavery activism. There, she sheltered fugitive slaves, hosted radical antislavery speakers (like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Wendell Phillips), and wrote numerous letters encouraging others, including her own children, to be activists in the cause of abolitionism. For her work, Chace became a social outcast and found a warm welcome only among a small band of radical abolitionists like herself. At the conclusion of the Civil War, when she was sixty, Elizabeth Buffum Chace turned her formidable energies to securing political rights for women, championing the cause of women prisoners, establishing a model state home and school for destitute children in Rhode Island, protecting prostitutes, providing advocacy for women and children whose labor was exploited in mills throughout the state, supporting the cause of young women who were denied a college education because of their sex, and a plethora of other reforms. In her incisive letters to the editor, her appearances at legislative hearings, her organization of protests and conventions, she was the most prominent woman reformer in nineteenth century Rhode Island. A founder and board member of national women's organizations like the prestigious thinktank, the Association for the Advancement of Woman, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (she served as president of AWSA in the 1880s), Chace was a revered figure in the ever-growing community of reformers. When she died in 1899, Elizabeth Buffum Chace was hailed as "the conscience of Rhode Island." Lillie Chace Wyman, the eighth of Elizabeth's children, came of age in a household suffused with antislavery orthodoxy. When she was still a child, she acted as her mother's lieutenant in the abolitionist cause. After attending a boarding school in Lexington, Massachusetts, organized by reformers for their children and staffed by abolitionists like Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimké, Lillie Chace sought a useful career in post-Civil War reform movements. Plagued by neurasthenia, depression, and ill health, Wyman nonetheless developed her skills as a writer and began to illustrate her mother's reform impulses with realistic fiction published in popular middle-class magazines like The Atlantic Monthly. Her stories depicted the harsh living and working conditions of mill workers and their indomitable spirit; the stories were published in a notable collection, Poverty Grass, in 1886. Wyman was not the political organizer that her mother was; nevertheless, despite personal griefs and battles with depression, as the century waned, she turned her energies to preserving the history of the abolitionist movement in which she had come of age. She eagerly joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, then the most radical organization advocating for equal rights for persons of all races, and, in the 1920s, she published inspirational stories in W.E.B. DuBois's children's version of The Crisis, illustrating the bonds that had existed between men and women of all races in the antislavery movement. She kept up a correspondence with notable African American leaders Francis and Archibald Grimké, and with poet and playwright, Angelina Grimké. A singular voice for racial tolerance and understanding, Lillie Chace Wyman died in Newtonville, Massachusetts in 1927. See also Homelessness is not a Crime: Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Creation of the State Home and School for Children, 1875-1885 by Elizabeth C. Stevens A letter from E.B. ChaceThe following is a letter that Elizabeth Buffum Chace wrote to her youngest daughter, Mary Chace Cheney Tolman in May 1884. It illustrates the relentless and tireless nature of Elizabeth Buffum Chace's activism, and the fact that she was involved in so many different campaigns to achieve more equitable lives for all Rhode Islanders. At the time, Elizabeth Buffum Chace was a wealthy widow living in Valley Falls, Rhode Island, and was almost eighty years old. May 18th, 1884. Reprinted from: Lillie Chace Wyman and Arthur Crawford Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Her Environment, vol. 2: 181-183 (Boston, 1914). Footnotes
This article last edited November 14, 2015 © 1999–2021 Quahog.org (with the exception of elements provided by contributors, as noted). |
Quahog.org: Anything else is just a clam. |