Hello, friend. I'm glad you're back.
Last time, I told you about Clare of Assisi --- a woman who found her freedom behind walls, in silence, in the deliberate emptying-out of everything she owned. It's a particular kind of courage, choosing less. Today I want to tell you about a different kind of courage entirely. The kind that chooses more noise, not less. More rooms she wasn't invited into. More trouble than any sensible person would go looking for.
I should tell you something before we start, because I don't want you to miss it as we go.
What I'm about to share with you is part of something larger --- though you'd never know it unless I told you, and even the woman at the center of today's story didn't know she was standing at the beginning of it. Over the stretch of days ahead, I'm going to walk you through some of the most remarkable people I have ever had the privilege to watch --- women, every one of them, who lived through what I can only call an awakening. Not a single moment. Not one convention, one speech, one vote won. A slow catching-fire that moved through towns and decades and, eventually, oceans --- women who looked at the world as it had always been arranged and simply refused to accept that "always" meant "forever."
I have watched a great many centuries pass, friend, and I will tell you plainly: I don't know that I have ever seen anything quite like the nineteenth century's turn toward this particular truth. Not because the truth was new --- it never is, not really --- but because of how many hands reached for it at once, in so many unlikely places, often without knowing the others were reaching too.
So consider this a thread among threads. You'll meet more of these women in the days to come. Some will know each other. Some never will, separated by an ocean or a generation, and yet you'll feel the kinship anyway, because I do, every time.
But today belongs to one woman only. She did not set out to start a movement. She barely set out to give a speech. And what happened next --- well. It involved a fire. A real one.
Let's begin.
I want you to smell smoke with me for a moment.
Philadelphia, May 1838. Three days old, this building --- brand new, built with donations from people who believed, fiercely, that free speech needed a roof over its head. They called it Pennsylvania Hall. Marble floors. Gas lighting, the very latest thing. A place, finally, where the arguments against slavery could be spoken aloud without fear of the street outside.
I remember walking past it while it was still being built, watching the bricklayers, thinking: how lovely, that people believe walls can protect an idea.
Inside, on its second night open, a young woman climbs to the platform. She is twenty-seven years old. She is not famous. Nobody outside a small circle of abolitionists has heard her name. And she is about to do something that, in most rooms in America that spring, would be considered more scandalous than the subject she's actually there to discuss.
She's going to address a mixed audience. Men and women, together, in the same room, listening to the same woman speak.
I watched the room that night. I watched men shift in their seats --- not because of what she said about slavery, though what she said about slavery was fierce enough. They shifted because of who was saying it, and to whom.
Outside, the crowd gathering in the street isn't there for a debate about bricks and gaslight. Word has traveled fast --- a woman, speaking to men, as though she had every right. By the third day, that crowd stops being a crowd and becomes a mob. Torches. Then flame catching timber, catching floorboards, catching the marble hall's brand-new roof.
By morning, Pennsylvania Hall --- three days old --- is a smoking shell. Foundation stones, some scorched brick, and ash still warm in the Philadelphia dawn.
Here is the strange part, friend, the part I still turn over: nobody burned that building because of an argument about slavery. Slavery, plenty of Americans could bear to hear debated. They burned it because a woman had opened her mouth in front of men who weren't her husband, her father, or her pastor --- and the world could not survive that.
She'd only meant to speak about one kind of chain.
Let me tell you who she was, and what she was actually setting on fire.
Her name was Abby Kelley --- later Abby Kelley Foster, once she married --- and I have to tell you, friend, nothing about her early life predicted the woman who would stand in that burning hall's shadow and simply keep going.
She was born in January of 1811, in Pelham, Massachusetts, to a Quaker family of no particular note. Raised in Worcester. Sent to Quaker schools, the way Quaker daughters were, and by her twenties she was doing exactly what an unmarried Quaker woman of modest means was expected to do: teaching school. Worcester, then Millbury, then Lynn. A quiet, useful, entirely unremarkable life, by the standards of 1830s Massachusetts.
Then she went to hear William Lloyd Garrison speak.
I was there, in the way I am always there --- unseen, listening at the edges of rooms where something is about to shift. Garrison had a way of speaking about slavery that didn't let you hold it at arm's length as someone else's moral problem. Abby sat in that room a schoolteacher. She left it something else --- a woman who had joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn before the week was out, taking up work as its corresponding secretary.
By 1837, she was a delegate to the first national Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York. And in May of 1838 --- the fire you already know about --- she gave her first public address to a mixed audience, at Pennsylvania Hall, three days before it burned to its foundation.
She did not stop. That's the part I want you to sit with. A gentler woman, or a more careful one, might have taken the burning of that hall as a sign --- an unmistakable message about what happens to women who step onto public platforms. Abby took it as confirmation that she was standing exactly where she needed to be. She gave up teaching entirely and went on the road as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and she stayed on that road, more or less, for the next thirty years.
I watched her travel into places no other abolitionist speaker wanted to go --- small towns, rural crossroads, congregations who'd never once heard the word "abolition" spoken aloud in their own meetinghouse. Her own motto, and she meant it: go where least wanted, for there you are most needed.
In 1840, the American Anti-Slavery Society appointed her to its business committee --- an ordinary administrative matter, you'd think, except that half the conservative membership walked out in protest rather than serve on a committee alongside a woman. The organization split in two, that day, and it split because of her.
She married a fellow abolitionist, Stephen Symonds Foster, in 1845 --- two radicals who found in each other someone equally unwilling to sit quietly. They bought a farm outside Worcester they called Liberty Farm, and used it, among other things, as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Abby kept lecturing. Kept fundraising --- she became the movement's most successful one, by far. Kept showing up in rooms that did not want her, decade after decade, until the Civil War came and slavery, formally, legally, at last, ended.
You would think that might have been an ending for her too. A woman who had given three decades to one singular, consuming cause, finally allowed to rest.
It was not an ending. Not even close.
Here's what I noticed, watching her across those years, that took me a while to name properly.
Abby never set out to make an argument about women. She set out to make an argument about the enslaved --- about human beings held as property, and about the plain wrongness of that. That was the whole of her intention when she rose to speak in 1838. But something happened to her in the act of pleading someone else's case that she never anticipated: she began to notice her own cage.
Watch the pattern of reactions to her, and you'll see what I mean. When Abby spoke about slavery --- the cruelty of it, the moral emergency of it --- many of her listeners, even hostile ones, could at least engage her on the substance. They might argue with her facts, contest her theology, dispute her politics. What undid people, what actually produced a mob and a burning building, was never really the argument. It was the woman making it, in a room with men in it, as though she believed her voice carried the same weight as theirs.
I watched grown men --- educated men, pious men, men who considered themselves friends of the enslaved --- grow more agitated by a woman's presence on a business committee than by three decades of moral argument against human bondage. That tells you something. It tells you where the deeper fault line actually ran.
Abby understood this faster than almost anyone around her. She didn't set out to be a women's rights advocate --- she became one because she kept discovering, meeting by meeting, town by town, that the very right she needed in order to fight for someone else's freedom was itself being denied to her. She could not raise her voice for the enslaved without first insisting on her own right to raise it at all. The two causes were not, in her lived experience, separate matters. They were the same lock, and she had simply found herself testing more than one door.
I remember the church sermon --- I was there for that one too, sitting quietly near the back where no one thinks to notice a woman who isn't supposed to be paying attention to anything at all. A minister, mid-service, turned his sermon directly at her, sitting in the pew: this Jezebel is come among us also. Not a debate about doctrine. Not even, really, about slavery. A punishment aimed at a woman for having spoken in public at all, delivered from the one platform society still agreed only men should occupy.
She did not flinch. I watched her sit through it. And something in that stillness told the room more than any rebuttal could have.
This is the part I find myself turning over, all these years later: Abby Kelley never announced that she was fighting two causes. She never drew you a diagram connecting the enslaved person's chains to her own exclusion from the speaker's platform. She simply kept living out the logic of what she'd already come to believe --- that a soul either possesses inherent worth or it doesn't, that dignity is not a substance to be measured out differently depending on the body it happens to occupy --- and let other people notice, slowly, uncomfortably, that her fight for someone else's freedom had somehow become an argument for her own.
She had gone looking for one kind of chain. She kept finding others, everywhere she looked, once she'd learned to see the first one clearly.
So what did Abby actually leave behind, once the shouting quieted and the history books moved on to other names?
Not a single piece of legislation with her signature on it. Not an organization that still bears her name today, the way some of her contemporaries have theirs stamped on buildings and boulevards. What Abby left behind is harder to point to, and I'd argue it matters more: she left behind proof, lived out in public over thirty years, that justice does not stay contained in the box you first found it in.
Before Abby, plenty of good people managed to hold two convictions side by side without ever noticing the tension between them --- a man could believe slavery a grave sin and still believe, without any sense of contradiction, that a woman had no business speaking her mind on a public platform. Abby's life made that particular arrangement much harder to sustain. Once you had watched her get run out of a hall, sermonized against from a pulpit, and split an entire national society in two --- all because a woman insisted on being heard --- you could no longer pretend these were unrelated matters. She was living evidence that the same root produced both branches.
I've watched this pattern surface again and again across history, in traditions that share almost nothing else in common: a person reaches for one form of freedom and finds, in the reaching, that they've grasped something larger than they intended. The cause was never as narrow as it first appeared. It rarely is.
Abby didn't philosophize about this. She simply lived it, town after town, decade after decade, and let the living argue the point for her.
What she planted in 1838 didn't stay planted in one field. It was already beginning to spread --- quietly, unglamorously --- long before anyone thought to give it a name.
I want to tell you something I have come to believe, watching century after century pass beneath me, and I want to tell it to you plainly, the way you'd tell a friend something you've quietly known for a long time.
Justice does not stay where you first put it.
You can try to contain it --- draw a careful line around one group, one wrong, one narrow correction, and tell yourself that's the whole of the matter. People have tried this for as long as I've been watching. And it never quite holds. Abby Kelley walked into a hall to argue for the freedom of people she had never met, in bodies she did not share, in a bondage she would never personally suffer --- and in the act of insisting on their worth, she found she could no longer un-see the ways her own worth was being rationed out to her, a little at a time, by people who thought themselves her allies.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not really even a surprise, once you sit with it. The claim underneath any real justice is never actually about the specific group it first appears to be about. The claim is about worth itself --- that it exists, whole, in every person, and is not distributed by permission. Once you've made that claim honestly, even once, even quietly, you have made it everywhere. You just haven't noticed all the rooms it applies to yet.
I think this is why you cannot ever fully predict where a genuine movement toward justice will end up, once it begins. It doesn't travel in a straight line from the place it started. It travels the way water finds every crack in the ground it's poured onto --- not because it's looking for those cracks, but because they were already there, waiting, and water doesn't know how to refuse a low place once it's found one.
You are living inside the results of this pattern right now, whether you've stopped to notice it or not. Every widening you take for granted --- every room that used to be closed to someone and now isn't --- began as somebody's much smaller, much more specific fight. Almost none of them set out to change everything. They set out to change one thing, and the logic they were standing on turned out to reach further than they'd planned.
I don't say this to make you feel as though the work is finished, because it isn't, and I don't think it ever fully will be --- not because the outcome is in doubt, but because the outcome is not the kind of thing that arrives on its own. It has to be carried, by hands, generation after generation, into rooms that don't want it yet. That was true in Abby's Worcester meetinghouses. It is no less true now.
What I find myself most drawn to, in her particular story, is this: she never waited to be granted permission to notice the connection. Nobody handed her a philosophy that explained why her cause and her own freedom were the same fight. She simply lived honestly enough, and paid close enough attention, that the connection became impossible to ignore.
I suspect that fire she started never did stay in the one room she lit it in. I suspect, if you looked closely enough, you'd find it's still traveling --- into places she never got to visit herself, doing work she never got to see finished.
So let me leave you with a question, friend, rather than an answer --- because I think that's what Abby would have wanted, if I'm honest about the kind of woman she was.
Is there a cause in your own life --- something you care about, something you've shown up for, quietly or loudly, over months or years --- where you've never quite let yourself notice what else it might be connected to? A fight you've kept carefully contained, because the contained version is more comfortable, or more finishable, or simply easier to explain at dinner?
I'm not asking you to go looking for a bigger fight than the one you already have. Abby didn't go looking, either. She wasn't hunting for a second cause the day she climbed onto that platform in Philadelphia. The connection found her, in its own time, because she stayed present enough, and honest enough, to notice it when it arrived.
Maybe that's the more useful question, actually: not what else should I be fighting for, but simply --- am I paying close enough attention to notice, if the ground shifts under the thing I'm already doing?
Abby's gift wasn't foresight. She didn't map out, in 1838, where her life's work would eventually lead. Her gift was attention. She kept showing up, kept looking honestly at what was in front of her, and let the larger pattern reveal itself in its own time, at its own pace, without forcing it.
I wonder what you're already doing, right now, today, that might be quietly connected to something larger than you've let yourself see yet.
You don't have to answer that for me. Just carry it with you a while, and see what it finds.
I told you earlier that this wasn't an ending for her, when the Civil War closed and slavery, finally, legally, ceased to exist in this country. And I meant that.
Abby was in her fifties by then --- not young, not the fiery unknown who'd climbed onto a burning hall's platform decades before. But she didn't retire into the comfort she'd more than earned. She turned, instead, toward the fight she'd been quietly carrying alongside the first one all along: the vote, the standing, the plain legal recognition of women as full participants in the society they'd been asked to help build.
She supported the Fifteenth Amendment, giving Black men the vote, even as some of her fellow suffragists broke away in protest, unwilling to see any man enfranchised before any woman was. Abby didn't see it as a betrayal of her own cause. She saw one door opening as reason enough to celebrate, even while other doors stayed shut a while longer.
And in her seventies, when the state of Massachusetts came collecting property taxes on Liberty Farm, she refused to pay them --- not out of stubbornness, but principle. She had no vote, she reasoned, so she owed no taxation. Five years running, the county auctioned her farm out from under her. Five years running, her neighbors quietly bought it back and returned it to her, refusing to let the sale stand. She died in January of 1887, still fighting, still refusing quiet retirement, still living out the same logic that had carried her since Pennsylvania Hall: that worth is not something you wait patiently to be granted.
I told you, at the start of all this, that today's story was part of something larger --- a whole stretch of days ahead, each one belonging to a different woman caught up in this same awakening. I meant that too, and I haven't forgotten.
So let me tell you where the fire travels next.
There's a woman coming, friend, who took this very same instinct --- the discovery that one cause quietly contains another --- and pointed it somewhere Abby never quite aimed it herself. Not at a shackle. At a bottle. She'll build something Abby's solitary, town-by-town style of persuasion never touched: an organization vast enough to cross an ocean, carrying this same restless, widening logic all the way to places Abby never got to visit. Her name is Frances Willard, and I think you're going to like her.
Until then, friend --- carry your own small fires carefully. You never know how far they'll travel.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.