Rebecca Buffum Spring
8 Jun 1811 - est. 4 Feb 1911
Rebecca Buffum Spring (June 8, 1811—1911) was a Quaker abolitionist, educational reformer, feminist, and women's suffrage activist. She was born in Providence, Rhode Island, fourth daughter of Arnold Buffum (1782-1859), who with William Lloyd Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was the first president. Elizabeth ended her education at the age of 16 and became a teacher in an infant school at the request of her father. Elizabeth Buffum Chace was her sister. She was co-founder in 1836 of the Fall River Female Anti-Slavery Society.
She married Marcus Spring (1810-1874), a philanthropic New York businessman, in approximately 1840. She and her husband were long-time friends of Fredrika Bremer, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The couple had a favorable view of socialism and the welfare of the working classes, and invested their money in utopian communities like Brook Farm and were chief stockholders in the North American Phalanx commune.
Motherhood
She has been criticized, but also defended, for seeing motherhood as a fundamental role of women, and linking abolitionism with the maternal. She argued that motherhood and womanhood were inextricably linked, and claimed that due to their maternal connections, women were best positioned to champion the cause of Abolition.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rebecca Buffum Spring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.