Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman

Book excerpt: At her death she was hailed as the conscience of Rhode Island: Elizabeth Buffum Chace's life (1806-1899) of public activism spanned sixty years. Having fought to abolish slavery in the years before the Civil War, Chace spearheaded the drive for women's suffrage in Rhode Island in the last decades of the 19th century. She was an associate of radical activists William Lloyd Garrison and Lucy Stone and she advocated for the rights of women and children toiling in her husband's factories. Her daughter--one of ten children--Lillie Chace Wyman (1847-1929), was an activist-writer and published short stories on social issues in Atlantic Monthly and other periodicals. An outspoken advocate of racial equality, Wyman kept the legacy of the radical antislavery movement of her mother's generation alive into the twentieth century. Since neither Chace nor Wyman left behind a collection of personal papers, this mother-daughter biography is the product of Stevens' extensive research into public and private archives to locate documents that illuminate the lives of these two remarkable women. By looking at 19th century American women's history through the lens of this activist pair, Stevens reveals some of the connections between the public and private lives of activists and examines a relationship that was at once nurturing, confining, stifling and enriching.