"Without the Consumers of Slave Produce There Would Be No Slaves": Quaker Women, Antislavery Activism, and Free-Labor Cotton Dress in the 1850s

This chapter demonstrates the ways in which dress can be used as a powerful interpretative tool, in understanding how the Quaker family, and especially women, engaged with antislavery activism in the 1850s. It takes as a point of departure a pair of unique photographs, dubbed here the "free produce photographs." They show the Clark family, of West-Country shoemaking fame, dressed in striking checked and striped clothes made from cotton not made by slaves. Thus they evidence an important but little-known activity in the Transatlantic antislavery movement, known as the Free Produce Movement.