American reformer Abigail Kelley Foster (1810-1887) was a pioneer in the abolitionist movement and contributed to the developing suffragist principles of her time.

The daughter of Irish Quakers, Abby Kelley Foster was born in Pelham, Mass., on Jan. 15, 1810. She was raised in Worcester and educated at the Friends' School in Providence, R.I. She became a schoolteacher and showed gifts of eloquence and public presence. Abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore D. Weld urged her to join their cause. In 1837 she became an antislavery lecturer--the first woman to do so after the Grimké sisters, and the first woman to face mixed and often hostile audiences under the same conditions as men.

Though denounced and ridiculed, Foster entered alien environments in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, meeting antagonism with oratorical power and a firm grasp of her subject. As a symbol of Garrisonian extremism, she roused criticism among moderate abolitionists...