Rebecca Buffum Spring

Rebecca Buffum Spring (June 8, 18111911) 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. 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. At the first Anti-Slavery Convention in 1837, Spring put forward a motion stating that there is no group more compelled to defend anti-slavery than mothers.

Lydia Maria Child wrote John Brown while he was in jail in Virginia in 1859, asking if she could visit and nurse him; he declined. Rebecca did not ask; she traveled to Charles Town, Virginia, to meet with Brown and offer what consolation she could, and after delay, was allowed to meet with him twice. In her published description of her visits, she implied that there was something holy, even Biblical, in his person, and that he deserved her veneration. In the late 1850s Spring founded the Eagleswood Military Academy. She had two of John Brown's executed raiders, who lacked family to bury them, buried there. In the late 1890s, impoverished, she moved to Southern California to live with her daughter Jeanie Peet, where she became involved with many of the local artists and writers.