Abby Goes Digital!

Worcester Historical Museum is excited to announce the launch of an important new digital resource. Worcester Historical Museum and the American Antiquarian Society have collaborated to digitize the institutions’ collections of Abby Kelley Foster papers. Both WHM and AAS hold substantial collections of Foster’s correspondence and papers, and although located less than two miles apart, the collections have been separated from each other and not readily available to the wider world. Now, over 2,500 images of Foster’s correspondence have been made freely accessible and available to researchers and educators everywhere through a new digital archive.

ACCESSING ABBY

This important archive of over 600 letters – to and from Abby Kelley Foster – can be found online at gigi.mwa.org/res/sites/AKFoster. The archive is also searchable for materials belonging to Worcester Historical Museum and American Antiquarian Society.

All original letters are held at the designated intuitions and inquires and requests for copies should be made directly to them.

WHO WAS ABBY?

Abby Kelley Foster (1811-1887), radical abolitionist and women’s rights activist, dedicated her life to social justice, working relentlessly to end both race and gender prejudice. At a time when society demanded that women be silent, submissive, and obedient, Abby was none of these. Despite constant harassment and intense ridicule, Abby spent nearly twenty years traveling across the nation as a lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society, becoming its pre-eminent public speaker and most successful fundraiser. Those actions put her at the forefront of the woman’s rights movement. In 2011 Abby Kelley Foster was inducted into the National Abolition Hall of Fame and the National Women’s Hall of Fame.