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 Elizabeth Buffum Chace (1806-1899)
A life committed to freedom, rights

  By ELIZABETH RAU
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Elizabeth Buffum Chace emerged from her Valley Falls house in the 1850s wearing airy bloomers beneath her knee-length dress.

Until then, Chace had worn the roomy Aladdin-style undergarments only in the privacy of her home. One day, she decided to sally forth to make a statement.

But the fortyish activist was ambushed by steely stares from corseted women, and never wore those bloomers in public again. Though offended by the gawking, Chace knew when to pick a fight.

"She wasn't willing to go to the wall about bloomers," said Elizabeth Stevens, who has researched Chace for a decade. "It wasn't part of her major political agenda."

Chace was an aggressive, principled woman who fought for women's rights and battled slavery, never neglecting one of her most important roles, motherhood.

Outliving 7 of her 10 children -- some of whom died of scarlet fever -- Chace turned for a time to spiritualism, holding seances at her house to communicate with the dead.

Born in 1806, Chace grew up on her grandparents' farm in Smithfield, where her parents instilled the Quaker values of simplicity, independence and freedom of speech.

She attended village schools, then, at 18, boarded one year at the Quakers' Yearly Meeting Boarding School, now Moses Brown. In 1825, the family moved to Fall River, where Elizabeth married Samuel Chace, who worked at his family's prosperous cotton mill.

Her disgust over slavery took root in the 1830s, as she listened to the fiery speeches of her father, Arnold Buffum, and Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, founders of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Chace followed suit, and in 1835 she and her sisters founded the Fall River Anti-Slavery Society, trekking door-to-door collecting signatures on petitions calling for the immediate freeing of slaves; she and her husband hid fugitive slaves in her house.

"She went from being this young Quaker matron," Stevens said, "to being a political activist."

After much soul-searching, Chace, who, by this time had lost five children to illness, left the Quaker Meeting over its refusal to take a tougher stand against slavery.

The Chaces eventually moved to Valley Falls, where she gave birth to five more children -- one at the age of 46 -- and kept the anti-slavery spirit alive in Rhode Island in the 1850s.

Temperance and voting rights for women preoccupied Chace after the Civil War. Chace, who drank no liquor, tea or coffee, stormed a saloon in Valley Falls, praying and urging the owner to stop serving liquor. (He didn't.)

Chace also cried out for better conditions for women prisoners, helped establish a state school for homeless children and lobbied for the admission of women to Brown University. In 1876 she resigned from the Providence Woman's Club over its refusal to admit a black school teacher.

She was still relentless at 81. In 1887, after learning that an amendment to the Rhode Island Constitution allowing women to vote had been defeated, Chace, in bed recovering from surgery, blurted to a friend, "Well, what shall we do next?"

She died in 1899, at 93. Only a year earlier she had penned an article for The Woman's Journal, a suffrage newspaper.

Sources: Elizabeth Stevens, who holds a doctorate in American civilization from Brown University and wrote her dissertation on Chace; and " 'An ornament and honor to her sex': New England Women from Valley Forge to Fenway Park," a history curriculum researched and written by Jane Lancaster.

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