The first antislavery group in Britain to demand immediate emancipation

Although virtually all prominent male opponents of slavery were still talking about varieties of gradualism—emancipating the slaves in thirty years or raising money to buy women out of slavery—[Elizabeth] Heyrick would have none of it. In parliamentary elections in 1826 she called for people to vote only for candidates who supported freeing the slaves now. Other women agreed, and that year the women’s society in Sheffield, ignoring the gradualist men’s committee in the same town, became the first antislavery group in Britain to demand immediate emancipation. A few years later, it repeated its call for freedom “without reserve, without limitation, without delay.” “Men may propose only gradually to abolish the worst of crimes,” a women in Wilshire wrote, “and only mitigate the most cruel bondage, but why should we countenance such enormities? … We must not talk of gradually abolishing murder, licentiousness, cruelty, tyranny … I trust no Ladies’ Association will ever be found with such words attached to it.”
~ Adam Hochschild (2005)