ABSTRACT
In December 1836, Anne and Lucia Weston kept logs of their work for the Boston Antislavery Bazaar.1 The journals describe in vivid detail the whirlwind of activity preceding an antislavery fair; they talk of last minute committee meetings, hastily arranged sewing circles, of composing Antislavery mottos, decorating the fair hall and ‘arrang[ing] the things which had come in, in great profusion’.2 The sisters’ journals discuss themes and practices that reverberate throughout private and public correspondence about the Boston Bazaar. Taken together these sources generate insights into organization of the Bazaar, as well as the quotidian duties of charity fair work. What emerges is a remarkable portrait of a female economy in which almost all participants – manufactures, managers, retailers, and consumers – were women.3 The Boston Bazaar organizers established a transatlantic commercial network that harnessed the labour, resources and talent of women in the United States, Great Britain, and other parts of the world, to supply the annual sale with goods and services. ‘Let it be remembered’ Maria Weston Chapman declared in an advertisement for the 1844 Boston Bazaar, ‘that this fair is mainly the product of female skill, toil, and generosity’.4 What began in 1834 as a modest sale of
‘useful’ home-made articles had by the time it closed in 1857 raised over $65,000 for the Antislavery cause. It was also recognized by the Boston elite as ‘the most fashionable shopping resort of the holidays’.5
