The First Women's Abolitionist Society Changed History—And Nobody Knows In February 1832, a groundbreaking moment happened that changed the course of American activism—and history forgot about it. A group of free Black women in Salem, Massachusetts organized the first women's antislavery society in the United States. Not the second. Not the auxiliary. The first. According to historical records preserved by the American Anti-Slavery Society, these women declared themselves "convinced of the impor