Jane Wigham

Jane Wigham (née Smeal; 1801–1888) was a leading Scottish abolitionist. She was the stepmother of Eliza Wigham and the second wife of John Wigham.

Smeal was born in Glasgow in 1801, the daughter of William Smeal, a grocer and Quaker of the Glasgow society. She was educated as a Quaker at Ackworth School in Yorkshire. The family resided in Edinburgh, later moving to Aberdeen. As Quakers, Smeal's family were unusual in Scotland. The 1851 census shows that there were less than 400 active Scottish Quakers at the time.

Smeal became the leader and secretary of the radical Glasgow Ladies Emancipation Society. Her father William founded the Glasgow Anti-Slavery Society in 1822. Smeal had a record of anti-slavery activity, long before the free Church became involved in the issue. In 1838 she published an important pamphlet with Elizabeth Pease of Darlington titled Address to the Women of Great Britain. This document called for British women to speak in public and to form anti-slavery organisations for women. An address that Smeal prepared for Queen Victoria has been credited with being the "final blow" that ended slavery in the Caribbean.

In 1840 Smeal became the second wife of the Quaker John Wigham, who was a tea merchant and active abolitionist, in Glasgow. Wigham had lost two of his children and his wife in 1830, but the family was renewed when he married Smeal. Jane Smeal became Jane Wigham and she formed a close friendship and collaboration with her stepdaughter, Eliza Wigham. Smeal and Wigham's marriage took place in the same year as the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where Eliza was one of the delegates.

After the Ladies' Emancipation Society ceased activity, Jane and Eliza, along with some of their friends, set up the Edinburgh chapter of the National Society of Women's Suffrage. Priscilla Bright McLaren, the president, Elizabeth Pease, the treasurer, and McLaren's daughter Agnes McLaren joined Eliza as joint secretaries. Despite a lack of support from her husband John; Jane and her stepdaughter established the Edinburgh society as one of the leading British groups supporting the controversial views of William Lloyd Garrison.

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