Martha Gurney

1733 – 1816

During the height of the slave-trade controversy in the 1780s and 1790s, Martha Gurney was the only woman involved as a printer/bookseller in the campaign against slave trade. She played a crucial role in raising awareness against the slave trade in Britain, and published and sold 16 abolitionist pamphlets, of which An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (1791), became the most widely distributed pamphlet of the 18th century, with more than 200,000 distributed, and 26 editions published in the first year alone.