She became a fundraiser, lecturer and committee organizer for the influential American Anti-Slavery Society, where she worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and other radicals.

She married fellow abolitionist and lecturer Stephen Symonds Foster in 1845, and they both worked for equal rights for women and for Africans enslaved in the Americas.

Kelley grew up helping with the family farms in Worcester where she received a loving, yet strict Quaker upbringing.

In 1829, she attended her final year of schooling, having received the highest form of education any New England woman of her relatively moderate economic standing could hope to obtain.

Kelley joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn and was soon elected to a committee charged with collecting signatures for petitions to the Federal government to end slavery in the District of Columbia.

Kelley's advocacy of the radical abolitionist movement prompted some opponents to call her a "Jezebel", as what she proposed threatened their sense of social structure.

In 1838, Kelley gave her first public speech to a "promiscuous" (mixed-gender) audience at the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, in Philadelphia.

[18] In October 1849, Kelley wrote to her friend, Milo Townsend, and told of the work she was doing for the anti-slavery society: "We know our cause is steadily onward".

As a result, when Kelley was elected to the national business committee of the Anti-Slavery Society, conservative members left in protest.

Pacifist radical abolitionists controlled the Society, who promoted complete egalitarianism, to be obtained without the aid of any government, as all such institutions were constructed on the violence of war.

[13] Kelley influenced future suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone by encouraging them to take on a role in political activism.

After the amendment passed and Garrison dissolved the Anti-Slavery Society, Kelley continued to work for equal rights for both African Americans and women.

Although their farm was consequently seized and sold and repurchased for them by friends,[3] Kelley continued her activism in the face of financial difficulties and poor health.

[24] Kelley continued her efforts as a lecturer and fundraiser throughout the North until 1850, when declining health forced her to reduce traveling.

[25] Liberty Farm in Worcester, Massachusetts, the home of Abby Kelley and Stephen Symonds Foster, was designated a National Historic Landmark because of its association with their lives of working for abolitionism.