Helen Eliza Benson Garrison

Garrison managed the annual Boston Anti-Slavery Bazaar,[1] a fair to raise money for the AASS, and ran her home as a salon for radical thinkers and activists.

She welcomed numerous notable abolitionists under her roof including Wendell Phillips, who was also an advocate for Native Americans; Lucy Stone, the suffragist; and George Thompson, the British Member of Parliament.

[9] Just a week after the Garrisons' marriage,[8] Helen turned their home in Roxbury, Massachusetts – called "Freedom’s Cottage" — into a salon for radical liberals.

[2] From there, Helen also maintained written correspondence with reformers including Theodore Dwight Weld of Lane Seminary; the secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Elizur Wright; Gerrit Smith the philanthropist; Henry Grew the Quaker abolitionist; and the author Parker Pillsbury.

[7] William wrote that his wife's "last efforts were in behalf of the poor Southern freedmen, as she had devoted a considerable portion of [the day of her stroke] in soliciting aid for them".

For example, Wendell Phillips stated that any person could "hardly appreciate the large help [Helen] gave the anti-slavery movement", because by bringing abolitionists under her roof "[s]he made a family" of them, unifying an activist group.