Sarah D. Fish

Sarah Davids Bills Fish (1798–1868) was a 19th-century American suffragist and abolitionist. She has been variously known as Sarah Fish, Sarah D. Fish, Sarah David Bills, and Sarah David Bills Fish.

Life

Sarah Fish was born 11 September 1798 in Union, Union County, New Jersey, USA.

In 1822, she married Benjamin Fish. Benjamin was a Quaker, as well as an abolitionist. "When the Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers split in 1828, primarily over the issue of how actively slavery ought to be opposed, the Fishes joined the Hicksites—the more zealously abolitionist sect—and moved to Rochester." The couple had two daughters: Catherine Ann Fish (later Stebbins) and Mary Fish (later Curtis). Letters suggest the couple were living in Rochester, NY circa 1848 and were involved also in the rise of spiritualism.

Activism

Their family was "one of the most prominent early anti-slavery advocate groups." Their home was one of Rochester, New York's first way-stations of the Underground Railroad. The Fish family "helped organize everything from abolitionist conventions to antislavery craft fairs."

Sarah herself was a member of the Rochester Female Anti-Slavery Society (RFASS), and for a period served as the group's secretary. The RFASS "for a few years," "dominated women's antislavery activism," but was eventually replaced by a more radical group. In 1842, Sarah joined the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and, at the urging of Quaker activism Abbey Kelley, served on the executive committee. She was still serving on the executive cocmmitte in 1848, when her husband was president and her son-in-law corresponding secretary. She also wrote for the abolitionist newspaper The North Star.

Sarah Fish was also an early activists for women's rights. She participated in the very first Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. Sarah helped organize a second' women's rights convention only weeks later in Rochester, a convention of which her daughter Catherine was a secretary, and on "August 2, 1848, Sarah D. Fish delivered an address to the Rochester Woman's Rights Convention". Other important attendees included Frederick Douglass. Sarah Fish, Amy Post, and Sarah Hallowell "made the historic recommendation that the Rochester Woman's Rights Convention elect a female president." It is reported that "This was so radical a step that, amazingly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, two organizers of the Seneca Falls convention, walked off the platform in protest when Bush took the chair!"

The Fish family were also apparently involved in working for fairer treatment of Native Americans.

Death and legacy

She died on 7 Nov 1868 at the age of 70 in Rochester, Monroe County, New York, USA. She was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. Her daughter, Catherine, was also active in women's rights and abolition. Her husband is buried alongside her, and her daughter Catherine and son-in-law are in the adjacent plot.