Harriet was born into the most well-known black family in Philadelphia. She formed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society with her mother and sisters. She and her husband Robert Purvis ran an Underground Railroad station. She had eight children and argued for better public schools for black children.

Harriet was part of the Free Produce Society whose members boycotted produce grown and picked by slaves. She was a member of the National Woman Suffrage Association and was friends with Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott. She died on June 11, 1875 in Washington, D.C. of tuberculosis.

For more than four decades, Margaretta and her sister Harriet attended meetings, circulated petitions, collected money to aid fugitives, and helped organize the annual fair for the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She began teaching in Sarah Douglass’s school in the 1840s and opened her own school in 1850 which boarded its students. She worked as a teacher for at least thirty years.

Margaretta never married. In time, she would run her parents’ home on Lombard Street in Philadelphia, and cared for her elderly mother and brothers Thomas and William. She remained a teacher and advocate of social reform until her death from pneumonia on January 14, 1875.

Young Angelina taught the slaves on her parent's plantation in South Carolina how to read. In 1829, she moved to Philadelphia with her sister Sarah and joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1836, she published An Appeal to Christian Women of the South and joined the American Anti-Slavery Society where she and Sarah were the only women.

Through the AASS, Angelina met Thomas Weld. They married in 1838 and two days later, Angelina spoke at the convention where the building was burned down. The Welds retired from speaking and wrote abolitionist tracts, including American Slavery As It Is (1839). Angelina is the great aunt of Angelina Weld Grimke, a famous black playwright.

Lucretia was raised as a Quaker, a religion of equality of all people under God. In 1809, her family moved to Philadelphia, and two years later she married James Mott. The Motts were members of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s, and Lucretia helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.

At the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Lucretia met Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1848, they organized the Seneca Falls Convention. Lucretia later published Discourse on Women, a reasoned account of the history of women’s repression. When the women's right movement split in 1869, she tried to bring the two factions together. Lucretia died in 1880, in Pennsylvania.