Читать книгу Victory for the Vote - Doris Weatherford - Страница 8

Chapter Two

“Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World”: 1840 to 1848

At the end of the long debate that banned them from the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton “wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street.” During the next nine days, they “kept up a brisk fire” of words aimed at “the unfortunate gentlemen” who shared their hotel, one of whom packed his luggage and “withdrew after the first encounter.” Not eager to return to the convention and sit behind a humiliating curtain, Mott and Stanton spent much of their time walking in the June splendor of London’s parks, where they “agreed to hold a woman’s rights convention on their return to America.”

Lucretia Mott (Library of Congress)

But life got in the way. Lucretia Mott was one of the busiest women of her era, for there was little of Philadelphia civic life in which she was not involved. By the time of the World Anti-Slavery Convention, she and merchant James Mott had been married for 29 years. He was highly supportive of his unusual wife; she was not only the mother of six, but also had been an ordained Quaker minister for almost two decades. An ardent abolitionist, she spoke in black churches as early as 1829. Moreover, she took it upon herself to boycott everything produced with slave labor, which meant finding substitutes for such staples as cotton, sugar, coffee, and rice.

When they met in England, Lucretia Mott had been married for longer than 25-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been alive. Stanton graduated from Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, and then became involved in abolitionist activity, where she met journalist Henry Stanton. He was so impressed with her that he agreed to omit the bride’s traditional vow of obedience from their May wedding—and they immediately sailed for London.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and one of her children, 1876. (From the archives of the Seneca Falls Historical Society)

After losing the debate, the Motts and Stantons adopted the utilitarian view that it was better if one partner of their marriages was represented at the convention than none, and the women thus had plenty of time to spend together. Lucretia Mott became a true inspiration for Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom,” Stanton would write later, for Mott “seemed like a being from some larger planet.” James Mott similarly provided a model for Henry Stanton.

The Stantons traveled in Europe until November, and then Henry studied law with Elizabeth’s father, a judge in Johnstown, New York. While she bore the first three of their seven children, he passed the bar and they moved to Boston. During four wonderful years there, she met many inspirational women, including abolitionists Maria Weston Chapman, Lydia Maria Child, and Abbey Kelly Foster—whose husband was so feminist that he cared for their child when she went on lecture tours. In 1847, however, the Stantons again moved to a town where Henry would have fewer attorney competitors: Seneca Falls, New York.

It happened that Lucretia Coffin Mott had relatives nearby. Her youngest sibling, Martha Coffin Wright, lived in Auburn, New York. Mott was much more religious than Wright—who had been expelled from the Society of Friends for her first marriage to a non-Quaker who died young—but the sisters shared a commitment to liberal ideas. Like most women of their era, their lives were dominated by their anatomy: in July 1848, Martha Wright was pregnant with her seventh child. Her attitudes were unconventional enough that she taught her sons needle skills. One of them, she said, “had knit a bag to put his marbles in.”

Mott stayed with Wright when she came to western New York for the annual meeting of the Society of Friends, and Stanton met them for a tea party at the home of Jane Hunt, who, with her husband Richard, was considered “a prominent Friend near Waterloo,” New York. They were joined by Mary Ann M’Clintock, also a Quaker and a mother; her husband, Thomas, would later assist the women with their activism.

Desperately unhappy in Seneca Falls after the excitement of life in activist Boston, Stanton poured out her woes to her old soulmate Lucretia Mott, and, as Stanton would later write, they “at once returned to the topic they had so often discussed…the propriety of holding a woman’s convention.” With encouragement from the other women, they “decided to put their long-talked-of resolution into action, and before twilight deepened into night, the call was written, and sent to the Seneca County Courier.” When it appeared in the paper a few days later, it read:

WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current; commencing at 10 o’clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention.

The women gathered on Sunday morning at Mary M’Clintock’s home (minus Jane Hunt) to write the documents that would form the agenda for discussion at the meeting—and, as it turned out, set the agenda for American women for more than seven decades. Had they known the gravity of the cause upon which they embarked, it is possible that they would not have undertaken it: none of the women who met around the parlor table lived to see the achievement of their goals.

At the end of her life, M’Clintock regretted that she was unable to have done more for the cause, but Stanton pointed out the importance of M’Clintock’s influence within her own family: her son-in-law, Dr. James Truman of the Pennsylvania School of Dental Surgery, led the fight for the admission of women to dentistry in the 1870s.

According to Stanton, the women were “quite innocent of the herculean labors they proposed,” and they systematically set about the task of preparation for the gathering. Joined by Amy Post, Catherine A.F. Stebbins, and others—including husbands and children—they first perused documents from meetings they had attended for the causes of temperance, abolition, and even peace. All, however, “seemed too tame and pacific for the inauguration of a rebellion such as the world had never before seen.” Indeed, there was no precedent. From family roles (and unspoken family violence) to the dearth of educational and employment opportunities to the almost complete lack of legal rights and much more, women had problems that no male agenda had ever begun to envision, let alone address.

Finally they hit upon the right format: the nation’s Declaration of Independence, which was then 72 years old. Ironically, it would turn out to be exactly another 72 years later, in 1920, when women finally received full enfranchisement. The women’s Declaration of Independence thus fell at a precise midpoint of a female version of American history. Of course, those who wrote the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments had no way of foreseeing this long future. Instead, they set about their task with inspiration and even the good humor that comes with the excitement of doing something that will surprise and possibly shock. Stanton wrote later:

It was at once decided to adopt the historic document, with some slight changes such as substituting “all men” for “King George.” Knowing that women must have more to complain of than men under any circumstances possibly could, and seeing the Fathers had eighteen grievances, a protracted search was made through statute books, church usages, and the customs of society to find that exact number. Several well-disposed men assisted in collecting the grievances, until, with the announcement of the eighteenth, the women felt they had enough to go before the world with a good case. One youthful lord remarked, “Your grievances must be grievous indeed, when you are obliged to go to books in order to find them out.”

In just three days, these remarkable women had decided to hold a “convention”—without the delegate selection process that precedes most such gatherings—and made all the arrangements for planning it, publicizing it, and preparing an agenda for it. Their declaration was as dramatic as the more famous one Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues had prepared. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was analogous to Jefferson as the document’s chief author. With no resources beyond paper, pencil, pens dipped in inkwells, and their powerful intelligence, they framed their thoughts as eternal truths.

The declaration was ready for discussion when “the eventful day dawned at last,” but those in charge on the morning of July 19, 1848, felt a last-minute panic: the doors of the Wesleyan Methodist church in Seneca Falls, where the meeting was to be held, were firmly locked. One of Stanton’s nephews—the son of her sister Harriet Cady Eaton and “an embryo Professor of Yale College”—was boosted through a window and opened the chapel from the inside.

Meanwhile, crowds headed through the town. On a Wednesday morning in July, when they could have been cultivating or mowing or doing any number of the tasks that had to be packed into summer weekdays, some 300 people (of an approximate 8,000 living in Seneca Falls) chose instead to participate in this wildly unusual meeting. Women walked or, in many cases, persuaded their husbands to hitch up the horses to take them to town. The latter was so often true that dozens of men were present, and the leaders decided to ignore their own newspaper announcement that said the first day’s discussion would be limited to women. Because so many men were at the church, the women quickly decided that they could remain. In this reversal of their original plans, the women’s rights movement accepted an important principle from the beginning: feminism is not necessarily defined by gender.

Confronted by an unexpectedly large crowd, most of the women rapidly felt the inadequacy of their leadership training. Because of the taboo against public speaking by women and because, outside of the Quaker meeting house, and a handful of female anti-slavery societies, there were no women’s organizations, none had experience in parliamentary procedure or the fundamentals of running a meeting. They “shrank from the responsibility of organizing the meeting and leading the discussions,” Stanton said, and held “a hasty council around the altar.” Because experienced men were “already on the spot,” they decided that “this was an occasion when men might make themselves pre-eminently useful.” Men could “take the laboring oar through the Convention.”

This engraving from Harper’s Weekly parodies the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. (Library of Congress)

Lucretia Mott, who was “accustomed to public speaking in the Society of Friends, stated the objects of the Convention,” while her husband James, as Stanton later described him, stood “tall and dignified, in Quaker costume” as he presided. Frederick Douglass, a decade out of slavery and a recent resident of Rochester, joined in leading the discussion. Mary M’Clintock was appointed secretary—but she did not limit herself to secretarial duty; both she and her sister Elizabeth M’Clintock read “well-written” speeches. Stanton displayed her early talent in doing the same, while Martha Wright “read some satirical articles she had published in the daily papers answering the diatribes on women’s sphere.” Among the male presenters was Ansel Bascom, a recent delegate to a state constitutional convention, who thus was well qualified to speak to women’s property rights. Samuel Tillman, a young law student, had researched a “most exasperating” set of English and American statutes related to women, all of which demonstrated “the tender mercies of men toward their wives, in taking care of their property and protecting them in their civil rights.”

The meat of the convention was debate on the Declaration of Sentiments. After two days, “the only resolution that was not unanimously adopted was the ninth,” the one favoring the vote for women. Even longtime liberal Lucretia Mott did not favor this resolution, because she agreed with those who “feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat the others they deemed more rational, and make the whole movement ridiculous.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, however, insisted that without this fundamental right to participate in government, the principle of equality for women would never be taken seriously. After long discussion, the resolution “at last carried by a small majority.” The document was signed by exactly 100 participants: 32 men and 68 women. Just one of them, 19-year-old Charlotte Woodward, would live to see the centerpiece of the declaration achieved: only she was still alive to vote in 1920.

Although they talked for two days in Seneca Falls, “there were still so many new points for discussion,” according to Stanton, that the excited participants planned a follow-up meeting for the big city of Rochester. It was to be held just two weeks later, on August 2, 1848. This time the Committee of Arrangement was composed of Amy Post, Sarah D. Fish, Sarah C. Owen, and Mary H. Hallowell—none of whom had worked with the original planners. So untapped were these women’s talents, however, that the Rochester organizers had no trouble setting precedents of their own.

The meeting, which was scheduled for the city’s Unitarian Church, was “so well advertised in the daily papers” that when the day came, it “was filled to overflowing.” The women’s personal growth also was exponential; they had gained enough confidence that they undertook the parliamentary offices at this meeting. James Mott was present and ready to preside again, but the night before the meeting, Amy Post, Sarah Fish, and Rhoda DeGarmo undertook to persuade Abigail Bush to assume the leadership. According to Bush, her old friends “commenced to prove that the hour had come when a woman should preside, and led me into the church.” Much later, she would say: “No one knows what I passed through on that occasion. I was born and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church. At that time its sacred teachings were, ‘If a woman would know anything let her ask her husband.’ ” Somewhere, however, she found courage.

Amy Post called the packed house to order and nominated Abigail Bush for president, with Laura Murray as vice president, and three women—Elizabeth M’Clintock, Sarah Hallowell, and Catherine A.F. Stebbins—as secretaries. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later wrote that she, “Mrs. Mott, and Mrs. McClintock [sic] thought it a most hazardous experiment to have a woman President, and stoutly opposed it.” The original leadership was “on the verge of leaving the Convention in disgust,” Stanton said, “but Amy Post and Rhoda de Garmo assured them” that a woman “could also preside at a public meeting, if they would but make the experiment.” Those in attendance voted, a majority agreed, and Abigail Bush took the chair. “The calm way she assumed the duties of the office, and the admirable manner in which she charged them,” Stanton admitted, “soon reconciled the opposition to the seemingly ridiculous experiment.” Bush humbly summarized, “from that hour I seemed endowed as from on high to serve.”

Still, some of the secretaries were so inexperienced at using their voices that they could not be heard. In a time before microphones, the crowd cried for increased volume so that they could participate. Finally, Sarah Anthony Burtis, a teacher and a Quaker accustomed to public speaking, volunteered. She “read the reports and documents of the Convention with a clear voice and confident manner, to the great satisfaction of her more timid coadjutors.”

Men once again were involved, including Frederick Douglass and a “Mr. Colton,” who traveled the long distance from eastern Connecticut to remind the audience that “woman’s sphere was home.” Lucretia Mott’s response to him indicated her exceptional awareness of seemingly every aspect of her world: she embarrassed Colton by pointing out that his church limited its Female Moral Reform Society to its basement and then only on the “condition that none of the women should speak at the meeting.” These societies had begun in the 1840s, especially in Ohio and other non-coastal areas, to encourage men to drop immoral behaviors: some were even courageous enough to publicize the names of men seen visiting brothels. Mott’s point was that Colton welcomed women to the anti-vice movement merely as listeners, even in a group ostensibly for women.

Another memorable aspect of this meeting was the appearance of a “young and beautiful stranger,” who held the audience “spell-bound.” It was near the close of the morning session when a “bride in traveling dress, accompanied by her husband, slowly walked up the aisle and asked the privilege of saying a few words.” The newlyweds were going west, heard of the convention, and rearranged their train schedule so that they could come. During a 20-minute speech, Rebecca Sanford advocated female political participation; she ended by encouraging women to “hang the wreath of domestic harmony upon the eagle’s talons.”

Ernestine Rose circa 1850. (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America)

Perhaps the most important person to appear at this meeting, however, was Ernestine Rose, who had long labored for women’s rights in isolation. Born as Ernestine Susmond Potowski in Poland, she had gone to court at age 16 to insist on receiving her inheritance from her mother; after emigrating and marrying an Englishman, she arrived in New York in 1836. Within months, she began working to ensure property rights for American women. There were just five signatures on the first petition that she sent to the New York legislature—and those she obtained only “after a good deal of trouble.” Rose explained, “Some of the ladies said the gentlemen would laugh at them; others, that they had rights enough; and the men said the women had too many rights already.” Undaunted, her efforts put American-born women to shame: from 1837 to 1848, when she came to feminists’ attention at the Rochester convention, Ernestine Rose addressed the New York legislature five times. Supported in her travels by a feminist husband, she had lectured on women’s rights in Ohio and lobbied the legislature of frontier Michigan.

The Rochester convention also brought attention to economic needs, as several speakers reported on women’s working conditions. The upper-middle-class women in attendance, the only ones with sufficient leisure to organize such meetings, found disgraceful “the intolerable servitude and small remuneration paid to the working-class of women.” Once again, however, more time was spent on religious issues, especially on the interpretation of biblical injunctions regarding a woman’s place. The question of taking a man’s name at marriage also was debated; Elizabeth Cady Stanton reminded the others that this practice was neither divinely ordained nor universal.

After three sessions before a large and receptive audience, the convention adopted resolutions that were shorter and more concrete than those of Seneca Falls. The first called for the vote, and another commended Elizabeth Blackwell, who recently had become the world’s first female student in a traditional medical school. But the majority were based on women’s economic needs, focusing on taxation without representation, property ownership, and the inheritance rights of widows. Most meaningfully, the convention called upon the audience to be better employers: “Those who believe the laboring classes of women are oppressed ought to do all in their power to raise their wages, beginning with their own household servants.”

The strongest language centered on the right to retain one’s own earnings. “Whereas,” the document proclaimed, “the husband has the legal right to hire out his wife to service, collect her wages, and appropriate it to his own exclusive and independent benefit…reducing her almost to the condition of a slave…. [W]e will seek the overthrow of this barbarous and unrighteous law; and conjure women no longer to promise obedience in the marriage covenant.”

Amy Post moved for the adoption of the resolutions, and with only “two or three dissenting voices,” they were accepted and the meeting adjourned. The significant differences from the Seneca Falls resolutions showed that the movement’s leadership already was learning a lesson in pragmatism: they saw that, more than the intellectual and legal arguments that motivated so many of them, the average woman instead was moved on pocketbook issues. “Though few women responded to the demand for political rights,” Stanton said of the Rochester meeting, “many at once saw the importance of equality in the world of work.”

As Stanton suggested, not everyone was brave enough to respond to the call. Some of the signers of the Seneca Falls declaration withdrew their names within weeks, as soon as a derogatory volcano erupted in the press. It was largely Amelia Jenks Bloomer who served as the unintended publicity agent for the Seneca Falls convention—and, later, as a chief target for the barbs of cartoonists.

Although her name (or more aptly, her husband’s name) became synonymous with pants worn by women, Amelia Bloomer had been a rather conservative schoolteacher until she married a more liberal man. Her husband, Dexter Bloomer, owned the Seneca County Courier, and she often wrote for it. The couple also served as postmaster and postmistress for Seneca Falls.

Amelia Bloomer (Library of Congress)

Bloomer attended the historic convention but did not sign the declaration. She was there primarily as a reporter, and it would be several years before Bloomer became an advocate of voting rights. Her chief interest was temperance, and, in January 1849, she began her own paper, The Lily. It focused on ending the abuse of alcohol, with women’s rights incidental to that, and soon circulated beyond state borders. Adding more than a thousand subscribers per year, The Lily would bring women’s needs to a national audience.

Prior to that, however, other journalists learned of the unconventional convention from the Bloomers’ Seneca County Courier. Train service had come to Seneca Falls in 1841, seven years prior to the convention, and in a time before syndicated press services, journalists met the trains and read each other’s papers to discover the news. On learning of the Seneca Falls Convention, most editors responded with an incredulity that still conveys a mental picture of men rubbing their eyes in disbelief—but they rapidly spread the story. A Massachusetts paper, the Worcester Telegraph, was one of the more objective, although editorial amazement at the women’s audacity suffused its commentary:

A female Convention has just been held at Seneca Falls, N.Y…. The list of grievances which the Amazons exhibit, concludes by expressing a determination to insist that woman shall have “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens”…. This is bolting with a vengeance.

In an era when it was almost impossible to distinguish between news coverage and editorial opinion, James Gordon Bennett, publisher of New York City’s widely read New York Herald, was unusual in putting his name on his report about the Seneca Falls convention. In a long argument with himself, Bennett offered a bit of encouragement for every point of view and ended with a surprising conclusion:

This is the age of revolutions…. The work of revolution is no longer confined to the Old World, nor to the masculine gender. The flag of independence has been hoisted, for the second time, on this side of the Atlantic; and a solemn league and covenant has just been entered into by a Convention of women at Seneca Falls, to “throw off the despotism under which they are groaning”….

The declaration is a most interesting document…. The amusing part is the preamble…. It complains of the want of the elected franchise…. We do not see by what principle of right the angelic creatures should claim to compete…. Though we have the most perfect confidence in the courage and daring of Miss Lucretia Mott and several others of our lady acquaintances, we confess it would go to our hearts to see them putting on the panoply of war, and mixing in scenes like those….

It is not the business, however, of the despot to decide upon the rights of his victims; nor do we undertake to define the duties of women. Their standard is now unfurled by their own hands. The Convention of Seneca Falls has appealed to the country. Miss Lucretia Mott has propounded the principles of the party. Ratification meetings will no doubt shortly be held…. We are much mistaken if Lucretia would not make a better President than some of those who have lately tenured the White House.

The editor gave the meeting more credence than some of its participants: Bennett assumed that the world would soon be debating the declaration’s principles in “ratification meetings,” and his musing on the possibility of a female president was not even a notion that the women themselves had begun to envision. Newspaper circulation of the declaration meant that its ideas traveled around the globe far faster than its rural authors ever could have expected.

The Rochester convention, held in a much larger city, naturally elicited more editorial comment, most of it negative. According to the Rochester Democrat, “The great effort seemed to be to bring out some new, impracticable, absurd, and ridiculous proposition, and the greater its absurdity the better.” The Rochester Advertiser took an unusual approach: its editor appeared to hope that the women’s gatherings would go away if he yawned: “to us they appear extremely dull and uninteresting, and, aside from their novelty, hardly worth notice.” Despite the efforts in the Rochester meeting to direct attention to women’s economic needs, one of the state’s most populist newspapers was also one of its most annoyed. The Mechanic’s Advocate, published in the capital of Albany, was uncharacteristically conservative in its reaction when women were the issue. After an internal debate with its better nature, its editorial essentially ended up saying that even if changes were needed, the upheaval would be so great that it was not worth the effort:

The women who attend these meetings, no doubt at the expense of their more appropriate duties, act as committees, write resolutions…make speeches, etc….

Now, it requires no argument to prove that this all is wrong. Every true hearted female will instantly feel that this is unwomanly…. Society would have to be radically remodeled in order to accommodate itself to so great a change…. But this change is impracticable, uncalled for, and unnecessary…. It would be of no positive good, that would not be outweighed tenfold by positive evil.

An out-of-state paper, the Public Ledger and Daily Transcript, apparently was unaware of Lucretia Mott and other Pennsylvanians who initiated the feminist agenda. Its editorial began with smug congratulations to “our Philadelphia ladies,” who not only possessed “beauty, but are celebrated for discretion and modesty…. Whoever heard of a Philadelphia lady setting up for a reformer, or standing out for women’s rights?” Seemingly blissfully ignorant of the long records established by the city’s women in the Society of Friends and other reform groups, the paper continued mockingly, “Boston ladies contend for the rights of women [and] the New York girls aspire to mount the rostrum…. Our Philadelphia girls prefer the baby-jumper…and the ballroom.” The unsigned editorial concluded by revealing a profound masculine egocentrism: “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything.”

The Lowell Courier displayed a similarly regressive attitude, even though this Massachusetts textile town employed thousands of women who entertained no thoughts of babies and ballrooms. Most Lowell mill workers were unmarried women who lived in company housing; many were highly literate, for they had the opportunity to read, join study clubs, and even publish their own writing in industry-sponsored publications. Blind to this audience, however, the Lowell editor assumed his satire would please: “They should have resolved,” he said of the conventions, “that it was obligatory also upon the [men of the house] to wash dishes, scour up, be put to the tub, handle the broom, darn stockings, patch breeches…look beautiful and be fascinating.”

It was a thought that the Rochester Daily Advertiser found surprisingly plausible. Although Henry Montgomery titled his editorial “The Reign of Petticoats” and began with satirical commentary about “the beautiful and feminine business of politics,” he ended up with a most unconventional endorsement:

Can not women fill an office, or cast a vote, or conduct a campaign, as judiciously and vigorously as men? And, on the other hand, can not men…boil a pot as safely and as well as women? If they can not, the evil is in the arbitrary organization of society…. It is time these false notions and practices were changed…. Let the women keep the ball moving, so bravely started by those who have become tired of the restraints imposed upon them.

The end of summer did not end the publicity. “There is no danger of this question dying for want of notice,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the National Reformer on September 14:

Every paper you take up has something to say about it…. For those who do not yet understand the real objects of our recent Conventions at Rochester and Seneca Falls, I would state that we did not meet to discuss fashions, customs, or dress, the rights or duties of man, nor the propriety of the sexes changing positions, but simply our own inalienable rights…. There is no such thing as a sphere for a sex. Every man has a different sphere, and one in which he may shine, and it is the same with every woman; and the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.

Stanton explicated her point with the examples of Angelina Grimké and Lucretia Mott. Grimké had gone “the length and breadth of New England, telling the people of her personal experience of the slave system,” and her testimony had moved the public in a way “unsurpassed by any of the highly gifted men of her day.” She then married and chose to remove herself from public life. “Her sphere and her duties have changed,” Stanton wrote, but both portions of her life had value. Mott, in contrast, devoted the first part of her life to children and home, and now, “her husband and herself, having a comfortable fortune, pass much of their time in going about and doing good.” Like men, Stanton argued, women are naturally capable of many “spheres” and of making different choices at different points in life.

Stanton also reached out from their tiny town to larger and more diverse circulation sources. By far the most important of the papers that supported the women’s agenda was Horace Greeley’s tremendously popular New York Tribune. Although he later would quarrel with suffragists and retract much of his support, in these early days, he encouraged women, including the first credentialed female physician, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. He opened the Tribune’s pages to Stanton, and she used Greeley’s paper as an opportunity to respond to the verbal assaults that most journalists made. Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who never would be recognized as the philosopher that she actually was—mailed out her brilliant argumentation and transformed her world.