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Chapter Three

“The Spirit of a Snake” and the Spirit of Success, 1848 to 1860

After the excitement of 1848, the women’s movement drew a collective breath and allowed 1849 to pass quietly. In 1850 came a second explosion of women’s rights conventions, and from that year, the revolution would be permanent. That year the movement went national, expanding out of New York with conventions in Ohio and Massachusetts.

Frontier Ohio may seem an odd place to follow the Rochester meeting, but several factors made it logical. It was a haven for young people dissatisfied with life in the staid East, making a new start in what was still considered the West. Second, because only the Ohio River separated it from slave territory on its southern border, the state became an early refuge for escaped slaves—and thus for abolitionists. Finally, Oberlin College, a hotbed of radical ideas, had operated there for almost two decades. The nation’s first college to admit women and blacks when it began in 1833, Oberlin graduated abolitionist lecturer Lucy Stone in 1847, and more shockingly, had yielded to the persistent pleas of Stone’s roommate, Antoinette Brown, to be admitted to its theology department. Both women, while still students, had “lectured at different places in the State” in 1849.

Just as Seneca Falls hosted its famous convention because Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived there, the site of Ohio’s 1850 convention was chosen largely because it was home to Josephine Griffing and other abolitionists. Salem, in eastern Ohio between Akron and Pittsburgh, was known as an “underground railroad” town, welcoming to escaped slaves. It was also the base of the Anti-Slavery Bugle. Griffing frequently wrote for this widely circulated paper; its owners, Oliver and Mariana Johnson, were committed to women’s rights as well as to abolition. When the abolitionist and women’s rights causes began to diverge in the Civil War era, Griffing would concentrate on the first cause; the postwar Freedman’s Bureau was largely her brainchild.

The year was as meaningful as the site, for 1850 saw the adoption of the Fugitive Slave Act, which demanded the return of all escaped slaves to their previous owners. One of the cruelest pieces of legislation Congress ever passed, the act forced people of conscience to choose between what was legal and what was morally right. Because geography made Ohio a likely route to freedom, it had enacted similar laws earlier, which Salem abolitionists defiantly violated. They were encouraged by Abby Kelly, who was one of the first to travel through the state denouncing “the black laws of Ohio”; indeed, one feminist pioneer dated “the agitation of Woman’s Rights” in Ohio from Kelly’s lectures in 1843. Finally, the state planned a constitutional convention for 1850. Ohio women who had learned through the national press of the 1848 meetings in New York decided, in the words of their report for the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, “if the fundamental laws of the State were to be revised and amended, it was a fitting time for them to ask to be recognized.”

Abby Kelly (Library of Congress)

The women’s convention was planned for April 19 and 20, 1850, in Salem’s Second Baptist Church. At 10 a.m. Emily Robinson gaveled it to order and turned the podium over to Mariana W. Johnson, who read “the call” that stated their aims. They were there “to concert measures to secure to all persons the recognition of equal rights…without distinction of sex or color.” Participants were invited “to inquire if the position you now occupy is one appointed by wisdom, and designed to secure the best interests of the human race.”

Although these women had no parliamentary experience, they showed none of the timorousness of Seneca Falls and filled organizational positions with women. They created a business committee of six, chose three secretaries, and named three vice presidents to assist the president, Betsey M. Cowles. Ohio women felt fortunate to have Cowles as their leader: she was establishing a reputation as one of the state’s outstanding educators. A teacher since 1825, she had remained single, and, in 1834, organized a Young Ladies Society for Intellectual Improvement. She helped introduce the new concepts of kindergarten and Sunday school, and a few months after she chaired the convention, Cowles began work in the prestigious position of superintendent of girls’ elementary and secondary schools in Canton, Ohio.

The secretaries read greetings from Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and others unable to attend. A speech that Mott had made in Philadelphia the previous December, “On Woman,” was delivered, and the women proceeded to debate and adopt 22 resolutions without the least bit of timidity on the great question of demanding the vote.

Not only did women conduct this meeting, but they also did all of the debating: According to the report, “not a man was allowed to sit on the platform, to speak or vote. Never did men so suffer.” Betsey Cowles’s school-teaching experience plainly showed, for the men “implored just to say one word; but no; the President was inflexible no man should be heard. If one meekly arose to make a suggestion, he was at once ruled out of order. For the first time in the world’s history, men learned how it felt to sit in silence when questions in which they were interested were under discussion.” In addition to their resolutions, the women adopted a “Memorial” to the upcoming constitutional convention. They reminded the men who planned to rewrite fundamental law:

Women have no part or lot in the foundation or administration of government. They can not vote or hold office. They are required to contribute their share, by way of taxes, to the support of the Government, but are allowed no voice….

We would especially direct attention to the legal condition of married women…. Legally, she ceases to exist…. All that she has becomes legally his, and he can collect and dispose of the profits of her labor as he sees fit…. If he renders life intolerable, so that she is forced to leave him, he has the power to retain her children, and “seize her and bring her back, for he has a right to her society which he may enforce, either against herself or any other person who detains her.” Woman by being thus subject to the control, and dependent on the will of man, loses her self-dependence; and no human being can be deprived of this without a sense of degradation.

An even longer document was aimed at their sisters. In an “Address to the Women of Ohio,” they developed an argument based on the ideas of Locke and Jefferson, and these unknown women followed the concept of natural rights that human beings have rights as immutable as the natural laws of physics to its logical conclusion:

This government, having therefore exercised powers underived from the consent of the governed, and having signally failed to secure the end for which all just government is instituted, should be immediately altered, or abolished.

“The legal theory is, marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband…. There is scarcely a legal act that she is competent to perform…. She can make no contracts…. She has no power over his person, and her only claim upon his property is for a bare support. In no instance can she sue or be sued….” [quoted from Professor Walker, author of Introduction to American Law] Women of Ohio!… Slaves we are, politically and legally…. If men would be men worthy of the name, they must cease to disfranchise and rob their wives and mothers, they must forbear to consign to political and legal slavery their sisters and daughters. And we women…must cease to submit to such tyranny….

Woman, over half the globe, is now and always has been chattel. Wives are bargained for, bought and sold…. Can antiquity make wrong right?… We appeal to our sisters of Ohio to arise from the lethargy of ages…and take possession of your birthright to freedom and equality.

“A favorable and lengthy report” of the meeting “found its way into the New York Tribune and other leading journals,” and Ohio women did not seem to feel themselves as much the objects of scorn as New Yorkers had. Instead, they believed their convention “had accomplished a great educational work.” This statewide meeting was quickly emulated with smaller local events. The leader of the follow-up activity was Frances Dana Gage, who had been unable to attend the Salem convention. Known as “Aunt Fanny,” she was an established writer, who, in her own words, was “notorious” for “craziness.” Nonetheless, Gage had a mainstream readership, which she risked for the mocked cause of women’s rights, in such publications as the Ohio Cultivator, a farm magazine, and the Ladies’ Repository of Cincinnati. With three others—“all the women that I knew in that region even favorable to a movement for the help of women”—she called a meeting for her southeastern Ohio town of McConnelsville in early May.

“Women dared not speak then,” and even among this venturesome four, Gage stood alone in asking “for the ballot…without regard to sex or color.” She drew up a petition to omit the words “white” and “male” from the state’s constitution, and at the end of the day-long meeting, 40 of the 70 attendees signed it. Excited by this, the four planned another meeting in the Methodist church of nearby Morgan County for late May. They advertised it, and early in the morning of the appointed day, they “hired a hack” and rode 16 miles, where they discovered that they were “to be denied admittance to church or school-house.” A sympathetic minister, however, was prepared for his colleagues’ hostility: according to Gage, he “had found us shelter on the threshing-floor of a fine barn,” where the women found “three or four hundred of the farmers and their wives, sons, and daughters” already assembled. “Many names were added to our Memorial, and on the whole, we had a delightful day,” Gage summarized. She concluded ominously, however: “But to shut up doors against women was a new thing.”

Gage and others worked hard, and the petitions they presented to Ohio’s constitutional convention held a significant number of signatures. The one for “Equal Rights” in property laws and similar legislation was signed by 7,901 people. The one for the “Right of Suffrage,” on the other hand, was still seen as a radical idea: only 2,106 signed it. The men of the constitutional convention, however, did not appear to take these thousands of petitioners with any seriousness at all. Rebecca Janney, a leader in Ohio’s movement from its earliest days, summarized tersely: “The discussions in the Constitutional Convention were voted to be dropped from the records, because they were so low and obscene.”

The young state of Indiana also held a constitutional convention in 1850. The women’s movement was not yet organized there, but feminist Robert Dale Owen made their case for them. He doubtless was inspired by his wife, Mary Robinson Owen, a Virginian who had endured pioneer Indiana with him. When the Owens married in 1832, they wrote an unconventional compact in which Robert declared: “Of the unjust rights which…this ceremony…gives me over the person and property of another, I can not legally, but I can morally, divest myself.” He also was influenced by his longtime colleague, Frances Wright. Both natives of Scotland, Wright and Owen worked together in a number of reform efforts, including a utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana.

When the constitutional convention met, he argued especially for the property rights of married women and widows, but without success. Perhaps inspired by the efforts that this man made for them, Indiana women began to organize themselves at an anti-slavery meeting the following year. The first Indiana women’s rights convention was held in October 1851 in the Wayne County village of Dublin. “Such a Convention being a novel affair,” reads their record in the History of Woman Suffrage, “it called out some ridicule and opposition,” but the women were “so well pleased” that they immediately planned another. From 1851 through the end of the decade, Indiana women held annual conventions that were never distracted by jeering men as those in the East would be.

Often Ohio women came to Indiana to speak, especially the ever-popular Frances Dana Gage and the thoughtful Caroline Severance. Amanda Way was perhaps Indiana’s primary leader at this time; a talented tailor and milliner, she was a bit unusual in the women’s rights movement in that she never married. A Quaker, she had ties to Lucretia Mott and the temperance and abolitionist movements, and Way would take these causes with her as she moved west to Kansas and then California during the rest of the century. Another inspirational leader was Mary F. Thomas, a married woman with three young daughters who had learned of the women’s movement while she lived in Salem, Ohio. At the first Indiana convention, she announced her intention to become a physician and by the 1856 convention, she was Dr. Thomas. Less than a decade after Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from a male medical school, Thomas completed her education at Cleveland’s Western Reserve College (now Case Western Reserve) and at Philadelphia’s Penn Medical University.

She also managed to participate in most of Indiana’s systematically scheduled and smoothly run conventions. The 1852 and 1853 ones were in the town of Richmond; 1854 and 1855 took them to the Masonic Hall in Indianapolis, but meetings returned for the rest of the decade to the small towns of Richmond and Winchester. The most hostile press was in the largest city: at the 1855 Indianapolis convention, “the reporters gave glowing pen sketches of the ‘masculine women’ and ‘feminine men;’ they described the dress and appearance of the women very minutely, but said little of the merits of the question or the arguments of the speakers.”

With the New York and Ohio precedents set, Massachusetts hosted its first women’s rights convention in autumn of the same year. Unlike the earlier meetings, however, this one was carefully planned months in advance. In May, at an anti-slavery gathering in Boston, nine women caucused in a “dark, dingy room” about a convention for their own civil rights. They scheduled the meeting for October 23 and 24, 1850, and chose the Massachusetts town of Worcester because of its central location. Most important, they decided to aim for a national, not merely a state, women’s rights convention.

Paulina Wright Davis (Library of Congress)

Paulina Wright Davis undertook most of the planning work. In 1835, as Paulina Kellogg Wright, she and her husband had organized one of the first anti-slavery meetings and endured a mob assault on their home in Utica, New York. He died in 1846, leaving her a widow wealthy enough to do something very unusual: with a female anatomical mannequin imported from Paris, she taught the basics of their bodies to the relatively few women who dared to explore this forbidden subject. A second marriage to jeweler Thomas Davis changed her name, and as Paulina Wright Davis, she organized the Massachusetts meeting from her home in Providence, Rhode Island.

Davis had hoped to turn over the leadership of this first National Woman’s Rights Convention to famous author Margaret Fuller, but after Fuller drowned in a July shipwreck, Davis decided to assemble a list of prestigious names to sign the meeting’s “call.” She sent “earnest private letters” to those she hoped would become endorsers, but even though she thought her call was “moderate in tone,” it nonetheless “gave the alarm to conservatism.” The response was painful: “Letters, curt, reproachful, and sometimes almost insulting,” Davis said, “came with absolute refusals to have the names of the writers used.” But other mail brought better news. While the “alarmed conservatives” missed a chance to enshrine their names in history, visionary people gladly signed. More than 50 women and 30 men, including famed philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, endorsed the convention. The first signer, Sarah Tyndale, inspired particular optimism; Davis termed her “perhaps more widely known than any other woman of her time.” Tyndale had run what the History of Woman Suffrage termed one of Philadelphia’s “largest businesses” for more than two decades. Davis especially appreciated this support, for Tyndale made a “great social sacrifice in taking up a cause so unpopular.” Another hopeful opportunity for broadening the movement’s base of support was an endorsement from Catherine M. Sedgwick, one of the era’s most popular novelists.

On “the bright October days” of the convention, reads the women’s report of their historic gathering, “a solemn, earnest crowd of noble men and women” assembled in Worcester’s Brinley Hall. The meeting was called to order by Sarah H. Earl, a locally prominent woman married to the editor of the Worcester Spy. She conducted an election and turned the gavel over to Paulina Wright Davis. Four other officers were equally divided by gender, and the five people elected came from four states. The meeting was indeed national in tone, with sizeable delegations from nine states, but all of them were in the North, a fact that presaged the coming of the Civil War.

Gathered in Worcester were the people who would form the backbone of the women’s movement for the rest of the century. From Vermont came newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols; from Philadelphia, Lucretia Mott and other Friends. From Ohio came the Anti-Slavery Bugle editors Mariana and Oliver Johnson, as well as two sisters of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. Ernestine Rose was among those from New York, while longtime abolitionists Parker and Sarah Pillsbury came from New Hampshire. The two people who came the greatest distances, Mary G. Wright of California and Silas Smith of Iowa, were the only representatives from those states. Massachusetts, of course, had far more participation than any other state; among its many luminaries were Abby Kelly Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, and several members of 18-year-old Louisa May Alcott’s family. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth “represented the enslaved African race.”

Just as the Rochester meeting introduced women to Ernestine Rose, Worcester debuted several other suffragist stars. Like Rose, Lucy Stone had been speaking out on behalf of women for years prior to the conventions. She was Massachusetts’s first female college graduate, but not only did Stone have to go to Ohio’s Oberlin to earn this credential, she also had to support herself because her affluent father refused to pay tuition for a girl. Nearly 30 when she graduated, she turned down the “honor” of writing a commencement speech that even at progressive Oberlin would be read by a man. Stone followed Abby Kelly Foster’s example and earned a precarious living as a paid lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society on the weekends, while on weekdays, she freelanced as a women’s rights speaker. Like others on the abolitionist circuit, she learned to expect routine greetings from jeering mobs armed with rotten eggs and stones.

Antoinette Brown (Library of Congress)

Her Oberlin classmate (and future sister-in-law) Antoinette Brown also attended the convention. Brown had just completed three years of work in Oberlin’s theology department, but the college would not grant this sacred degree to a woman. No church was willing to ordain her, and she was spending her autumn wandering country roads in hopes of finding a congregation that would allow her to preach. Perhaps more than anyone, Antoinette Brown needed the solace and support of the network she found at Worcester.

Another celebrity at the meeting was, sadly enough, much more famous then than now. Dr. Harriot K. Hunt had begun practicing medicine in 1835; Dr. Hunt did not have a medical degree, but it was not uncommon at that time for even male physicians to lack medical school credentials. Her healing techniques emphasized hygiene and did not include leeches, mercury, and other dangerous interventions that many physicians used. Hunt’s reputation as a successful healer soon was established enough that she had a busy practice among Boston’s finest families, especially with female patients who appreciated having a female physician whom they could trust.

In the same way that Harriot K. Hunt’s remarkable history was allowed to die, modern women also are unfamiliar with Abby H. Price, but convention president Paulina Wright Davis evidently thought of her in the same category as Lucy Stone. In a report on the Worcester meeting, in a sentence immediately before one about Stone, Davis wrote: “Abby H. Price, large-hearted and large-brained, gentle and strong, presented an address on the social question.” Davis added that the speech was “seldom bettered,” but provided no details, for the euphemistic “social question” doubtless referred to prostitution and venereal disease.

“The debates on the resolutions,” Davis said, “were spicy, pointed, and logical” and kept “crowded audiences through two entire days.” The resolutions not only included the same “sex and color” phrase that was used at Salem, but spelled out this commitment further: “Resolved, that the cause we have met to advocate the claim for woman of all her natural and civil rights bids us remember the two millions of slave women at the South, the most grossly wronged and foully outraged of all women.”

Although the network of women’s advocates would still be referred to as “Woman’s Rights Conventions” until after the Civil War, this meeting took significant steps to chart out a permanent, national organization. Paulina Wright Davis would chair a Central Committee with members from every state; other committees were Education, Industry, Civil and Political Functions, Social Relations, and Publications. Except for Publications, which was undertaken by William Henry Channing, the committees were chaired by women.

“Thus encouraged,” Paulina Wright Davis summarized, “we felt new zeal to go on.” Once again, the group did an amazingly good public relations job, and this time, it was particularly effective in Europe. “Many letters were received from literary women in this country as well as abroad,” Davis enthused. She was especially happy about favorable publicity from Swedish Frederika Bremer, one of the world’s bestselling contemporary commentators. Bremer, who would tour and write about America in the 1850s, “quoted from our writings,” Davis marveled. “Our words had been like an angel’s visit to the prisoners of State in France,” where revolution recently had been suppressed.

The most significant attention came from the October 29, 1850, international edition of the New York Tribune. Among many who read it was English philosopher John Stuart Mill, one of the modern age’s greatest thinkers. The next July, the prestigious Westminster Review followed up with a philosophical essay in which Mill explicated the ideas of the American women or so people thought at the time. The article, “On Enfranchisement of Women,” began by discussing the American phenomenon:

Most of our readers will probably learn, from these pages, for the first time, that there has risen in the United States…an organized agitation on a new question…the enfranchisement of women, their admission in law, and in fact, to equality….

It will add to the surprise with which many receive this intelligence that…not merely for women, but by them….

A succession of public meetings was held, under the name of a “Woman’s Rights Convention,” of which the President was a woman, and nearly all the chief speakers were women….

According to the report in the New York Tribune, above a thousand persons were present throughout, and “if a larger place could have been had, many thousands more would have attended.”

The proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely in the oratory of public meetings is…calm good sense and reason so considerable.

The result…is probably destined to inaugurate one of the most important of the movements toward political and social reform…. The promoters of this new agitation take their stand on principles, and do not fear.

Mill later explained that the true author of the famous essay was Harriet Hardy Taylor. For two decades, she had been, he said, “the honour and chief blessing of my existence,” but she was married to another man. After her husband’s 1849 death, Taylor married Mill, but they had only a few years together before her sudden death. When he wrote his most famous work, On Liberty (1859), Mill acknowledged that “so much of it was the work of her whom I lost.” It goes without saying that his 1869 publication, The Subjection of Women, also originated in the mind of this unknown female philosopher. Still later, Mill wrote to Paulina Wright Davis:

John Stuart Mill (Library of Congress)

It gives me the greatest pleasure to know that the service rendered by my dear wife to the cause which was nearer her heart than any other, by her essay in the Westminster Review, has had so much effect and is so justly appreciated in the United States. Were it possible in a memoir to have the formation and growth of a mind like hers portrayed, to do so would be as valuable a benefit to mankind as was ever conferred by a biography. But such a psychological history is seldom possible.

Just as New York’s Seneca Falls convention was followed by one in the city of Rochester, Ohio’s 1850 event in Salem was a prelude to a larger one in Akron. Midwestern activism was renewed, and many of those who made history at Salem went to Akron on May 28 and 29, 1851. This meeting also heralded several women who would be among the most important suffragists for decades to come.

Frances Dana Gage, who had clearly established her leadership the previous year, presided. Gage also mentored several of the women there, including Caroline Severance, who eventually moved back East and became the founding president of the important New England Woman’s Club. The conventioneers were also excited about the presence of Maria L. Giddings; she not only gave “a very able digest on the common law,” but also had political connections, for her father “represented Ohio in Congress for many years.”

The appearance of Hannah Tracy, later Hannah Tracy Cutler, at the convention demonstrated tremendous commitment, for she had overcome serious handicaps. After her father refused to allow her to attend the new Oberlin College, she married at 18 and had three children. She was pregnant with the last when her husband died, after pro-slavery men assaulted him while he was helping slaves escape. Widowed, she then went to Oberlin, ran a boardinghouse to support her family, and even found time to write original feminist theory: Woman as She Was, Is, and Should Be was published in 1846. Tracy graduated the following year, and by the time of the Akron convention, she had the plum job of principal of the “female department” of the new Columbus high school. Most women in such a position would not risk it with radical feminist activity, but her courage was fired by experience.

Pittsburgh’s Jane Grey Swisshelm had learned similar courage. The publisher of the abolitionist Saturday Visiter [sic] at the time, she attended the prior year’s Worcester convention and would go on to national leadership in Minnesota and in Washington D.C. but despite this apparent success, Swisshelm still had a miserable personal life. Until her tyrannical husband discovered that her literacy could earn her money, he had sometimes forbidden her to read; he used his legal right to her wages to sue her family for the time that she devoted to her ailing mother. Another six years would pass before Swisshelm managed to get him to file for the divorce that would liberate her: in 1857, she took her little daughter and fled to Minnesota.

A network of female support was clearly developing. Among the out-of-state women who sent letters of support to Akron were Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols of Vermont, and Nantucket Island native Lydia Folger Fowler, who became the second female graduate of a traditional medical school this same year. Dr. Fowler, a happily married woman without children, wrote Familiar Lessons on Physiology in 1847 to teach women about their bodies. During a lifelong Rochester career teaching obstetrics and gynecology, she set another precedent as the world’s first female medical school professor.

Unlike the Salem convention, men were allowed to participate at Akron and at future Ohio meetings to the regret of some women who said in their report that “the sons of Adam crowded our platform and often made it the scene of varied pugilistic efforts.” The convention also was the first with entertainment: a popular singing group, the Hutchinson Family Singers, was a big hit at reform assemblies for decades.

Sojourner Truth (Library of Congress)

Far and away the most important aspect of the Akron meeting, however, was the historic speech of Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery under the name Isabella in the late eighteenth century, she was owned by Dutch-speaking people who lived about 50 miles north of New York City. By her teenage years, she had been sold three times and was scarred from beatings she suffered when she did not understand orders in English.

In 1827, a year before New York implemented its gradual emancipation plan, she ran away to a Quaker family. They not only sheltered her, but even supported her in a legal battle: amazingly enough, her son Peter, who had been sold in violation of New York law, was returned from Alabama. Feeling “tall within,” she set out for New York City. She left the Society of Friends, she said, because “they would not let me sing,” and developed her own deeply personal faith: “God himself talks to me.”

After a disastrous time in a New York commune that ended up with her successfully fighting a murder charge, she took the name of Sojourner Truth in 1843 and set out to preach. In traveling through New England, she came to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists. When she arrived in Akron in 1851, she recently had published her autobiography, which she dictated to a white woman, Olive Gilbert. Sales of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth would support her for the rest of her life, as she continued to move throughout the United States, living in Kansas during its tumultuous pre–Civil War years and finally settling in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Although she was listed as an attendee of the 1850 Worcester convention, the Massachusetts women who created its record for the History of Woman Suffrage did not see fit to discuss this black woman at any length in their convention report. Instead, it was Ohio’s “Aunt Fanny,” Frances Dana Gage, who detailed the appearance of Sojourner Truth at the Akron meeting:

The ladies of the movement trembled on seeing a tall, gaunt black woman in a gray dress and white turban, surmounted with an uncouth sun-bonnet, march deliberately into the church, walk with the air of a queen up the aisle, and take her seat upon the pulpit steps. A buzz of disapprobation was heard all over the house, and there fell on the listening ear, “An abolition affair!” “Woman’s rights and niggers!”….

At my request, order was restored, and the business of the Convention went on…. All through these sessions old Sojourner, quiet and reticent…sat crouched against the wall on the corner of the pulpit stairs…. At intermission she was busy selling the “Life of Sojourner Truth,” a narrative of her own strange and adventurous life. Again and again, timorous ones came to me and said, with earnestness, “Don’t let her speak, Mrs. Gage, it will ruin us. Every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed up with abolition and niggers, and we shall be utterly denounced.” My only answer was, “We shall see when the time comes.”

The second day the work waxed warm. Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Universalist ministers came in to hear and discuss the resolutions presented. One claimed superior rights and privileges for man, on the ground of “superior intellect;” another, because of the “manhood of Christ”…. Another gave us a theological view of the “sin of our first mother.”

There were very few women in those days who dared to “speak in meeting;” and the august teachers of the people were seemingly getting the better of us, while the boys in the galleries, and the sneerers among the pews, were hugely enjoying the discomfiture, as they supposed, of the “strongminded.” Some of the tender-skinned friends were on the point of losing dignity, and the atmosphere betokened a storm. When, slowly from her seat in the corner rose Sojourner Truth, who, till now, had scarcely lifted her head. “Don’t let her speak!” gasped a half a dozen in my ear. She moved slowly and solemnly to the front, laid her old bonnet at her feet, and turned her great speaking eyes to me. There was a hissing sound of disapprobation above and below. I rose and announced “Sojourner Truth,” and begged the audience to keep silent for a few moments.

The tumult subsided at once, and every eye was fixed on this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piecing the upper air like one in a dream. At her first word there was a profound hush. She spoke in deep tones, which, though not loud, reached every ear in the house and away through the throng at the doors and windows. [In the following, Sojourner Truth’s speech has been freed of the nineteenth-century dialect style that Gage used in recording it. Gage’s occasional descriptive interjections into the body of the speech also have been eliminated.]

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that between the niggers of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there say that women needs to be helped into carriages, lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me. And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [‘Intellect’ someone whispers near.] That’s right, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or nigger’s rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Men had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now that they are asking to do it, the men better let them! Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner has got nothing more to say.”

At Sojourner Truth’s rebuke of the minister who made the point about “intellect,” the audience’s “cheering was loud and long.” When she spoke to the story of Eve, “the first woman God ever made,” Gage said that “almost every sentence elicited deafening applause.” Sojourner Truth “returned to her corner, amid roars of applause, leaving more than one of us with streaming eyes, and hearts beating with gratitude. She had taken us up in her strong arms and carried us,” Gage averred. “I have never in my life seen anything like her magical influence.”

When the speech was over, “hundreds rushed up to shake hands with her,” and Sojourner Truth’s place as a celebrity suffragist was solidified. More than most men or women, black or white, she immediately understood the crucial link between women’s rights and the anti-slavery cause; from the beginning, she could see that women’s needs should not be trivialized nor forced to compete with those of blacks. Earlier than Susan B. Anthony and others who became famous, Sojourner Truth stood tall.

A Currier & Ives print of the Bloomer style, circa 1851. (Library of Congress)

Not all progress is political. Social change can be of at least equal significance, and one of the greatest issues of the 1850s became feminine apparel. Early in 1851, Elizabeth Smith Miller appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls wearing “Turkish trousers.” An affluent and fashionable young mother, she came to visit her father’s cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The full, almost skirt-like pants that Miller wore were based on a fashion introduced by English Fanny Kemble, whose stage portrayals of Shakespeare’s Juliet in the 1830s had made her one of America’s first entertainment celebrities.

Both Kemble’s professional and personal life led her to feminism. She had given up her career for a South Carolina planter and soon found that the marriage was a disaster. The law was on his side in every disagreement, including their frequent fights over her sympathy for slaves. When she finally left him, it meant leaving her children, too; she did not see them for more than 20 years. She returned to the stage, and in the midst of what was likely personal turmoil, introduced the shockingly different apparel known as “pantalettes.”

While Kemble was a trendsetter, primarily for reasons of style rather than practicality or health, there were others who advocated dress reform for more serious reasons. A thoughtful listener at the Worcester convention might have been moved to consider these ideas when a letter was read from French agriculturist Helene Marie Weber. After apologizing that “circumstances place it out of my power to visit America” for the October convention, she wrote:

The newspapers both of England and America have done me great injustice. While they have described my apparel with the minute accuracy of professional tailors, they have…charged me with undervaluing the female sex and identifying myself with the other…. I have never wished…to be anything but a woman…. I adopted male attire as a matter of convenience in my business…. I have never had cause to regret my adoption of male attire, and never expect to return to a female toilette….

There is no moral or political principle involved in this question…. [If] the superiority of male dress for all purposes of business and recreation is conceded, it is absurd to argue that we should not avail ourselves of its advantages….

Women who prefer the gown should, of course, consult their own pleasure by continuing to wear it; while those whose preference is a male dress, ought not to be blamed for adopting it. I close…by recording my prediction, that in ten years male attire will be generally worn by women of most civilized countries.

Paulina Wright Davis received Weber’s letter via Mildred Spofford, an American living in France, who assured the Worcester audience that the French feminist was “lady-like, modest, and unassuming.” Her deviance in dress was understandable, Spofford urged, for Weber was “a practical agriculturist” who personally conducted “the entire business of her farm.” Although just 25 years old, Weber also was “in the front rank of essayists in France,” and had “a perfect command of the English language.” She not only practiced her feminism in her apparel, but also wrote feminist theory: “She has labored zealously on behalf of her sex, as her numerous tracts on subjects of reform bear testimony,” Spofford concluded. “No writer of the present age has done more.”

One of the Worcester attendees who must have nodded his head in agreement with Weber’s words was Gerrit Smith, Stanton’s cousin and the father of Elizabeth Smith Miller. He had inherited a fortune through a family partnership with New York millionaire John Jacob Astor, and the Smith home in western New York near Seneca Falls was a haven for both runaway slaves and the era’s most prominent liberals. Stanton later remembered his estate as a place where “one would meet the first families in the State, with Indians, Africans, slaveowners, religionists of all sects…each class welcomed and honored.”

Gerrit Smith (Library of Congress)

No one was a stronger advocate of dress reform than Gerrit Smith. Long after women had given up the fight, he argued for making this area a “battleground.” To the end of his life, he believed that women would find greater political success if their appearance were not so strikingly different from that of men. He received isolated support for this reform, often from other men. As early as 1787, Philadelphia’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, a founder of the nation’s first medical school, had written, “I…ascribe the invention of ridiculous and expensive fashions in female dress entirely to the gentlemen, in order to divert the ladies from improving their minds…to secure more arbitrary and unlimited authority over them.” Many others, especially physicians, echoed the same thought, particularly after the Gilded Age brought even more confining corsets and bustles.

Because Gerrit Smith could not model ideal feminine clothing himself, it was no surprise that his daughter did. Cousin Elizabeth liked the idea, too, and soon Seneca Falls was seeing a second revolution, more visual than the first. “I wore the dress for two years,” Stanton recalled, “and found it a great blessing.”

What a sense of liberty I felt, in running up and down stairs with my hands free to carry whatsoever I would, to trip through the rain or snow with no skirts to hold…ready at any moment to climb a hill-top to see the sun go down, or the moon rise, with no ruffles or trails to be…soiled. What an emancipation from little petty vexations.

Her friend Amelia Bloomer already was on record: she had defended Fanny Kemble’s “pantalettes” in one of the first issues of Bloomer’s temperance paper, The Lily. Seeing the practicality of Miller’s costume up close, Bloomer also adopted the style. When she wrote about it in The Lily, her name forever would be attached to the garment. To her chagrin, it was soon clear that many women were more interested in clothing than in temperance, and when she included sewing patterns, subscriptions soared. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune was quick to pick up this second hot story from Seneca Falls, and soon people around the globe were debating the merits of the “Bloomer Costume.”

Although she had not intended to create this “furor,” Bloomer wore the style for “some six or eight years.” That she stuck with it longer than Stanton is probably due to the fact that the Bloomers moved from Seneca Falls to Iowa in 1853. Practicality always has priority over fashion in frontier situations, and it therefore was not surprising that among those Stanton listed as long-term bloomer wearers were “many farmers’ wives.”

Other women’s rights leaders who experimented with the costume included Lucy Stone, the Grimké sisters, and Susan B. Anthony. For the latter women, the change was an especially daring one from the modest Quaker dress of their youth, but for all women, wearing the new style meant inviting controversy and worse. Preachers, in Gerrit Smith’s words, ran “to the Bible, not to learn the truth, but to make the Bible the minister to folly” in preaching against the garment. Using scripture such as “male and female He created them,” clergymen argued that it was sinful for a woman to dress like a man. Any outing in the new clothes became a trial. “People would stare,” Stanton said. “Some men and women make rude remarks; boys follow in crowds, or shout from behind fences.”

In the end, she and others decided to surrender their freedom of movement at least in part because the experiment was literally threatening to the men in their lives: when strangers jeered at the women, “the gentleman in attendance felt it his duty to resent the insult by showing fight.” Elizabeth Smith Miller’s husband especially suffered while trying to support his father-in-law’s visionary ideas. “No man,” Stanton said in praise of Charles Dudley Miller, “went through the ordeal with [such] coolness and dogged determination.” The cousins called on him to escort them in sophisticated places as well as on country outings, and when Washington and New York City were just as hostile to the style as rural bumpkins, the women decided the battle was not worth it. Helene Maria Weber’s prediction was wrong. Male attire was not “generally worn” within the century, let alone within the decade that she forecast. Gerrit Smith, however, would not give up. In 1855, he even refused to attend the annual women’s rights convention over this issue. He railed to his Cousin Elizabeth about women’s timidity: “I am amazed that intelligent women…see not the relation between their dress and the oppressive evils which they are striving to throw off.”

Stanton replied with equal force. She had lived with the experiment of dressing like a man, but Smith had never considered what public reaction would be if he were to adopt any aspect of female apparel. She argued that image was exactly that: a matter of style, not substance, upon which no individual rights should be based. Moreover, women had no reason “to hope that pantaloons would do for us” any more good than pants did for black men. It was not acceptance of apparel that mattered, but acceptance of ideas.

While she “fully agreed that woman is terribly cramped and crippled in her present style of dress,” this was not the battleground on which to win the war. She pointed out that New York women recently had achieved an emancipating property law, something far more important than a fashion victory. “Depend on it,” Stanton wrote, “when men and women…think less of sex and more of mind, we shall all lead…higher lives.”

Smith did not let the issue rest with his cousin; he wrote an article on the subject that Frederick Douglass published in his reform newspaper. When Frances Dana Gage read it, she responded with an angry letter to the editor:

This article, though addressed to Mrs. Stanton, is an attack upon every one engaged in the cause…. He has made the whole battle-ground of the Woman’s Rights Movement her dress. We must own ourselves under the law first, own our bodies, our earnings, our genius, and our consciences; then we will turn to the lesser matter of what shall be the garniture of the body.

Gage, Stanton, and others made a reasoned case for a pragmatic solution to their problem, and most women agreed. They logically concluded that the political battle was both more important than the social one, and that it was more likely to be won if women were not engaged in a war on two fronts. A few women, however, ignored both the movement’s leadership and the derisive jeers of scoffers to continue to wear the garment.

Perhaps the most dedicated and successful was Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck. She adopted pants earlier than the more famous Elizabeth Smith Miller. Late in life, she was openly resentful that others, especially Amelia Bloomer, became celebrities while her much longer commitment went unrecognized. In 1849, two years before the dress-reform publicity from Seneca Falls, 22-year-old Lydia Sayer was refused admission to a New York female seminary because she wore pantaloons. This was a defining moment of her life, and the clothing choice became one of principle. Long after most feminists gave up the fight, Hasbrouck carried on. In 1856, she began a biweekly publication, The Sibyl, that attracted a sufficient audience to keep it in business for almost a decade. Her chief editorial concern was improved health from less confining clothing, a point of view doubtless reinforced by the fact that she married and bore three children during the decade of The Sibyl. She also took on the presidency of the hopefully named National Dress Reform Association in 1863. The Civil War might have offered an occasion for more practical clothing, but the association never grew into a power. Nonetheless, with a highly supportive husband, she carried on her crusade to impressive personal success: in 1880, Lydia Hasbrouck was elected to the school board of Middletown, New York.

She achieved this electoral victory despite decades of unabashed feminism, for she not only wore unconventional clothing, but also refused to pay taxes because she could not vote. Perhaps her story makes Gerrit Smith’s point: Hasbrouck’s appearance was more like that of a man, and her townspeople treated her with respect that was measurable in votes. The more conservatively dressed suffragists, meanwhile, were not elected to anything. Conceivably, their dress-for-success strategy was wrong.

During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement grew in both sophistication and numbers. Its system of operations was refined so that techniques for public relations and coalition-building became routine. In well-reported meetings, resolutions were debated and publicized. Letters to the editor and other writings educated the public on women’s issues through nationally circulated media. In addition, the movement increased the number of supporters who came to conventions, offered donations of time and occasional money, and, most importantly, went home to organize meetings of their own. Beyond that, the decade developed a base of committed, quality leadership that would serve through the century.

All of this was evident at the 1851 annual meeting. Seeing no reason to argue with success, the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention was held under the same circumstances as the first: in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, with Ohio’s Frances Dana Gage as president. Celebrities new to the list of endorsers were Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, an extremely popular preacher, and famous educator Horace Mann. Conventioneers also were thrilled to hear a speech by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a well-known novelist and New York Tribune columnist.

Once more, the convention’s report said that “every session” of the two-day meeting “was so crowded at an early hour that hundreds were unable to gain admittance.” Because of the throng who wanted to hear, the closing session was moved to City Hall, and even that venue was not sufficiently large. Much later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would summarize, “in the whole history of the woman suffrage movement there never was at one time more able and eloquent men and women on our platform and represented by letter than in those Worcester Conventions.”

In 1852, the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention moved out of Massachusetts and back to the movement’s original home of western New York. Held in Syracuse for an unprecedented three days, the September 8–10 meeting drew people from eight states and Canada. For the first time, the women charged one shilling for admission, but that did nothing to deter attendance, for “City Hall was densely packed at every session.” The program “called out immense audiences, attracted many eminent persons…and was most favorably noticed in the press.”

Despite the crowd, “the proceedings were orderly and harmonious throughout” under presiding officer Lucretia Mott. A nominating committee had recommended her “as permanent President,” and the convention elected this faithful, oldest member of the original movement by acclamation. Ever modest, she “sat far back in the audience” and asked for a second confirming vote before accepting the chair. In so doing, she “rendered herself liable to expulsion” from the Society of Friends, because the admission fee that had been charged violated Quaker tradition. Just four years after Mott herself had considered a female president to be a dangerous experiment at the Rochester convention, she presided in the words of the Syracuse Standard “with an ease, dignity, and grace that might be envied by the most experienced legislator in the country.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who bore the fifth of her seven children in 1852, did not come to Syracuse. It was, however, the first convention for two other women who would form the backbone of the movement for the rest of the century: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony. With Stanton, they would be the three coeditors of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a history in which they were also, in Stanton’s words, “among the chief actors.” (The surnames of Ohio’s Frances Dana Gage and New York’s Matilda Joslyn Gage appear to be coincidental; if there was any family connection between their husbands, it was not close.)

At the time of the Syracuse convention, Matilda Joslyn Gage was 26 years old and married to a merchant who valued his brilliant wife; affluent and well-dressed, but frequently ill, she would be the mother of five. When she entered the Syracuse convention, Gage did not know a single other woman. She sat alone, “trembling” as she anticipated her first public speech, but she was determined to make it clear why she was there. Later, Gage wrote of herself: “She consulted no one as to time and opportunity, but when her courage had reached a sufficiently high point, with palpitating heart she ascended the platform, where she was cordially given place by Mrs. Mott, whose kindness to her at this supreme moment of her life was never forgotten.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (Library of Congress)

Gage was the youngest person to speak, and the better-than-average education she received from her physician father was reflected in the comments she made. A natural historian from youth, she told the audience of outstanding female models from Silesia to Ireland and from astronomers to musicians. It was just the beginning of her career as the movement’s chief historian and most thoughtful intellectual.

By the time of the Syracuse convention, Susan Brownell Anthony was 32 and had spent more than a decade as a teacher in upstate New York, a career that she turned to when her father went bankrupt in the 1837 financial panic. When family finances were better in 1849, she came home and volunteered for the Daughters of Temperance. Ironically, this first national depression provided an economic opportunity for a number of future female leaders who otherwise never would have lived independently from their fathers and husbands.

Her parents and her sister Mary had gone to the 1848 Rochester convention and signed its resolutions, but, like Amelia Bloomer, Anthony was more interested in temperance than in women’s rights. Although she had met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1850 through their mutual friend Bloomer, Anthony did not attend the women’s rights convention either that year or the next.

The events that galvanized a change in her priorities occurred just before and after the Syracuse convention. In January 1852 she, Dr. Lydia Fowler, and other women were refused permission to speak at a temperance rally in Albany. As a Quaker, Anthony was accustomed to speaking; she left the event in protest, and soon organized the alternative Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. Two more such insults deepened her awareness of the secondary place of women, even in liberal organizations: in 1853, she was not recognized as a delegate at the World’s Temperance Convention in New York City and was forbidden to speak at a convention of the state teachers’ association. The men of these organizations had learned nothing since women were banned from the World Anti-Slavery Convention, and they again chose to drive away their sisters in these causes.

Susan B. Anthony (Library of Congress)

More than most women, Susan B. Anthony saw things in political and organizational terms, and the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society was just the first example of her forte in organizing women. Almost from the beginning, Anthony targeted female political power, expressed in groups, as fundamental to success. Seldom swayed from this straightforward approach, she would set aside temperance, abolition, and other reforms to place singular value on women’s rights and within that area, she would spend her life aimed like an arrow on the vote.

This sense of purpose was evident in physician Harriot K. Hunt, who also attended the 1852 convention. That year, she began an annual effort to draw attention to the vote. Along with her tax payment, Dr. Hunt sent a proclamation to the “treasurer, and the Assessors, and other Authorities of the city of Boston, and the Citizens generally”:

Harriot K. Hunt, physician, a native and permanent resident of the city of Boston…begs leave to protest against the injustice and inequality of levying taxes upon women, and at the same time, refusing them any voice or vote…. Even drunkards, felons, idiots, and lunatics, if men, may still enjoy the right of voting to which no woman, however large the amount of taxes she pays, however respectable her character, or useful her life, can ever attain.

She pointed out that because women lacked the vote, women’s priorities were rarely considered when the government spent the taxes they paid. If women had the vote, she said, they would encourage common sense in government: women would provide schools and colleges to “supply our girls with occupation” and “save them from lives of frivolity and emptiness,” which, in turn, would create more taxpayers. Year after year, Hunt would file similar protests with her taxes.

The Syracuse convention was dominated by one aspect that boded ill for the future: the first confrontation between Protestant theologian Antoinette Brown and Jewish immigrant Ernestine Rose. In one of the many long speeches Brown made as she wrestled with contradictory biblical statements on women, she said in part: “The Bible…recognizes neither male nor female in Christ Jesus…. The submission enjoined upon the wife in the New Testament…is a Christian submission due from man to man, and from man to woman.” By the end, Rose had had enough:

When the inhabitants of Boston converted their harbor into a teapot…they did not go to the Bible for their authority; for if they had, they would have been told…“to render unto Caesar what belonged to Caesar” [and] “Submit to the powers that be, for they are of God.” No! on Human Rights and Freedom…there is no need of written authority.

Others joined “the somewhat bitter discussion,” which continued “for two days, calling out great diversity.” At one point, “the Rev. Junius Hatch made so coarse a speech” that the audience “called out, Sit down! Shut up!” and the president “was obliged to call him to order.” The convention’s wisdom in their presidential choice was clear, for Lucretia Mott was exactly the right person to preside over this clash. Obviously personally devout, she also firmly believed in freedom of expression, and perhaps only she was capable of bringing the meeting to an amicable close.

The undercurrent of animosity between the traditional Christians and the freethinkers would erupt again in the future. Christian debaters who labeled their opponents as “infidels” took a terrible risk, because reporters were invariably present at women’s rights conventions; the participants, after all, eagerly sought publicity and most editorialists were delighted to expand on the “infidel” idea. By labeling women’s rights advocates as dangerous atheists, both press and pulpit could ignore the questions of justice that the women raised. Moreover, although increasing numbers of Catholic and Jewish people immigrated to the United States, Ernestine Rose long would remain the leadership’s only Jew, and in the whole long history to come of the suffrage movement, there never would be a prominent Catholic woman. The “diversity” of opinion was, in fact, almost wholly within the context of Protestantism and not nearly so great as it might have been. This also applied to African American suffrage activists—women marginalized throughout the movement and only recently finding their place in the history of suffrage activism.

That the Syracuse convention ended in unity was perhaps due to the distraction of a different debate: whether or not the movement should organize more formally. For the 1850s, the question was largely answered with an overwhelming no. Mary Springstead “moved that the Convention proceed to organize a National Woman’s Rights Society,” but a letter from Angelina Grimké Weld argued differently, predicting that more formality would “prove a burden, a clog, an incumbrance, rather than a help.” Ernestine Rose agreed that “organizations were like Chinese bandages” in their restrictiveness, and Harriot K. Hunt preferred “spontaneity,” which she deemed “a law of nature.” Lucy Stone made perhaps the strongest argument when she said they “had all been in permanent organizations, and therefore dread them.”

Paulina Wright Davis demonstrated her skill at achieving resolution, and the convention adopted her motion that “persons in any or all of our States who are interested in this great reform” should call state and local meetings, “certainly as often as once a year.” That was the way the movement would proceed until after the Civil War: without any bylaws, headquarters, official publication, or other accoutrements of formal organization. The cause would carry on, as Weld had suggested, “by the natural ties of spiritual affinity.”

These natural ties were strengthened by Davis herself when, just six months after the convention, she began publishing The Una from her Providence, Rhode Island, home. Her February 1853 inaugural issue announced: “Our plan is to publish a paper monthly…. Our purpose is to discuss the rights, duties, sphere, and destiny of women fully and fearlessly.” The Una, she said, “signifies truth.” For three years, Davis and her assistant Caroline H. Dall provided a communication network for feminists. Along with such familiars as Stanton, Stone, and Frances Dana Gage, The Una also featured mainstream writers such as Ohio author Hannah Tracy Cutler, educator and publisher Elizabeth Peabody, the New York Tribune’s Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and “Fanny Fern,” the pseudonym of Sara Parton who was so popular that in 1855, the New York Ledger paid her a fabulous $100 weekly for just one column. Illustrious men wrote for The Una too, including literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Besides publishing, the other standard method of spreading the women’s rights gospel was through lecture tours. Fall 1853 featured a particularly adventurous one, when Dr. Lydia Fowler took leave of her New York City medical practice to join Vermont newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols in frontier Wisconsin. Nichols estimated that they traveled 900 miles, “speaking in forty-three towns to audiences estimated at 30,000 in the aggregate.” They spoke to women’s rights through the facade of temperance, with “Mrs. F.” using her medical expertise on “the physiological effects of alcohol” and Nichols emphasizing the tragic link between alcohol abuse and women’s lack of legal rights. Once again, male temperance leaders in Milwaukee were hostile to this assistance from women, but their opposition backfired, as Wisconsin women welcomed the lecturers. When men closed off lecture halls, the women found alternate space.

The Midwest also hosted its first national women’s rights convention in 1853. Cleveland was the site of the Fourth National Convention, with attendees from eight Northern states. Presiding officers Lucretia Mott and Frances Dana Gage laid down firm rules at the beginning, and the 1,500 attendees conducted a meeting that was more amicable than the Syracuse one had been. Newspaper response was detailed and generally favorable, although the Cleveland Plain Dealer could not resist playing favorites: “the handsomest woman” was Antoinette Brown, and although “Mrs. Gage is not a handsome woman, you can see genius in her eye.”

Among the noteworthy new speakers was Henry Blackwell, brother of Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who doubtless hoped to impress his future wife, Lucy Stone, by speaking “with great eloquence for nearly an hour.” His chief point was that “the interests of the sexes are inseparably connected, and in the elevation of one lies the salvation of the other.” That it was women who needed to be “elevated” and men who needed to be “saved” did not require spelling out.

Back East, a very different event occurred that year. Just prior to the Cleveland convention, New York City hosted the World’s Fair. This prompted many organizations to call meetings for the same time and place; among them was what women’s rights leaders would dub “The Half World’s Temperance Convention.” Antoinette Brown’s “handsome” appearance was worth little among the men of the temperance movement, for once again, they excluded women, Brown specifically. Horace Greeley sarcastically reported on September 7, 1853:

This convention has completed three of its four business sessions, and the results may be summed up as follows:

First Day—Crowding a woman off the platform

Second Day—Gagging her

Third Day—Voting that she shall stay gagged.

Having thus disposed of the main question, we presume the incidentals will be finished this morning.

The following Sunday evening, however, Brown preached to a New York City audience of 5,000. Even more significantly, the next week simple farm folk quietly registered their disagreement with the temperance leaders: on September 15, the First Congregational Church of Wayne County, New York, ordained Rev. Antoinette Brown. She was the first woman to be an official minister of a church in a mainstream American denomination.

In the weeks that followed, many expressed respect for her and the other women, including Susan B. Anthony, who were so unchivalrously turned away from the convention. Pointing out that Brown had been duly elected as a delegate by not merely one, but two, temperance organizations, more liberal ministers took on their colleagues: “If any man says that Antoinette Brown forced the subject of ‘Woman’s Rights’ on that Temperance Convention,” Rev. William Henry Channing fumed, “he lies. She never dreamed of asking any privilege as a woman; she stood there in her right as a delegate.” Rev. Channing denounced his fellow pastors, calling them “Reverend for what?” He cited an onlooker at the temperance rally who inquired, “Are those men drunk?”

Attendees in front of the Crystal Palace at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1853, when women and other activists gathered for a world temperance convention. (Wikimedia/Karl Gildemeister)

In addition to the uproarious temperance meeting, abolitionists and other supporters of controversial causes held meetings. By the end of the week, the right-wing newspapers of the city had rallied the men who felt threatened by all this change. Unfortunately, the last of these meetings was on women’s rights. As so many people were in New York for other events, this gathering, although not the official annual convention, attracted the greatest crowd thus far: 11 states were represented, as well as England and Germany. Even with a 25-cent admission, every one of the 3,000 seats in the Broadway Tabernacle was sold out—but not everyone was there to be enlightened.

The event went down in feminist history as “The Mob Convention.” By “hissing, yelling, stamping, and all manner of unseemly interruptions,” men in the audience thwarted the convention’s speakers. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other men were attacked in the same way that the women were. Determined orators took on the mob and persisted in rising above the din, occasionally with success. “Never before,” said Horace Greeley’s editorial, “have we heard Antoinette Brown, Mrs. Rose, and Lucy Stone speak with such power…. When Lucy Stone closed the discussion with some pungent, yet pathetic, remarks on the opposition…it was evident that if any rowdies had an ant-hole in the bottom of his boot, he would inevitably have sunk through it and disappeared forever.”

The rowdies, however, did not disappear. They were there again the next day, and this time, Sojourner Truth took them on. In the words of her New York women’s rights colleagues, she personified the mob’s “two most hated elements,” for “she was black and she was a woman, and all the insults that could be cast upon color and sex were hurled at her; but there she stood, calm and dignified, a grand, wise woman.” When “the terrible turmoil” abated a bit, Sojourner Truth’s powerful voice rolled out:

Is it not good for me to come and draw forth a spirit, to see what kind of spirit people are of? I see that some of you have got the spirit of a goose, and some have got the spirit of a snake…. I was a slave in the State of New York, and now I am a good citizen of this State…. I know it [makes you] feel like hissing…to see a colored woman get up and tell you…about Woman’s Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again, and now I am here….

We’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.

New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley (Library of Congress)

The mob quieted briefly to satisfy their curiosity about German Mathilde Anneke, who recently fled from the repressive aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Ernestine Rose translated for her, and when she told the audience that Anneke “could hardly express her astonishment at what she witnessed” in the hall because it contradicted “what she had heard so much of freedom in America,” the tumult again erupted, proving her point. Rose called for the police, saying that “we have a right to this protection, for we pay our money for it.” She pointed out that the mayor had “promised to see that our meetings should not be disturbed,” but no police came.

As translator, Rose took over the platform from President Lucretia Mott, who, consistent with Quaker principles, refused to bring in the police. In the end, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt shouted out a resolution thanking Lucretia Mott “for the grace, firmness, ability, and courtesy” that Mott had demonstrated in the “arduous” task of presiding, and the convention adjourned. That it was a pious woman in Quaker dress who was so abused by these political thugs did not pass unnoticed, and, in the eyes of many, the mob’s behavior backfired. “If it had been their earnest desire to strengthen the cause of Woman’s Rights,” Horace Greeley said later, “they could not have done the work half so effectively. Nothing is so good for a weak and unpopular movement as this sort of opposition.” William Cullen Bryant, famed poet and editor of The Evening Post, also spoke out “against mob law and for the rights of woman.” In the end, the “spirit of a snake” whiplashed and bit its own tail.

Upper-class life was becoming sufficiently genteel in the 1850s that wealthy families began taking summer vacations, a phenomenon that would not extend to most people until the next century. A new railroad network in this decade made travel something to be desired instead of merely endured, and Southerners especially began leaving the heat, humidity, and frequently fatal mosquitoes of plantation life for the cool lakes and mountains of the North. New York’s Saratoga Springs was one of the nation’s first resort towns, and, in the summer of 1854, Susan B. Anthony demonstrated her savvy by going where the affluent and influential were likely to be. She wanted to use “the fashionable season” to reach “a new class of hearers.”

Initially, things did not go well for the would-be lecturer. Anthony acknowledged that she had “but little experience as a speaker,” and worse, someone stole her purse. She had no money to pay the printer for the flyers she ordered to advertise the event, and some of the scheduled speakers sent last-minute cancellations. In this unhappy situation, she came upon vacationer Matilda Joslyn Gage, whom Anthony had met when they both were newcomers at the Syracuse convention. Gage provided the money that Anthony lacked and even overcame her terror of speaking to join the platform. They both were favorably reviewed in the press that followed—along with great detail on Gage’s stylish clothes.

For the rest of the decade, women’s rights advocates would spend some of each summer in Saratoga. Anthony honed her fundraising and networking skills there. In 1855, for example, she “announced that woman’s rights tracts…were for sale at the door” after the speeches, and she told the audience that “they must take The Una.” Even though she was disappointed that The Woman’s Advocate confined itself to economic issues and did not endorse suffrage, she also sold this new Philadelphia-based paper, which was run by Anna E. McDowell and an all-female staff. Saratoga was exceptional in its ability to support fundraising: in 1855 alone, Anthony sold 20,000 pamphlets on women’s rights. Many of them ended up in the South, where they were often the only such information available. Twenty years later, for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton met a Texas woman who said that her introduction to the cause had come through a Georgia friend who attended a women’s rights rally in Saratoga and brought back tracts.

The resort also was a rare opportunity for fun: Charles F. Hovey, a faithful supporter of the liberated women, made it a “usual custom” to invite them for “a bountiful repast” at the lake, and he even took them sailing. Moreover, the first endowment that the women’s movement received was from this man: when Hovey died in 1859, he left $50,000 for the promotion of this and other reforms.

Their Saratoga experience cemented a friendship between Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony that culminated decades later with their coeditorship of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. The third coeditor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, also set a milestone in 1854: she sent an address to the New York legislature, along with 5,931 petition signatures for “the just and equal rights of women.” With Susan B. Anthony doing the legwork, the petition-gathering effort continued through the rest of the year. Anthony’s organizational abilities sharpened as she followed this plan through: while “getting petitions and subscribers to The Una,” she reported holding “conventions in fifty-four counties.”

This pattern became a model for the way that Stanton and Anthony would work: Stanton used her powerful writing skills, while Anthony excelled at the fieldwork. Not only was this an expression of their individual fortes, but also, in the first years of their relationship, it was essential because Stanton was tied down with children. Anthony became a frequent visitor to Seneca Falls, and after the seven little Stantons were in bed, their mother and “Aunt Susan” sat by the fireside and plotted strategy. The relationship was well defined by this commonly used description: Stanton made the thunderbolts, and Anthony threw them.

While these two led the petitioning of the New York legislature, Caroline Severance did the same for the Ohio Women’s Rights Association. The married women’s property rights bill that she proposed in 1854 was not taken up, but Massachusetts women were successful in winning property rights this year, and that example would be quickly emulated elsewhere. It was Mary Upton Ferrin of Salem who was almost singlehandedly responsible for setting the Massachusetts precedent. From 1848, when she became aware of the legalisms that prevented women from writing valid wills, Ferrin spent six years educating Massachusetts women on their lack of rights and asking for signatures. “Many persons laughed at her,” said her friends later, “but knowing it to be a righteous work, and deeming laughter healthful to those indulging in it, Mrs. Ferrin continued.” Without any connection to the emerging women’s movement, Ferrin “traveled six hundred miles, two-thirds of it on foot,” to gather the petitions that culminated in the 1854 success. During the next few years, other states began similarly revising their laws.

Lucy Stone (Library of Congress)

Perhaps the most talked-of event of 1855 regarded a completely different facet of the movement: the innovative wedding of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. Even though she was appreciably older than he, Blackwell courted her assiduously. He finally persuaded her to marry by suggesting not only that they emulate the Stantons and eliminate the bridal vow “to obey,” but also that their ceremony include a protest against the laws on marriage that they would circulate in the press. Most significantly, he encouraged her to retain the name by which she was known. The precedent was so unusual that “stoner” became a commonly used nineteenth-century noun to denote a woman who kept her maiden name. Nonetheless, habits were so strong that even women’s rights documents invariably added a marital honorific, turning her into “Mrs. Stone.”

The next year, Samuel Blackwell won his even longer courtship of Antoinette Brown, but unlike her former Oberlin classmate Lucy Stone, Brown took her husband’s name. With this, the Blackwells—physicians Elizabeth and Emily, Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone, and Samuel and Antoinette Brown Blackwell—became the century’s most visibly feminist family.

Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were thus very much the stars of the 1855 national convention, which took place in the calmer clime of Cincinnati in October. Martha C. Wright presided in the absence of her sister, Lucretia Mott. Wright, one of the five who had planned the Seneca Falls convention, pointed out that in the few years since that convention, “the newspapers which ridiculed and slandered us at first are beginning to give impartial accounts of our meetings. Newspapers,” she noted sagaciously, “do not lead, but follow public opinion.” A last gasp of the dress reform movement provided a spirit of fun in Cincinnati, as well as an exercise in consciousness raising: while some of women wore bloomers, their “gentlemen” donned shawls.

The women tested themselves the next year by going back to the scene of the “Mob Convention,” Broadway Tabernacle. Perhaps because it was late November and New York was not filled with fair-goers looking for a cheap thrill, the convention was orderly. Martha Wright called it to order, and Lucy Stone was elected president. “This is a day of congratulation,” she said: “It is our Seventh Annual National Woman’s Rights Convention,” and in just a few years, “almost every Northern state has more or less modified its laws.” She reeled off a systematic list of property rights changes in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island, and then verbally moved west:

Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana have also very materially modified their laws. And Wisconsin—God bless these young States—has granted almost all that has been asked except the right of suffrage…. In Michigan, it has been moved that women should have a right to their own babies, which none of you ladies have here in New York.

She went on with even more astonishing news: the Nebraska House had passed a bill granting women the vote! That it was lost in the senate, Stone said, was “only because of the too early closing of the session.” The full story, however, was a bit more complex. It was true that the territorial legislature of infant Nebraska displayed far more liberalism than was ever the case in the ossified East. Nebraska men, of their own volition and without any organized pressure, invited Amelia Bloomer, who had recently moved from Seneca Falls to Iowa, to address them in December 1855. The next month, the House followed up on her well-received speech and, by a vote of 14 to 11, passed “a bill to confer suffrage equally upon women.” Some legislators, however, seemed surprised with themselves: in the words of a local newspaper, the Chronotype, on January 30, 1856, “its passage by the House of Representatives created a great deal of talk, and several members threatened to resign.” Although the newspaper alleged that the upper chamber failed to follow the House “only for want of time,” on the last day of the session, it also reported a long filibuster on a minor local bill, which no member bothered to interrupt. Nor were women’s rights taken up at later sessions, and Amelia Bloomer’s positive effect was apparently brief.

Stone was perceptive in blessing these “young states,” which would prove to be consistently ahead of older ones in the future. She was wrong, however, on her other assumptions. Though understandable, it was naive of her to believe that the Nebraska Senate loss was merely a matter of timing. This was simply the first of many times when politicians would assure women that their cause was nearly won, expecting them to go away happy in the innocent belief that only a technicality prevented men from doing the right thing. Stone was even more wrong when she moved from politics to education: she predicted that “our demand that Harvard and Yale Colleges should admit women…waits only for a little time.” As it turned out, a “little time” was more than 100 years. The midpoint of the twentieth century would be long past before these most conservative of institutions finally admitted women to their undergraduate colleges.

That these hopeful predictions were so badly off probably was due to the fact that the property rights issue was being won with relative ease. After the 1850s, women did not have to expend much effort on this aspect of their great reforms, and so it was understandable that their judgments on other issues would be falsely skewed by this quick success. The vote for women was another matter, however, and its singular relationship to democracy made that effort much harder.

Moreover, the 1850s were infused with a spirit of change in a multiplicity of areas: from vegetarianism and “water cures” to celibacy and “complex marriage” in utopian societies, it was an age of experimentation. When all of those ideas channeled into one major one—abolition—with the coming of the Civil War, the expansion of women’s rights from property rights to other civil rights would stall.

A preview of the Civil War played out in Kansas during the decade. Whether this territory would become “Free Soil” or lead to an immense expansion of slavery was the great question. Devoted abolitionists moved there, and Southerners did the same. “Bleeding Kansas” was the result: through the 1850s, anarchy prevailed, as women and men suffered from politically motivated arson and murder.

Clarina Howard Nichols (Kansas State Historical Society)

Vermont’s Clarina Howard Nichols was among those who went to Kansas to support the abolitionists, and along the way, she discovered that her women’s rights reputation preceded her. She received many invitations to speak, including one at a constitutional convention in Topeka. Her husband’s illness prevented her from accepting, and so the convention did not hear the case for including women as voters in the new Kansas constitution. Without any female advocacy, seven delegates, including the governor, nevertheless voted to eliminate “male” from the proposed enfranchisement clause of the state constitution in 1855.

Ohio, a “middle-aged state” compared with Kansas, came even closer to setting the precedent that instead would elude women for decades. While revising property laws in 1857, its senate cast a vote on female enfranchisement: in response to some 10,000 petitions gathered by Caroline Severance, Frances Dana Gage, Hannah Tracy Cutler, and other Ohio women, a committee endorsed the amending of the state constitution to give women the vote. On the floor, the senators tied 44 to 44, which meant that the amendment was not adopted. It was the first of many such legislative heartbreaks.

Decades would pass before suffragists again saw similarly close margins. As the 1850s drew to a close, everything focused on the issue of slavery, and then the war came. A careful student of history knows that a period of conservatism follows almost every war, and the century would end before there was a genuine revival of the spirit of the 1850s. One thing that favors reform, however, is the very fact that the future cannot be predicted: the actors in this great American drama did not know that their lives would end before their goals were accomplished, and so they carried on.

In 1856, women watched the first election with participation from the new Republican Party. The neophyte group was the antithesis of what it would be at the beginning of the twenty-first century: those who joined the Republican Party of the 1850s never labeled themselves “conservatives,” but were instead unabashed radicals wholly dedicated to ending slavery. One of the ways in which the new party displayed its disposition for reform was the first promotion of a woman as part of a presidential campaign. Jessie Benton Fremont, wife of Republican candidate Charles Fremont, became the first to star as a potential first lady and the first to be denounced as excessively ambitious. Had she been male, perhaps she would have been the candidate herself, for as the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, a longtime senator from Missouri, she knew and loved politics. The Republicans not only used her connections, but also made her an integral part of the campaign, including a smiling picture of “Our Jessie” on lapel buttons. Although the new party lost, Charles Fremont did surprisingly well without the endorsement of his stoutly Democratic father-in-law. Jessie Benton Fremont would linger on the political stage through the century, occasionally helping suffragists with financial contributions, but never risking her political insider position by openly joining them.

There was no national convention the following year, although there were so many state ones that the authors of the History of Woman Suffrage only realized this omission in surprised retrospect: “The year 1857 seems to have passed without a National Convention,” they wrote. In May 1858, they met again in New York. Although the convention was slightly disrupted “by the rowdyism of a number of men occupying the rear part of the hall,” it nonetheless was successful.

Among the newcomers was Sarah Remond, a black woman from Boston who had successfully sued the city in 1853, when a policeman knocked her down the stairs as she tried to integrate an opera audience. Remond would eventually settle in Europe, and her speeches there not only raised funds for abolitionists, but also were a factor in keeping European nations neutral in the Civil War.

Another convention speaker was Eliza Woodson Farnham, who was known for her innovative policies as supervisor of women in Sing Sing prison. Her speech on the “superiority of women” asserted that “woman’s creative power during maternity” made her “second only to God himself.” Farnham suggested that man should consider himself “as a John the Baptist, going before to prepare the world for her coming.” In 1864, Farnham published a major feminist work, Woman and Her Era, in which she expanded on this thesis of the natural superiority of women.

Finally, Parker Pillsbury recommended that “the women hold their next Convention at the ballot-box, as that would do more good than a hundred such as these.” If officials refused to give ballots to women, Pillsbury suggested that they “look the tax collectors in the face and defy them to come for taxes.” Perhaps inspired by Phillips’s words, as well as by the example of Dr. Harriot Hunt, Lucy Stone used 1858 to set another precedent: in the year between her pregnancies at age 39 and 41, she allowed her household goods to be impounded rather than accept taxation without representation.

Stone’s prescient observation at the 1856 convention that the “young states” were leading the older ones was demonstrated again the following year. Out in Indiana, “an immense crowd assembled in the Houses of the Legislature” on January 19, 1859, to hear Dr. Mary F. Thomas read a petition signed by over a thousand Indiana citizens. It asked for “laws giving equal property rights to married women, and to take the necessary steps to so amend the Constitution of the State as to secure to all women the right of suffrage.” Mary Birdstall followed up with a half-hour speech, and the legislature unanimously accepted the women’s documents and requested copies for newspaper publication. The senators then departed, while the House acted as a committee of the whole. Not surprisingly, their parliamentary maneuvers left the women both stranded and confused: they referred the petition to the Committee on Rights and Privileges, which eventually reported “that legislation on this subject is inexpedient at this time.”

In May, intrepid Indiana women were among those who returned to New York for the Ninth National Convention. This one-day meeting held in Mozart Hall has only brief records in the History of Woman Suffrage, which characterized the speeches as “short” and the atmosphere as “turbulent.” Wendell Phillips, “who understood from long experience how to play and lash a mob,” proved the star of the show: “for nearly two hours he held that mocking crowd in the hallow of his hand.” He pointed out, among other things, that “the reformers—the fanatics, as we are called—are the only ones who have launched social and moral questions.” Once again, this 1859 convention adopted resolutions that were “extensively circulated and sent to the Legislature of every state,” but this time, there was little reward. “Owing to the John Brown raid and the general unrest and forebodings of the people on the eve of our civil war,” the report concluded, their resolutions “commanded but little attention.” (White abolitionist John Brown and 16 other white and black men were either killed in or executed for their raid on a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. The object of the raid was to obtain arms, promote a rebellion among slaves, and establish a free state for blacks.)

The distractions of the coming war made the Tenth National Convention the last of its type. Held in New York’s Cooper Institute on May 10 and 11, 1860, it was called to order by Susan B. Anthony, while Martha Wright once again presided. Hecklers left this convention in peace, and excellent stenographers detailed the exact words of lengthy speeches that run for almost 50 pages of fine print in the History of Woman Suffrage. Unfortunately, they were not all amicable speeches.