altar, beseeching Divine guidance, but their own counsel was sought by
men, and given, in the deliberations which resulted in the nation’s
independence. Less than half a century ago, Mrs. E. F. Ellett took on
herself the task of collecting the facts, and sketching the biographies,
of the women who were known to have contributed to the success of the
country in its struggle for independence. She was successful beyond her
expectations, and published three volumes of about three hundred pages
each, containing biographical sketches of nearly one hundred and seventy
women. Despite the light esteem in which the service of women has been
held, and the ease with which it has been forgotten, their record had
been preserved, and their memories tenderly perpetuated for
three-quarters of a century.
Foremost among them stands Mrs. Mercy Warren, wife of Joseph Warren, and
sister of James Otis, author of the never-to-be-forgotten axiom, that
“Taxation without representation is tyranny!” She possessed the fiery
ardor and patriotic zeal of her distinguished brother, with more
political wisdom and sagacity. She was the first one to suggest the
doctrine of the “right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as
inherent, and belonging equally to all mankind”; and the patriots of
that day accepted her teaching. She first of all counseled separation
from the mother country as the only solution of the political problem.
She so impressed her convictions upon Samuel and John Adams that they
were foremost in their advocacy of “independence,” and received, at
first, marked discourtesy from their contemporaries for their
imprudence.
She corresponded with the Adamses, Jefferson, Generals Gerry and Knox,
Lee and Gates, and others who sought her advice. She entertained General
and Mrs. Washington, supplied political parties with their arguments,
and was the first woman to teach political leaders their duties in
matters of state. She kept a faithful record of events during the
Revolutionary War, drew her own conclusions as a philosopher and
politician, and at the close of the struggle published a history of the
war, which can be found in some of the New England libraries, and which
contains faithful portraits of the most eminent men of the day.
Rochefoucauld, in his “Tour of the United States,” says of her, “Seldom
has a woman in any age acquired such ascendancy by the mere force of a
powerful intellect, and her influence continued through life.”
So grand a leader had plenty of followers, and while there appears to
have been no other woman of the time whose influence was as powerful,
there were not a few who almost reached the altitude of her rare
development. The _morale_ of these women penetrated the men of the time
with a sinewy courage that neither weakened nor flagged. They enforced
their words of cheer by relinquishing prospects of advantage for
themselves, renouncing tea and all other imported luxuries, and pledged
themselves to card, spin, and weave the clothing of their households,
and as far as possible of the army. They gave their own property for the
purchase of arms and ammunition for the soldiers, and melted their
wealth of pewter ware, in which many of the colonial households were
rich, and ran it into bullets for the army. They raised grain, gathered
it, and caused it to be ground for bread, that the poor and feeble might
be fed.
They visited the hospitals with proper diet for the sick and wounded,
sought out the dungeons of the provost and the crowded holds of the
prison-ships, with food and medicine in their hands and heroic words on
their lips. They unsparingly condemned coldness or backwardness in the
nation’s cause, and young girls refused the suits of lovers till they
had obeyed the call of their country for military service. They received
their beloved dead, slain in battle, and forbore to weep, although their
hearts were breaking. They even hushed the bitter resentment of their
souls, which had been aroused by British invasion, and gave Christian
burial to their enemies, who, but for them, at times would not have
received it. They trained their little children to the same
uncomplaining patience, the same steely endurance, and the same heroic
love of liberty which fired their own hearts, until boys and girls
gloried in danger and privation. What wonder that the heroes of the
Revolutionary War proved invincible!
John Adams, the second President of the Republic, knew the women of the
Revolution well, and was able to measure a superior woman wherever he
found her, and to estimate her influence. His own wife, Mrs. Abigail
Adams, was the personal friend of Mrs. Mercy Warren, and every whit her
peer. Her husband was proud to acknowledge her as his equal in all save
early education, which was accorded him in large measure and wholly
denied her, as she never attended school a day in her life. In one of
his letters to his wife Mr. Adams comments on the futile efforts of the
British General Howe to obtain possession of Philadelphia, which the
colonists foiled for a long time. He writes her, “I do not believe
General Howe has a very great woman for a wife. A smart wife would have
put Howe in possession of Philadelphia a long time ago.”
In the winter of 1780, the resources of the country touched their lowest
point, and allowed but the scantiest supply of food and clothing for any
one. British cruisers on the coast destroyed every hope of aid from the
merchant vessels, and the cup of misfortune pressed to the lips of the
struggling colonists overflowed with bitterness. Even the ability of the
wealthiest and most generous was exhausted by the repeated drafts made
on them. So great was the need of the army, that General Steuben, who
had been aid-de-camp to the king of Prussia, and had learned the art of
war from the renowned Frederic the Great, declared that “there was not a
commander in all Europe who could keep his troops together a week in
such suffering and destitution.”
But when all despaired the women rallied. All else was temporarily
forgotten. The women of Philadelphia went forth from house to house,
soliciting money, or whatever could be converted into money. They asked
for cloth, garments, and food. Rich women stripped themselves of jewels
that were heirlooms in their families, pillaged their parlors of antique
bric-a-brac, with the hope that it might find purchasers, and emptied
their purses of the last penny they possessed. More than seventy-five
hundred dollars in specie were collected, when hard money was at its
highest value. One woman cut five hundred pairs of pantaloons with her
own hand, and superintended their manufacture. Mrs. Bache, a daughter of
Dr. Franklin, was a leading spirit in these patriotic efforts. When a
company of French noblemen called on her, she conducted them to her
parlor, and showed them a pile of twenty-two hundred shirts for the
army, collected by herself, each one marked with the name of the woman
who had cut and made it.
Nor was this a mere spasm of helpfulness, that soon died out in
forgetfulness and inaction. All through that dreary winter women
continued their visits to Washington’s camp, fortifying the men with
their own inflexible spirit, and tiding them over this darkest passage
in their experience, with steady streams of beneficence. They always
went laden with comforts for the needy and the sick, and were prepared
to serve as cook or seamstress, amanuensis or nurse, equally prompt with
hymn or story, Bible-reading or prayer, as occasion demanded.
While the colonial women were a mighty bulwark of strength to the
struggling men of the embryo nation, some of them were unforgetful of
their own rights, and in advance of the formation of the new government
asked for recognition. Abigail Smith Adams, the wife of John Adams of
Massachusetts, was a woman of strong convictions, and of large
intellectual abilities. She wrote her husband, in March, 1776, then at
the Colonial Congress in Philadelphia, and urged the claims of her sex
upon his attention, demanding for them representation when the
government was organized. She wrote as follows:
“I long to hear that you have declared an independency; and in the new
code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, _I
desire that you will remember the women, and be more generous and
honorable to them than your ancestors_. Do not put such unlimited power
in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they
could.
“If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are
determined to foment a rebellion, and _will not hold ourselves bound by
any laws in which we have no voice nor representation_. That your sex is
tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no
dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy, willingly give up the
harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.
Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and lawless to use
us with cruelty and indignity? Superior men of all ages abhor those
customs which treat us as the vassals of your sex.”
When the Constitution of the United States was framed without any
recognition of the rights of women, the disappointment of Mrs. Adams
almost culminated in indignation. She felt most keenly the
discrimination of the law against her sex, and wrote her husband again,
as follows:
“I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies, for
while you are proclaiming peace and good-will to all men, emancipating
all nations, you insist on retaining absolute power over wives. But you
must remember that absolute power, like most other things which are very
bad, is most likely to be broken.”
She was especially solicitous that there should be equal advantages of
education for boys and girls. “If we mean to have heroes,” she writes,
“statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women.” And again,
“If you complain of lack of education for sons, what shall I say in
regard to daughters who every day experience the want of it!”
Nor were the women of the South forgetful of their rights, and at an
early day they also put in a demand for political equality. The counties
of Mecklenburg and Rowan in North Carolina blazed with the fiery
patriotism of their women. And in their defiant conversations with
British officers, who were quartered in the houses of the wealthiest and
most intelligent of these Southern matrons, as also in their debates
with the men of their own community, officers, judges, and clergymen,
they unhesitatingly declared their right to legal equality with men, in
the new government, whenever laws should be formulated for the infant
republic.
Two years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the sister
of General Richard Henry Lee, Mrs. Hannah Lee Corbin of Virginia, wrote
to her brother, declaring that women should be allowed the franchise, if
they paid taxes. He replied that in Virginia women already had the right
to vote, and “it is on record that women in Virginia did exercise the
right of voting at an early day.” On the second day of July, 1776, the
right to vote was secured to the women of New Jersey, and they exercised
it for over thirty years. Our country began its very existence burdened
with the protests of our great fore-mothers against violation of the
immortal principles which were its corner-stone. “All just governments
derive their powers from the consent of the governed,” was the startling
announcement the Fathers thundered into the ears of the monarchs of the
old world. And many of their wives and daughters contended, with
invincible logic, that this axiom included women as well as men.
The long struggle of American women for education, opportunity, and
political equality which has since followed, dates, therefore, from the
hour of the nation’s birth. It is the legitimate outcome of American
ideas, for which the nation contended for nearly a century. Absorbed in
severe pioneer work, inevitable to life in the wilderness, and denied
education themselves, the first care of our revolutionary mothers was
for the literary and religious instruction of their children. As far
back as the year 1700, a woman, one Bridget Graffort, had given the
first lot of ground for a public school-house, although at that time,
and for long years after, no provision whatever was made for the
education of girls. There was a bitter prejudice against educated and
literary women in the early days of our history. And even after five
colleges had been founded for young men,—Harvard, Yale, Princeton,
Columbia, and William and Mary, Virginia,[162]—a young woman was
regarded as well educated who could “read, write, and cipher.”
If, however, school privileges were denied them, the education of the
early American women proceeded, through the very logic of events. In
laying the foundations of the new government all questions were
discussed that touched human interests, not only publicly but
privately—from the pulpit, and around the fireside. Women listened to
them, and took part in them. The famous book of Mary Wollstonecraft, “A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” was published in London in 1790,
and found its way into American circles. It received the unsparing
condemnation meted out to all efforts put forth in advance of the age,
for the world has always stoned its prophets. It demanded for women
every opportunity accorded to man, and the same rights in
representation, before the law, in the courts, and in the world of work.
Torrents of the vilest abuse were heaped on the author, and formed the
answer vouchsafed by the public. It educated not a few women, however,
who in turn preached the same gospel, and made for women the same
demands.
In 1831 the first real grapple began with American slavery, through the
establishment of the _Liberator_ by William Lloyd Garrison. He flung out
his banner, which he never lowered, demanding immediate and
unconditional emancipation of the slaves of the South, and after a
struggle of forty years, his demand was granted. Slavery was fastened on
our coast long before the birth of the republic. In the century before
1776, three and a quarter millions of negroes had been taken by Great
Britain from African shores for her various colonies in the new world.
And at the close of the Revolutionary War, when the population was but
three millions, six hundred thousand of these were black slaves, even
then a menace to the peace of the nation. Against the protests of some
of the noblest and wisest of the revolutionary patriots slavery, was
introduced into the National Constitution in 1787, and was fastened on
the national life.
The aggressions of the slaveocracy during the first half century of our
national existence alarmed the non-slaveholding portion of the country.
And almost at the same time, in the progress of civilization, the era
was reached when the enlightened conscience of the civilized world
demanded the abolition of slavery. Slowly routed from the dominions of
other nations by the manumission of the bondmen, or the purchase of
their freedom, slavery seemed at last to have intrenched itself on
American soil, and to dominate American civilization. A struggle with it
was inevitable. Some of the grandest men and women of the nation entered
the lists against it, for the early Abolitionists were remarkable
people. It is only necessary to mention the names of some of the leaders
in that holy war, to summon up visions of manly beauty and womanly
grace, men and women endowed with ability, culture, character,
refinement, courage, and social charm. Their public speech blazed with
remorseless moral logic, and thrilled with matchless eloquence, so that
crowds flocked to hear them, wherever they spoke. Garrison and Phillips,
Sumner and Parker, Birney and Pierpont, Gerrit Smith and Theodore
Weld—what men of their day surpassed them in manliness, moral force, and
persuasive and convincing speech? They were supplemented and
complemented by noble women, unlike them, and yet every whit their
peers—Maria Weston Chapman and Lydia Maria Child, Sarah and Angelina
Grimké, Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly, Helen Garrison and Ann Greene
Phillips.[163]
Mrs. Chapman and Mrs. Child put to the service of the great reform pens
tipped with flame, and wielded with consummate energy and skill. And the
Grimké sisters, who had manumitted their slaves in Charleston, S. C.,
and come North to advocate Antislavery doctrines, with Lucretia Mott and
Abby Kelly, entranced large audiences with their eloquent discourse, and
roused the dormant moral sense of their hearers into protest against the
colossal sin of the nation. Conservatives in church and state were
alarmed. War was declared against the eloquent women, and it was decided
that they should be silenced, and not allowed to act or vote in the
business meetings of the Antislavery Society. This brought about a
division in the organization before it had reached its first decade.
A double battle was now forced on the Garrisonian Abolitionists—a battle
for the rights of woman as well as for the freedom of the slave. The
doctrine of human rights was discussed anew, broadly and exhaustively,
and it was demonstrated that the rights of man and woman were identical.
Antislavery platforms resounded with the demand that liberty, justice,
and equality be accorded to women, and the anti-slavery press teemed
with arguments for women’s rights, which are repeated in the woman
suffrage meetings of the present time.
In 1840 a “World’s Antislavery Convention” was held in London, and all
Antislavery organizations throughout the world were invited to join in
it, through their delegates. Several American societies accepted the
invitation, and elected delegates, six or eight of whom were women,
Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Wendell Phillips among them. The excitement
caused by their presence in London was intense, for the English
Abolitionists were very conservative, and never dreamed of inviting
women to sit in their Convention. And these women who had come among
them had rent the American Antislavery Societies in twain, had been
denounced from the pulpit, anathematized by the press, and mobbed by the
riffraff of the streets. “They who have turned the world upside down
have come hither also,” was the affrighted cry, nor was the alarm of the
English Abolitionists lessened when they saw that those of the women
delegates who were not Quakers, clad in the traditional garb of that
sect, were young, cultivated, and refined.
A long and acrimonious debate followed on the admission of the women,
during which many of the men delegates from America showed the white
feather and sided with the English opposition. Again the tyranny of sex
was combated, and the doctrine of woman’s equality with man enunciated,
and again the battle for woman’s rights was fought with moral force and
logical correctness, as it had been in America the year before. Some of
the noblest women of England were in attendance as listeners and
spectators,—Elizabeth Fry and Lady Byron, Mrs. Anna Jameson and Mary
Howitt,—and, judging by later events, the lesson was not lost upon them.
When the vote was taken, the women delegates were excluded by a large
majority. William Lloyd Garrison did not arrive in London until after
the rejection of the women. When he was informed of the decision of the
Convention he refused to take his seat with the delegates. And
throughout the ten days’ sessions he maintained absolute silence,
remaining in the gallery as a spectator. Only one other of the delegates
joined him, Nathaniel P. Rogers of Concord, New Hampshire, an editor of
an Antislavery paper.
The London Convention marked the beginning of a new era in the woman’s
cause. Hitherto, the agitation of the question of woman’s equal rights
had been incidental to the prosecution of other work. Now the time had
come when a movement was needed to present the claims of woman in a
direct and forcible manner, and to take issue with the legal and social
order which denied her the rights of human beings, and held her in
everlasting subjection. At the close of the exasperating and insulting
debates of the “World’s Antislavery Convention,” Lucretia Mott and Mrs.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed to hold a Woman’s Rights Convention on
their return to America, and to begin in earnest the education of the
people on the question of woman’s enfranchisement. Mrs. Stanton had
attended the Convention as a bride, her husband having been chosen a
delegate.
Accordingly the first Woman’s Rights Convention of the world was called
at Seneca Falls, New York, on the 19th and 20th of July, 1848. It was
attended by crowds of men and women, and the deepest interest was
manifested in the proceedings. “Demand the uttermost,” said Daniel
O’Connell, “and you will get something.” The leaders in the new
movement, Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Stanton, with their husbands, and
Frederick Douglass, acted on this advice. They demanded in unambiguous
terms all that the most radical friends of woman have ever claimed:
“equal rights in colleges and universities, trades and professions; the
right to vote; to share in all political offices, honors, and
emoluments; to complete equality in marriage; equal rights in property,
in wages for equal work, and in minor children; to make contracts; to
sue and be sued; to personal freedom; and to serve on juries, especially
when women were tried.”
The Convention adjourned to meet in Rochester, New York, August 2, 1848.
There were the same crowds in attendance, the same deep interest, and
the same earnest debates and discussions as had characterized the
meeting at Seneca Falls. Women soon adapted themselves to the situation,
increased in efficiency and courage, participated in the debates, and
elected a woman president, in spite of the ridicule occasioned by the
suggestion. She discharged the duties of the office admirably, and the
ridicule was soon merged in applause. A third Convention was held at
Salem, Ohio, in 1850; a fourth in Akron, Ohio, in 1851; a fifth in
Massillon, Ohio, in 1852; another at Ravenna, Ohio, in 1853, and others
rapidly followed. The advocates of woman suffrage increased in number
and ability. Superior women, whose names have become historic, espoused
the cause—Frances D. Gage, Hannah Tracy Cutler, Jane G. Swisshelm,
Caroline M. Severance, Celia C. Burr, who later became Mrs. C. C.
Burleigh, Josephine S. Griffing, Antoinette L. Brown, Lucy Stone, Susan
B. Anthony, Paulina W. Davis, Caroline H. Dall, Elizabeth Oakes Smith,
Ernestine L. Rose, Mrs. C. H. Nichols, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt; the
roll-call was a brilliant one, representing an unusual versatility of
culture and ability.
The First National Woman Suffrage Convention was held in Worcester,
Massachusetts, October 23 and 24, 1850. It was more carefully planned
than any that had yet been held. Nine States were represented. The
arrangements were perfect—the addresses and papers were of the highest
character—the audiences were at a white heat of enthusiasm. The number
of cultivated people who espoused the new gospel for women was increased
by the names of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Bronson and Abby
May Alcott, Thomas W. Higginson, William I. Bowditch, Samuel E. and
Harriet W. Sewall, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry B. Blackwell, Ednah D.
Cheney, Hon. John Neal, Rev. William H. Channing, and Wendell Phillips.
Space fails for a detailed statement of the grand personages who gave of
their talents, their wealth, and themselves, that the cause of woman’s
elevation might be advanced.
Meetings were now of frequent occurrence in various parts of the
country. The ridicule of the press, the horror of conservatives, the
anathemas of the pulpit, and the ostracism of society began to abate.
Petitions to legislatures, that were at first received with derisive
laughter, and then laid on the table, now received attention. Unjust
laws, that bore down upon women with cruel severity, were modified. And
papers established in the interest of women found their way to the
people, increased in circulation, and their influence was felt for good.
A dozen years were spent in severe pioneer work and then came the four
years Civil War. All reformatory work was temporarily suspended, for the
nation then passed through a crucial experience, and the issue of the
fratricidal conflict was national life or national death.