BLOOMERS AND WOMAN'S RIGHTS CONVENTIONS.
The appearance of _The Visiter_ was the signal for an outbreak, for
which I was wholly unprepared, and one which proved the existence of an
eating cancer of discontent in the body politic. Under the smooth
surface of society lay a mass of moral disease, which suddenly broke out
into an eruption of complaints, from those who felt themselves oppressed
by the old Saxon and ecclesiastical laws under which one-half the people
of the republic still lived.
In the laws governing the interests peculiar to men, and those affecting
their interests in common with woman, great advance had been made during
the past six centuries, but those regarding the exclusive interests of
women, had remained in _statu quo_, since King Alfred the Great and the
knights of his Round Table fell asleep. The anti-negro slavery object of
my paper seemed to be lost sight of, both by friends and foes of human
progress, in the surprise at the innovation of a woman entering the
political arena, to argue publicly on great questions of national
policy, and while men were defending their pantaloons, they created and
spread the idea, that masculine supremacy lay in the form of their
garments, and that a woman dressed like a man would be as potent as he.
Strange as it may now seem, they succeeded in giving such efficacy to
the idea, that no less a person than Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was led
astray by it, so that she set her cool, wise head to work and invented a
costume, which she believed would emancipate woman from thraldom. Her
invention was adopted by her friend Mrs. Bloomer, editor and proprietor
of the _Lily_, a small paper then in infancy in Syracuse, N.Y., and from
her, the dress took its name--"the bloomer." Both women believed in
their dress, and staunchly advocated it as the sovereignest remedy for
all the ills that woman's flesh is heir to.
I made a suit and wore it at home parts of two days, long enough to feel
assured that it must be a failure; and so opposed it earnestly, but
nothing I could say or do could make it apparent that pantaloons were
not the real objective point, at which all discontented woman aimed. I
had once been tried on a charge of purloining pantaloons, and been
acquitted for lack of evidence; but now, here was the proof! The women
themselves, leaders of the malcontents, promulgated and pressed their
claim to bifurcated garments, and the whole tide of popular discussion
was turned into that ridiculous channel.
The _Visiter_ had a large list of subscribers in Salem, Ohio, and in the
summer of '49 a letter from a lady came to me saying, that the _Visiter_
had stirred up so much interest in women's rights that a meeting had
been held and a committee appointed to get up a woman's rights
convention, and she, as chairman of that committee, invited me to
preside. I felt on reading this as if I had had a douche bath; then, as
a lawyer might have felt who had carried a case for a corporation
through the lower court, and when expecting it up before the supreme
bench, had learned that all his clients were coming in to address the
court on the merits of the case.
By the pecks of letters I had been receiving, I had learned that there
were thousands of women with grievances, and no power to state them or
to discriminate between those which could be reached by law and those
purely personal; and that the love of privacy with which the whole sex
was accredited was a mistake, since most of my correspondents literally
agonized to get before the public. Publicity! publicity! was the
persistent demand. To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by
women, sprang up all over the land, and like Jonah's gourd, perished in
a night. Ruskin says to be noble is to be known, and at that period
there was a great demand on the part of women for their full allowance
of nobility; but not one in a hundred thought of merit as a means of
reaching it. No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences
together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of
expressing it. One woman was printing her productions, and why should
not all the rest do likewise? They had so long followed some leader like
a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into
newspaperdom.
I declined the presidential honors tendered me, on the ground of
inability to fill the place; and earnestly entreated the movers to
reconsider and give up the convention, saying:
"It will open a door through which fools and fanatics will pour in, and
make the cause ridiculous."
The answer was that it was too late to recede. The convention was held,
and justified my worst fears. When I criticised it, the reply was:
"If you had come and presided, as we wished you to do, the result would
have been different. You started the movement and now refuse to lead it,
but cannot stop it."
The next summer a convention was held in Akron, Ohio, and I attended,
hoping to modify the madness, but failed utterly, by all protests I
could make, to prevent the introduction by the committee on resolutions
of this:
"_Resolved_, that the difference in sex is one of education."
A man stood behind the president to prompt her, but she could not catch
his meaning, and when confusion came, she rose and made a little speech,
in which she stated that she knew nothing of parliamentary rules, and
when consenting to preside had resolved, if there were trouble, to say
to the convention as she did to her boys at home: "Quit behaving
yourselves!"
This brought down the house, but brought no order, and she sat down,
smiling, a perfect picture of self-complaisance.
People thought the press unmerciful in its ridicule of that convention,
but I felt in it all there was much forbearance. No words could have
done justice to the occasion. It was so much more ridiculous than
ridicule, so much more absurd than absurdity. The women on whom that
ridicule was heaped were utterly incapable of self-defense, or
unconscious of its need. The mass of nobility seekers seemed content to
get before the public by any means, and to wear its most stinging
sarcasms as they would a new dress cap.
In those days I reserved all my hard words for men, and in my notice of
the convention mildly suggested that it would have been better had Mrs.
Oliver Johnson been made president, as she had great executive ability
and a good knowledge of parliamentary rules. This suggestion was
received by the president as an insult never to be forgiven, and in the
_Visiter_ defended herself against it. I replied, and in the discussion
which followed she argued that the affairs of each family should be so
arranged that the husband and wife would be breadwinner and housekeeper
by turns, day or oven half day about. He should go to business in the
forenoon, then in the afternoon take care of baby and permit her to go
to the office, shop or warehouse from which came the family supplies.
I took the ground that baby would be apt to object, and that in our
family the rule would not work, since I could not put a log on the
mill-carriage, and the water would be running to waste all my day or
half-day as bread-winner.
About the same time, Mrs. Stanton published a series of articles in Mrs.
Bloomer's paper, the _Lily_, in which she taught that it was right for a
mother to make baby comfortable, lay him in his crib, come out, lock the
door, and leave him to develop his lungs by crying or cooing, as he
might decide, while mamma improved her mind and attended to her public
and social duties.
Against such head winds, it was hard for my poor little craft to make
progress in asserting the right of women to influence great public
questions.
For something over twenty years, after that Akron meeting, I did not see
a woman's rights convention, and in all have seen but five. Up to 1876
there had been no material improvement in them, if those I saw were a
fair specimen. Their holders have always seemed to me like a woman who
should undertake at a state fair to run a sewing machine, under pretense
of advertising it, while she had never spent an hour in learning its
use.
However, those conventions have probably saved the republic. From the
readiness with which Pennsylvania legislators responded to the petition
of three of four women, acting without concert, in the matter of
property rights, it is probable that in a fit of generosity the men of
the United States would have enfranchised its women _en masse;_ and the
government now staggering under the ballots of ignorant, irresponsible
men, must have gone down under the additional burden of the votes which
would have been thrown upon it, by millions of ignorant, irresponsible
women. Before that time, the unanswerable argument of Judge Hurlbut had
been published, and had made a deep impression on the minds of thinking
men. Had this been followed by the earnest, thrilling appeals of Susan
B. Anthony, free from all alliance with cant and vanity, we should no
doubt have had a voting population to-day, under which no government
could exist ten years; but those conventions raised the danger signal,
and men took heed to the warning.