her almost to the condition of a slave…. [W]e will seek the overthrow of this barbarous and unrighteous law; and conjure women no longer to promise obedience in the marriage covenant.”
Amy Post moved for the adoption of the resolutions, and with only “two or three dissenting voices,” they were accepted and the meeting adjourned. The significant differences from the Seneca Falls resolutions showed that the movement’s leadership already was learning a lesson in pragmatism: they saw that, more than the intellectual and legal arguments that motivated so many of them, the average woman instead was moved on pocketbook issues. “Though few women responded to the demand for political rights,” Stanton said of the Rochester meeting, “many at once saw the importance of equality in the world of work.”
As Stanton suggested, not everyone was brave enough to respond to the call. Some of the signers of the Seneca Falls declaration withdrew their names within weeks, as soon as a derogatory volcano erupted in the press. It was largely Amelia Jenks Bloomer who served as the unintended publicity agent for the Seneca Falls convention—and, later, as a chief target for the barbs of cartoonists.
Although her name (or more aptly, her husband’s name) became synonymous with pants worn by women, Amelia Bloomer had been a rather conservative schoolteacher until she married a more liberal man. Her husband, Dexter Bloomer, owned the Seneca County Courier, and she often wrote for it. The couple also served as postmaster and postmistress for Seneca Falls.
Amelia Bloomer (Library of Congress)
Bloomer attended the historic convention but did not sign the declaration. She was there primarily as a reporter, and it would be several years before Bloomer became an advocate of voting rights. Her chief interest was temperance, and, in January 1849, she began her own paper, The Lily. It focused on ending the abuse of alcohol, with women’s rights incidental to that, and soon circulated beyond state borders. Adding more than a thousand subscribers per year, The Lily would bring women’s needs to a national audience.
Prior to that, however, other journalists learned of the unconventional convention from the Bloomers’ Seneca County Courier. Train service had come to Seneca Falls in 1841, seven years prior to the convention, and in a time before syndicated press services, journalists met the trains and read each other’s papers to discover the news. On learning of the Seneca Falls Convention, most editors responded with an incredulity that still conveys a mental picture of men rubbing their eyes in disbelief—but they rapidly spread the story. A Massachusetts paper, the Worcester Telegraph, was one of the more objective, although editorial amazement at the women’s audacity suffused its commentary:
A female Convention has just been held at Seneca Falls, N.Y…. The list of grievances which the Amazons exhibit, concludes by expressing a determination to insist that woman shall have “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens”…. This is bolting with a vengeance.
In an era when it was almost impossible to distinguish between news coverage and editorial opinion, James Gordon Bennett, publisher of New York City’s widely read New York Herald, was unusual in putting his name on his report about the Seneca Falls convention. In a long argument with himself, Bennett offered a bit of encouragement for every point of view and ended with a surprising conclusion:
This is the age of revolutions…. The work of revolution is no longer confined to the Old World, nor to the masculine gender. The flag of independence has been hoisted, for the second time, on this side of the Atlantic; and a solemn league and covenant has just been entered into by a Convention of women at Seneca Falls, to “throw off the despotism under which they are groaning”….
The declaration is a most interesting document…. The amusing part is the preamble…. It complains of the want of the elected franchise…. We do not see by what principle of right the angelic creatures should claim to compete…. Though we have the most perfect confidence in the courage and daring of Miss Lucretia Mott and several others of our lady acquaintances, we confess it would go to our hearts to see them putting on the panoply of war, and mixing in scenes like those….
It is not the business, however, of the despot to decide upon the rights of his victims; nor do we undertake to define the duties of women. Their standard is now unfurled by their own hands. The Convention of Seneca Falls has appealed to the country. Miss Lucretia Mott has propounded the principles of the party. Ratification meetings will no doubt shortly be held…. We are much mistaken if Lucretia would not make a better President than some of those who have lately tenured the White House.
The editor gave the meeting more credence than some of its participants: Bennett assumed that the world would soon be debating the declaration’s principles in “ratification meetings,” and his musing on the possibility of a female president was not even a notion that the women themselves had begun to envision. Newspaper circulation of the declaration meant that its ideas traveled around the globe far faster than its rural authors ever could have expected.
The Rochester convention, held in a much larger city, naturally elicited more editorial comment, most of it negative. According to the Rochester Democrat, “The great effort seemed to be to bring out some new, impracticable, absurd, and ridiculous proposition, and the greater its absurdity the better.” The Rochester Advertiser took an unusual approach: its editor appeared to hope that the women’s gatherings would go away if he yawned: “to us they appear extremely dull and uninteresting, and, aside from their novelty, hardly worth notice.” Despite the efforts in the Rochester meeting to direct attention to women’s economic needs, one of the state’s most populist newspapers was also one of its most annoyed. The Mechanic’s Advocate, published in the capital of Albany, was uncharacteristically conservative in its reaction when women were the issue. After an internal debate with its better nature, its editorial essentially ended up saying that even if changes were needed, the upheaval would be so great that it was not worth the effort:
The women who attend these meetings, no doubt at the expense of their more appropriate duties, act as committees, write resolutions…make speeches, etc….
Now, it requires no argument to prove that this all is wrong. Every true hearted female will instantly feel that this is unwomanly…. Society would have to be radically remodeled in order to accommodate itself to so great a change…. But this change is impracticable, uncalled for, and unnecessary…. It would be of no positive good, that would not be outweighed tenfold by positive evil.
An out-of-state paper, the Public Ledger and Daily Transcript, apparently was unaware of Lucretia Mott and other Pennsylvanians who initiated the feminist agenda. Its editorial began with smug congratulations to “our Philadelphia ladies,” who not only possessed “beauty, but are celebrated for discretion and modesty…. Whoever heard of a Philadelphia lady setting up for a reformer, or standing out for women’s rights?” Seemingly blissfully ignorant of the long records established by the city’s women in the Society of Friends and other reform groups, the paper continued mockingly, “Boston ladies contend for the rights of women [and] the New York girls aspire to mount the rostrum…. Our Philadelphia girls prefer the baby-jumper…and the ballroom.” The unsigned editorial concluded by revealing a profound masculine egocentrism: “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything.”
The Lowell Courier displayed a similarly regressive attitude, even though this Massachusetts textile town employed thousands of women who entertained no thoughts of babies and ballrooms. Most Lowell mill workers were unmarried women who lived in company housing; many were highly literate, for they had the opportunity to read, join study clubs, and even publish their own writing in industry-sponsored publications. Blind to this audience, however, the Lowell editor assumed his satire would please: “They should have resolved,” he said of the conventions, “that it was obligatory also upon the [men of the house]
