It was a thought that the Rochester Daily Advertiser found surprisingly plausible. Although Henry Montgomery titled his editorial “The Reign of Petticoats” and began with satirical commentary about “the beautiful and feminine business of politics,” he ended up with a most unconventional endorsement:
Can not women fill an office, or cast a vote, or conduct a campaign, as judiciously and vigorously as men? And, on the other hand, can not men…boil a pot as safely and as well as women? If they can not, the evil is in the arbitrary organization of society…. It is time these false notions and practices were changed…. Let the women keep the ball moving, so bravely started by those who have become tired of the restraints imposed upon them.
The end of summer did not end the publicity. “There is no danger of this question dying for want of notice,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the National Reformer on September 14:
Every paper you take up has something to say about it…. For those who do not yet understand the real objects of our recent Conventions at Rochester and Seneca Falls, I would state that we did not meet to discuss fashions, customs, or dress, the rights or duties of man, nor the propriety of the sexes changing positions, but simply our own inalienable rights…. There is no such thing as a sphere for a sex. Every man has a different sphere, and one in which he may shine, and it is the same with every woman; and the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.
Stanton explicated her point with the examples of Angelina Grimké and Lucretia Mott. Grimké had gone “the length and breadth of New England, telling the people of her personal experience of the slave system,” and her testimony had moved the public in a way “unsurpassed by any of the highly gifted men of her day.” She then married and chose to remove herself from public life. “Her sphere and her duties have changed,” Stanton wrote, but both portions of her life had value. Mott, in contrast, devoted the first part of her life to children and home, and now, “her husband and herself, having a comfortable fortune, pass much of their time in going about and doing good.” Like men, Stanton argued, women are naturally capable of many “spheres” and of making different choices at different points in life.
Stanton also reached out from their tiny town to larger and more diverse circulation sources. By far the most important of the papers that supported the women’s agenda was Horace Greeley’s tremendously popular New York Tribune. Although he later would quarrel with suffragists and retract much of his support, in these early days, he encouraged women, including the first credentialed female physician, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. He opened the Tribune’s pages to Stanton, and she used Greeley’s paper as an opportunity to respond to the verbal assaults that most journalists made. Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who never would be recognized as the philosopher that she actually was—mailed out her brilliant argumentation and transformed her world.
“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
