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
