meetings, however, this one was carefully planned months in advance. In May, at an anti-slavery gathering in Boston, nine women caucused in a “dark, dingy room” about a convention for their own civil rights. They scheduled the meeting for October 23 and 24, 1850, and chose the Massachusetts town of Worcester because of its central location. Most important, they decided to aim for a national, not merely a state, women’s rights convention.
Paulina Wright Davis (Library of Congress)
Paulina Wright Davis undertook most of the planning work. In 1835, as Paulina Kellogg Wright, she and her husband had organized one of the first anti-slavery meetings and endured a mob assault on their home in Utica, New York. He died in 1846, leaving her a widow wealthy enough to do something very unusual: with a female anatomical mannequin imported from Paris, she taught the basics of their bodies to the relatively few women who dared to explore this forbidden subject. A second marriage to jeweler Thomas Davis changed her name, and as Paulina Wright Davis, she organized the Massachusetts meeting from her home in Providence, Rhode Island.
Davis had hoped to turn over the leadership of this first National Woman’s Rights Convention to famous author Margaret Fuller, but after Fuller drowned in a July shipwreck, Davis decided to assemble a list of prestigious names to sign the meeting’s “call.” She sent “earnest private letters” to those she hoped would become endorsers, but even though she thought her call was “moderate in tone,” it nonetheless “gave the alarm to conservatism.” The response was painful: “Letters, curt, reproachful, and sometimes almost insulting,” Davis said, “came with absolute refusals to have the names of the writers used.” But other mail brought better news. While the “alarmed conservatives” missed a chance to enshrine their names in history, visionary people gladly signed. More than 50 women and 30 men, including famed philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, endorsed the convention. The first signer, Sarah Tyndale, inspired particular optimism; Davis termed her “perhaps more widely known than any other woman of her time.” Tyndale had run what the History of Woman Suffrage termed one of Philadelphia’s “largest businesses” for more than two decades. Davis especially appreciated this support, for Tyndale made a “great social sacrifice in taking up a cause so unpopular.” Another hopeful opportunity for broadening the movement’s base of support was an endorsement from Catherine M. Sedgwick, one of the era’s most popular novelists.
On “the bright October days” of the convention, reads the women’s report of their historic gathering, “a solemn, earnest crowd of noble men and women” assembled in Worcester’s Brinley Hall. The meeting was called to order by Sarah H. Earl, a locally prominent woman married to the editor of the Worcester Spy. She conducted an election and turned the gavel over to Paulina Wright Davis. Four other officers were equally divided by gender, and the five people elected came from four states. The meeting was indeed national in tone, with sizeable delegations from nine states, but all of them were in the North, a fact that presaged the coming of the Civil War.
Gathered in Worcester were the people who would form the backbone of the women’s movement for the rest of the century. From Vermont came newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols; from Philadelphia, Lucretia Mott and other Friends. From Ohio came the Anti-Slavery Bugle editors Mariana and Oliver Johnson, as well as two sisters of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. Ernestine Rose was among those from New York, while longtime abolitionists Parker and Sarah Pillsbury came from New Hampshire. The two people who came the greatest distances, Mary G. Wright of California and Silas Smith of Iowa, were the only representatives from those states. Massachusetts, of course, had far more participation than any other state; among its many luminaries were Abby Kelly Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, and several members of 18-year-old Louisa May Alcott’s family. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth “represented the enslaved African race.”
Just as the Rochester meeting introduced women to Ernestine Rose, Worcester debuted several other suffragist stars. Like Rose, Lucy Stone had been speaking out on behalf of women for years prior to the conventions. She was Massachusetts’s first female college graduate, but not only did Stone have to go to Ohio’s Oberlin to earn this credential, she also had to support herself because her affluent father refused to pay tuition for a girl. Nearly 30 when she graduated, she turned down the “honor” of writing a commencement speech that even at progressive Oberlin would be read by a man. Stone followed Abby Kelly Foster’s example and earned a precarious living as a paid lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society on the weekends, while on weekdays, she freelanced as a women’s rights speaker. Like others on the abolitionist circuit, she learned to expect routine greetings from jeering mobs armed with rotten eggs and stones.
Antoinette Brown (Library of Congress)
Her Oberlin classmate (and future sister-in-law) Antoinette Brown also attended the convention. Brown had just completed three years of work in Oberlin’s theology department, but the college would not grant this sacred degree to a woman. No church was willing to ordain her, and she was spending her autumn wandering country roads in hopes of finding a congregation that would allow her to preach. Perhaps more than anyone, Antoinette Brown needed the solace and support of the network she found at Worcester.
Another celebrity at the meeting was, sadly enough, much more famous then than now. Dr. Harriot K. Hunt had begun practicing medicine in 1835; Dr. Hunt did not have a medical degree, but it was not uncommon at that time for even male physicians to lack medical school credentials. Her healing techniques emphasized hygiene and did not include leeches, mercury, and other dangerous interventions that many physicians used. Hunt’s reputation as a successful healer soon was established enough that she had a busy practice among Boston’s finest families, especially with female patients who appreciated having a female physician whom they could trust.
In the same way that Harriot K. Hunt’s remarkable history was allowed to die, modern women also are unfamiliar with Abby H. Price, but convention president Paulina Wright Davis evidently thought of her in the same category as Lucy Stone. In a report on the Worcester meeting, in a sentence immediately before one about Stone, Davis wrote: “Abby H. Price, large-hearted and large-brained, gentle and strong, presented an address on the social question.” Davis added that the speech was “seldom bettered,” but provided no details, for the euphemistic “social question” doubtless referred to prostitution and venereal disease.
“The debates on the resolutions,” Davis said, “were spicy, pointed, and logical” and kept “crowded audiences through two entire days.” The resolutions not only included the same “sex and color” phrase that was used at Salem, but spelled out this commitment further: “Resolved, that the cause we have met to advocate the claim for woman of all her natural and civil rights bids us remember the two millions of slave women at the South, the most grossly wronged and foully outraged of all women.”
Although the network of women’s advocates would still be referred to as “Woman’s Rights Conventions” until after the Civil War, this meeting took significant steps to chart out a permanent, national organization. Paulina Wright Davis would chair a Central Committee with members from every state; other committees were Education, Industry, Civil and Political Functions, Social Relations, and Publications. Except for Publications, which was undertaken by William Henry Channing, the committees were chaired by women.
“Thus encouraged,” Paulina Wright Davis summarized, “we felt new zeal to go on.” Once again, the group did an amazingly good public relations job, and this time, it was particularly effective in Europe. “Many letters were received from literary women in this country as well as abroad,” Davis enthused. She was especially happy about favorable publicity from Swedish Frederika Bremer, one of the world’s bestselling contemporary commentators. Bremer, who would tour and write about America in the 1850s, “quoted from our writings,” Davis marveled. “Our words had been
