been suppressed.
The most significant attention came from the October 29, 1850, international edition of the New York Tribune. Among many who read it was English philosopher John Stuart Mill, one of the modern age’s greatest thinkers. The next July, the prestigious Westminster Review followed up with a philosophical essay in which Mill explicated the ideas of the American women or so people thought at the time. The article, “On Enfranchisement of Women,” began by discussing the American phenomenon:
Most of our readers will probably learn, from these pages, for the first time, that there has risen in the United States…an organized agitation on a new question…the enfranchisement of women, their admission in law, and in fact, to equality….
It will add to the surprise with which many receive this intelligence that…not merely for women, but by them….
A succession of public meetings was held, under the name of a “Woman’s Rights Convention,” of which the President was a woman, and nearly all the chief speakers were women….
According to the report in the New York Tribune, above a thousand persons were present throughout, and “if a larger place could have been had, many thousands more would have attended.”
The proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely in the oratory of public meetings is…calm good sense and reason so considerable.
The result…is probably destined to inaugurate one of the most important of the movements toward political and social reform…. The promoters of this new agitation take their stand on principles, and do not fear.
Mill later explained that the true author of the famous essay was Harriet Hardy Taylor. For two decades, she had been, he said, “the honour and chief blessing of my existence,” but she was married to another man. After her husband’s 1849 death, Taylor married Mill, but they had only a few years together before her sudden death. When he wrote his most famous work, On Liberty (1859), Mill acknowledged that “so much of it was the work of her whom I lost.” It goes without saying that his 1869 publication, The Subjection of Women, also originated in the mind of this unknown female philosopher. Still later, Mill wrote to Paulina Wright Davis:
John Stuart Mill (Library of Congress)
It gives me the greatest pleasure to know that the service rendered by my dear wife to the cause which was nearer her heart than any other, by her essay in the Westminster Review, has had so much effect and is so justly appreciated in the United States. Were it possible in a memoir to have the formation and growth of a mind like hers portrayed, to do so would be as valuable a benefit to mankind as was ever conferred by a biography. But such a psychological history is seldom possible.
Just as New York’s Seneca Falls convention was followed by one in the city of Rochester, Ohio’s 1850 event in Salem was a prelude to a larger one in Akron. Midwestern activism was renewed, and many of those who made history at Salem went to Akron on May 28 and 29, 1851. This meeting also heralded several women who would be among the most important suffragists for decades to come.
Frances Dana Gage, who had clearly established her leadership the previous year, presided. Gage also mentored several of the women there, including Caroline Severance, who eventually moved back East and became the founding president of the important New England Woman’s Club. The conventioneers were also excited about the presence of Maria L. Giddings; she not only gave “a very able digest on the common law,” but also had political connections, for her father “represented Ohio in Congress for many years.”
The appearance of Hannah Tracy, later Hannah Tracy Cutler, at the convention demonstrated tremendous commitment, for she had overcome serious handicaps. After her father refused to allow her to attend the new Oberlin College, she married at 18 and had three children. She was pregnant with the last when her husband died, after pro-slavery men assaulted him while he was helping slaves escape. Widowed, she then went to Oberlin, ran a boardinghouse to support her family, and even found time to write original feminist theory: Woman as She Was, Is, and Should Be was published in 1846. Tracy graduated the following year, and by the time of the Akron convention, she had the plum job of principal of the “female department” of the new Columbus high school. Most women in such a position would not risk it with radical feminist activity, but her courage was fired by experience.
Pittsburgh’s Jane Grey Swisshelm had learned similar courage. The publisher of the abolitionist Saturday Visiter [sic] at the time, she attended the prior year’s Worcester convention and would go on to national leadership in Minnesota and in Washington D.C. but despite this apparent success, Swisshelm still had a miserable personal life. Until her tyrannical husband discovered that her literacy could earn her money, he had sometimes forbidden her to read; he used his legal right to her wages to sue her family for the time that she devoted to her ailing mother. Another six years would pass before Swisshelm managed to get him to file for the divorce that would liberate her: in 1857, she took her little daughter and fled to Minnesota.
A network of female support was clearly developing. Among the out-of-state women who sent letters of support to Akron were Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls, newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols of Vermont, and Nantucket Island native Lydia Folger Fowler, who became the second female graduate of a traditional medical school this same year. Dr. Fowler, a happily married woman without children, wrote Familiar Lessons on Physiology in 1847 to teach women about their bodies. During a lifelong Rochester career teaching obstetrics and gynecology, she set another precedent as the world’s first female medical school professor.
Unlike the Salem convention, men were allowed to participate at Akron and at future Ohio meetings to the regret of some women who said in their report that “the sons of Adam crowded our platform and often made it the scene of varied pugilistic efforts.” The convention also was the first with entertainment: a popular singing group, the Hutchinson Family Singers, was a big hit at reform assemblies for decades.
Sojourner Truth (Library of Congress)
Far and away the most important aspect of the Akron meeting, however, was the historic speech of Sojourner Truth. Born into slavery under the name Isabella in the late eighteenth century, she was owned by Dutch-speaking people who lived about 50 miles north of New York City. By her teenage years, she had been sold three times and was scarred from beatings she suffered when she did not understand orders in English.
In 1827, a year before New York implemented its gradual emancipation plan, she ran away to a Quaker family. They not only sheltered her, but even supported her in a legal battle: amazingly enough, her son Peter, who had been sold in violation of New York law, was returned from Alabama. Feeling “tall within,” she set out for New York City. She left the Society of Friends, she said, because “they would not let me sing,” and developed her own deeply personal faith: “God himself talks to me.”
After a disastrous time in a New York commune that ended up with her successfully fighting a murder charge, she took the name of Sojourner Truth in 1843 and set out to preach. In traveling through New England, she came to the attention of William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists. When she arrived in Akron in 1851, she recently had published her autobiography, which she dictated to a white woman, Olive Gilbert. Sales of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth would support her for the rest of her life, as she continued to move throughout the United States, living in Kansas during its tumultuous pre–Civil War years and finally settling in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Although she
