went unrecognized. In 1849, two years before the dress-reform publicity from Seneca Falls, 22-year-old Lydia Sayer was refused admission to a New York female seminary because she wore pantaloons. This was a defining moment of her life, and the clothing choice became one of principle. Long after most feminists gave up the fight, Hasbrouck carried on. In 1856, she began a biweekly publication, The Sibyl, that attracted a sufficient audience to keep it in business for almost a decade. Her chief editorial concern was improved health from less confining clothing, a point of view doubtless reinforced by the fact that she married and bore three children during the decade of The Sibyl. She also took on the presidency of the hopefully named National Dress Reform Association in 1863. The Civil War might have offered an occasion for more practical clothing, but the association never grew into a power. Nonetheless, with a highly supportive husband, she carried on her crusade to impressive personal success: in 1880, Lydia Hasbrouck was elected to the school board of Middletown, New York.
She achieved this electoral victory despite decades of unabashed feminism, for she not only wore unconventional clothing, but also refused to pay taxes because she could not vote. Perhaps her story makes Gerrit Smith’s point: Hasbrouck’s appearance was more like that of a man, and her townspeople treated her with respect that was measurable in votes. The more conservatively dressed suffragists, meanwhile, were not elected to anything. Conceivably, their dress-for-success strategy was wrong.
During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement grew in both sophistication and numbers. Its system of operations was refined so that techniques for public relations and coalition-building became routine. In well-reported meetings, resolutions were debated and publicized. Letters to the editor and other writings educated the public on women’s issues through nationally circulated media. In addition, the movement increased the number of supporters who came to conventions, offered donations of time and occasional money, and, most importantly, went home to organize meetings of their own. Beyond that, the decade developed a base of committed, quality leadership that would serve through the century.
All of this was evident at the 1851 annual meeting. Seeing no reason to argue with success, the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention was held under the same circumstances as the first: in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, with Ohio’s Frances Dana Gage as president. Celebrities new to the list of endorsers were Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, an extremely popular preacher, and famous educator Horace Mann. Conventioneers also were thrilled to hear a speech by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a well-known novelist and New York Tribune columnist.
Once more, the convention’s report said that “every session” of the two-day meeting “was so crowded at an early hour that hundreds were unable to gain admittance.” Because of the throng who wanted to hear, the closing session was moved to City Hall, and even that venue was not sufficiently large. Much later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would summarize, “in the whole history of the woman suffrage movement there never was at one time more able and eloquent men and women on our platform and represented by letter than in those Worcester Conventions.”
In 1852, the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention moved out of Massachusetts and back to the movement’s original home of western New York. Held in Syracuse for an unprecedented three days, the September 8–10 meeting drew people from eight states and Canada. For the first time, the women charged one shilling for admission, but that did nothing to deter attendance, for “City Hall was densely packed at every session.” The program “called out immense audiences, attracted many eminent persons…and was most favorably noticed in the press.”
Despite the crowd, “the proceedings were orderly and harmonious throughout” under presiding officer Lucretia Mott. A nominating committee had recommended her “as permanent President,” and the convention elected this faithful, oldest member of the original movement by acclamation. Ever modest, she “sat far back in the audience” and asked for a second confirming vote before accepting the chair. In so doing, she “rendered herself liable to expulsion” from the Society of Friends, because the admission fee that had been charged violated Quaker tradition. Just four years after Mott herself had considered a female president to be a dangerous experiment at the Rochester convention, she presided in the words of the Syracuse Standard “with an ease, dignity, and grace that might be envied by the most experienced legislator in the country.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who bore the fifth of her seven children in 1852, did not come to Syracuse. It was, however, the first convention for two other women who would form the backbone of the movement for the rest of the century: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony. With Stanton, they would be the three coeditors of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a history in which they were also, in Stanton’s words, “among the chief actors.” (The surnames of Ohio’s Frances Dana Gage and New York’s Matilda Joslyn Gage appear to be coincidental; if there was any family connection between their husbands, it was not close.)
At the time of the Syracuse convention, Matilda Joslyn Gage was 26 years old and married to a merchant who valued his brilliant wife; affluent and well-dressed, but frequently ill, she would be the mother of five. When she entered the Syracuse convention, Gage did not know a single other woman. She sat alone, “trembling” as she anticipated her first public speech, but she was determined to make it clear why she was there. Later, Gage wrote of herself: “She consulted no one as to time and opportunity, but when her courage had reached a sufficiently high point, with palpitating heart she ascended the platform, where she was cordially given place by Mrs. Mott, whose kindness to her at this supreme moment of her life was never forgotten.”
Matilda Joslyn Gage (Library of Congress)
Gage was the youngest person to speak, and the better-than-average education she received from her physician father was reflected in the comments she made. A natural historian from youth, she told the audience of outstanding female models from Silesia to Ireland and from astronomers to musicians. It was just the beginning of her career as the movement’s chief historian and most thoughtful intellectual.
By the time of the Syracuse convention, Susan Brownell Anthony was 32 and had spent more than a decade as a teacher in upstate New York, a career that she turned to when her father went bankrupt in the 1837 financial panic. When family finances were better in 1849, she came home and volunteered for the Daughters of Temperance. Ironically, this first national depression provided an economic opportunity for a number of future female leaders who otherwise never would have lived independently from their fathers and husbands.
Her parents and her sister Mary had gone to the 1848 Rochester convention and signed its resolutions, but, like Amelia Bloomer, Anthony was more interested in temperance than in women’s rights. Although she had met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1850 through their mutual friend Bloomer, Anthony did not attend the women’s rights convention either that year or the next.
The events that galvanized a change in her priorities occurred just before and after the Syracuse convention. In January 1852 she, Dr. Lydia Fowler, and other women were refused permission to speak at a temperance rally in Albany. As a Quaker, Anthony was accustomed to speaking; she left the event in protest, and soon organized the alternative Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. Two more such insults deepened her awareness of the secondary place of women, even in liberal organizations: in 1853, she was not recognized as a delegate at the World’s Temperance Convention in New York City and was forbidden to speak at a convention of the state teachers’ association. The men of these organizations had learned nothing since women were banned from the World Anti-Slavery Convention, and they again chose to drive away their sisters in these causes.
Susan B. Anthony (Library of Congress)
More than most women, Susan B. Anthony saw things in political and organizational terms,
