in groups, as fundamental to success. Seldom swayed from this straightforward approach, she would set aside temperance, abolition, and other reforms to place singular value on women’s rights and within that area, she would spend her life aimed like an arrow on the vote.
This sense of purpose was evident in physician Harriot K. Hunt, who also attended the 1852 convention. That year, she began an annual effort to draw attention to the vote. Along with her tax payment, Dr. Hunt sent a proclamation to the “treasurer, and the Assessors, and other Authorities of the city of Boston, and the Citizens generally”:
Harriot K. Hunt, physician, a native and permanent resident of the city of Boston…begs leave to protest against the injustice and inequality of levying taxes upon women, and at the same time, refusing them any voice or vote…. Even drunkards, felons, idiots, and lunatics, if men, may still enjoy the right of voting to which no woman, however large the amount of taxes she pays, however respectable her character, or useful her life, can ever attain.
She pointed out that because women lacked the vote, women’s priorities were rarely considered when the government spent the taxes they paid. If women had the vote, she said, they would encourage common sense in government: women would provide schools and colleges to “supply our girls with occupation” and “save them from lives of frivolity and emptiness,” which, in turn, would create more taxpayers. Year after year, Hunt would file similar protests with her taxes.
The Syracuse convention was dominated by one aspect that boded ill for the future: the first confrontation between Protestant theologian Antoinette Brown and Jewish immigrant Ernestine Rose. In one of the many long speeches Brown made as she wrestled with contradictory biblical statements on women, she said in part: “The Bible…recognizes neither male nor female in Christ Jesus…. The submission enjoined upon the wife in the New Testament…is a Christian submission due from man to man, and from man to woman.” By the end, Rose had had enough:
When the inhabitants of Boston converted their harbor into a teapot…they did not go to the Bible for their authority; for if they had, they would have been told…“to render unto Caesar what belonged to Caesar” [and] “Submit to the powers that be, for they are of God.” No! on Human Rights and Freedom…there is no need of written authority.
Others joined “the somewhat bitter discussion,” which continued “for two days, calling out great diversity.” At one point, “the Rev. Junius Hatch made so coarse a speech” that the audience “called out, Sit down! Shut up!” and the president “was obliged to call him to order.” The convention’s wisdom in their presidential choice was clear, for Lucretia Mott was exactly the right person to preside over this clash. Obviously personally devout, she also firmly believed in freedom of expression, and perhaps only she was capable of bringing the meeting to an amicable close.
The undercurrent of animosity between the traditional Christians and the freethinkers would erupt again in the future. Christian debaters who labeled their opponents as “infidels” took a terrible risk, because reporters were invariably present at women’s rights conventions; the participants, after all, eagerly sought publicity and most editorialists were delighted to expand on the “infidel” idea. By labeling women’s rights advocates as dangerous atheists, both press and pulpit could ignore the questions of justice that the women raised. Moreover, although increasing numbers of Catholic and Jewish people immigrated to the United States, Ernestine Rose long would remain the leadership’s only Jew, and in the whole long history to come of the suffrage movement, there never would be a prominent Catholic woman. The “diversity” of opinion was, in fact, almost wholly within the context of Protestantism and not nearly so great as it might have been. This also applied to African American suffrage activists—women marginalized throughout the movement and only recently finding their place in the history of suffrage activism.
That the Syracuse convention ended in unity was perhaps due to the distraction of a different debate: whether or not the movement should organize more formally. For the 1850s, the question was largely answered with an overwhelming no. Mary Springstead “moved that the Convention proceed to organize a National Woman’s Rights Society,” but a letter from Angelina Grimké Weld argued differently, predicting that more formality would “prove a burden, a clog, an incumbrance, rather than a help.” Ernestine Rose agreed that “organizations were like Chinese bandages” in their restrictiveness, and Harriot K. Hunt preferred “spontaneity,” which she deemed “a law of nature.” Lucy Stone made perhaps the strongest argument when she said they “had all been in permanent organizations, and therefore dread them.”
Paulina Wright Davis demonstrated her skill at achieving resolution, and the convention adopted her motion that “persons in any or all of our States who are interested in this great reform” should call state and local meetings, “certainly as often as once a year.” That was the way the movement would proceed until after the Civil War: without any bylaws, headquarters, official publication, or other accoutrements of formal organization. The cause would carry on, as Weld had suggested, “by the natural ties of spiritual affinity.”
These natural ties were strengthened by Davis herself when, just six months after the convention, she began publishing The Una from her Providence, Rhode Island, home. Her February 1853 inaugural issue announced: “Our plan is to publish a paper monthly…. Our purpose is to discuss the rights, duties, sphere, and destiny of women fully and fearlessly.” The Una, she said, “signifies truth.” For three years, Davis and her assistant Caroline H. Dall provided a communication network for feminists. Along with such familiars as Stanton, Stone, and Frances Dana Gage, The Una also featured mainstream writers such as Ohio author Hannah Tracy Cutler, educator and publisher Elizabeth Peabody, the New York Tribune’s Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and “Fanny Fern,” the pseudonym of Sara Parton who was so popular that in 1855, the New York Ledger paid her a fabulous $100 weekly for just one column. Illustrious men wrote for The Una too, including literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Besides publishing, the other standard method of spreading the women’s rights gospel was through lecture tours. Fall 1853 featured a particularly adventurous one, when Dr. Lydia Fowler took leave of her New York City medical practice to join Vermont newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols in frontier Wisconsin. Nichols estimated that they traveled 900 miles, “speaking in forty-three towns to audiences estimated at 30,000 in the aggregate.” They spoke to women’s rights through the facade of temperance, with “Mrs. F.” using her medical expertise on “the physiological effects of alcohol” and Nichols emphasizing the tragic link between alcohol abuse and women’s lack of legal rights. Once again, male temperance leaders in Milwaukee were hostile to this assistance from women, but their opposition backfired, as Wisconsin women welcomed the lecturers. When men closed off lecture halls, the women found alternate space.
The Midwest also hosted its first national women’s rights convention in 1853. Cleveland was the site of the Fourth National Convention, with attendees from eight Northern states. Presiding officers Lucretia Mott and Frances Dana Gage laid down firm rules at the beginning, and the 1,500 attendees conducted a meeting that was more amicable than the Syracuse one had been. Newspaper response was detailed and generally favorable, although the Cleveland Plain Dealer could not resist playing favorites: “the handsomest woman” was Antoinette Brown, and although “Mrs. Gage is not a handsome woman, you can see genius in her eye.”
Among the noteworthy new speakers was Henry Blackwell, brother of Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who doubtless hoped to impress his future wife, Lucy Stone, by speaking “with great eloquence for nearly an hour.” His chief point was that “the interests of the sexes are inseparably connected, and in the elevation of one lies the salvation of the other.” That it was women who needed to be “elevated” and men who needed to be “saved” did not require spelling out.
Back East, a very different event occurred that year. Just prior to the Cleveland convention, New York City hosted the World’s Fair. This prompted many organizations
