to support fundraising: in 1855 alone, Anthony sold 20,000 pamphlets on women’s rights. Many of them ended up in the South, where they were often the only such information available. Twenty years later, for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton met a Texas woman who said that her introduction to the cause had come through a Georgia friend who attended a women’s rights rally in Saratoga and brought back tracts.
The resort also was a rare opportunity for fun: Charles F. Hovey, a faithful supporter of the liberated women, made it a “usual custom” to invite them for “a bountiful repast” at the lake, and he even took them sailing. Moreover, the first endowment that the women’s movement received was from this man: when Hovey died in 1859, he left $50,000 for the promotion of this and other reforms.
Their Saratoga experience cemented a friendship between Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony that culminated decades later with their coeditorship of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage. The third coeditor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, also set a milestone in 1854: she sent an address to the New York legislature, along with 5,931 petition signatures for “the just and equal rights of women.” With Susan B. Anthony doing the legwork, the petition-gathering effort continued through the rest of the year. Anthony’s organizational abilities sharpened as she followed this plan through: while “getting petitions and subscribers to The Una,” she reported holding “conventions in fifty-four counties.”
This pattern became a model for the way that Stanton and Anthony would work: Stanton used her powerful writing skills, while Anthony excelled at the fieldwork. Not only was this an expression of their individual fortes, but also, in the first years of their relationship, it was essential because Stanton was tied down with children. Anthony became a frequent visitor to Seneca Falls, and after the seven little Stantons were in bed, their mother and “Aunt Susan” sat by the fireside and plotted strategy. The relationship was well defined by this commonly used description: Stanton made the thunderbolts, and Anthony threw them.
While these two led the petitioning of the New York legislature, Caroline Severance did the same for the Ohio Women’s Rights Association. The married women’s property rights bill that she proposed in 1854 was not taken up, but Massachusetts women were successful in winning property rights this year, and that example would be quickly emulated elsewhere. It was Mary Upton Ferrin of Salem who was almost singlehandedly responsible for setting the Massachusetts precedent. From 1848, when she became aware of the legalisms that prevented women from writing valid wills, Ferrin spent six years educating Massachusetts women on their lack of rights and asking for signatures. “Many persons laughed at her,” said her friends later, “but knowing it to be a righteous work, and deeming laughter healthful to those indulging in it, Mrs. Ferrin continued.” Without any connection to the emerging women’s movement, Ferrin “traveled six hundred miles, two-thirds of it on foot,” to gather the petitions that culminated in the 1854 success. During the next few years, other states began similarly revising their laws.
Lucy Stone (Library of Congress)
Perhaps the most talked-of event of 1855 regarded a completely different facet of the movement: the innovative wedding of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. Even though she was appreciably older than he, Blackwell courted her assiduously. He finally persuaded her to marry by suggesting not only that they emulate the Stantons and eliminate the bridal vow “to obey,” but also that their ceremony include a protest against the laws on marriage that they would circulate in the press. Most significantly, he encouraged her to retain the name by which she was known. The precedent was so unusual that “stoner” became a commonly used nineteenth-century noun to denote a woman who kept her maiden name. Nonetheless, habits were so strong that even women’s rights documents invariably added a marital honorific, turning her into “Mrs. Stone.”
The next year, Samuel Blackwell won his even longer courtship of Antoinette Brown, but unlike her former Oberlin classmate Lucy Stone, Brown took her husband’s name. With this, the Blackwells—physicians Elizabeth and Emily, Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone, and Samuel and Antoinette Brown Blackwell—became the century’s most visibly feminist family.
Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were thus very much the stars of the 1855 national convention, which took place in the calmer clime of Cincinnati in October. Martha C. Wright presided in the absence of her sister, Lucretia Mott. Wright, one of the five who had planned the Seneca Falls convention, pointed out that in the few years since that convention, “the newspapers which ridiculed and slandered us at first are beginning to give impartial accounts of our meetings. Newspapers,” she noted sagaciously, “do not lead, but follow public opinion.” A last gasp of the dress reform movement provided a spirit of fun in Cincinnati, as well as an exercise in consciousness raising: while some of women wore bloomers, their “gentlemen” donned shawls.
The women tested themselves the next year by going back to the scene of the “Mob Convention,” Broadway Tabernacle. Perhaps because it was late November and New York was not filled with fair-goers looking for a cheap thrill, the convention was orderly. Martha Wright called it to order, and Lucy Stone was elected president. “This is a day of congratulation,” she said: “It is our Seventh Annual National Woman’s Rights Convention,” and in just a few years, “almost every Northern state has more or less modified its laws.” She reeled off a systematic list of property rights changes in Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Rhode Island, and then verbally moved west:
Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana have also very materially modified their laws. And Wisconsin—God bless these young States—has granted almost all that has been asked except the right of suffrage…. In Michigan, it has been moved that women should have a right to their own babies, which none of you ladies have here in New York.
She went on with even more astonishing news: the Nebraska House had passed a bill granting women the vote! That it was lost in the senate, Stone said, was “only because of the too early closing of the session.” The full story, however, was a bit more complex. It was true that the territorial legislature of infant Nebraska displayed far more liberalism than was ever the case in the ossified East. Nebraska men, of their own volition and without any organized pressure, invited Amelia Bloomer, who had recently moved from Seneca Falls to Iowa, to address them in December 1855. The next month, the House followed up on her well-received speech and, by a vote of 14 to 11, passed “a bill to confer suffrage equally upon women.” Some legislators, however, seemed surprised with themselves: in the words of a local newspaper, the Chronotype, on January 30, 1856, “its passage by the House of Representatives created a great deal of talk, and several members threatened to resign.” Although the newspaper alleged that the upper chamber failed to follow the House “only for want of time,” on the last day of the session, it also reported a long filibuster on a minor local bill, which no member bothered to interrupt. Nor were women’s rights taken up at later sessions, and Amelia Bloomer’s positive effect was apparently brief.
Stone was perceptive in blessing these “young states,” which would prove to be consistently ahead of older ones in the future. She was wrong, however, on her other assumptions. Though understandable, it was naive of her to believe that the Nebraska Senate loss was merely a matter of timing. This was simply the first of many times when politicians would assure women that their cause was nearly won, expecting them to go away happy in the innocent belief that only a technicality prevented men from doing the right thing. Stone was even more wrong when she moved from politics to education: she predicted that “our demand that Harvard and Yale Colleges should admit women…waits only for a little time.” As it turned out, a “little time” was more than 100 years. The midpoint of the twentieth century would be long past before these most conservative of institutions finally admitted women to their undergraduate colleges.
That these hopeful predictions were so badly off probably was due to the fact that the property rights issue was being won with relative ease. After the 1850s, women did not have to expend
