by this quick success. The vote for women was another matter, however, and its singular relationship to democracy made that effort much harder.
Moreover, the 1850s were infused with a spirit of change in a multiplicity of areas: from vegetarianism and “water cures” to celibacy and “complex marriage” in utopian societies, it was an age of experimentation. When all of those ideas channeled into one major one—abolition—with the coming of the Civil War, the expansion of women’s rights from property rights to other civil rights would stall.
A preview of the Civil War played out in Kansas during the decade. Whether this territory would become “Free Soil” or lead to an immense expansion of slavery was the great question. Devoted abolitionists moved there, and Southerners did the same. “Bleeding Kansas” was the result: through the 1850s, anarchy prevailed, as women and men suffered from politically motivated arson and murder.
Clarina Howard Nichols (Kansas State Historical Society)
Vermont’s Clarina Howard Nichols was among those who went to Kansas to support the abolitionists, and along the way, she discovered that her women’s rights reputation preceded her. She received many invitations to speak, including one at a constitutional convention in Topeka. Her husband’s illness prevented her from accepting, and so the convention did not hear the case for including women as voters in the new Kansas constitution. Without any female advocacy, seven delegates, including the governor, nevertheless voted to eliminate “male” from the proposed enfranchisement clause of the state constitution in 1855.
Ohio, a “middle-aged state” compared with Kansas, came even closer to setting the precedent that instead would elude women for decades. While revising property laws in 1857, its senate cast a vote on female enfranchisement: in response to some 10,000 petitions gathered by Caroline Severance, Frances Dana Gage, Hannah Tracy Cutler, and other Ohio women, a committee endorsed the amending of the state constitution to give women the vote. On the floor, the senators tied 44 to 44, which meant that the amendment was not adopted. It was the first of many such legislative heartbreaks.
Decades would pass before suffragists again saw similarly close margins. As the 1850s drew to a close, everything focused on the issue of slavery, and then the war came. A careful student of history knows that a period of conservatism follows almost every war, and the century would end before there was a genuine revival of the spirit of the 1850s. One thing that favors reform, however, is the very fact that the future cannot be predicted: the actors in this great American drama did not know that their lives would end before their goals were accomplished, and so they carried on.
In 1856, women watched the first election with participation from the new Republican Party. The neophyte group was the antithesis of what it would be at the beginning of the twenty-first century: those who joined the Republican Party of the 1850s never labeled themselves “conservatives,” but were instead unabashed radicals wholly dedicated to ending slavery. One of the ways in which the new party displayed its disposition for reform was the first promotion of a woman as part of a presidential campaign. Jessie Benton Fremont, wife of Republican candidate Charles Fremont, became the first to star as a potential first lady and the first to be denounced as excessively ambitious. Had she been male, perhaps she would have been the candidate herself, for as the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, a longtime senator from Missouri, she knew and loved politics. The Republicans not only used her connections, but also made her an integral part of the campaign, including a smiling picture of “Our Jessie” on lapel buttons. Although the new party lost, Charles Fremont did surprisingly well without the endorsement of his stoutly Democratic father-in-law. Jessie Benton Fremont would linger on the political stage through the century, occasionally helping suffragists with financial contributions, but never risking her political insider position by openly joining them.
There was no national convention the following year, although there were so many state ones that the authors of the History of Woman Suffrage only realized this omission in surprised retrospect: “The year 1857 seems to have passed without a National Convention,” they wrote. In May 1858, they met again in New York. Although the convention was slightly disrupted “by the rowdyism of a number of men occupying the rear part of the hall,” it nonetheless was successful.
Among the newcomers was Sarah Remond, a black woman from Boston who had successfully sued the city in 1853, when a policeman knocked her down the stairs as she tried to integrate an opera audience. Remond would eventually settle in Europe, and her speeches there not only raised funds for abolitionists, but also were a factor in keeping European nations neutral in the Civil War.
Another convention speaker was Eliza Woodson Farnham, who was known for her innovative policies as supervisor of women in Sing Sing prison. Her speech on the “superiority of women” asserted that “woman’s creative power during maternity” made her “second only to God himself.” Farnham suggested that man should consider himself “as a John the Baptist, going before to prepare the world for her coming.” In 1864, Farnham published a major feminist work, Woman and Her Era, in which she expanded on this thesis of the natural superiority of women.
Finally, Parker Pillsbury recommended that “the women hold their next Convention at the ballot-box, as that would do more good than a hundred such as these.” If officials refused to give ballots to women, Pillsbury suggested that they “look the tax collectors in the face and defy them to come for taxes.” Perhaps inspired by Phillips’s words, as well as by the example of Dr. Harriot Hunt, Lucy Stone used 1858 to set another precedent: in the year between her pregnancies at age 39 and 41, she allowed her household goods to be impounded rather than accept taxation without representation.
Stone’s prescient observation at the 1856 convention that the “young states” were leading the older ones was demonstrated again the following year. Out in Indiana, “an immense crowd assembled in the Houses of the Legislature” on January 19, 1859, to hear Dr. Mary F. Thomas read a petition signed by over a thousand Indiana citizens. It asked for “laws giving equal property rights to married women, and to take the necessary steps to so amend the Constitution of the State as to secure to all women the right of suffrage.” Mary Birdstall followed up with a half-hour speech, and the legislature unanimously accepted the women’s documents and requested copies for newspaper publication. The senators then departed, while the House acted as a committee of the whole. Not surprisingly, their parliamentary maneuvers left the women both stranded and confused: they referred the petition to the Committee on Rights and Privileges, which eventually reported “that legislation on this subject is inexpedient at this time.”
In May, intrepid Indiana women were among those who returned to New York for the Ninth National Convention. This one-day meeting held in Mozart Hall has only brief records in the History of Woman Suffrage, which characterized the speeches as “short” and the atmosphere as “turbulent.” Wendell Phillips, “who understood from long experience how to play and lash a mob,” proved the star of the show: “for nearly two hours he held that mocking crowd in the hallow of his hand.” He pointed out, among other things, that “the reformers—the fanatics, as we are called—are the only ones who have launched social and moral questions.” Once again, this 1859 convention adopted resolutions that were “extensively circulated and sent to the Legislature of every state,” but this time, there was little reward. “Owing to the John Brown raid and the general unrest and forebodings of the people on the eve of our civil war,” the report concluded, their resolutions “commanded but little attention.” (White abolitionist John Brown and 16 other white and black men were either killed in or executed for their raid on a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. The object of the raid was to obtain arms, promote a rebellion among slaves, and establish a free state for blacks.)
The distractions of the coming war made the Tenth National Convention the last of its type. Held in New York’s Cooper Institute on May 10 and 11, 1860, it was called
