act was little publicized, though, and few women knew of this fundamental change in their status. Especially because many Quaker women refused to participate in secular government at all, the legalism made little difference for nearly a decade. In 1797, however, women in Elizabethtown marched together to vote against a legislative candidate who was backed by the male power structure. They nearly defeated him, and politicians began talking about repealing women’s franchise. Newspaper editors backed the ruling cabal, ridiculing the female voters in print and intimidating them from casting ballots in the future. Like John Adams’s view that the British had planted rebellious thoughts in his wife’s mind, editorials portrayed the Elizabethtown women as the opposition’s dupes—either ignorantly misled or forced to the polls by scheming, domineering husbands. That women were capable of both forming their own political views and organizing a coalition was a thought that these newspaper men simply could not entertain.
A decade later, in 1807, New Jersey women lost their vote, with the repeal sponsored by the Elizabethtown man they had nearly defeated. A recent campaign over whether a new courthouse would be located in Elizabethtown or Newark became his excuse for the repeal. The race was hotly contested, and there were newspaper allegations that women were so ignorant, corrupt, or obtuse that they “voted again and again.” The guilty party, however, was likely to have been men and boys disguised as women who cast multiple ballots. That women were disenfranchised for reasons of corruption and fraud is greatly ironic, because one of the strongest arguments against suffrage in the following decades was that women were naturally pure and should not engage in anything so dirty as politics.
As the new republic developed, ideologies of individual liberty expanded. This was, after all, the first nation in the Western world without a divine-right personage at its head, the first in which citizens openly averred their intention to govern themselves, and the vote continually expanded as state governments grew from colonial ones. Disenfranchised males, including non-property holders, Catholics, Jews, and free blacks, were granted suffrage. Especially after frontiersman Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in the presidential elections of 1824 and 1828, the “common man” ideals of Jacksonian populism were assured.
This rise of democracy, however, would continue to exclude the female half of the population. The only actual enfranchisement of women during the Jacksonian era was in Kentucky in 1838, when widows were allowed to cast ballots in school elections—but only if they had no children currently in school. The exclusionary provisions made it clear that Kentucky’s men did not believe that their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters were able to make informed judgments: even when a woman was allowed to vote because there was no man to cast a ballot in her stead, she apparently could not be trusted to vote reasonably if an issue actually might touch her personal life.
Yet it was, of course, for their own lives that women—like men—wanted the vote. They wanted to improve educational opportunities, especially for girls; they wanted to protect property that they earned or inherited; they wanted custody of their children when a man was abusive. And some of them wanted grander, less personally necessary political change; many women did think of themselves as their brothers’ keepers, as the most likely embodiment of purity and morality.
This moral realm was the one in which they felt most comfortable, and indeed, one of the things that kept them out of politics for so long was the difficulty of convincing both women and men that moral imperatives often are best implemented through government. In the case of ending slavery, for example, only government could achieve their goal. The same was true of the temperance movement, because laws regulating the sale of alcohol and other addictive substances could only be enacted by political bodies.
Emma Willard (Library of Congress)
Although women long would be severely constrained even in their traditional realms of moral and educational improvement, the era again showed signs of slow progress. In 1817, in the same rural New York area where Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson had led religious movements, Deborah Pierce published A Scriptural Vindication of Female Preaching, Prophesying, or Exhortation. The following year, Bostonian Hannah Mather Crocker published another innovative piece, Observations on the Real Rights of Women. With this work, Crocker redeemed some of the harm done to women by her grandfather, Reverend Cotton Mather, whose writing on witchcraft helped produce the hysteria that had led to 19 executions and more than 140 arrests in the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692. Far more thoughtful and less mystic than he, Crocker was the mother of ten—and yet she found time to read the work of English feminists, especially Hannah More, and to follow up on the theories of Judith Sargent Murray, especially concerning the negative effects of educating boys and girls differently.
Although it is unlikely that they knew of each other, Emma Willard was thinking the same thoughts. In 1818, the same year Crocker’s work was published, Willard presented to the New York legislature An Address…Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. The lawmakers were shocked by her intention to teach math and science—especially anatomy—to girls, but the working-class town of Troy, New York, saw the good sense behind Willard’s innovative curriculum and raised taxes to build the school. An amazingly quick success, it demonstrated a great public desire for serious female education. Willard’s model was soon adopted elsewhere, and the Emma Willard School continues today.
Willard’s most significant early emulator was Mary Lyon, who built a work/study institution of higher education for women, Mt. Holyoke Seminary, in western Massachusetts in 1834. Those who knew Lyon said that they recognized immediately that they were in the presence of a genius, and her words certainly indicate an innate grasp of the subtlety of politics. “The plan,” she wrote to a friend of her ideas for this school, “should not seem to originate with us, but with benevolent gentlemen.” Lyon literally went from farm to farm, raising $15,000 for her school in two years. When criticized for this unladylike method of implementing her dream, she confidently replied, “I am doing a great work; I cannot come down.”
But Lyon spoke to people one-on-one; except for Quakers and others willing to be seen as on the radical fringe, women did not speak in public. Even Emma Willard’s famous “address” was written, not spoken. It was considered scandalous for a woman to speak to a “promiscuous audience”—an audience composed of men and women. Nor was this simply a societal taboo, but, in the view of almost everyone at the time, it was a commandment from God. St. Paul’s words in First Corinthians are unequivocal: “Women should keep silent in the churches…. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (1 Cor. 14:34–35). Because virtually all of the era’s cultural activity was church-related, very few women ever learned to speak in public. The subliminal message from Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer doubtless rang across the decades as a warning that speech could mean death.
Stage fright could not have been more real for the pioneers who broke this taboo. Clarina Howard Nichols, a Vermont newspaper editor of sufficient political power that, in 1852, she was invited to speak to the state’s senate on married women’s property rights, was nonetheless so frightened that she showed the symptoms of a heart attack. Nichols later wrote that she only barely managed to calm the “violent throbbing” in her chest to finish her speech, and her “voice was tremulous throughout.” She was supported by a local judge, who, with incredible kindness, had gone door-to-door the previous day, encouraging women to sit in the gallery. When the speech was over, they ran down the gallery stairs and said, “We did not know before what Woman’s Rights were, Mrs. Nichols, but we are for Woman’s Rights.” Another showed her vicarious anxiety: “I broke out in cold perspiration when…you leaned your head on your hand. I thought you were going to fail.”
The public-speaking taboo reflected more than a little class bias: working women in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, headed by labor leader Sarah Bagley, had addressed a legislative committee in 1845 with little public criticism. These
