is important to remember that their testimony focused on their legal needs as workers, not on their needs as women. Presumably because men in the mills also would benefit from labor reforms, public speaking by these women appeared acceptable.
Frances Wright (Library of Congress)
One woman stands out above all others of this era for insisting on her right to free speech. Frances Wright, a wealthy Scot who spent much of her life in the United States, violated the taboo with complete abandon. She made her first trip to the U.S. in 1818, and the travelogue she published was Europe’s first widely read book on the new nation. She returned again in 1824 and sailed around the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, where she established a colony for freed slaves near modern Memphis. Not surprisingly, the economy of this remote place could not support them, so Wright financed and personally escorted some 30 blacks to a new home in Haiti.
As early as 1829—decades prior to other feminists—Wright traveled the country on a paid lecture tour. Especially in the Cincinnati area where she eventually settled, she attracted large and generally respectful crowds, with men actually more likely to support her radical ideas than women. Not only an abolitionist and a utopian, Wright also unhesitatingly attacked organized religion for the secondary place it assigned women; most shockingly, she advocated the empowerment of women through divorce and the use of birth control. She married in France in 1831 after bearing her lover’s child. A true internationalist, she crossed the Atlantic five times in the 1840s alone. In 1851, a fatal accident deprived feminists of Frances Wright’s leadership, but decades later, they paid tribute to her by placing her picture first in the first volume of their History of Woman Suffrage.
A second well-known feminist did not engage in public speaking but did charge money for “conversations” in her home. New Englander Margaret Fuller’s writing was at least as influential as Wright’s; she was a close friend of the era’s most famous literati, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and others. They chose her to edit the group’s innovative journal, The Dial, and she went from there to the New York Tribune, where she carved out a position as the nation’s first professional book reviewer. Like Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller bore a child abroad before she married her lover, an Italian revolutionary; also like Wright, an early death cut short the contribution she could have made to the women’s rights movement. The young family drowned in a shipwreck while returning to America.
Margaret Fuller (Library of Congress)
Fuller’s most important feminist work was Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. Her national reputation brought readership to the book, and it was a factor in creating the ferment of ideas that led to the Seneca Falls Convention three years later. Like Frances Wright, however, Fuller was at least a century ahead of her time, especially in her advocacy of “free love,” the era’s term for sexual liberation.
In the nineteenth century, more people lived unconventionally than is generally recognized today. By the time of the Seneca Falls meeting, the United States had at least 40 functioning utopian communities—what we might call “cults” today—with alternate lifestyles that usually included communal property, vegetarianism, and other health reforms, as well as sexual behavior that ranged from abstinence to communal sex. The Oneida community of rural New York probably was the most radical; its men were required to use birth control, and, even today, some of their “complex marriage” practices would be deemed not only scandalous, but criminal.
The era’s morally driven women, of course, were more than a little ambivalent about Wright and Fuller and the harm that this radicalism did to their shared cause of abolishing slavery. Those who hoped to influence a public that still believed in slavery as both economically necessary and divinely sanctioned could not afford the distraction and credibility loss that would result if they associated themselves with advocates of “free love.” Some abolitionists, however, were prescient enough to understand that, whatever the intentions of reformers, the public inevitably would link the agitation for women’s civil rights with that of blacks. Already at this embryonic stage of the movements, they understood that the best approach was to work for justice for both women and blacks, without forcing the two into a false competition.
Lydia Maria Child (Library of Congress)
Lydia Maria Child was one who had both causes on her mind: in 1833, she published an anti-slavery classic, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Just two years later, she wrote The History of the Condition of Women. These books were so controversial that Child went bankrupt. Subscription cancellations for her previously successful children’s magazine arrived in droves; it was America’s first, in which Child wrote classics such as the lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The image that she had built as the author of bestselling The Frugal Housewife (1829) was destroyed, and she was ostracized by former Massachusetts friends.
For a while, Child maintained the household income by adopting an early commuter-marriage lifestyle; she edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard from New York, while her husband worked as a journalist in Washington.
The tie between racial and gender liberation also was spelled out by Sarah Grimké. In 1838, just one year after becoming an active abolitionist and a decade prior to the Seneca Falls meeting, she published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. At the time, she and her sister Angelina were becoming famous (or notorious, depending on one’s point of view) for their courageous stand against slavery. Born into a wealthy slaveholding South Carolina family, the sisters moved north, converted to Quakerism, and began writing and speaking against slavery. The only white Southerners ever to be leaders in the cause, their Massachusetts speaking tour was the first by female abolitionist agents. During the summer of 1837, the Grimkés attracted hundreds of listeners, both men and women, every day. In Lowell alone, 1,500 came; in smaller towns, people stood on ladders peering into overcrowded churches.
Once again, it was speech, more than the written word, that made the Grimkés objects of scorn. Even the Society of Friends rebuked Sarah, not for speaking as such, but for raising the controversial subject of slavery at the society’s 1836 national convention. The next year, Massachusetts ministers of the Congregationalist denomination (the intellectual heirs of Puritanism) issued a pastoral letter denouncing the sisters’ speaking tour. “We invite your attention to the dangers that at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury,” the clerics read from their pulpits. “The appropriate duties and influence of woman are clearly stated in the New Testament.”
Mary S. Parker of Boston was one of the women who would ignore the Massachusetts ministers’ admonitions; in May 1837, she went to New York to preside over the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Arguably the first national organization of women, this initial meeting attracted 200 delegates from nine states, some of them free blacks including, among others, Julia Williams, a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. A permanent organization grew out of it, but, when the women assembled in Philadelphia the next year, the City of Brotherly Love greeted them with immense hostility. After a howling mob made it impossible for them to continue their business, presiding officer Maria Weston Chapman led the women out of the hall with a white woman holding the hand of each black woman, something that she had done three years earlier when similar men threatened the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. So frequently attacked for her views that she said she was afraid to walk alone because of the “odious” comments Bostonians made to her, Chapman nonetheless displayed singular courage and leadership as did the black activists who marched with her. After the women’s dramatic exit, the mob set fire to the building.
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