previous month, a serious split had developed in the American Anti-Slavery Society when its founder, William Lloyd Garrison, appointed Abby Kelly to the society’s business committee. Garrison was impressed by Kelly’s commitment to the cause; she had given up her teaching job to endure the most hostile of conditions while lecturing against slavery. During a tour the previous year, she was slandered, physically attacked, and refused hotel rooms. Despite this demonstration of commitment, many male abolitionists objected to a woman in a leadership position. At the May convention, “clergymen went through the audience urging every woman…to vote against the motion.” The contradiction of asking women to vote in this case but not in others did not escape ironic comment from feminists, and Garrison’s appointment of Kelly prevailed. Some of the losers, however, could not accept majority rule, and they vented their frustrations in London the next month.
Also sailing across the sea were the female delegates: Lucretia Mott led five Philadelphia women “in modest Quaker costume”; the three from Boston were “women of refinement and education” and they were joined by “several still in their twenties.” Among them was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry, who went to the abolitionist meeting on their honeymoon. Much later, in the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, she would recall:
The American clergymen, who had landed a few days before, had been busily engaged in fanning the English prejudice into active hostility against the admission of these women into the Convention…. The excitement and vehemence of protest and denunciation could not have been greater.
While the women watched in silence, some of the male American delegates made strong arguments for their inclusion. George Bradburn, a Massachusetts legislator, orated for a half-hour: “What a misnomer to call this a World’s Convention of Abolitionists when some of the oldest and most thorough-going Abolitionists in the World are denied the right to be represented!” Toward the end of the day’s debate, he sprang to his feet exasperated and used words that are almost incredible for a politician of any era:
“Prove to me, gentlemen, that your Bible sanctions the slavery of women—the complete subjugation of one-half the race to the other—and I should feel that the best work I could do for humanity would be to make a grand bonfire of every Bible in the Universe.”
Along with others, Bostonian Wendell Phillips zealously advocated the women’s cause. He pointed out that the American men could not “take upon themselves the responsibility of withdrawing the delegates…[whom] their constituents…sanctioned as their fit representatives.” In response to the most frequently offered argument for excluding women—that a mixed group would be offensive to the host country—Phillips retorted:
In America we listen to no such arguments. If we had done so we would never had been here as Abolitionists. It is the custom there not to admit colored men into respectable society, and we have been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have submitted to brick-bats, and the tar tub and feathers in America, rather than yield to the custom…shall we yield to the parallel custom or prejudice against women in Old England? We can not yield this question if we would; for it is a matter of conscience. But we would not yield it on the ground of expediency. In doing so we should feel that we are striking off the right arm of our enterprise. We could not go back and ask for any aid from the women…if we had deserted them.
Wendell Phillips (The Free Library of Philadelphia)
The feminist arguments were of no avail. The vote to refuse to accept the credentials of the female delegates passed by an overwhelming majority. The women were fenced off behind a curtain, where they could hear but could not be heard or seen. None of the men cared enough about the principle to surrender his credentials—except for William Lloyd Garrison, who arrived too late for the debate. “Brave, noble Garrison” sat “a silent spectator in the gallery” during the ten-day convention. “What a sacrifice,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “for a principle so dimly seen by the few, and so ignorantly ridiculed by the many!” Wendell Phillips, in contrast, assured the other men that he had “no unpleasant feelings.” Stanton concluded bitterly:
Would there have been no unpleasant feelings in Wendell Phillips’ mind had African American Frederick Douglass and Robert Purvis been refused their seats? And had they listened one entire day to debate on their…fitness for plantation life, and unfitness for the forum and public assemblies, and been rejected as delegates on the grounds of color.
The sadness of her conclusion still echoes. Although she commended Phillips’s leadership, his easy acquiescence to the status quo upset the young Stanton greatly, and it changed forever her view of even good men. Although much in love with her groom of exactly one month, she was forced to acknowledge: “it is almost impossible for the most liberal of men to understand what liberty means for woman.”
“Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World”: 1840 to 1848
At the end of the long debate that banned them from the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton “wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street.” During the next nine days, they “kept up a brisk fire” of words aimed at “the unfortunate gentlemen” who shared their hotel, one of whom packed his luggage and “withdrew after the first encounter.” Not eager to return to the convention and sit behind a humiliating curtain, Mott and Stanton spent much of their time walking in the June splendor of London’s parks, where they “agreed to hold a woman’s rights convention on their return to America.”
Lucretia Mott (Library of Congress)
But life got in the way. Lucretia Mott was one of the busiest women of her era, for there was little of Philadelphia civic life in which she was not involved. By the time of the World Anti-Slavery Convention, she and merchant James Mott had been married for 29 years. He was highly supportive of his unusual wife; she was not only the mother of six, but also had been an ordained Quaker minister for almost two decades. An ardent abolitionist, she spoke in black churches as early as 1829. Moreover, she took it upon herself to boycott everything produced with slave labor, which meant finding substitutes for such staples as cotton, sugar, coffee, and rice.
When they met in England, Lucretia Mott had been married for longer than 25-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been alive. Stanton graduated from Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, and then became involved in abolitionist activity, where she met journalist Henry Stanton. He was so impressed with her that he agreed to omit the bride’s traditional vow of obedience from their May wedding—and they immediately sailed for London.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and one of her children, 1876. (From the archives of the Seneca Falls Historical Society)
After losing the debate, the Motts and Stantons adopted the utilitarian view that it was better if one partner of their marriages was represented at the convention than none, and the women thus had plenty of time to spend together. Lucretia Mott became a true inspiration for Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom,” Stanton would write later, for Mott “seemed like a being from some larger planet.” James Mott similarly provided a model for Henry Stanton.
The Stantons traveled in Europe until November, and then Henry studied law with Elizabeth’s father, a judge in Johnstown,
