her early talent in doing the same, while Martha Wright “read some satirical articles she had published in the daily papers answering the diatribes on women’s sphere.” Among the male presenters was Ansel Bascom, a recent delegate to a state constitutional convention, who thus was well qualified to speak to women’s property rights. Samuel Tillman, a young law student, had researched a “most exasperating” set of English and American statutes related to women, all of which demonstrated “the tender mercies of men toward their wives, in taking care of their property and protecting them in their civil rights.”
The meat of the convention was debate on the Declaration of Sentiments. After two days, “the only resolution that was not unanimously adopted was the ninth,” the one favoring the vote for women. Even longtime liberal Lucretia Mott did not favor this resolution, because she agreed with those who “feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat the others they deemed more rational, and make the whole movement ridiculous.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, however, insisted that without this fundamental right to participate in government, the principle of equality for women would never be taken seriously. After long discussion, the resolution “at last carried by a small majority.” The document was signed by exactly 100 participants: 32 men and 68 women. Just one of them, 19-year-old Charlotte Woodward, would live to see the centerpiece of the declaration achieved: only she was still alive to vote in 1920.
Although they talked for two days in Seneca Falls, “there were still so many new points for discussion,” according to Stanton, that the excited participants planned a follow-up meeting for the big city of Rochester. It was to be held just two weeks later, on August 2, 1848. This time the Committee of Arrangement was composed of Amy Post, Sarah D. Fish, Sarah C. Owen, and Mary H. Hallowell—none of whom had worked with the original planners. So untapped were these women’s talents, however, that the Rochester organizers had no trouble setting precedents of their own.
The meeting, which was scheduled for the city’s Unitarian Church, was “so well advertised in the daily papers” that when the day came, it “was filled to overflowing.” The women’s personal growth also was exponential; they had gained enough confidence that they undertook the parliamentary offices at this meeting. James Mott was present and ready to preside again, but the night before the meeting, Amy Post, Sarah Fish, and Rhoda DeGarmo undertook to persuade Abigail Bush to assume the leadership. According to Bush, her old friends “commenced to prove that the hour had come when a woman should preside, and led me into the church.” Much later, she would say: “No one knows what I passed through on that occasion. I was born and baptized in the old Scotch Presbyterian church. At that time its sacred teachings were, ‘If a woman would know anything let her ask her husband.’ ” Somewhere, however, she found courage.
Amy Post called the packed house to order and nominated Abigail Bush for president, with Laura Murray as vice president, and three women—Elizabeth M’Clintock, Sarah Hallowell, and Catherine A.F. Stebbins—as secretaries. Elizabeth Cady Stanton later wrote that she, “Mrs. Mott, and Mrs. McClintock [sic] thought it a most hazardous experiment to have a woman President, and stoutly opposed it.” The original leadership was “on the verge of leaving the Convention in disgust,” Stanton said, “but Amy Post and Rhoda de Garmo assured them” that a woman “could also preside at a public meeting, if they would but make the experiment.” Those in attendance voted, a majority agreed, and Abigail Bush took the chair. “The calm way she assumed the duties of the office, and the admirable manner in which she charged them,” Stanton admitted, “soon reconciled the opposition to the seemingly ridiculous experiment.” Bush humbly summarized, “from that hour I seemed endowed as from on high to serve.”
Still, some of the secretaries were so inexperienced at using their voices that they could not be heard. In a time before microphones, the crowd cried for increased volume so that they could participate. Finally, Sarah Anthony Burtis, a teacher and a Quaker accustomed to public speaking, volunteered. She “read the reports and documents of the Convention with a clear voice and confident manner, to the great satisfaction of her more timid coadjutors.”
Men once again were involved, including Frederick Douglass and a “Mr. Colton,” who traveled the long distance from eastern Connecticut to remind the audience that “woman’s sphere was home.” Lucretia Mott’s response to him indicated her exceptional awareness of seemingly every aspect of her world: she embarrassed Colton by pointing out that his church limited its Female Moral Reform Society to its basement and then only on the “condition that none of the women should speak at the meeting.” These societies had begun in the 1840s, especially in Ohio and other non-coastal areas, to encourage men to drop immoral behaviors: some were even courageous enough to publicize the names of men seen visiting brothels. Mott’s point was that Colton welcomed women to the anti-vice movement merely as listeners, even in a group ostensibly for women.
Another memorable aspect of this meeting was the appearance of a “young and beautiful stranger,” who held the audience “spell-bound.” It was near the close of the morning session when a “bride in traveling dress, accompanied by her husband, slowly walked up the aisle and asked the privilege of saying a few words.” The newlyweds were going west, heard of the convention, and rearranged their train schedule so that they could come. During a 20-minute speech, Rebecca Sanford advocated female political participation; she ended by encouraging women to “hang the wreath of domestic harmony upon the eagle’s talons.”
Ernestine Rose circa 1850. (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America)
Perhaps the most important person to appear at this meeting, however, was Ernestine Rose, who had long labored for women’s rights in isolation. Born as Ernestine Susmond Potowski in Poland, she had gone to court at age 16 to insist on receiving her inheritance from her mother; after emigrating and marrying an Englishman, she arrived in New York in 1836. Within months, she began working to ensure property rights for American women. There were just five signatures on the first petition that she sent to the New York legislature—and those she obtained only “after a good deal of trouble.” Rose explained, “Some of the ladies said the gentlemen would laugh at them; others, that they had rights enough; and the men said the women had too many rights already.” Undaunted, her efforts put American-born women to shame: from 1837 to 1848, when she came to feminists’ attention at the Rochester convention, Ernestine Rose addressed the New York legislature five times. Supported in her travels by a feminist husband, she had lectured on women’s rights in Ohio and lobbied the legislature of frontier Michigan.
The Rochester convention also brought attention to economic needs, as several speakers reported on women’s working conditions. The upper-middle-class women in attendance, the only ones with sufficient leisure to organize such meetings, found disgraceful “the intolerable servitude and small remuneration paid to the working-class of women.” Once again, however, more time was spent on religious issues, especially on the interpretation of biblical injunctions regarding a woman’s place. The question of taking a man’s name at marriage also was debated; Elizabeth Cady Stanton reminded the others that this practice was neither divinely ordained nor universal.
After three sessions before a large and receptive audience, the convention adopted resolutions that were shorter and more concrete than those of Seneca Falls. The first called for the vote, and another commended Elizabeth Blackwell, who recently had become the world’s first female student in a traditional medical school. But the majority were based on women’s economic needs, focusing on taxation without representation, property ownership, and the inheritance rights of widows. Most meaningfully, the convention called upon the audience to be better employers: “Those who believe the laboring classes of women are oppressed ought to do all in their power to raise their wages, beginning with their own household servants.”
The strongest language centered on the right to retain one’s own earnings. “Whereas,” the document proclaimed, “the husband has the
