of men. Though through the dim past we find women still making discoveries, and in the feudal ages possessing knowledge of both medicine and surgery, it is but recently that they have been welcomed as practitioners into the medical profession. Looking back scarcely a hundred years, we find science much indebted to woman for some of its most brilliant discoveries. In 1736, the first medical botany was given to the world by Elizabeth Blackwell, a woman physician, whom the persecutions of her male compeers had cast into jail for debt. As Bunyan prepared his "Pilgrim's Progress" between prison walls, so did Elizabeth Blackwell, no-wise disheartened, prepare her valuable aid to medical science under the same conditions. Lady Montague's discovery of a check to the small-pox, Madam Boivin's discovery of the hidden cause of certain hemorrhages, Madam de Condrày's invention of the manikin, are among the notable steps which opened the way to the modern Elizabeth Blackwell, Harriot K. Hunt, Clemence S. Lozier, Ann Preston, Hannah Longshore, Marie Jackson, Laura Ross Wolcott, Marie Zakrzewska, and Mary Putnam Jacobi, who are some of the earlier distinguished American examples of woman's skill in the healing art.
Mary Gove Nichols gave public lectures upon anatomy in the United States in 1838. Paulina Wright (Davis) followed her upon physiology in 1844, using a manikin in her illustrations.1 Mariana Johnson followed Mrs. Davis, but it was 1848 before Elizabeth Blackwell—the first woman to pass through the regular course of medical study—received her diploma at Geneva.2 In 1845-6, preceding Miss Blackwell's course of study, Dr. Samuel Gregory and his brother George issued pamphlets advocating the education and employment of women-physicians, and, in 1847, Dr. Gregory delivered a series of lectures in Boston upon that subject, followed in 1848 by a school numbering twelve ladies, and an association entitled the "American Female Medical Education Society." In 1832, Lydia Maria Child published her "History of Woman," which was the first American storehouse of information upon the whole question, and undoubtedly increased the agitation. In 1836, Ernestine L. Rose, a Polish lady—banished from her native country by the Austrian tyrant, Francis Joseph, for her love of liberty—came to America, lecturing in the large cities North and South upon the "Science of Government." She advocated the enfranchisement of woman. Her beauty, wit, and eloquence drew crowded houses. About this period Judge Hurlbut, of New York, a leading member of the Bar, wrote a vigorous work on "Human Rights,"3 in which he advocated political equality for women. This work attracted the attention of many legal minds throughout that State. In the winter of 1836, a bill was introduced into the New York Legislature by Judge Hertell, to secure to married women their rights of property. This bill was drawn up under the direction of Hon. John Savage, Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court, and Hon. John C. Spencer, one of the revisers of the statutes of New York. It was in furtherance of this bill that Ernestine L. Rose and Paulina Wright at that early day circulated petitions. The very few names they secured show the hopeless apathy and ignorance of the women as to their own rights. As similar bills4 were pending in New York until finally passed in 1848, a great educational work was accomplished in the constant discussion of the topics involved. During the winters of 1844-5-6, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, living in Albany, made the acquaintance of Judge Hurlbut and a large circle of lawyers and legislators, and, while exerting herself to strengthen their convictions in favor of the pending bill, she resolved at no distant day to call a convention for a full and free discussion of woman's rights and wrongs.
In 1828, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, daughters of a wealthy planter of Charleston, South Carolina, emancipated their slaves and came North to lecture on the evils of slavery, leaving their home and native place forever because of their hatred of this wrong. Angelina was a natural orator. Fresh from the land of bondage, there was a fervor in her speech that electrified her hearers and drew crowds wherever she went. Sarah published a book reviewing the Bible arguments the clergy were then making in their pulpits to prove that the degradation of the slave and woman were alike in harmony with the expressed will of God. Thus women from the beginning took an active part in the Anti-Slavery struggle. They circulated petitions, raised large sums of money by fairs, held prayer-meetings and conventions. In 1835, Angelina wrote an able letter to William Lloyd Garrison, immediately after the Boston mob. These letters and appeals were considered very effective abolition documents.
In May, 1837, a National Woman's Anti-Slavery Convention was held in New York, in which eight States were represented by seventy-one delegates. The meetings were ably sustained through two days. The different sessions were opened by prayer and reading of the Scriptures by the women themselves. A devout, earnest spirit prevailed. The debates, resolutions, speeches, and appeals were fully equal to those in any Convention held by men of that period. Angelina Grimke was appointed by this Convention to prepare an appeal for the slaves to the people of the free States, and a letter to John Quincy Adams thanking him for his services in defending the right of petition for women and slaves, qualified with the regret that by expressing himself "adverse to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia," he did not sustain the cause of freedom and of God. She wrote a stirring appeal to the Christian women of the South, urging them to use their influence against slavery. Sarah also wrote an appeal to the clergy of the South, conjuring them to use their power for freedom.
Among those who took part in these conventions we find the names of Lydia Maria Child, Mary Grove, Henrietta Sargent, Sarah Pugh, Abby Kelley, Mary S. Parker, of Boston, who was president of the Convention; Anne Webster, Deborah Shaw, Martha Storrs, Mrs. A. L. Cox, Rebecca B. Spring, and Abigail Hopper Gibbons, a daughter of that noble Quaker philanthropist, Isaac T. Hopper.
Abby Kelley was the most untiring and the most persecuted of all the women who labored throughout the Anti-Slavery struggle. She traveled up and down, alike in winter's cold and summer's heat, with scorn, ridicule, violence, and mobs accompanying her, suffering all kinds of persecutions, still speaking whenever and wherever she gained an audience; in the open air, in school-house, barn, depot, church, or public hall; on week-day or Sunday, as she found opportunity. For listening to her, on Sunday, many men and women were expelled from their churches. Thus through continued persecution was woman's self-assertion and self-respect sufficiently developed to prompt her at last to demand justice, liberty, and equality for herself.
In 1840, Margaret Fuller published an essay in the Dial, entitled "The Great Lawsuit, or Man vs. Woman: Woman vs. Man." In this essay she demanded perfect equality for woman, in education, industry, and politics. It attracted great attention and was afterward expanded into a work entitled "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." This, with her parlor conversations, on art, science, religion, politics, philosophy, and social life, gave a new impulse to woman's education as a thinker.5
"Woman and her Era," by Eliza Woodson Farnham, was another work that called out a general discussion on the status of the sexes, Mrs. Farnham taking the ground of woman's superiority. The great social and educational work done by her in California, when society there was chiefly male, and rapidly tending to savagism, and her humane experiment in the Sing Sing (N. Y.), State Prison, assisted by Georgiana Bruce Kirby and Mariana Johnson, are worthy of mention.
In the State of New York, in 1845, Rev. Samuel J. May preached a sermon at Syracuse, upon "The Eights and Conditions of Women," in which he sustained their right to take part in political life, saying women need not expect "to have their wrongs fully redressed, until they themselves have a voice and a hand in the enactment and administration of the laws."
In 1847, Clarina Howard Nichols, in her husband's paper, addressed to the voters of the State of Vermont a series of editorials, setting forth the injustice of the property disabilities of married women.
In 1849, Lucretia Mott published a discourse on woman, delivered in the Assembly Building, Philadelphia, in answer to a Lyceum lecture which Richard H. Dana, of Boston, was giving in many of the chief cities, ridiculing the idea of political equality for woman. Elizabeth Wilson, of Ohio, published a scriptural view of woman's rights
