The declaration is a most interesting document…. The amusing part is the preamble…. It complains of the want of the elected franchise…. We do not see by what principle of right the angelic creatures should claim to compete…. Though we have the most perfect confidence in the courage and daring of Miss Lucretia Mott and several others of our lady acquaintances, we confess it would go to our hearts to see them putting on the panoply of war, and mixing in scenes like those….
It is not the business, however, of the despot to decide upon the rights of his victims; nor do we undertake to define the duties of women. Their standard is now unfurled by their own hands. The Convention of Seneca Falls has appealed to the country. Miss Lucretia Mott has propounded the principles of the party. Ratification meetings will no doubt shortly be held…. We are much mistaken if Lucretia would not make a better President than some of those who have lately tenured the White House.
The editor gave the meeting more credence than some of its participants: Bennett assumed that the world would soon be debating the declaration’s principles in “ratification meetings,” and his musing on the possibility of a female president was not even a notion that the women themselves had begun to envision. Newspaper circulation of the declaration meant that its ideas traveled around the globe far faster than its rural authors ever could have expected.
The Rochester convention, held in a much larger city, naturally elicited more editorial comment, most of it negative. According to the Rochester Democrat, “The great effort seemed to be to bring out some new, impracticable, absurd, and ridiculous proposition, and the greater its absurdity the better.” The Rochester Advertiser took an unusual approach: its editor appeared to hope that the women’s gatherings would go away if he yawned: “to us they appear extremely dull and uninteresting, and, aside from their novelty, hardly worth notice.” Despite the efforts in the Rochester meeting to direct attention to women’s economic needs, one of the state’s most populist newspapers was also one of its most annoyed. The Mechanic’s Advocate, published in the capital of Albany, was uncharacteristically conservative in its reaction when women were the issue. After an internal debate with its better nature, its editorial essentially ended up saying that even if changes were needed, the upheaval would be so great that it was not worth the effort:
The women who attend these meetings, no doubt at the expense of their more appropriate duties, act as committees, write resolutions…make speeches, etc….
Now, it requires no argument to prove that this all is wrong. Every true hearted female will instantly feel that this is unwomanly…. Society would have to be radically remodeled in order to accommodate itself to so great a change…. But this change is impracticable, uncalled for, and unnecessary…. It would be of no positive good, that would not be outweighed tenfold by positive evil.
An out-of-state paper, the Public Ledger and Daily Transcript, apparently was unaware of Lucretia Mott and other Pennsylvanians who initiated the feminist agenda. Its editorial began with smug congratulations to “our Philadelphia ladies,” who not only possessed “beauty, but are celebrated for discretion and modesty…. Whoever heard of a Philadelphia lady setting up for a reformer, or standing out for women’s rights?” Seemingly blissfully ignorant of the long records established by the city’s women in the Society of Friends and other reform groups, the paper continued mockingly, “Boston ladies contend for the rights of women [and] the New York girls aspire to mount the rostrum…. Our Philadelphia girls prefer the baby-jumper…and the ballroom.” The unsigned editorial concluded by revealing a profound masculine egocentrism: “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything.”
The Lowell Courier displayed a similarly regressive attitude, even though this Massachusetts textile town employed thousands of women who entertained no thoughts of babies and ballrooms. Most Lowell mill workers were unmarried women who lived in company housing; many were highly literate, for they had the opportunity to read, join study clubs, and even publish their own writing in industry-sponsored publications. Blind to this audience, however, the Lowell editor assumed his satire would please: “They should have resolved,” he said of the conventions, “that it was obligatory also upon the [men of the house] to wash dishes, scour up, be put to the tub, handle the broom, darn stockings, patch breeches…look beautiful and be fascinating.”
It was a thought that the Rochester Daily Advertiser found surprisingly plausible. Although Henry Montgomery titled his editorial “The Reign of Petticoats” and began with satirical commentary about “the beautiful and feminine business of politics,” he ended up with a most unconventional endorsement:
Can not women fill an office, or cast a vote, or conduct a campaign, as judiciously and vigorously as men? And, on the other hand, can not men…boil a pot as safely and as well as women? If they can not, the evil is in the arbitrary organization of society…. It is time these false notions and practices were changed…. Let the women keep the ball moving, so bravely started by those who have become tired of the restraints imposed upon them.
The end of summer did not end the publicity. “There is no danger of this question dying for want of notice,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in the National Reformer on September 14:
Every paper you take up has something to say about it…. For those who do not yet understand the real objects of our recent Conventions at Rochester and Seneca Falls, I would state that we did not meet to discuss fashions, customs, or dress, the rights or duties of man, nor the propriety of the sexes changing positions, but simply our own inalienable rights…. There is no such thing as a sphere for a sex. Every man has a different sphere, and one in which he may shine, and it is the same with every woman; and the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.
Stanton explicated her point with the examples of Angelina Grimké and Lucretia Mott. Grimké had gone “the length and breadth of New England, telling the people of her personal experience of the slave system,” and her testimony had moved the public in a way “unsurpassed by any of the highly gifted men of her day.” She then married and chose to remove herself from public life. “Her sphere and her duties have changed,” Stanton wrote, but both portions of her life had value. Mott, in contrast, devoted the first part of her life to children and home, and now, “her husband and herself, having a comfortable fortune, pass much of their time in going about and doing good.” Like men, Stanton argued, women are naturally capable of many “spheres” and of making different choices at different points in life.
Stanton also reached out from their tiny town to larger and more diverse circulation sources. By far the most important of the papers that supported the women’s agenda was Horace Greeley’s tremendously popular New York Tribune. Although he later would quarrel with suffragists and retract much of his support, in these early days, he encouraged women, including the first credentialed female physician, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. He opened the Tribune’s pages to Stanton, and she used Greeley’s paper as an opportunity to respond to the verbal assaults that most journalists made. Elizabeth Cady Stanton—who never would be recognized as the philosopher that she actually was—mailed out her brilliant argumentation and transformed her world.
“The Spirit of a Snake” and the Spirit of Success, 1848 to 1860
After the excitement of 1848, the women’s movement drew a collective breath and allowed 1849 to pass quietly. In 1850 came a second explosion of women’s rights conventions, and from that year, the revolution would be permanent. That year the movement went national, expanding out of New York with conventions in Ohio and Massachusetts.
Frontier Ohio may seem an odd place to follow the Rochester meeting, but several factors made it logical. It was a haven for young people dissatisfied with life in the staid East, making a new start in what was still considered the West. Second, because only the Ohio River separated it from slave territory on its southern border, the state became an early refuge for escaped slaves—and thus for abolitionists. Finally, Oberlin College, a hotbed of radical ideas, had operated there for almost two decades. The nation’s