Just as Seneca Falls hosted its famous convention because Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived there, the site of Ohio’s 1850 convention was chosen largely because it was home to Josephine Griffing and other abolitionists. Salem, in eastern Ohio between Akron and Pittsburgh, was known as an “underground railroad” town, welcoming to escaped slaves. It was also the base of the Anti-Slavery Bugle. Griffing frequently wrote for this widely circulated paper; its owners, Oliver and Mariana Johnson, were committed to women’s rights as well as to abolition. When the abolitionist and women’s rights causes began to diverge in the Civil War era, Griffing would concentrate on the first cause; the postwar Freedman’s Bureau was largely her brainchild.
The year was as meaningful as the site, for 1850 saw the adoption of the Fugitive Slave Act, which demanded the return of all escaped slaves to their previous owners. One of the cruelest pieces of legislation Congress ever passed, the act forced people of conscience to choose between what was legal and what was morally right. Because geography made Ohio a likely route to freedom, it had enacted similar laws earlier, which Salem abolitionists defiantly violated. They were encouraged by Abby Kelly, who was one of the first to travel through the state denouncing “the black laws of Ohio”; indeed, one feminist pioneer dated “the agitation of Woman’s Rights” in Ohio from Kelly’s lectures in 1843. Finally, the state planned a constitutional convention for 1850. Ohio women who had learned through the national press of the 1848 meetings in New York decided, in the words of their report for the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, “if the fundamental laws of the State were to be revised and amended, it was a fitting time for them to ask to be recognized.”
Abby Kelly (Library of Congress)
The women’s convention was planned for April 19 and 20, 1850, in Salem’s Second Baptist Church. At 10 a.m. Emily Robinson gaveled it to order and turned the podium over to Mariana W. Johnson, who read “the call” that stated their aims. They were there “to concert measures to secure to all persons the recognition of equal rights…without distinction of sex or color.” Participants were invited “to inquire if the position you now occupy is one appointed by wisdom, and designed to secure the best interests of the human race.”
Although these women had no parliamentary experience, they showed none of the timorousness of Seneca Falls and filled organizational positions with women. They created a business committee of six, chose three secretaries, and named three vice presidents to assist the president, Betsey M. Cowles. Ohio women felt fortunate to have Cowles as their leader: she was establishing a reputation as one of the state’s outstanding educators. A teacher since 1825, she had remained single, and, in 1834, organized a Young Ladies Society for Intellectual Improvement. She helped introduce the new concepts of kindergarten and Sunday school, and a few months after she chaired the convention, Cowles began work in the prestigious position of superintendent of girls’ elementary and secondary schools in Canton, Ohio.
The secretaries read greetings from Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and others unable to attend. A speech that Mott had made in Philadelphia the previous December, “On Woman,” was delivered, and the women proceeded to debate and adopt 22 resolutions without the least bit of timidity on the great question of demanding the vote.
Not only did women conduct this meeting, but they also did all of the debating: According to the report, “not a man was allowed to sit on the platform, to speak or vote. Never did men so suffer.” Betsey Cowles’s school-teaching experience plainly showed, for the men “implored just to say one word; but no; the President was inflexible no man should be heard. If one meekly arose to make a suggestion, he was at once ruled out of order. For the first time in the world’s history, men learned how it felt to sit in silence when questions in which they were interested were under discussion.” In addition to their resolutions, the women adopted a “Memorial” to the upcoming constitutional convention. They reminded the men who planned to rewrite fundamental law:
Women have no part or lot in the foundation or administration of government. They can not vote or hold office. They are required to contribute their share, by way of taxes, to the support of the Government, but are allowed no voice….
We would especially direct attention to the legal condition of married women…. Legally, she ceases to exist…. All that she has becomes legally his, and he can collect and dispose of the profits of her labor as he sees fit…. If he renders life intolerable, so that she is forced to leave him, he has the power to retain her children, and “seize her and bring her back, for he has a right to her society which he may enforce, either against herself or any other person who detains her.” Woman by being thus subject to the control, and dependent on the will of man, loses her self-dependence; and no human being can be deprived of this without a sense of degradation.
An even longer document was aimed at their sisters. In an “Address to the Women of Ohio,” they developed an argument based on the ideas of Locke and Jefferson, and these unknown women followed the concept of natural rights that human beings have rights as immutable as the natural laws of physics to its logical conclusion:
This government, having therefore exercised powers underived from the consent of the governed, and having signally failed to secure the end for which all just government is instituted, should be immediately altered, or abolished.
“The legal theory is, marriage makes the husband and wife one person, and that person is the husband…. There is scarcely a legal act that she is competent to perform…. She can make no contracts…. She has no power over his person, and her only claim upon his property is for a bare support. In no instance can she sue or be sued….” [quoted from Professor Walker, author of Introduction to American Law] Women of Ohio!… Slaves we are, politically and legally…. If men would be men worthy of the name, they must cease to disfranchise and rob their wives and mothers, they must forbear to consign to political and legal slavery their sisters and daughters. And we women…must cease to submit to such tyranny….
Woman, over half the globe, is now and always has been chattel. Wives are bargained for, bought and sold…. Can antiquity make wrong right?… We appeal to our sisters of Ohio to arise from the lethargy of ages…and take possession of your birthright to freedom and equality.
“A favorable and lengthy report” of the meeting “found its way into the New York Tribune and other leading journals,” and Ohio women did not seem to feel themselves as much the objects of scorn as New Yorkers had. Instead, they believed their convention “had accomplished a great educational work.” This statewide meeting was quickly emulated with smaller local events. The leader of the follow-up activity was Frances Dana Gage, who had been unable to attend the Salem convention. Known as “Aunt Fanny,” she was an established writer, who, in her own words, was “notorious” for “craziness.” Nonetheless, Gage had a mainstream readership, which she risked for the mocked cause of women’s rights, in such publications as the Ohio Cultivator, a farm magazine, and the Ladies’ Repository of Cincinnati. With three others—“all the women that I knew in that region even favorable to a movement for the help of women”—she called a meeting for her southeastern Ohio town of McConnelsville in early May.
“Women dared not speak then,” and even among this venturesome four, Gage stood alone in asking “for the ballot…without regard to sex or color.” She drew up a petition to omit the words “white” and “male” from the state’s constitution, and at the end of the day-long meeting, 40 of the 70 attendees signed it. Excited by this, the four planned another meeting in the Methodist church of nearby Morgan County for late May. They advertised it, and early in the morning of the appointed day, they “hired a hack” and rode 16 miles, where they discovered that they were “to be denied admittance to church or school-house.” A sympathetic minister, however, was prepared for his colleagues’ hostility: according to Gage, he “had found us shelter on the threshing-floor of a fine barn,” where the women found “three or four hundred of the farmers and their wives, sons, and daughters” already assembled.