Gage and others worked hard, and the petitions they presented to Ohio’s constitutional convention held a significant number of signatures. The one for “Equal Rights” in property laws and similar legislation was signed by 7,901 people. The one for the “Right of Suffrage,” on the other hand, was still seen as a radical idea: only 2,106 signed it. The men of the constitutional convention, however, did not appear to take these thousands of petitioners with any seriousness at all. Rebecca Janney, a leader in Ohio’s movement from its earliest days, summarized tersely: “The discussions in the Constitutional Convention were voted to be dropped from the records, because they were so low and obscene.”
The young state of Indiana also held a constitutional convention in 1850. The women’s movement was not yet organized there, but feminist Robert Dale Owen made their case for them. He doubtless was inspired by his wife, Mary Robinson Owen, a Virginian who had endured pioneer Indiana with him. When the Owens married in 1832, they wrote an unconventional compact in which Robert declared: “Of the unjust rights which…this ceremony…gives me over the person and property of another, I can not legally, but I can morally, divest myself.” He also was influenced by his longtime colleague, Frances Wright. Both natives of Scotland, Wright and Owen worked together in a number of reform efforts, including a utopian community at New Harmony, Indiana.
When the constitutional convention met, he argued especially for the property rights of married women and widows, but without success. Perhaps inspired by the efforts that this man made for them, Indiana women began to organize themselves at an anti-slavery meeting the following year. The first Indiana women’s rights convention was held in October 1851 in the Wayne County village of Dublin. “Such a Convention being a novel affair,” reads their record in the History of Woman Suffrage, “it called out some ridicule and opposition,” but the women were “so well pleased” that they immediately planned another. From 1851 through the end of the decade, Indiana women held annual conventions that were never distracted by jeering men as those in the East would be.
Often Ohio women came to Indiana to speak, especially the ever-popular Frances Dana Gage and the thoughtful Caroline Severance. Amanda Way was perhaps Indiana’s primary leader at this time; a talented tailor and milliner, she was a bit unusual in the women’s rights movement in that she never married. A Quaker, she had ties to Lucretia Mott and the temperance and abolitionist movements, and Way would take these causes with her as she moved west to Kansas and then California during the rest of the century. Another inspirational leader was Mary F. Thomas, a married woman with three young daughters who had learned of the women’s movement while she lived in Salem, Ohio. At the first Indiana convention, she announced her intention to become a physician and by the 1856 convention, she was Dr. Thomas. Less than a decade after Elizabeth Blackwell was the first woman to graduate from a male medical school, Thomas completed her education at Cleveland’s Western Reserve College (now Case Western Reserve) and at Philadelphia’s Penn Medical University.
She also managed to participate in most of Indiana’s systematically scheduled and smoothly run conventions. The 1852 and 1853 ones were in the town of Richmond; 1854 and 1855 took them to the Masonic Hall in Indianapolis, but meetings returned for the rest of the decade to the small towns of Richmond and Winchester. The most hostile press was in the largest city: at the 1855 Indianapolis convention, “the reporters gave glowing pen sketches of the ‘masculine women’ and ‘feminine men;’ they described the dress and appearance of the women very minutely, but said little of the merits of the question or the arguments of the speakers.”
With the New York and Ohio precedents set, Massachusetts hosted its first women’s rights convention in autumn of the same year. Unlike the earlier meetings, however, this one was carefully planned months in advance. In May, at an anti-slavery gathering in Boston, nine women caucused in a “dark, dingy room” about a convention for their own civil rights. They scheduled the meeting for October 23 and 24, 1850, and chose the Massachusetts town of Worcester because of its central location. Most important, they decided to aim for a national, not merely a state, women’s rights convention.
Paulina Wright Davis (Library of Congress)
Paulina Wright Davis undertook most of the planning work. In 1835, as Paulina Kellogg Wright, she and her husband had organized one of the first anti-slavery meetings and endured a mob assault on their home in Utica, New York. He died in 1846, leaving her a widow wealthy enough to do something very unusual: with a female anatomical mannequin imported from Paris, she taught the basics of their bodies to the relatively few women who dared to explore this forbidden subject. A second marriage to jeweler Thomas Davis changed her name, and as Paulina Wright Davis, she organized the Massachusetts meeting from her home in Providence, Rhode Island.
Davis had hoped to turn over the leadership of this first National Woman’s Rights Convention to famous author Margaret Fuller, but after Fuller drowned in a July shipwreck, Davis decided to assemble a list of prestigious names to sign the meeting’s “call.” She sent “earnest private letters” to those she hoped would become endorsers, but even though she thought her call was “moderate in tone,” it nonetheless “gave the alarm to conservatism.” The response was painful: “Letters, curt, reproachful, and sometimes almost insulting,” Davis said, “came with absolute refusals to have the names of the writers used.” But other mail brought better news. While the “alarmed conservatives” missed a chance to enshrine their names in history, visionary people gladly signed. More than 50 women and 30 men, including famed philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, endorsed the convention. The first signer, Sarah Tyndale, inspired particular optimism; Davis termed her “perhaps more widely known than any other woman of her time.” Tyndale had run what the History of Woman Suffrage termed one of Philadelphia’s “largest businesses” for more than two decades. Davis especially appreciated this support, for Tyndale made a “great social sacrifice in taking up a cause so unpopular.” Another hopeful opportunity for broadening the movement’s base of support was an endorsement from Catherine M. Sedgwick, one of the era’s most popular novelists.
On “the bright October days” of the convention, reads the women’s report of their historic gathering, “a solemn, earnest crowd of noble men and women” assembled in Worcester’s Brinley Hall. The meeting was called to order by Sarah H. Earl, a locally prominent woman married to the editor of the Worcester Spy. She conducted an election and turned the gavel over to Paulina Wright Davis. Four other officers were equally divided by gender, and the five people elected came from four states. The meeting was indeed national in tone, with sizeable delegations from nine states, but all of them were in the North, a fact that presaged the coming of the Civil War.
Gathered in Worcester were the people who would form the backbone of the women’s movement for the rest of the century. From Vermont came newspaper editor Clarina Howard Nichols; from Philadelphia, Lucretia Mott and other Friends. From Ohio came the Anti-Slavery Bugle editors Mariana and Oliver Johnson, as well as two sisters of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell. Ernestine Rose was among those from New York, while longtime abolitionists Parker and Sarah Pillsbury came from New Hampshire. The two people who came the greatest distances, Mary G. Wright of California and Silas Smith of Iowa, were the only representatives from those states. Massachusetts, of course, had far more participation than any other state; among its many luminaries were Abby Kelly Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, and several members of 18-year-old Louisa May Alcott’s family. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth “represented the enslaved African race.”
Just as the Rochester meeting introduced women to Ernestine Rose, Worcester debuted several other suffragist stars. Like Rose, Lucy Stone had been speaking out on behalf of women for years prior to the conventions. She was Massachusetts’s first female college graduate, but not only did Stone have to go to Ohio’s Oberlin to earn this credential, she also had to support herself because her affluent father refused to pay tuition for a girl. Nearly 30 when she graduated, she turned down the “honor” of writing a commencement speech that even at progressive Oberlin would be read by a man. Stone followed Abby Kelly Foster’s example and earned a precarious living as a paid lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society on the weekends, while on weekdays,