Antoinette Brown (Library of Congress)
Her Oberlin classmate (and future sister-in-law) Antoinette Brown also attended the convention. Brown had just completed three years of work in Oberlin’s theology department, but the college would not grant this sacred degree to a woman. No church was willing to ordain her, and she was spending her autumn wandering country roads in hopes of finding a congregation that would allow her to preach. Perhaps more than anyone, Antoinette Brown needed the solace and support of the network she found at Worcester.
Another celebrity at the meeting was, sadly enough, much more famous then than now. Dr. Harriot K. Hunt had begun practicing medicine in 1835; Dr. Hunt did not have a medical degree, but it was not uncommon at that time for even male physicians to lack medical school credentials. Her healing techniques emphasized hygiene and did not include leeches, mercury, and other dangerous interventions that many physicians used. Hunt’s reputation as a successful healer soon was established enough that she had a busy practice among Boston’s finest families, especially with female patients who appreciated having a female physician whom they could trust.
In the same way that Harriot K. Hunt’s remarkable history was allowed to die, modern women also are unfamiliar with Abby H. Price, but convention president Paulina Wright Davis evidently thought of her in the same category as Lucy Stone. In a report on the Worcester meeting, in a sentence immediately before one about Stone, Davis wrote: “Abby H. Price, large-hearted and large-brained, gentle and strong, presented an address on the social question.” Davis added that the speech was “seldom bettered,” but provided no details, for the euphemistic “social question” doubtless referred to prostitution and venereal disease.
“The debates on the resolutions,” Davis said, “were spicy, pointed, and logical” and kept “crowded audiences through two entire days.” The resolutions not only included the same “sex and color” phrase that was used at Salem, but spelled out this commitment further: “Resolved, that the cause we have met to advocate the claim for woman of all her natural and civil rights bids us remember the two millions of slave women at the South, the most grossly wronged and foully outraged of all women.”
Although the network of women’s advocates would still be referred to as “Woman’s Rights Conventions” until after the Civil War, this meeting took significant steps to chart out a permanent, national organization. Paulina Wright Davis would chair a Central Committee with members from every state; other committees were Education, Industry, Civil and Political Functions, Social Relations, and Publications. Except for Publications, which was undertaken by William Henry Channing, the committees were chaired by women.
“Thus encouraged,” Paulina Wright Davis summarized, “we felt new zeal to go on.” Once again, the group did an amazingly good public relations job, and this time, it was particularly effective in Europe. “Many letters were received from literary women in this country as well as abroad,” Davis enthused. She was especially happy about favorable publicity from Swedish Frederika Bremer, one of the world’s bestselling contemporary commentators. Bremer, who would tour and write about America in the 1850s, “quoted from our writings,” Davis marveled. “Our words had been like an angel’s visit to the prisoners of State in France,” where revolution recently had been suppressed.
The most significant attention came from the October 29, 1850, international edition of the New York Tribune. Among many who read it was English philosopher John Stuart Mill, one of the modern age’s greatest thinkers. The next July, the prestigious Westminster Review followed up with a philosophical essay in which Mill explicated the ideas of the American women or so people thought at the time. The article, “On Enfranchisement of Women,” began by discussing the American phenomenon:
Most of our readers will probably learn, from these pages, for the first time, that there has risen in the United States…an organized agitation on a new question…the enfranchisement of women, their admission in law, and in fact, to equality….
It will add to the surprise with which many receive this intelligence that…not merely for women, but by them….
A succession of public meetings was held, under the name of a “Woman’s Rights Convention,” of which the President was a woman, and nearly all the chief speakers were women….
According to the report in the New York Tribune, above a thousand persons were present throughout, and “if a larger place could have been had, many thousands more would have attended.”
The proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely in the oratory of public meetings is…calm good sense and reason so considerable.
The result…is probably destined to inaugurate one of the most important of the movements toward political and social reform…. The promoters of this new agitation take their stand on principles, and do not fear.
Mill later explained that the true author of the famous essay was Harriet Hardy Taylor. For two decades, she had been, he said, “the honour and chief blessing of my existence,” but she was married to another man. After her husband’s 1849 death, Taylor married Mill, but they had only a few years together before her sudden death. When he wrote his most famous work, On Liberty (1859), Mill acknowledged that “so much of it was the work of her whom I lost.” It goes without saying that his 1869 publication, The Subjection of Women, also originated in the mind of this unknown female philosopher. Still later, Mill wrote to Paulina Wright Davis:
John Stuart Mill (Library of Congress)
It gives me the greatest pleasure to know that the service rendered by my dear wife to the cause which was nearer her heart than any other, by her essay in the Westminster Review, has had so much effect and is so justly appreciated in the United States. Were it possible in a memoir to have the formation and growth of a mind like hers portrayed, to do so would be as valuable a benefit to mankind as was ever conferred by a biography. But such a psychological history is seldom possible.
Just as New York’s Seneca Falls convention was followed by one in the city of Rochester, Ohio’s 1850 event in Salem was a prelude to a larger one in Akron. Midwestern activism was renewed, and many of those who made history at Salem went to Akron on May 28 and 29, 1851. This meeting also heralded several women who would be among the most important suffragists for decades to come.
Frances Dana Gage, who had clearly established her leadership the previous year, presided. Gage also mentored several of the women there, including Caroline Severance, who eventually moved back East and became the founding president of the important New England Woman’s Club. The conventioneers were also excited about the presence of Maria L. Giddings; she not only gave “a very able digest on the common law,” but also had political connections, for her father “represented Ohio in Congress for many years.”
The appearance of Hannah Tracy, later Hannah Tracy Cutler, at the convention demonstrated tremendous commitment, for she had overcome serious handicaps. After her father refused to allow her to attend the new Oberlin College, she married at 18 and had three children. She was pregnant with the last when her husband died, after pro-slavery men assaulted him while he was helping slaves escape. Widowed, she then went to Oberlin, ran a boardinghouse to support her family, and even found time to write original feminist theory: Woman as She Was, Is, and Should Be was published in 1846. Tracy graduated the following year, and by the time of the Akron convention, she had the plum job of principal of the “female department” of the new Columbus high school. Most women in such a position would not risk it with radical feminist activity, but her courage was fired by experience.
Pittsburgh’s Jane Grey Swisshelm had learned similar courage. The publisher of the abolitionist Saturday Visiter [sic] at the time, she attended the prior year’s Worcester convention and would go on to national leadership in Minnesota and in Washington D.C. but despite this apparent success, Swisshelm still