Stanton replied with equal force. She had lived with the experiment of dressing like a man, but Smith had never considered what public reaction would be if he were to adopt any aspect of female apparel. She argued that image was exactly that: a matter of style, not substance, upon which no individual rights should be based. Moreover, women had no reason “to hope that pantaloons would do for us” any more good than pants did for black men. It was not acceptance of apparel that mattered, but acceptance of ideas.
While she “fully agreed that woman is terribly cramped and crippled in her present style of dress,” this was not the battleground on which to win the war. She pointed out that New York women recently had achieved an emancipating property law, something far more important than a fashion victory. “Depend on it,” Stanton wrote, “when men and women…think less of sex and more of mind, we shall all lead…higher lives.”
Smith did not let the issue rest with his cousin; he wrote an article on the subject that Frederick Douglass published in his reform newspaper. When Frances Dana Gage read it, she responded with an angry letter to the editor:
This article, though addressed to Mrs. Stanton, is an attack upon every one engaged in the cause…. He has made the whole battle-ground of the Woman’s Rights Movement her dress. We must own ourselves under the law first, own our bodies, our earnings, our genius, and our consciences; then we will turn to the lesser matter of what shall be the garniture of the body.
Gage, Stanton, and others made a reasoned case for a pragmatic solution to their problem, and most women agreed. They logically concluded that the political battle was both more important than the social one, and that it was more likely to be won if women were not engaged in a war on two fronts. A few women, however, ignored both the movement’s leadership and the derisive jeers of scoffers to continue to wear the garment.
Perhaps the most dedicated and successful was Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck. She adopted pants earlier than the more famous Elizabeth Smith Miller. Late in life, she was openly resentful that others, especially Amelia Bloomer, became celebrities while her much longer commitment went unrecognized. In 1849, two years before the dress-reform publicity from Seneca Falls, 22-year-old Lydia Sayer was refused admission to a New York female seminary because she wore pantaloons. This was a defining moment of her life, and the clothing choice became one of principle. Long after most feminists gave up the fight, Hasbrouck carried on. In 1856, she began a biweekly publication, The Sibyl, that attracted a sufficient audience to keep it in business for almost a decade. Her chief editorial concern was improved health from less confining clothing, a point of view doubtless reinforced by the fact that she married and bore three children during the decade of The Sibyl. She also took on the presidency of the hopefully named National Dress Reform Association in 1863. The Civil War might have offered an occasion for more practical clothing, but the association never grew into a power. Nonetheless, with a highly supportive husband, she carried on her crusade to impressive personal success: in 1880, Lydia Hasbrouck was elected to the school board of Middletown, New York.
She achieved this electoral victory despite decades of unabashed feminism, for she not only wore unconventional clothing, but also refused to pay taxes because she could not vote. Perhaps her story makes Gerrit Smith’s point: Hasbrouck’s appearance was more like that of a man, and her townspeople treated her with respect that was measurable in votes. The more conservatively dressed suffragists, meanwhile, were not elected to anything. Conceivably, their dress-for-success strategy was wrong.
During the 1850s, the women’s rights movement grew in both sophistication and numbers. Its system of operations was refined so that techniques for public relations and coalition-building became routine. In well-reported meetings, resolutions were debated and publicized. Letters to the editor and other writings educated the public on women’s issues through nationally circulated media. In addition, the movement increased the number of supporters who came to conventions, offered donations of time and occasional money, and, most importantly, went home to organize meetings of their own. Beyond that, the decade developed a base of committed, quality leadership that would serve through the century.
All of this was evident at the 1851 annual meeting. Seeing no reason to argue with success, the Second National Woman’s Rights Convention was held under the same circumstances as the first: in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October, with Ohio’s Frances Dana Gage as president. Celebrities new to the list of endorsers were Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, an extremely popular preacher, and famous educator Horace Mann. Conventioneers also were thrilled to hear a speech by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a well-known novelist and New York Tribune columnist.
Once more, the convention’s report said that “every session” of the two-day meeting “was so crowded at an early hour that hundreds were unable to gain admittance.” Because of the throng who wanted to hear, the closing session was moved to City Hall, and even that venue was not sufficiently large. Much later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would summarize, “in the whole history of the woman suffrage movement there never was at one time more able and eloquent men and women on our platform and represented by letter than in those Worcester Conventions.”
In 1852, the Third National Woman’s Rights Convention moved out of Massachusetts and back to the movement’s original home of western New York. Held in Syracuse for an unprecedented three days, the September 8–10 meeting drew people from eight states and Canada. For the first time, the women charged one shilling for admission, but that did nothing to deter attendance, for “City Hall was densely packed at every session.” The program “called out immense audiences, attracted many eminent persons…and was most favorably noticed in the press.”
Despite the crowd, “the proceedings were orderly and harmonious throughout” under presiding officer Lucretia Mott. A nominating committee had recommended her “as permanent President,” and the convention elected this faithful, oldest member of the original movement by acclamation. Ever modest, she “sat far back in the audience” and asked for a second confirming vote before accepting the chair. In so doing, she “rendered herself liable to expulsion” from the Society of Friends, because the admission fee that had been charged violated Quaker tradition. Just four years after Mott herself had considered a female president to be a dangerous experiment at the Rochester convention, she presided in the words of the Syracuse Standard “with an ease, dignity, and grace that might be envied by the most experienced legislator in the country.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who bore the fifth of her seven children in 1852, did not come to Syracuse. It was, however, the first convention for two other women who would form the backbone of the movement for the rest of the century: Matilda Joslyn Gage and Susan B. Anthony. With Stanton, they would be the three coeditors of the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, a history in which they were also, in Stanton’s words, “among the chief actors.” (The surnames of Ohio’s Frances Dana Gage and New York’s Matilda Joslyn Gage appear to be coincidental; if there was any family connection between their husbands, it was not close.)
At the time of the Syracuse convention, Matilda Joslyn Gage was 26 years old and married to a merchant who valued his brilliant wife; affluent and well-dressed, but frequently ill, she would be the mother of five. When she entered the Syracuse convention, Gage did not know a single other woman. She sat alone, “trembling” as she anticipated her first public speech, but she was determined to make it clear why she was there. Later, Gage wrote of herself: “She consulted no one as to time and opportunity, but when her courage had reached a sufficiently high point, with palpitating heart she ascended the platform, where she was cordially given place by Mrs. Mott, whose kindness to her at this supreme moment of her life was never forgotten.”
Matilda Joslyn Gage (Library of Congress)
Gage was the youngest person to speak, and the better-than-average education she received from her physician father was reflected in the comments she made. A natural historian from youth, she told the audience of outstanding female models from Silesia