Yet it was, of course, for their own lives that women—like men—wanted the vote. They wanted to improve educational opportunities, especially for girls; they wanted to protect property that they earned or inherited; they wanted custody of their children when a man was abusive. And some of them wanted grander, less personally necessary political change; many women did think of themselves as their brothers’ keepers, as the most likely embodiment of purity and morality.
This moral realm was the one in which they felt most comfortable, and indeed, one of the things that kept them out of politics for so long was the difficulty of convincing both women and men that moral imperatives often are best implemented through government. In the case of ending slavery, for example, only government could achieve their goal. The same was true of the temperance movement, because laws regulating the sale of alcohol and other addictive substances could only be enacted by political bodies.
Emma Willard (Library of Congress)
Although women long would be severely constrained even in their traditional realms of moral and educational improvement, the era again showed signs of slow progress. In 1817, in the same rural New York area where Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson had led religious movements, Deborah Pierce published A Scriptural Vindication of Female Preaching, Prophesying, or Exhortation. The following year, Bostonian Hannah Mather Crocker published another innovative piece, Observations on the Real Rights of Women. With this work, Crocker redeemed some of the harm done to women by her grandfather, Reverend Cotton Mather, whose writing on witchcraft helped produce the hysteria that had led to 19 executions and more than 140 arrests in the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692. Far more thoughtful and less mystic than he, Crocker was the mother of ten—and yet she found time to read the work of English feminists, especially Hannah More, and to follow up on the theories of Judith Sargent Murray, especially concerning the negative effects of educating boys and girls differently.
Although it is unlikely that they knew of each other, Emma Willard was thinking the same thoughts. In 1818, the same year Crocker’s work was published, Willard presented to the New York legislature An Address…Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. The lawmakers were shocked by her intention to teach math and science—especially anatomy—to girls, but the working-class town of Troy, New York, saw the good sense behind Willard’s innovative curriculum and raised taxes to build the school. An amazingly quick success, it demonstrated a great public desire for serious female education. Willard’s model was soon adopted elsewhere, and the Emma Willard School continues today.
Willard’s most significant early emulator was Mary Lyon, who built a work/study institution of higher education for women, Mt. Holyoke Seminary, in western Massachusetts in 1834. Those who knew Lyon said that they recognized immediately that they were in the presence of a genius, and her words certainly indicate an innate grasp of the subtlety of politics. “The plan,” she wrote to a friend of her ideas for this school, “should not seem to originate with us, but with benevolent gentlemen.” Lyon literally went from farm to farm, raising $15,000 for her school in two years. When criticized for this unladylike method of implementing her dream, she confidently replied, “I am doing a great work; I cannot come down.”
But Lyon spoke to people one-on-one; except for Quakers and others willing to be seen as on the radical fringe, women did not speak in public. Even Emma Willard’s famous “address” was written, not spoken. It was considered scandalous for a woman to speak to a “promiscuous audience”—an audience composed of men and women. Nor was this simply a societal taboo, but, in the view of almost everyone at the time, it was a commandment from God. St. Paul’s words in First Corinthians are unequivocal: “Women should keep silent in the churches…. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (1 Cor. 14:34–35). Because virtually all of the era’s cultural activity was church-related, very few women ever learned to speak in public. The subliminal message from Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer doubtless rang across the decades as a warning that speech could mean death.
Stage fright could not have been more real for the pioneers who broke this taboo. Clarina Howard Nichols, a Vermont newspaper editor of sufficient political power that, in 1852, she was invited to speak to the state’s senate on married women’s property rights, was nonetheless so frightened that she showed the symptoms of a heart attack. Nichols later wrote that she only barely managed to calm the “violent throbbing” in her chest to finish her speech, and her “voice was tremulous throughout.” She was supported by a local judge, who, with incredible kindness, had gone door-to-door the previous day, encouraging women to sit in the gallery. When the speech was over, they ran down the gallery stairs and said, “We did not know before what Woman’s Rights were, Mrs. Nichols, but we are for Woman’s Rights.” Another showed her vicarious anxiety: “I broke out in cold perspiration when…you leaned your head on your hand. I thought you were going to fail.”
The public-speaking taboo reflected more than a little class bias: working women in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, headed by labor leader Sarah Bagley, had addressed a legislative committee in 1845 with little public criticism. These working-class women were less concerned about accusations of unladylike behavior, and it is important to remember that their testimony focused on their legal needs as workers, not on their needs as women. Presumably because men in the mills also would benefit from labor reforms, public speaking by these women appeared acceptable.
Frances Wright (Library of Congress)
One woman stands out above all others of this era for insisting on her right to free speech. Frances Wright, a wealthy Scot who spent much of her life in the United States, violated the taboo with complete abandon. She made her first trip to the U.S. in 1818, and the travelogue she published was Europe’s first widely read book on the new nation. She returned again in 1824 and sailed around the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, where she established a colony for freed slaves near modern Memphis. Not surprisingly, the economy of this remote place could not support them, so Wright financed and personally escorted some 30 blacks to a new home in Haiti.
As early as 1829—decades prior to other feminists—Wright traveled the country on a paid lecture tour. Especially in the Cincinnati area where she eventually settled, she attracted large and generally respectful crowds, with men actually more likely to support her radical ideas than women. Not only an abolitionist and a utopian, Wright also unhesitatingly attacked organized religion for the secondary place it assigned women; most shockingly, she advocated the empowerment of women through divorce and the use of birth control. She married in France in 1831 after bearing her lover’s child. A true internationalist, she crossed the Atlantic five times in the 1840s alone. In 1851, a fatal accident deprived feminists of Frances Wright’s leadership, but decades later, they paid tribute to her by placing her picture first in the first volume of their History of Woman Suffrage.
A second well-known feminist did not engage in public speaking but did charge money for “conversations” in her home. New Englander Margaret Fuller’s writing was at least as influential as Wright’s; she was a close friend of the era’s most famous literati, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and others. They chose her to edit the group’s innovative journal, The Dial, and she went from there to the New York Tribune, where she carved out a position as the nation’s first professional book reviewer. Like Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller bore a child abroad before she married her lover, an Italian revolutionary; also like Wright, an early death cut short the contribution she could have made to the women’s rights movement. The young family drowned in a shipwreck while