On Quilts & Uncle Tom - Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly was the most popular American book of the 19th century. First published serially in the National Era magazine (1851- 1852), it was an immediate success. Forty different publishers printed it in England alone, and it was quickly translated into 20 languages, receiving the praise of such authors as Georges Sand in France, Heinrich Heine in Germany, and Ivan Turgenev in Russia. Its passionate appeal for an end to slavery in the United States inflamed the debate that, within a decade, led to the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865).

Reasons for the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin are obvious. It reflected the idea that slavery in the United States, the nation that purportedly embodied democracy and equality for all, was an injustice of colossal proportions. Stowe herself was a perfect representative of old New England Puritan stock. Her father, brother, and husband all were well- known, learned Protestant clergymen and reformers. Stowe conceived the idea of the novel -- in a vision of an old, ragged slave being beaten -- as she participated in a church service. Later, she said that the novel was inspired and "written by God." Her motive was the religious passion to reform life by making it more godly. The Romantic period had ushered in an era of feeling: The virtues of family and love reigned supreme.

Stowe's novel attacked slavery precisely because it violated domestic values. Uncle Tom, the slave and central character, is a true Christian martyr who labors to convert his kind master, St. Clare, prays for St. Clare's soul as he dies, and is killed defending slave women. Slavery is depicted as evil not for political or philosophical reasons but mainly because it divides families, destroys normal parental love, and is inherently un-Christian. The most touching scenes show an agonized slave mother unable to help her screaming child and a father sold away from his family. These were crimes against the sanctity of domestic love.

Stowe's novel was not originally intended as an attack on the South; in fact, Stowe had visited the South, liked southerners, and portrayed them kindly. Southern slave owners are good masters and treat Tom well. St. Clare personally abhors slavery and intends to free all of his slaves. The evil master Simon Legree, on the other hand, is a northerner and the villain. Ironically, the novel was meant to reconcile the North and South, which were drifting toward the Civil War a decade away. Ultimately, though, the book was used by abolitionists and others as a polemic against the South.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Minister's Wooing, Derby and Jackson, 1859

The Quilting

Harriet Beecher Stowe tells of Mary and her intended preacher husband and an 1859 New England tradition for brides-to-be...

The quilting was in those days considered the most solemn and important recognition of a betrothal. And for the benefit of those not to the manner born, a little preliminary instruction may be necessary.

The good wives of New England, impressed with that thrifty orthodoxy of economy which forbids to waste the merest trifle, had a habit of saving every scrap clipped out in the fashioning of household garments, and these they cut into fanciful patterns and constructed of them rainbow shapes and quaint traceries, the arrangement of which became one of their few fine arts. Many a maiden, as she sorted and arranged fluttering bits of green, yellow, red, and blue, felt rising in her breast a passion for somewhat vague and unknown, which came out at length in a new pattern of patchwork. Collections of these tiny fragments were always ready to fill an hour when there was nothing else to do; and as the maiden chattered with her beau, her busy flying needle stitched together those pretty bits, which, little in themselves, were destined, by gradual unions and accretions, to bring about at last substantial beauty, warmth, and comfort,—emblems thus of that household life which is to be brought to stability and beauty by reverent economy in husbanding and tact in arranging the little useful and agreeable morsels of daily existence.

When a wedding was forthcoming, there was a solemn review of the stores of beauty and utility thus provided, and the patchwork-spread best worthy of such distinction was chosen for the quilting. Thereto, duly summoned, trooped all intimate female friends of the bride, old and young; and the quilt being spread on a frame, and wadded with cotton, each vied with the others in the delicacy of the quilting she could put upon it. For the quilting also was a fine art, and had its delicacies and nice points, — which grave elderly matrons discussed with judicious care. The quilting generally began at an early hour in the afternoon, and ended at dark with a great supper and general jubilee, at which that ignorant and incapable sex which could not quilt was allowed to appear and put in claims for consideration of another nature...

By two o'clock a goodly company began to assemble... Good Mrs. Jones, broad, expansive, and solid, having vegetated tranquilly on in the cabbage-garden of the virtues since three years ago, when she graced our teaparty, was now as well preserved as ever, and brought some fresh butter, a tin pail of cream, and a loaf of cake made after a new Philadelphia receipt.

The quilt-pattern was gloriously drawn in oakleaves, done in indigo; and soon all the company, young and old, were passing busy fingers over it and conversation went on briskly.

At the quilting, Madame de Frontignac would have her seat, and soon won the respect of the party by the dexterity with which she used her needle; though, when it was whispered that she learned to quilt among the nuns, some of the elderly ladies exhibited a slight uneasiness, as being rather doubtful whether they might not be encouraging Papistical opinions by allowing her an equal share in the work of getting up their minister's bed-quilt...

This speech was founded on a tradition, current in those times, that no young lady was fit to be married til she could construct a boiled Indian pudding of such consistency that it could be thrown up chimney and come down on the ground, outside, without breaking...

"Girls a'n't what they used to be in my day," remarked an elderly lady. "I remember my mother told me when she was thirteen she could knit a long cotton stocking in a day."

"I haven't much faith in these stories of old times, — have you, girls?" said Cerinthy, appealing to the younger members at the frame.

"At any rate," said Mrs. Twitchel, "our minister's wife will be a pattern; I don't know anybody that goes beyond her either in spinning or fine stitching."

Mary sat as placid and disengaged as the new moon, and listened to the chatter of old and young with the easy quietness of a young heart that has early outlived life, and looks on everything in the world from some gentle, restful eminence far on towards a better home. She smiled at everybody's word, had a quick eye for everybody's wants, and was ready with thimble, scissors, or thread, whenever any one needed them...

The husbands, brothers, and lovers had come in, and the scene was redolent of gayety. When Mary made her appearance, there was a moment's pause, till she was conducted to the side of the Doctor; when, raising his hand, he invoked a grace upon the loaded board.

Unrestrained gayeties followed. Groups of young men and maidens chatted together, and all the gallantries of the times were enacted. Serious matrons commented on the cake, and told each other high and particular secrets in the culinary art, which they drew from remote family-archives. One might have learned in that instructive assembly how best to keep moths out of blankets,— how to make fritters of Indian corn undistinguishable from oysters, — how to bring up babies by hand, — how to mend a cracked teapot, — how to take out grease from a brocade, — how to reconcile absolute decrees with free will, how to make five yards of cloth answer the purpose of six,— and how to put down the Democratic party. All were busy, earnest, and certain,—just as a swarm of men and women, old and young, are in 1859.

Vain, transitory splendors! Even this evening, so glorious, so heart-cheering, so fruitful in instruction and amusement, could not last forever. Gradually the company broke up; the matrons mounted soberly on horseback behind their spouses...

Biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811-1896

By Debra Michals, PhD 2017 womanshistory.org

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Abolitionist author, Harriet Beecher Stowe rose to fame in 1851 with the publication of her best-selling book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which highlighted the evils of slavery, angered the slaveholding South, and inspired pro-slavery copy-cat works in defense of the institution of slavery.

Stowe was born on June 14, 1811 in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of famed Congregational minister Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher. Her famous siblings include elder sister Catherine (11 years her senior), and Henry Ward Beecher, the famous preacher and reformer. Stowe’s mother died when she was five years old and while her father remarried, her sister Catherine became the most pronounced influence on young Harriet’s life. At age eight, she began her education at the Litchfield Female Academy. Later, in 1824, she attended Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary, which exposed young women to many of the same courses available in men’s academies. Stowe’s proclivity for writing was evident in the essays she produced for school.  Stowe became a teacher, working from 1829 to 1832 at the Hartford Female Seminary.

In 1832, when Stowe’s father Lyman accepted the position of president of the esteemed Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, she went with him. There, she met some of the great minds and reformers of the day, including noted abolitionists. Smitten with the landscape of the West, she published her first book, Primary Geography, in 1833, which celebrated the diverse cultures and vistas she encountered. In 1836, she met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor at the Lane Seminary. He encouraged her writing, they had seven children, and weathered financial and other problems during their decades-long union. Stowe would write countless articles, some were published in the renowned women’s magazine of the times, Godey’s Lady’s Book. She also wrote 30 books, covering a wide range of topics from homemaking to religion in nonfiction, as well as several novels.

The turning point in Stowe’s personal and literary life came in 1849, when her son died in a cholera epidemic that claimed nearly 3000 lives in her region. She later said that the loss of her child inspired great empathy for enslaved mothers who had their children sold away from them. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which legally compelled Northerners to return runaway slaves, infuriated Stowe and many in the North. This was when Stowe penned what would become her most famous work, the novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Originally serialized in the National Era, Stowe saw her tale as a call to arms for Northerners to defy the Fugitive Slave Act. The vivid characters and great empathy inspired by the book was further aided by Stowe’s strong Christianity.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was released as a book in March 1852, selling 300,000 copies in the US in the first year. It was later performed on stage and translated into dozens of languages. When some claimed her portrait of slavery was inaccurate, Stowe published Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book of primary source historical documents that backed up her account, including the narratives of notable former slaves Frederick Douglass and Josiah Henderson. Southern pro-slavery advocates countered with books of their own, such as Mary Henderson Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; Or, Southern Life as It Is. This work and others like it attempted to portray slavery as a benevolent institution, but never received the acclaim or widespread readership of Stowe’s.

Stowe used her fame to petition to end slavery. She toured nationally and internationally, speaking about her book and donating some of what she earned to help the antislavery cause. She also wrote extensively on behalf of abolition, most notably her “Appeal to Women of the Free States of America, on the Present Crisis on Our Country,” which she hoped would help raise public outcry to defeat the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.

During the Civil War, Stowe became one of the most visible professional writers. For years, popular folklore claimed that President Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Stowe in 1862, said, “So you’re the woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” That quote, published in a 1911 biography of Stowe by her son Charles, has been called into question, as Stowe herself and two others present at the meeting make no reference to it in their accounts (and Charles was only a boy at the time of the meeting).

In 1873, Stowe and her family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where she remained until her death in 1896, summering in Florida. She helped breathe new life into the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and was involved with efforts to launch the Hartford Art School, later part of the University of Hartford.

Bibliography

Books:

Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Biography. Garden City: Doubleday, 1999.

Boydston, Jeanne. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Cott, Nancy F., ed. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.

Gordon, Beverly. Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998.

Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.

Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Keller, Katherine J. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Politics of Slavery. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

Reynolds, David S. Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and James Brewer Stewart. Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852 (various reprint editions).

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Minister's Wooing. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1859.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856.

Articles:

Ammons, Elizabeth. "Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Reformed Southern Lady, the Christian Woman, and the Black Slave Woman." American Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 5, 1981, pp. 603-624.

Crane, Gregg. "The Refrain of ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’." New Literary History, vol. 37, no. 4, 2006, pp. 725-742.

Foster, Frances Smith. "Resisting Incidents: Re-reading Uncle Tom's Cabin through Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 22, no. 2, 1997, pp. 447-462.

Hedrick, Joan D. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the ‘Woman Question’." New England Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4, 1993, pp. 553-570.

MacKethan, Lucinda. "Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Slave Narratives and the Growth of the Abolitionist Novel." American Literature, vol. 53, no. 4, 1981, pp. 555-572.

Morrison, Toni. "Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Gothic Imagination." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 13, no. 3, 1971, pp. 23-31.

Tompkins, Jane. "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History." American Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, 1989, pp. 579-601.

Yellin, Jean Fagan. "Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Black Abolitionists." The Massachusetts Review, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 636-646.

Notes on Recent Publications & Scholarship:

David S. Reynolds’s Mightier than the Sword (2011) offers a compelling exploration of the political and social impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Reynolds argues that Stowe's novel played a critical role in shaping the national consciousness around slavery and abolition, particularly in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Katherine J. Keller’s Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Politics of Slavery (2019) adds a modern academic take on Stowe’s political engagements, particularly focusing on her post-Uncle Tom's Cabin career and her influence on the antislavery movement.

Fighting for Equality - Florence Allen 1884-1966

Florence Allen attended Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University), graduating with honors in 1904. After graduation, Allen traveled to Germany to further her music studies. Unfortunately, a nerve injury kept her from pursuing a career in music, and she returned to the United States in 1906.

Between 1906 and 1909, Allen utilized her musical training as a music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. At the same time, she pursued a graduate degree in political science and constitutional law at Western Reserve. She received her master's degree in 1908, and in the following year, she moved to New York City to work for the New York League for the Protection of Immigrants. She also earned a law degree from the New York University School of Law in 1913.

Back in Cleveland, Allen joined the Ohio bar and established her own law practice because she couldn’t find a law firm to hire her, despite her education and experience. In 1920, with women voting for the first time because of passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Allen was elected judge of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. In 1922, Allen won a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court. She was the first woman to serve on a supreme court in any state.

In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the Sixth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. Once again, Allen was the first woman judge in a federal court. She eventually became chief judge of the court, serving until her retirement in 1959.

Throughout her life, Allen challenged traditional assumptions about women's roles and acted as a role model for women who wanted to pursue legal careers. Her contributions to numerous women's organizations and improvements in women's status throughout the 20C have been recognized through dozens of honorary degrees and induction into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame.

Bibliography

Books:

Bauer, Jennifer. Florence Ellinwood Allen: Ohio’s First Lady of the Law. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992.

Brown, Carrie. Justice for Women: The Life and Times of Florence Ellinwood Allen. New York: Feminist Press, 1993.

Friedman, Lawrence M., and Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo. Legal Culture in the Age of Globalization: Latin America and Latin Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Gordon, Ann D. Women in American Politics: History and Milestones. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2012.

Kline, Carolyn L. Women Pioneers in Politics and Public Service. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1974.

Merryman, Robert. Florence Allen: Ohio’s Lady of the Law. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Press, 1975.

Myers, Margaret G. A Woman’s Fight for Justice: Florence Ellinwood Allen and Her Struggles in Law and Politics. New York: Franklin Watts, 1969.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and Thomas Dublin. Women and Power in American History: A Reader. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.

Smith, J. Clay Jr. Rebels in Law: Voices in History of Black Women Lawyers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998

Articles:

Babcock, Barbara Allen. "Women Defenders in the West." Stanford Law Review, vol. 45, no. 2, 1993, pp. 217-258.

Drachman, Virginia. "Florence Allen and the Struggle for Women in the Legal Profession." The Journal of Women's History, vol. 10, no. 3, 1998, pp. 124-135.

Frank, John P. "The Life of Florence Ellinwood Allen: The Struggle for Equality in the American Judiciary." American Journal of Legal History, vol. 20, no. 4, 1976, pp. 301-316.

Lawrence, Paula. "Florence E. Allen and the Feminist Jurisprudence Movement." Legal History Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2001, pp. 192-211.

Millender, Katie. "Pioneers of the Bench: Florence E. Allen and the Advancement of Women in Law." Ohio Law Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 84-101.

Morse, Sydney. "Breaking Barriers: Florence Allen's Influence on Women’s Legal Careers." Law and Social Inquiry, vol. 27, no. 1, 2004, pp. 12-35.

Schneider, Elizabeth M. "Florence Ellinwood Allen: A Pioneer for Women's Rights in American Law." Women’s Rights Law Reporter, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995, pp. 112-132.

Stevens, Jill. "Trailblazing Women in the Judiciary: The Impact of Florence Allen." Judicature, vol. 71, no. 4, 1987, pp. 234-24

Notes on Recent Publications and Scholarship:Jennifer 

Bauer’s Florence Ellinwood Allen: Ohio’s First Lady of the Law (1992) offers one of the most thorough examinations of Allen’s life and legal career. It focuses on her contributions as the first woman to serve on a state supreme court and later the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Carrie Brown’s Justice for Women: The Life and Times of Florence Ellinwood Allen (1993) is another comprehensive biography that places Allen’s achievements in the broader context of the women's rights and feminist movements of her time.

Barbara Allen Babcock's article (1993) provides valuable insights into Allen’s role as a legal pioneer in the West, focusing on her defense work and early challenges as one of the first women in the legal profession.

Drachman’s article (1998) details Allen’s struggle for professional equality within the legal field, exploring how her career opened doors for future generations of women lawyers and judges.

Morse’s (2004) and Millender’s (2002) articles reflect more recent scholarship on Allen’s lasting influence on women’s legal careers, particularly in terms of mentorship and breaking barriers in the judiciary.

Fighting for Equality - Hallie Quinn Brown 1850-1949

Hallie Quinn Brown was born on March 10, 1850 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of former slaves. Her family migrated to Canada and to the United States in 1870, settling in Wilberforce, Ohio.  Brown attended Wilberforce College and received a degree in 1873.  Brown taught at Allen University served as Dean of the University.  Brown also served as Dean of Women at Tuskegee Institute before returning to Ohio where she taught in the Dayton public schools.

Brown had since childhood held an interest in public speaking  In 1895 Hallie Q. Brown addressed an audience at the Women’s Christian Temperance Union Conference in London.  In 1899, while serving as one of the United States representatives, she spoke before the International Congress of Women meeting in London, UK.  Brown also spoke before Queen Victoria.

Brown was involved in the women’s suffrage campaign which led her to help organize the Colored Women’s League in Washington, D.C., one of the organizations that allied in 1896 to become the National Association of Colored Women (NACW).   During her last year as president of the NACW, she spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Hallie Q. Brown published several significant books. In 1926, her book Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction was published.  It documented the biographies of leading African American women of the era.  Hallie Quinn Brown died in Wilberforce, Ohio in 1949.

Bibliography

Books:

Alexander, Adele Logan. Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846-1926. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Brown, Hallie Quinn. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. Xenia, Ohio: Aldine Publishing, 1926. (Reprinted in several editions in the 21st century)

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Hine, Darlene Clark, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Honey, Maureen. Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.

Hutchinson, George. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006.

Jenkins, Earnestine L. Black Women and the Politics of Racial Identity in the 19th Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021.

Jones, Beverly Washington. Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863-1954. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990.

Knight, Alisha R. Colored Girls and Boys Inspired by Hallie Quinn Brown: The Development of African American Children’s Literature in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2010.

Lerner, Gerda. Black Women in White America: A Documentary History. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Peterson, Carla L. Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830–1880. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Sterling, Dorothy. We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Terrell, Mary Church. A Colored Woman in a White World. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1940 (Reprinted by Humanity Books, 2005).

Williams, Fannie Barrier. The Work of the Afro-American Woman. Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895 (Reprinted by the University of Illinois Press, 2020).

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Articles:

Carby, Hazel V. "Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context." Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 4, 1992, pp. 738-755.

Collier-Thomas, Bettye. "Hallie Quinn Brown and the Politics of Respectability: African-American Women in Higher Education and the Struggle for Civil Rights." The Journal of African American History, vol. 91, no. 3, 2006, pp. 300-320.

Gaines, Kevin. "Black Women and the Rearticulation of Race and Gender in the Nineteenth Century." American Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 1998, pp. 37-41.

Greene, Amanda L. "Claiming Public Space: Hallie Quinn Brown and the Evolution of African American Elocution." Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, 2009, pp. 166-181.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. "Hallie Quinn Brown’s Contribution to the Black Women’s Club Movement." The Journal of Negro Education, vol. 61, no. 2, 1992, pp. 174-183.

Mitchell, Michele. "Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender and Sexuality in African-American History." Gender and History, vol. 11, no. 3, 1999, pp. 433-444.

Nelson, Jill. "The Public Influence of Black Women: Hallie Quinn Brown, Ida B. Wells, and the Struggle for Justice." American Studies Journal, vol. 57, no. 1, 2017, pp. 25-45.

Rogers, Deborah. "Hallie Quinn Brown: Elocutionist and Advocate for African-American Women." African American Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2000, pp. 49-65.

Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. "Representations of Black Women in the Post-Reconstruction Period: The Literary Legacy of Hallie Quinn Brown." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 27, no. 3, 2002, pp. 825-844.

Simmons, LaKisha Michelle. "Hallie Quinn Brown and the Battle for Women's Education in the Reconstruction Era." The Journal of African American History, vol. 98, no. 4, 2013, pp. 579-599.

Noites on Recent Publications and Scholarship

Carla L. Peterson’s Doers of the Word (1995) and Greene's article (2009) focus on the rhetorical strategies of African American women speakers, highlighting Hallie Quinn Brown’s role as a powerful public figure and advocate for racial and gender equality.

Collier-Thomas’s article (2006) provides a modern examination of Brown’s contributions to education and civil rights, connecting her work to the broader Black women’s club movement.

LaKisha Michelle Simmons’s article (2013) offers an insightful analysis of Brown’s efforts to promote education for African American women during the Reconstruction Era, emphasizing her long-term impact on Black women's education.

Fighting for Equality in Bloomers - Amelia Jenks Bloomer 1818-1894

Amelia Bloomer edited the first American newspaper for women, The Lily. It was issued from 1849 until 1853. The newspaper began as a temperance journal. Bloomer felt that as women lecturers were considered unseemly, writing was the best way for women to work for reform. Originally, The Lily was to be for “home distribution” among members of the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society, which had formed in 1848. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller introduced the outfit and editor Amelia Bloomer publicized it in The Lily.

Like most local endeavors, the paper encountered several obstacles early on, and the Society’s enthusiasm died out. Bloomer felt a commitment to publish and assumed full responsibility for editing and publishing the paper. Originally, the title page had the legend “Published by a committee of ladies.” But after 1850 – only Bloomer’s name appeared on the masthead.

1851 Currier and Ives

Although women’s exclusion from membership in temperance societies and other reform activities was the main force that moved the Ladies Temperance Society to publish The Lily, it was not at first a radical paper. Its editorial stance conformed to the emerging stereotype of women as “defenders of the home.” 

Photo c 1855

In the first issue, Bloomer wrote:  It is woman that speaks through The Lily…Intemperance is the great foe to her peace and happiness. It is that above all that has made her Home desolate and beggared her offspring…. Surely, she has the right to wield her pen for its Suppression. Surely, she may without throwing aside the modest refinements which so much become her sex, use her influence to lead her fellow mortals from the destroyer’s path. The Lily always maintained its focus on temperance. Fillers often told horror stories about the effects of alcohol. For example, the May 1849 issue noted, “A man when drunk fell into a kettle of boiling brine at Liverpool, Onondaga Co. and was scaled to death.” But gradually, the newspaper began to include articles about other subjects of interest to women. Many were from the pen of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, writing under the pseudonym “sunflower.” The earliest Stanton’s articles dealt with the temperance, child-bearing, and education, but she soon turned to the issue of women’s rights. She wrote about laws unfair to women and demanded change.

Bloomer was greatly influenced by Stanton and gradually became a convert to the cause of women’s rights. Recalling the case of an elderly friend who was turned out of her home when her husband died without a will she wrote:  Later, other similar cases coming to my knowledge made me familiar with cruelty of the laws towards women; and when the women rights convention put forth its Declaration of Sentiments. I was ready to join with that party in demanding for women such change in laws as would give her a right to her earnings, and her children a right to wider fields of employment and a better education, and also a right to protect her interest at the ballot box.  

Bloomer became interested in dress reform, advocating that women wear the outfit that came to be known as the “Bloomer costume.”  Actually the reform of clothing for women began in the 1850s, as a result of the need for a more practical way of dressing . The reform started in New England where the social activist Elizabeth Smith Miller (1822-1911), called Libby Miller. Mrs Miller  was the daughter of abolitionists Gerrit Smith and his second wife, Ann Carroll Fitzhugh. She was a lifelong of the women's rights movement. She  became famous when she  adopted what she considered a more rational costume: Turk trousers - loose trousers gathered at the ankles like the trousers worn by Middle Eastern and Central Asian women – worn under a short dress or knee length skirt. The outfits were similar to the clothing worn by the women in the Oneida Community, a religious commune founded  by John Humphrey Noyes in Oneida, New York in 1848.

This new fashion was soon supported by Bloomer, by then a women's rights and temperance advocate. Bloomer popularized Mr Miller’s idea in her bi-weekly publication The Lily. And this women's clothing reform soon was named bloomers. The rebellion against the voluminous and constraining fashion of the Victorian period was both a practical necessity and a focal point of social reform. Stanton and others copied a knee-length dress with pants worn by Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York. 

For some time the "Bloomer" outfit was worn by many of the leaders in the women's rights movement, then it was abandoned because of the heavy criticism in the popular press. In 1859, Amelia Bloomer herself said that a new invention, the crinoline, was a sufficient reform.  The bloomer costume returned later, adapted and modified, as a women's athletic costume in the 1890s and early 1900s.

 1864 Godey's Lady's Book

Although Bloomer refused to take any credit for inventing the pants-and-tunic outfit, her name became associated with it because she wrote articles about the unusual dress, printed illustrations in The Lily, and wore the costume herself. In reference to her advocacy of the costume, she once wrote, “I stood amazed at the furor I had unwittingly caused.” But people certainly were interested in the new fashion. She remembered: “As soon as it became known that I was wearing the new dress, letters came pouring in upon me by the hundreds from women all over the country making inquiries about the dress and asking for patterns – showing how ready and anxious women were to throw off the burden of long, heavy skirts.”  In May of 1851 Amelia Bloomer introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton said, "I liked her immediately and why I did not invite her home to dinner with me I do not know."

The circulation of The Lily rose from 500 per month to 4000 per month because of the dress reform controversy. At the end of 1853, the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where Amelia Bloomer continued to edit The Lily, which by then had a national circulation of over 6000. Bloomer sold The Lily in 1854 to Mary Birdsall, because she and her husband Dexter were moving again this time to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where no facilities for publishing the paper were available. She remained a contributing editor for the two years The Lily survived after she sold it. US National Park Service

Bibliography

Books:

Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Buhle, Mari Jo, and Paul Buhle. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Durnford, Dorothy. Amelia Bloomer: Champion of Women’s Rights. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Fischer, Gayle V. Pantaloons and Power: A Nineteenth-Century Dress Reform in the United States. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001.

Ginzberg, Lori D. Women in Antebellum Reform. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2000.

Hewitt, Nancy A. Radical Friend: Amy Post and the Transformation of American Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

O'Dowd, Sarah M. A Rhode Island Original: Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004.

Schneiderman, Howard. Amelia Bloomer: A Little Woman in Big Pants. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Women’s Rights Emerges within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Short History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.

Woloch, Nancy. Women and the American Experience: A Concise History. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Articles:

Clinton, Catherine. "Reform in Bloom: Amelia Jenks Bloomer and Women’s Dress Reform." Journal of Women’s History, vol. 3, no. 2, 1991, pp. 26-50.

Fischer, Gayle V. "The Issue of Dress Reform: Amelia Bloomer and the Bloomer Costume." Women's Studies Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 1/2, 1999, pp. 19-33.

Ginzberg, Lori D. "Amelia Bloomer and the Popularization of Women's Rights." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 1977, pp. 20-35.

Hewitt, Nancy A. "Recasting Women's Activism in Antebellum America: Amelia Bloomer, Dress Reform, and the Press." American Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3, 1984, pp. 323-336.

Lebsock, Suzanne. "Amelia Bloomer: Suffragist, Dress Reformer, and Advocate for Women’s Health." The Journal of American History, vol. 62, no. 3, 1975, pp. 489-507.

Lutz, Alma. "Amelia Bloomer and the Struggle for Women’s Rights." The New England Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4, 1953, pp. 531-546.

Reed, James. "Fashioning Reform: Amelia Bloomer and the Dress Reform Movement." Fashion Theory, vol. 9, no. 3, 2005, pp. 345-364.

Socolow, Elizabeth. "Amelia Bloomer’s Feminist Advocacy and the Evolution of Dress Reform." American Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2001, pp. 97-120.

Wellman, Judith. "Amelia Bloomer, Dress Reform, and the Politics of Style." Women’s History Review, vol. 4, no. 3, 1995, pp. 423-439.

Notes

One of the most recent and significant works on Amelia Bloomer is Gayle V. Fischer’s Pantaloons and Power (2001), which provides a detailed analysis of the dress reform movement and Bloomer’s role in advocating for women's rights through clothing. Nancy A. Hewitt’s (2018) work, although more focused on Amy Post, offers a broader context of women’s activism that intersects with Bloomer’s influence in antebellum reform movements.

Clinton’s (1991) article remains an essential reading for understanding Bloomer's pivotal role in the dress reform movement, while Hewitt’s 1984 article provides an in-depth look at how Bloomer used the press to advocate for women’s rights and dress reform.

Fighting for Equality - Lucretia Coffin Mott 1793-1880

Lucretia Mott (1793 - 1880), by Joseph Kyle (1815 - 1863)

One of 8 children born to Quaker parents on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880) dedicated her life to the goal of human equality. As a child Mott attended Nine Partners, a Quaker boarding school located in New York, where she learned of the horrors of slavery from her readings & from visiting lecturers such as Elias Hicks, a well-known Quaker abolitionist. She also saw that women & men were not treated equally, even among the Quakers, when she discovered that female teachers at Nine Partners earned less than males. At a young age Lucretia Coffin Mott became determined to put an end to such social injustices.

In 1833 Mott, along with Mary Ann M’Clintock & nearly 30 other female abolitionists, organized the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.  In 1840 she was one of several American women chosen as delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London by the American Anti-Slavery Society & by other abolitionist groups. 

Arriving in England with her husband, she found the convention controlled by the rival American & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society -known to Garrisonians as the “New Organization” & its opposite number, the British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, both opposed to public activity by women.  Despite vigorous protests by Wendell Phillips & others, the American women delegates were refused recognition & assigned seats “behind the bar.”  Though Lucretia Mott was deprived of a voice in the proceedings, she was nevertheless described by a journalist as “the lioness of the Convention” (Liberator, Oct. 23, 1840, p. 170).  

It was there, that she 1st met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was attending the convention with her husband Henry, a delegate from New York. Mott & Stanton were indignant at the fact that women were excluded from participating in the convention simply because of their gender, & that indignation would result in a discussion about holding a woman’s rights convention. Stanton later recalled this conversation in the History of Woman Suffrage:  As Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street that night, reviewing the exciting scenes of the day, they agreed to hold a woman’s rights convention on their return to America, as the men to whom they had just listened had manifested their great need of some education on that question. Thus a missionary work for the emancipation of woman…was then and there inaugurated.

Eight years later, on July 19 & 20, 1848, Mott, Stanton, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Martha Coffin Wright, & Jane Hunt acted on this idea; when they organized the First Woman’s Rights Convention.

Two weeks after Seneca Falls,  a 2nd convention was held in the Unitarian Chapel at Rochester, N.Y.  From this time on, woman’s rights claimed as much of Lucretia Mott’s attention as any of the other reforms with which she associated herself.  In a closely reasoned Discourse of Woman (1850) she attributed the alleged inferiority of women to the repressions under which her sex had always labored -unequal educational opportunities, a lower standard of wages, restricted employment, & denial of political rights.  

Throughout her life Mott remained active in both the abolition & women’s rights movements. She continued to speak out against slavery; & in 1866, she became the first president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization formed to achieve equality for both African Americans & women.

For nearly 20 years the Motts lived & reared their children in a red brick house at 136 North Ninth Street in Philadelphia.  In 1850, they moved to 338 Arch Street, a spacious house; where they entertained on a simple but generous scale during the Quaker Yearly Meeting & the annual sessions of the reform societies & where they sometimes harbored runaway slaves. Unlike some “strong-minded” female reformers, Mott was a conscientious housekeeper who never laid herself open to the charge, that she neglected her domestic duties.  In 1857 she & her husband, now retired from business, moved to Roadside, a plain, rambling country house on the Old York Road, north of Philadelphia, where Lucretia continued her efficient housewife concerns: sewing carpet rags, cooking Nantucket blackberry pudding, raising vegetables in her kitchen garden.

Always a strong believe in the Quaker peace testimony, she regularly attended meetings of the Pennsylvania Peace Society, of which she was vice-president.  She seldom missed a woman’s rights or suffrage convention & seldom failed to be called upon for an address.  At the 1st convention of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, she was named president at the insistence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  When in 1869, the movement split into rival factions, one led by Mrs. Stanton & Susan B Anthony, the other by Lucy Stone, Mary Livermore, & Julia Ward Howe, she sought earnestly but unsuccessfully to overcome the division.

During her last 12 years she was without the faithful support of her husband, for James Mott died on Jan. 26, 1868.  She herself lived to the age of 87,  active to the end, publicly & privately, in good causes.  National Park Service

Bibliography

Books:

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott. New York: Walker and Company, 1980.

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Lucretia Mott: A Guide to Research on Her Life and Work. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Lucretia Mott: Valiant Friend. Philadelphia: Friends General Conference, 1999.

Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Block, Sharon. Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Faulkner, Carol. Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Ginzberg, Lori D. Women in Antebellum Reform. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2000.

Griffith, Elisabeth. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Kraditor, Aileen S. Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.

Sterling, Dorothy. Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.

Wellman, Judith. The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

White, Deborah Gray. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Articles:

Bacon, Margaret Hope. "The Quiet Revolution: The Legacy of Lucretia Mott." Quaker History, vol. 70, no. 2, 1981, pp. 75-91.

Bacon, Margaret Hope. "Lucretia Mott: Negotiating the Struggle for Black Equality." Pennsylvania History, vol. 55, no. 3, 1988, pp. 159-180.

Faulkner, Carol. "Lucretia Mott and the Abolitionist Network in the United States." Journal of Women's History, vol. 21, no. 1, 2009, pp. 10-33.

Faulkner, Carol. "A 'Volunteer Family': Lucretia Mott's Reform Networks in the 1840s." Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, pp. 51-80.

Ginzberg, Lori D. "The 'Joint Education of the Sexes': The Transformation of Women's Education in the United States, 1820-1870." History of Education Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, 1981, pp. 193-211.

Ginzberg, Lori D. "Lucretia Mott: Abolition and Women's Rights in Antebellum America." The Journal of American History, vol. 75, no. 2, 1988, pp. 484-486.

Gordon, Ann D. "The Transformation of Feminism: From Quakers to Suffragists." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 15, no. 2, 1990, pp. 241-266.

Kerrison, Catherine. "Lucretia Mott and the Quaker Influence on American Women's Rights." Quaker History, vol. 78, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1-16.

Ryan, Mary P. "The Public and the Private Good: Across the Great Divide in Women's History." Journal of Women's History, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 10-27.

Wellman, Judith. "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks." Journal of Women's History, vol. 3, no. 1, 1991, pp. 9-37.

Fighting for Equality - Susan B. Anthony 1820-1906

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) is perhaps the most widely known suffragist of her generation and has become an icon of the woman’s suffrage movement. Anthony traveled the country to give speeches, circulate petitions, and organize local women’s rights organizations.

Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts. After the Anthony family moved to Rochester, New York in 1845, they became active in the antislavery movement. Antislavery Quakers met at their farm almost every Sunday, where they were sometimes joined by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. Later two of Anthony's brothers, Daniel and Merritt, were anti-slavery activists in the Kansas territory.

In 1848 Susan B. Anthony was working as a teacher in Canajoharie, New York and became involved with the teacher’s union when she discovered that male teachers had a monthly salary of $10.00, while the female teachers earned $2.50 a month. Her parents and sister Marry attended the 1848 Rochester Woman’s Rights Convention held August 2.

Anthony’s experience with the teacher’s union, temperance and antislavery reforms, and Quaker upbringing, laid fertile ground for a career in women’s rights reform to grow. The career would begin with an introduction to Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

On a street corner in Seneca Falls in 1851, Amelia Bloomer introduced Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and later Stanton recalled the moment: “There she stood with her good earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray silk, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not at once invite her home with me to dinner, I do not know.”

Meeting Elizabeth Cady Stanton was probably the beginning of her interest in women’s rights, but it is Lucy Stone’s speech at the 1852 Syracuse Convention that is credited for convincing Anthony to join the women’s rights movement.

In 1853 Anthony campaigned for women's property rights in New York State, speaking at meetings, collecting signatures for petitions, and lobbying the state legislature. Anthony circulated petitions for married women's property rights and woman suffrage. She addressed the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1854 and urged more petition campaigns. In 1854 she wrote to Matilda Joslyn Gage that “I know slavery is the all-absorbing question of the day, still we must push forward this great central question, which underlies all others.”

By 1856 Anthony became an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, arranging meetings, making speeches, putting up posters, and distributing leaflets. She encountered hostile mobs, armed threats, and things thrown at her. She was hung in effigy, and in Syracuse her image was dragged through the streets.

At the 1856 National Women’s Rights Convention, Anthony served on the business committee and spoke on the necessity of the dissemination of printed matter on women’s rights. She named The Lily and The Woman’s Advocate, and said they had some documents for sale on the platform.

Stanton and Anthony founded the American Equal Rights Association and in 1868 became editors of its newspaper, The Revolution. The masthead of the newspaper proudly displayed their motto, “Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

By 1869 Stanton, Anthony and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association and focused their efforts on a federal woman’s suffrage amendment. In an effort to challenge suffrage, Anthony and her three sisters voted in the 1872 Presidential election. She was arrested and put on trial in the Ontario Courthouse, Canandaigua, New York. The judge instructed the jury to find her guilty without any deliberations, and imposed a $100 fine. When Anthony refused to pay a $100 fine and court costs, the judge did not sentence her to prison time, which ended her chance of an appeal. An appeal would have allowed the suffrage movement to take the question of women’s voting rights to the Supreme Court, but it was not to be.

From 1881 to 1885, Anthony joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage in writing the History of Woman Suffrage.

Susan B Anthonuy and Elizabeth Caty Stanton

As a tribute to Susan B. Anthony, the Nineteenth Amendment was named the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was ratified in 1920. National Park Service

Bibliography

Books:

Baker, Jean H. Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Barry, Kathleen. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. New York: Ballantine Books, 2020.

Bausum, Ann. With Courage and Cloth: Winning the Fight for a Woman’s Right to Vote. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2004.

Blatch, Harriot Stanton, and Alma Lutz. Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

Buhle, Mari Jo, and Paul Buhle. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020.

Durnford, Dorothy. Susan B. Anthony: Champion of Women's Rights. New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Fry, Amelia R. Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment. University of Kansas Press, 1976.

Griffith, Elisabeth. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Harper, Ida Husted. The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony: Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many from Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years. 2 vols. Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1898.

Hoffert, Sylvia D. When Hens Crow: The Woman's Rights Movements in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Kraditor, Aileen S. Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968.

Sherr, Lynn. Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. New York: Random House, 1995.

Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Weiss, Nancy J. The Susan B. Anthony Reader: A Documentary History of the American Women’s Movement. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Articles:

Baker, Jean H. "The Radical Vision of Susan B. Anthony." Journal of Women's History, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 8-29.

DuBois, Ellen Carol. "Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Women’s Suffrage." American Historical Review, vol. 67, no. 1, 1981, pp. 63-85.

Ginzberg, Lori D. "The Political Ideals of Susan B. Anthony: A Study in Feminist History." Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1990, pp. 315-334.

Isenberg, Nancy. "Susan B. Anthony and the Crisis of Feminism." Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 12, no. 2, 1992, pp. 227-242.

Kraditor, Aileen S. "Susan B. Anthony's Constitutional Strategy for Women's Rights." The Journal of American History, vol. 71, no. 3, 1984, pp. 518-539.

Sherr, Lynn. "Susan B. Anthony: Failure Was Not an Option." Smithsonian Magazine, vol. 27, no. 5, 1996, pp. 38-47.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. "Susan B. Anthony and the Pursuit of Women's Suffrage." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 13, no. 1, 1987, pp. 15-39.

Ward, Geoffrey C. "The Friendship Between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony." The American Scholar, vol. 55, no. 4, 1990, pp. 59-70.

Weiss, Nancy J. "Susan B. Anthony's Influence on American Feminism." American Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 615-636.

Fighting for Equality - Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902 - Solitude of Self 1892

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) with Susan B. Anthony (standing)  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Born November 12, 1815 in Johnstown and died October 26, 1902 in New York City

Solitude of Self

Address Delivered by Mrs. Stanton before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, Monday, January 18, 1892 Reprinted from the Congressional Record
Mrs. Stanton's Address

Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee: We have been speaking before Committees of the Judiciary for the last twenty years, and we have gone over all the arguments in favor of a sixteenth amendment which are familiar to all you gentlemen; therefore, it will not be necessary that I should repeat them again.

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment--our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

Secondly, if we consider her as a citizen, as a member of a great nation, she must have the same rights as all other members, according to the fundamental principles of our Government.

Thirdly, viewed as a woman, an equal factor in civilization, her rights and duties are still the same--individual happiness and development.

Fourthly, it is only the incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter, that may involve some special duties and training. In the usual discussion in regard to woman's sphere, such as men as Herbert Spencer, Frederic Harrison, and Grant Allen uniformly subordinate her rights and duties as an individual, as a citizen, as a woman, to the necessities of these incidental relations, some of which a large class of woman may never assume. In discussing the sphere of man we do not decide his rights as an individual, as a citizen, as a man by his duties as a father, a husband, a brother, or a son, relations some of which he may never fill. Moreover he would be better fitted for these very relations and whatever special work he might choose to do to earn his bread by the complete development of all his faculties as an individual.

Just so with woman. The education that will fit her to discharge the duties in the largest sphere of human usefulness will best fit her for whatever special work she may be compelled to do.

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right, to choose his own surroundings.

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation. To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel; to match the wind and waves and know when to take in the sail, and to read the signs in the firmament over all. It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman.

Nature having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.

To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal over will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will never find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must be the infinite diversity in human, character, we can in a measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any large class of the people in uneducated and unrepresented in the government. We ask for the complete development of every individual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities, then each man bears his own burden.

Again we ask complete individual development for the general good; for the consensus of the competent on the whole round of human interest; on all questions of national life, and here each man must bear his share of the general burden. It is sad to see how soon friendless children are left to bear their own burdens before they can analise their feelings; before they can even tell their joys and sorrows, they are thrown on their own resources. The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. What a touching instance of a child's solitude; of that hunger of heart for love and recognition, in the case of the little girl who helped to dress a christmas tree for the children of the family in which she served. On finding there was no present for herself she slipped away in the darkness and spent the night in an open field sitting on a stone, and when found in the morning was weeping as if her heart would break. No mortal will ever know the thoughts that passed through the mind of that friendless child in the long hours of that cold night, with only the silent stars to keep her company. The mention of her case in the daily papers moved many generous hearts to send her presents, but in the hours of her keenest sufferings she was thrown wholly on herself for consolation.

In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions are known only to otherwise, even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion in every situation we conceal. Even so in our triumphs and our defeats.

The successful candidate for Presidency and his opponent each have a solitude peculiarly his own, and good form forbide either in speak of his pleasure or regret. The solitude of the king on his throne and the prisoner in his cell differs in character and degree, but it is solitude nevertheless.

We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a broken friendship or shattered love. When death sunders our nearest ties, alone we sit in the shadows of our affliction. Alike mid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. On the devine heights of human attainments, eulogized land worshiped as a hero or saint, we stand alone. In ignorance, poverty, and vice, as a pauper or criminal, alone we starve or steal; alone we suffer the sneers and rebuffs of our fellows; alone we are hunted and hounded thro dark courts and alleys, in by-ways and highways; alone we stand in the judgment seat; alone in the prison cell we lament our crimes and misfortunes; alone we expiate them on the gallows. In hours like these we realize the awful solitude of individual life, its pains, its penalties, its responsibilities; hours in which the youngest and most helpless are thrown on their own resources for guidance and consolation. Seeing then that life must ever be a march and a battle, that each soldier must be equipped for his own protection, it is the height of cruelty to rob the individual of a single natural right.

To throw obstacle in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property, like cutting off the hands. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment. Shakespeare's play of Titus and Andronicus contains a terrible satire on woman's position in the nineteenth century--"Rude men" (the play tells us) "seized the king's daughter, cut out her tongue, out off her hands, and then bade her go call for water and wash her hands." What a picture of woman's position. Robbed of her natural rights, handicapped by law and custom at every turn, yet compelled to fight her own battles, and in the emergencies of life to fall back on herself for protection.

The girl of sixteen, thrown on the world to support herself, to make her own place in society, to resist the temptations that surround her and maintain a spotless integrity, must do all this by native force or superior education. She does not acquire this power by being trained to trust others and distrust herself. If she wearies of the struggle, finding it hard work to swim upstream, and allow herself to drift with the current, she will find plenty of company, but not one to share her misery in the hour of her deepest humiliation. If she tried to retrieve her position, to conceal the past, her life is hedged about with fears last willing hands should tear the veil from what she fain would hide. Young and friendless, she knows the bitter solitude of self.

How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.

The young wife and mother, at the head of some establishment with a kind husband to shield her from the adverse winds of life, with wealth, fortune and position, has a certain harbor of safety, occurs against the ordinary ills of life. But to manage a household, have a deatrable influence in society, keep her friends and the affections of her husband, train her children and servants well, she must have rare common sense, wisdom, diplomacy, and a knowledge of human nature. To do all this she needs the cardinal virtues and the strong points of character that the most successful statesman possesses.

An uneducated woman, trained to dependence, with no resources in herself must make a failure of any position in life. But society says women do not need a knowledge of the world, the liberal training that experience in public life must give, all the advantages of collegiate education; but when for the lock of all this, the woman's happiness is wrecked, alone she bears her humiliation; and the attitude of the weak and the ignorant in indeed pitiful in the wild chase for the price of life they are ground to powder.

In age, when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and hustle of life in a measure over, when the hands are weary of active service, when the old armchair and the fireside are the chosen resorts, then men and women alike must fall back on their own resources. If they cannot find companionship in books, if they have no interest in the vital questions of the hour, no interest in watching the consummation of reforms, with which they might have been identified, they soon pass into their dotage. The more fully the faculties of the mind are developed and kept in use, the longer the period of vigor and active interest in all around us continues. If from a lifelong participation in public affairs a woman feels responsible for the laws regulating our system of education, the discipline of our jails and prisons, the sanitary conditions of our private homes, public buildings, and thoroughfares, an interest in commerce, finance, our foreign relations, in any or all of these questions, here solitude will at least be respectable, and she will not be driven to gossip or scandal for entertainment.

The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties an pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone. I once asked Prince Krapotkin, the Russian nihilist, how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper. "Ah," he said, "I thought out many questions in which I had a deep interest. In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I have ever learned. I became acquainted with myself and my own resources. I had a world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailor or Czar could invade." Such is the value of liberal thought and broad culture when shut off from all human companionship, bringing comfort and sunshine within even the four walls of a prison cell.

As women of times share a similar fate, should they not have all the consolation that the most liberal education can give? Their suffering in the prisons of St. Petersburg; in the long, weary marches to Siberia, and in the mines, working side by side with men, surely call for all the self-support that the most exalted sentiments of heroism can give. When suddenly roused at midnight, with the startling cry of "fire! fire!" to find the house over their heads in flames, do women wait for men to point the way to safety? And are the men, equally bewildered and half suffocated with smoke, in a position to more than try to save themselves?

At such times the most timid women have shown a courage and heroism in saving their husbands and children that has surprise everybody. Inasmuch, then, as woman shares equally the joys and sorrows of time and eternity, is it not the height of presumption in man to propose to represent her at the ballot box an the throne of grace, do her voting in the state, her praying in the church, and to assume the position of priest at the family alter.

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, every where conceded; a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment, by inheritance, wealth, family, and position. Seeing, then that the responsibilities of life rests equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce sterns of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. Such are the facts in human experience, the responsibilities of individual. Rich and poor, intelligent and ignorant, wise and foolish, virtuous and vicious, man and woman, it is ever the same, each soul must depend wholly on itself.

Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, on one mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.

From the mountain tops of Judea, long ago, a heavenly voice bade His disciples, "Bear ye one another's burdens," but humanity has not yet risen to that point of self-sacrifice, and if ever so willing, how few the burdens are that one soul can bear for another. In the highways of Palestine; in prayer and fasting on the solitary mountain top; in the Garden of Gethsemane; before the judgment seat of Pilate; betrayed by one of His trusted disciples at His last supper; in His agonies on the cross, even Jesus of Nazareth, in these last sad days on earth, felt the awful solitude of self. Deserted by man, in agony he cries, "My God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken me?" And so it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, on the long weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience each moral stands alone.

But when all artificial trammels are removed, and women are recognized as individuals, responsible for their own environments, thoroughly educated for all the positions in life they may be called to fill; with all the resources in themselves that liberal though and broad culture can give; guided by their own conscience an judgment; trained to self-protection by a healthy development of the muscular system and skill in the use of weapons of defense, and stimulated to self-support by the knowledge of the business world and the pleasure that pecuniary independence must ever give; when women are trained in this way they will, in a measure, be fitted for those hours of solitude that come alike to all, whether prepared or otherwise. As in our extremity we must depend on ourselves, the dictates of wisdom point of complete individual development.

In talking of education how shallow the argument that each class must be educated for the special work it proposed to do, and all those faculties not needed in this special walk must lie dormant and utterly wither for want of use, when, perhaps, these will be the very faculties needed in life's greatest energies. Some say, Where is the use of drilling series in the languages, the Sciences, in law, medicine, theology? As wives, mothers, housekeepers, cooks, they need a different curriculum from boys who are to fill all positions. The chief cooks in our great hotels and ocean steamers are men. In large cities men run the bakries; they make our bread, cake and pies. They manage the laundries; they are now considered our best milliners and dressmakers. Because some men fill these departments of usefulness, shall we regulate the curriculum in Harvard and Yale to their present necessities? If not why this talk in our best colleges of a curriculum for girls who are crowding into the trades and professions; teachers in all our public schools rapidly hiring many lucrative and honorable positions in life? They are showing too, their calmness and courage in the most trying hours of human experience.

You have probably all read in the daily papers of the terrible storm in the Bay of Biscay when a tidal wave such havoc on the shore, wrecking vessels, unroofing houses and carrying destruction everywhere. Among other buildings the woman's prison was demolished. Those who escaped saw men struggling to reach the shore. They promptly by clasping hands made a chain of themselves and pushed out into the sea, again and again, at the risk of their lives until they had brought six men to shore, carried them to a shelter, and did all in their power for their comfort and protection.

What especial school of training could have prepared these women for this sublime moment of their lives. In times like this humanity rises above all college curriculums and recognises Nature as the greatest of all teachers in the hour of danger and death. Women are already the equals of men in the whole of ream of thought, in art, science, literature, and government. With telescope vision they explore the starry firmament, and bring back the history of the planetary world. With chart and compass they pilot ships across the mighty deep, and with skillful finger send electric messages around the globe. In galleries of art the beauties of nature and the virtues of humanity are immortalized by them on their canvas and by their inspired touch dull blocks of marble are transformed into angels of light.

In music they speak again the language of Mendelssohn, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and are worthy interpreters of their great thoughts. The poetry and novels of the century are theirs, and they have touched the keynote of reform in religion, politics, and social life. They fill the editor's and professor's chair, and plead at the bar of justice, walk the wards of the hospital, and speak from the pulpit and the platform; such is the type of womanhood that an enlightened public sentiment welcomes today, and such the triumph of the facts of life over the false theories of the past.

Is it, then, consistent to hold the developed woman of this day within the same narrow political limits as the dame with the spinning wheel and knitting needle occupied in the past? No! no! Machinery has taken the labors of woman as well as man on its tireless shoulders; the loom and the spinning wheel are but dreams of the past; the pen, the brush, the easel, the chisel, have taken their places, while the hopes and ambitions of women are essentially changed.

We see reason sufficient in the outer conditions of human being for individual liberty and development, but when we consider the self dependence of every human soul we see the need of courage, judgment, and the exercise of every faculty of mind and body, strengthened and developed by use, in woman as well as man.

Whatever may be said of man's protecting power in ordinary conditions, mid all the terrible disasters by land and sea, in the supreme moments of danger, alone, woman must ever meet the horrors of the situation; the Angel of Death even makes no royal pathway for her. Man's love and sympathy enter only into the sunshine of our lives. In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever. A recent writer says:

I remember once, in crossing the Atlantic, to have gone upon the deck of the ship at midnight, when a dense black cloud enveloped the sky, and the great deep was roaring madly under the lashes of demoniac winds. My feelings was not of danger or fear (which is a base surrender of the immortal soul), but of utter desolation and loneliness; a little speck of life shut in by a tremendous darkness. Again I remember to have climbed the slopes of the Swiss Alps, up beyond the point where vegetation ceases, and the stunted conifers no longer struggle against the unfeeling blasts. Around me lay a huge confusion of rocks, out of which the gigantic ice peaks shot into the measureless blue of the heavens, and again my only feeling was the awful solitude.

And yet, there is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. It is more hidden than the caves of the gnome; the sacred adytum of the oracle; the hidden chamber of eleusinian mystery, for to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.

Such is individual life. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?