USA Women Fight To Vote - 19th Amendment

In colonial British America, men were considered superior to woman in all ways. In a strict patriarchal hierarchy, men controlled not only wealth & political power but also how their wives served them, how their children were raised, family religious questions, & had the final say in all matters of right & wrong.

In the early part of the 19C, however, many Americans experienced a revolution in gender. The doctrine of “separate spheres” maintained that woman’s sphere was the world of privacy, family, & morality, while man’s sphere was becoming the public world -– economic striving, political maneuvering, & social competition. But women were becoming interested in equality.

In 1848, New York passed the Married Woman’s Property Act. Now a woman wasn’t automatically liable for her husband’s debts; she could enter contracts on her own; she could collect rents or receive an inheritance in her own right; she could file a lawsuit on her own behalf. She became for economic purposes, an individual. By 1900, every state has passed legislation modeled after this, granting married women some control over their property & earnings.

In 1870 after the Civi War, the 15th Amendment was ratified, saying, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” African-Americans could vote, but women could not.

But it was not until 1920, that the 19th Amendment was ratified granting women the right to vote. Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, & ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote.“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

The 19th amendment legally guarantees American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy & difficult struggle—victory took decades of agitation & protest. Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, & practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see final victory in 1920.

Beginning in the 1800s, women organized, petitioned, & picketed to win the right to vote, but it took them decades to accomplish their purpose. Between 1878, when the amendment was 1st introduced in Congress, & August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving their goal varied. 

Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state - 9 western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. Others challenged male-only voting laws in the courts. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, & hunger strikes. Often supporters met fierce resistance. Male opponents heckled, jailed, & sometimes physically abused them.

By 1916, almost all of the major suffrage organizations were united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment. When the state of New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 & President Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift.

On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, & 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the amendment passed its final hurdle of obtaining the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920, hopefully changing the face of the American electorate forever.

The campaign for woman suffrage was long, difficult, & sometimes dramatic; yet ratification did not ensure full enfranchisement. Decades of struggle to include African Americans & other minority women in the promise of voting rights remained. Many women remained unable to vote long into the 20th century because of discriminatory state voting laws.Transcript

See The National Archives

Sixty-sixth Congress of the United States of America; At the First Session,

Begun and held at the City of Washington on Monday, the nineteenth day of May, one thousand nine hundred and nineteen.

JOINT RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution extending the right of suffrage to women.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislature of three-fourths of the several States.

"ARTICLE 

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. 

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation

Timeline of the Fight for All Women’s Right to Vote

19th Amendment: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women’s Right to Vote

By: Sarah Pruitt Updated: History.com July 23, 2024

1848 - Senecca Falls

The Seneca Falls Convention was the 1st women's rights convention in the United States, held in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19–20, 1848. The convention is considered the birthplace of American feminism & launched the women's suffrage movement.

Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton & other participants at the inaugural women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls adopt the Declaration of Sentiments, which calls for equality for women & includes a resolution that women should seek the right to vote. The suffrage resolution passes by a narrow margin, helped along by the support of the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, an early ally of women’s rights activists.

1869 - Wyoming Passes Women's Suffrage Law

Tensions erupt within the women’s rights movement over the recently ratified 14th Amendment & the proposed 15th Amendment, which would give the vote to Black men, but not women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony found the National Woman Suffrage Association to focus on fighting for a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, while Lucy Stone & other more conservative suffragists favor lobbying for voting rights on a state-by-state basis.

1872 - Suffragists Arrested for Voting in NY

Anthony & more than a dozen other women are arrested in Rochester, New York after illegally voting in the presidential election. Anthony unsuccessfully fought the charges, & the court fined her $100, which she never paid.

1878 - California Senate Drafts Amendment

Senator Aaron Sargent of California introduces a women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Senate for the first time. Drafted by Stanton & Anthony, it reads: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” (When Congress passes the amendment 41 years later, the wording will remain unchanged.)

1890 - NAWSA Forms

The two sides of the women’s movement reunite, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). With Stanton as president, the organization focuses on a state-by-state fight for voting rights.

1896 - Black Suffragists Organize National Group

A group of women including Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells-Barnett & Mary Church Terrell form the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC). In addition to women’s enfranchisement, the organization advocates for equal pay, educational opportunities, job training & access to child care for Black women.

Early 1900s - Black Suffragists Barred from Conventions

African-American women fighting for the right to vote continue to face discrimination from white suffragists, especially as the latter group seeks support in Southern states. In 1901 & 1903, the NAWSA conventions in Atlanta & New Orleans bar Black suffragists from attending.

1913 - Alice Paul Creates Militant Group

Alice Paul, vice president of the National Women's party, broadcasts plans for the dedication of the new national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Impatient with the pace of the state-by-state fight for suffrage, Alice Paul & Lucy Burns break from NAWSA & found the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (later the National Woman’s Party) to press for federal action. Inspired by the tactics of Great Britain’s more militant suffragists, Paul leads a protest march of some 5,000 to 10,000 women in Washington, D.C. on the day of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.

1916 - Jeanette Rankin Elected to Congress

1917- The Night of Terror: When Suffragists Were Imprisoned & Tortured in 1917

After peacefully demonstrating in front of the White House, 33 women endured a night of brutal beatings.

Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin is presented with the flag that flew at the House of Representatives during the passage of the suffrage amendment, 1918.

Jeanette Rankin of Montana, a former NAWSA lobbyist, becomes the first woman elected to Congress. With the U.S. entrance into World War I, NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt commits the organization to working toward the war effort. Paul & others take a different approach, holding peaceful protests outside the White House calling for Wilson to support women’s suffrage. Many of the protesters are arrested & jailed for obstructing sidewalk traffic; Paul & others undertake hunger strikes to bring attention to their cause.

On November 14, 1917, guards at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia beat & terrorize 33 women arrested for picketing, an ordeal that will become known as the “Night of Terror.”

1918 - President Wilson Changes Position, Supports Suffrage

In January 1918, Rep. Rankin opens debate in the House of Representatives on a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage. The House votes in favor, but the amendment fails to win a two-thirds majority in the Senate. In a speech to Congress in September, President Wilson officially changes his position to support a federal women’s suffrage amendment.

1919 - House, Senate Pass Amendment, Ratification Effort Begins

On May 21, 1919, the House again passes what would become the 19th Amendment, popularly known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. The Senate follows suit on June 4 by a narrow margin (just over the two-thirds requirement), & it goes to the states to be ratified. Ratification requires 36 states, or three-quarters of those in the Union at the time.

Eleven states—Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Kansas, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas, Iowa & Missouri—vote to ratify by late July 1919. On July 24, Georgia’s state legislature becomes the first to vote against ratification, thanks to a determined anti-suffrage effort in the Peach State. (Georgia won’t formally ratify the 19th Amendment until 1970.) The “antis” draw strength from powerful business interests including the railroad, liquor & manufacturing industries, as well as religious & conservative groups.

By year’s end, Alabama becomes the second state to vote against ratification, while state legislatures in Arkansas, Montana, Nebraska, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Utah, California, Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota & Colorado have all voted to ratify the amendment. Suffragists are 14 states short of their target.

January 1920 - Five More States Ratify

The first month of the new decade brings ratification from Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon, Indiana & Wyoming, & rejection from South Carolina.

March 1920 - 35 States Ratify, One More Needed

By the end of March, Virginia, Maryland & Mississippi have also voted against ratification. But Nevada, New Jersey, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, West Virginia & Washington ratify, bringing the total to 35 states—one short of the goal needed for the amendment to become law.

June 1920 - Delaware’s Vote Against Ratification Strikes a Blow

Delaware’s vote to reject ratification shocks suffragists, & deals a serious blow to their momentum. Suddenly, the fate of the suffrage amendment appears in doubt. Anti-suffrage sentiment runs high in most of the states left to vote: State legislatures in Connecticut, Vermont, Florida decline to consider the amendment, leaving only North Carolina & Tennessee, with North Carolina sure to reject.

August 1920 - Tennessee Provides Final Vote for Ratification

Called into special session, the Tennessee state legislature meets to decide the fate of the women’s suffrage amendment. Catt & other prominent national “Suffs” travel to Nashville to personally lobby legislators for weeks, as do “Anti-Suffs” determined to keep women from gaining the vote. In the so-called “War of the Roses,” supporters of suffrage wear white roses, while their opponents don red ones.

The Tennessee Senate votes to ratify, but the vote is tied in the House—until one legislator, Harry Burns, changes his vote after receiving a letter from his mother urging him to vote for women’s suffrage. On August 18, 1920, one day after the North Carolina legislature rejects the suffrage amendment by two votes, Tennessee becomes the 36th state to ratify.

By the time the final battle over ratification of the 19th Amendment occurred in Nash ville, Tennessee in the summer of 1920, 72 years had passed since the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. More than 20 nations around the world had granted women the right to vote, along with 15 states, more than half of them in the West. 

1924 - Native Americans Recognized as Citizens

Four years after the 19th Amendment is ratified, passage of the Snyder Act (aka the Indian Citizenship Act) makes Native Americans U.S. citizens for the first time. But many Native American women (& men) were still effectively barred from voting for the next four decades, until Utah became the last state to extend full voting rights to Native Americans in 1962.

1965 - Voting Rights Act Protects All Citizens’ Right to Vote

After a century of struggle by Black women (& men) against poll taxes, literacy tests & other discriminatory state voting laws, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965. The biggest legislative achievement of the civil rights movement, the bill protects all citizens’ right to vote under the 14th & 15th Amendments.

1984 - Mississippi Becomes Last US State to Ratify 19th Amendment

Mississippi formally ratifies the 19th Amendment on March 22, 1984, becoming the last U.S. state to do so. 

1856 Gentility for Proper American Ladies

 
The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility etc. By Emily Thornwell (New York: Derby & Jackson, Published 1856) 

Etiquette Lesson #1: Gait & Carriage

A lady ought to adopt a modest & intentionally measured gait; too great hurry can injure the grace which ought to characterize her. She should not turn her head on one side & on the other, especially in large towns or cities, where this bad habit seems to be an invitation to the impertinent. A lady should not present herself alone in a library, or a museum, unless to study, or work as an artist.

A Gentlemen’s attendance. – After twilight, a young lady would not be conducting herself in a becoming manner, by walking alone unescorted; & if she passes the evening with anyone, she ought, beforehand, to provide someone to come for her at a stated hour; but if this is not practicable, she should politely ask of the person whom she is visiting, to permit a servant to accompany her for safety.

In riding, the gentleman’s first duty is to provide a gentle horse, properly caparisoned. After seeing that the girths are all tightened, he leads the lady to the horse. With her back to the horse, she takes hold of the horn of the saddle, & the reins with her right hand, & places her left foot upon the shoulder of the gentleman, who stoops before her, making a stirrup for her of his clasped hands.

Raising himself up to his feet gently, the lady is able to be placed securely in the horse’s saddle. The gentleman puts her foot in the stirrup, adjusts her dress, mounts his own horse & takes his position, usually on the right, but authorities differ, & many prefer the left. In dismounting, the lady, having lifted her foot from the stirrup, may be received in the gentleman’s arms.

Etiquette Lesson #2 – Attention to Others

When you are passing in the street, & happen to see coming towards you a person of your acquaintance, whether they be a lady or an elderly person, you should always offer them the wall, that is to say, the side next to the houses. If a carriage should happen to stop, in such a manner as to leave only a narrow passage between it & the houses, beware of elbowing & rudely crowding the passengers, with a view to get by more expeditiously; wait your turn, & if any one of the persons before mentioned comes up, you should edge up to the wall, in order to give them the place. They also, as they pass, should bow politely to you in return.

Etiquette Lesson #3 – Never Use Your Knife

A lady should never use their knife to convey your food to your mouth, under any circumstance; it is unnecessary & glaringly vulgar to the eye. Feed yourself with a fork or spoon, nothing else; a knife is only to be used for cutting the food. The knife & fork should not be held upright in the hands, but always sloping; when done, lay them parallel to each other upon the plate. When you eat, bend the body a little toward your plate in a polite manner; do not gnaw bones at the table, always use your napkin before & after drinking.

Etiquette Lesson #4 – Decorum at The Table

It is ridiculous to make a display of your napkin; to attach it with pins to your bosom, or to pass it through your button; to use a fork in eating soup; to ask for meat instead of beef; for poultry instead of chicken; to turn up your cuffs in carving; to take bread, even when it is within your reach, instead of calling upon the servant; to cut with a knife your bread which should be broken by the hand, & to pour coffee into the saucer to cool. In conversation, be careful not to speak while eating a mouthful; it is indecorous in the extreme.

Etiquette Lesson #5 – How to Address Young Gentlemen

Do not be tempted to indulge in feminine indecorum, which may be countenanced, but can never be sanctioned by example; that of addressing young gentlemen of your acquaintance, who are unconnected [i.e., unrelated], by their christian names. It opens the way to unpleasant familiarities on their part, more effectually than you can well imagine, unless you have been taught the painful lesson by the imprudence of a friend. Any evident intention to display familiarity with them, will be more intolerable than absolute ignorance.

A lady’s influence in conversation.–Every woman whose heart & mind have been properly regulated, is capable of exerting a most salutary influence over the gentlemen with whom she associates; & this fact has been acknowledged by the best & wisest of all men, & seldom has it ever been disputed, except by those whose capacities for observation have been perverted by adverse circumstances. Always seek to converse with gentlemen into whose society you may be introduced, with a dignified modesty & simplicity, which will effectually check on their part any attempt at familiarity . . . .You may with propriety accept such delicate attentions as polished & refined men are desirous of paying, but never solicit them, or appear to be expecting them.

Etiquette Lesson #6 – Lady’s Proper Attire

Ladies’ morning attire.–The most appropriate morning dress for a lady upon first rising is a small muslin cap & loose robe. It is not in good taste for a lady to appear at the table in the morning without being laced at all; it gives an air of untidiness to the whole appearance. The hair papers which cannot be removed on rising (because the hair would not keep in curl till evening), should be concealed under a bandeau of lace . . . .

In this dress we can receive only intimate friends, or persons who call upon urgent or indispensable business; even then we should offer some apology for it. To neglect to take off this morning dress as soon as possible is to expose one’s self to embarrassments often very painful, & to the appearance of a want of education.

Morning Dress: A closely fitting morning-dress of plain cashmere, sleeves short at the wrist to display the full puff of muslin around the hand. A row of gimp embroidery from the hem of the skirt to the throat. Small collar of embroidered muslin, & cap of lace & ribbon.

Every one knows that whatever be the fortune of a young lady, her dress ought always, in form as well as ornaments, to exhibit less of a recherché appearance, & should be less showy than that of married ladies. Costly cashmeres, very rich furs, & diamonds, as well as many other brilliant ornaments, are to be forbidden a young lady; & those who act in defiance of these rational marks of propriety make us believe that they are possessed of an unrestrained love of luxury, & deprive themselves of the pleasure of receiving those ornaments from the hand of the man of their choice at some future day.

Walking Dress: for sociable calls, of plain stone colored merino; a short cloak of ture satin, trimmed with fringe; drawn casing bonnet of dark-green silk.

Etiquette Lesson #7 – Raising the Dress & Proper Behavior

When tripping over the pavement, a lady should gracefully raise her dress a little above her ankle. With the right hand, she should hold together the folds of her gown, & draw them towards the right side. To raise the dress on both sides, & with both hands, is absolutely vulgar. This ungraceful practice can only be tolerated for a few simple moments, when the mud is very deep.

Etiquette Lesson #8 – Bad habits in the highest degree displeasing

To look steadily at anyone, especially if you are a lady & are speaking to a gentleman; to turn the head frequently on one side & the other during conversation; to balance yourself upon your chair; to bend forward; to strike your hands upon your knees; to hold one of your knees between your hands locked together; to cross your legs; to extend your feet on the andirons; to admire yourself with complacency in a glass; to adjust, in an affected manner, your cravat, hair, dress, or handkerchief; to remain without gloves; to fold carefully your shawl, instead of throwing it with graceful negligence upon a table; to fret about a hat which you have just left off; to laugh immoderately; to place your hand upon the person with whom you are conversing…

To take him by the buttons, the collar of his cloak, the cuffs, the waist, & so forth; to seize any person by the waist or arm, or to touch their person; to roll the eyes or to raise them with affectation; to take snuff from the box of your neighbor, or to offer it to strangers, especially to ladies; to play continually with your chain or fan; to beat time with the feet & hands; to whirl round a chair with your hand; to shake with your feet the chair of your neighbor; to rub your face or your hands; wink your eyes; shrug up your shoulders; stamp your feet, & so forth.

Etiquette Lesson #9 – Speaking to Your Husband

A lady should not ever say “my husband,” except among intimates; in every other case she should always address him by his name, calling him “Mr.” It is equally proper, except on occasions of ceremony, & while she is quite young, to designate him by his christian name. Never use the initial of a person’s name to designate him; as “Mr. P.,” “Mr. L.,” etc. Nothing is so odious as to hear a lady speak of her husband, or, indeed, anyone else, as “Mr. B.”

How a lady should be spoken of by her husband. – It is equally improper for a gentleman to say “my wife,” except among very intimate friends; he should mention her as “Mrs. So-&-so.” When in private, the expression “my dear,” or merely the christian name, is considered in accordance with the best usage among the more refined.

Etiquette Lesson #10 – Requisites to Female Beauty

Exercise is unquestionably one of the very best means for the preservation of health; but its real importance is unknown, or but too lightly considered by the majority of females. Were they, however, to be made fully sensible of its extraordinary power in preserving the vigor of the body, in augmenting its capability to resist disease, in promoting its symmetrical development, in improving the freshness & brilliancy of the complexion, as well as its influence in prolonging the charms of beauty to an advanced age, they would shake off the prejudices by which they have been so long enthralled, & not voluntarily abandon means so completely within their power, & so simple, of enhancing all their physical perfections.

But let it be recollected, that to produce its beneficial effects, exercise must be taken in the open air. Not all the occupations appertaining to the domestic duties of a female, though they may require her to bustle from garret to cellar, will impart the kind of action to the different portions of the body by which her health & beauty shall be essentially improved.

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.