Fighting for Equality - Women's Rights Convention 1848 Seneca Falls, New York

A Convention to discuss the SOCIAL, CIVIL, AND RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF WOMAN, was called by the Women of Seneca County, N.Y., and held at the village of Seneca Falls, in the Wesleyan Chapel, on the 19th and 20th of July, 1848...

Whereas, the great precept of nature is conceded to be; "that man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness." Blackstone, in his Commentaries, remarks, that this law of Nature being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times; not human laws are of any validity if contrary to this, and such of them as are valid, derive all their force, and all their validity, and all their authority, mediately and immediately, from this original; Therefore,

Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and of no validity; for this is "superior in obligation to any other."

Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.

Resolved, That woman is man's equal--was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.

Resolved, That the women of this country ought to be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation, by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, not their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.

Resolved, That inasmuch as man, while claiming for himself intellectual superiority, does accord to woman moral superiority, it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak, and teach as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies.

Resolved, That the same amount of virtue, delicacy, and refinement of behavior, that is required of woman in the social state, should also be required of man, and the same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.

Resolved, That the objection of indelicacy and impropriety, which is so often brought against woman when she addresses a public audience, comes with a very ill grace from those who encourage, by their attendance, her appearance on the stage, in the concert, or in the feats of the circus.

Resolved, That woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the enlarged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.

Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.

Resolved, That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities.

Resolved, Therefore, That, being invested by the Creator with the same capabilities, and the same consciousness of responsibility for their exercise, it is demonstrably the right and duty of woman, equally with man, to promote every righteous cause, by every righteous means; and especially in regard to the great subjects of morals and religion, it is self-evidently her right to participate with her brother in teaching them, both in private and in public, by writing and by speaking, by any instrumentalities proper to be used, and in any assemblies proper to be held; and this being a self-evident truth, growing out of the divinely implanted principles of human nature, and custom or authority adverse to it, whether modern or wearing the hoary sanction of antiquity, is to be regarded as self-evident falsehood, and at war with the interests of mankind...

Declaration of Sentiments

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves, by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men - both natives and foreigners.

Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.

He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes, with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master - the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women - the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.

After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.

He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.

He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education - all colleges being closed against her.

He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.

He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.

He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, - in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.

In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.

Firmly relying upon the final triumph of the Right and the True, we do this day affix our signatures to this declaration.

The text of this report is from the original tract produced after the Convention in the North Star Printing Office owned by Frederick Douglass, Rochester, New York. It was reprinted several times and circulated as a sales item at local and national women's rights conventions.

Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848. Rochester: Printed by John Dick at the North Star Office

Winter in 19C America - William Charles Anthony Frerichs (Belgium-born American artist)

William Charles Anthony Frerichs (Belgium-born American artist) Ice Skating

Women traveling in Winter on the Canadian Frontier - by Cornelius Krieghoff 1815-1872

Cornelius Krieghoff (Dutch-born Canadian painter, 1815-1872) Winter Landscape 1849

Cornelius Krieghoff 1815-1872 was born in Amsterdam, spent his formative years in Bavaria, & studied in Rotterdam & Dusseldorf. He traveled to the United States in the 1830s, where he served in the Army for a few years. He married a young woman from Quebec & moved to the Montreal area, where he painted genre paintings of the people & countryside of Canada. According to Charles C. Hill, Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery, "Krieghoff was the first Canadian artist to interpret in oils... the splendour of our waterfalls, & the hardships & daily life of people living on the edge of new frontiers" Krieghoff moved to Quebec from 1854-1863, before he came to Chicago to live with his daughter.

Winter in 19C America - Eastman Johnson (American Painter, 1824-1906)

Eastman Johnson (American Painter, 1824-1906)  On Their Way to Camp

Fighting for Equality - The Grimke Sisters - Sarah 1792-1873 and Angelina 1805-1879

Sarah Moor Grimke (1792-1873) and Angelina Emily Grimke (1805-1879), abolitionists and woman’s rights pioneers, were born in Charleston, South Carolina. Sarah was the 6th of 14 children, Angelina the last.

Their father, John Faucheraud Grimke, whose French Huguenot ancestors had come to America after the revolution of the Edict of Nantes, was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and had studied law in England. After serving as a lieutenant colonel in the American Revolution, he rose in the South Carolina judiciary to a position equivalent to chief justice. Their mother, Mary (Smith) Grimke, of Irish and Puritan ancestry, also came from a family prominent in Carolina politics. Among their brothers were Thomas Smith Grimke, lawyer, state senator, and advocate of peace, temperance and educational reforms until his early death in 1834. Brother Frederick Grimke became a judge of the Ohio supreme court.

The Grimke sisters were educated by private tutors in the subjects then considered proper for young ladies; but Sarah protested at being denied Greek, Latin, philosophy, and law, and eagerly learned what she could of these subjects from her father and brothers. Outwardly conforming to the gay social life of antebellum Charleston, Sarah, deeply religious by temperament, was inwardly rebellious. When in 1819 she accompanied her ailing father on a health-seeking trip to Philadelphia and New Jersey (in the midst of which he died), she was much impressed by the simplicity, sincerity and piety of the Quakers whom she met.

The Quaker abhorrence of slavery struck a responsive note with Sarah. Although reared in an affluent home and accustomed to the services of numerous slaves, she had early become sensitive to the injustices of the slave system. As a young teacher in a Negro Sunday school, she had rebelled against the law which prohibited teaching slaves to read, and only threats of punishment had ended the reading lessons she had surreptitiously given to her own maid. 
After prolonged turmoil of mind, Sarah left the family’s Episcopal faith, became a member of the Society of Friends, and in 1821, at age 28, moved to Philadelphia.

Angelina Grimke, less introverted and more self-assured, modified her religious ideas more easily, turning first to Presbyterianism and then following Sarah into the Quaker fold. Angelina, however, was agitated even more deeply than her sister over the issue of slavery. “That system must be radically wrong which can only be supported by transgressing the laws of God,” she wrote in May 1829, in a diary already filled with remorse over the punishments meted out to family slaves.

Her mother refused to discuss the subject. Alienated from her family and repelled by the violent nature of her surroundings, Angelina in the autumn of 1829, left Charleston and joined her older sister in Philadelphia. Family ties, though strained, were not broken, but the sisters never returned to live in the South. Having made good their personal escape from the slave system, they devoted themselves for a time to charitable work and religious preoccupations. Sarah hoped to be accepted into the Friends ministry, but her stiff and halting delivery when she spoke in meeting made a bad impression. The Quaker merchant Israel Morris, a widower, twice proposed marriage, but although Sarah was much attracted to him she refused his offers. Angelina abandoned her thoughts of training at Catherine Beecher's Hartford school to become a teacher, when her suitor, Edward Bettle, son of a leading Quaker elder, disapproved, but Bettle died of cholera in 1832.

Of the two sisters, Angelina was the first to become convinced, that her vocation lay in the antislavery cause. After reading abolitionist newspapers and hearing such lecturers and England’s George Thompson, she joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, recording in her diary (May 12, 1835): “I am confident not many years will roll by before the horrible traffic in human beings will be destroyed…My earnest prayers have been poured out that the Lord would be pleased to permit me to be instrumental of good to these degraded. Oppressed , and suffering fellow-creatures.”

When William Lloyd Garrison in September 1835, unexpectedly printed in the Liberator a letter she had written to him expressing sympathy with his cause, the Grimke name was publicly and irrevocably identified with abolition. That same year, Angelina wrote An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, published in 1836 by the American Anti-Slavery Society. This abolitionist pamphlet, bearing the name of a leading Southern family, aroused intense public interest. Of the copies that reached the South, many were destroyed by southern postmasters, and the author was warned not to attempt a return to Charleston. Soon after completing her pamphlet, Angelina accepted an appointment from the American Anti-Slavery Society to hold meetings for small groups of interested women in the New York City area.

Sarah Grimke’s conversion to abolitionism proceeded somewhat more slowly. She was, however, like her sister, disturbed by discrimination against Negroes in the Friends meeting, and she felt increasing frustrated in the orthodox Quaker environment. In August 1836, upon attempting to speak in a meeting, she was publicly silenced and rebuked by “Pope Jonathan” Evans, leader of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Considering her Quaker ties severed, she moved to New York and cast her lot with Angelina in the antislavery movement. That November both sisters attended an indoctrination course for abolitionist workers conducted by the noted antislavery orator Theodore Dwight Weld. Inspired by this experience, Sarah wrote herEpistles to the Clergy of the Southern States (American Anti-Slavery Society, 1836) a refutation of the argument that slavery in Biblical times justified the modern institution.

Angelina’s audiences, meanwhile, had outgrown private parlors, and a few ministers had opened their churches to her-provided only women attended. The novelty of a sheltered Southern lady lecturing against slavery drew men as well as women, however, and during a New England tour in 1837, she created a sensation by publicly addressing “mixed” audiences containing both men and women. She wrote a second pamphlet, Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837), and early in 1838, she testified bore a committee of the Massachusetts legislature on the subject of antislavery petitions, the first woman accorded that privilege. Though she was plan and rather masculine in appearance, Angelina’s considerable height, piercing eyes, and powerful voice made an effective platform combination. The more retiring and conventionally feminine Sarah, neither so fluent nor so bold, accompanied her younger sister and spoke occasionally.

These appearances before mixed audiences catapulted the Grimke sisters into the center of a woman’s rights controversy-one of the earliest in American history. The issue was joined in July 1837 when the Congregational ministerial association of Massachusetts issued a “Pastoral Letter” strongly objecting to their unwomanly behavior. “We are,” wrote Angelina, “placed very unexpectedly in a very trying situation, in the forefront of an entirely new contest-a contest for the rights of woman as a moral, intelligent and responsible being.” To abolitionist friends like John Greenleaf Whittier and Theodore Weld, who pleaded with them not to endanger the antislavery crusade by raising an extraneous issue, they replied: “We cannot push Abolitionism forward…until we take up the stumbling block out of the road.”

Encouraged by Garrison, Henry C. Wright, and other New England radicals, the sisters confronted the challenge forthrightly. Angelina Grimke, in a series of Liberator letters, published in 1838, as a pamphlet, not only defended her right to speak out anywhere on the abolition issue, but declared that women should have a voice in the formation of all the laws by which they were governed. Sarah, too, contributed a vigorous pamphlet, Letters of the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (1838). The now famous sisters concluded their New England tour in the spring of 1838 with a lecture series in Boston’s Odeon Hall which drew audiences numbered in the thousands.

By this time Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimke, strongly attracted to each other since their first meeting, had avowed their affection. They were married on May 14, 1838, at the home of Angelina’s sister Anna in Philadelphia, in a simple ceremony attended by many prominent abolitionists. Since Weld was a Presbyterian, both Angelina and Sarah, as a participant, were formally dismissed from the Society of Friends. Two days later, Angelina Weld delivered an impassioned hour-long address to a Philadelphia antislavery convention, while an angry mob, which later burned the hall to the ground, raged outside. This appearance marked the end of her meteoric lecture career. Settling in Fort Lee. N.J., the Welds and Sarah Grimke (who made her home with the for the rest of her life) circulated antislavery petitions. They also complied, largely from reports in Southern newspapers, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), a telling antislavery document upon which Harriet Beecher Stowe drew heavily in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 

But in 1840, moving to a farm near Belleville, N.J., the erstwhile antislavery trio largely retired from the fray. Theodore Weld, his voice failing, deplored the increasing political course of the movement; his wife and sister-in-law were occupied with housekeeping duties. Angelina was often ill and Sarah took much of the care of the Welds’ 3 children-Charles Stuart, born in 1839, Theodore Grimke (1841), and Sarah Grimke (1844) - though this caused some friction between the two sisters. Garrison and his New England friends, who had regretted Angelina’s marriage to the more moderate Weld, felt that a powerful abolitionist voice had been silenced.

In 1848, in dire financial straits, the Welds and Sarah Grimke began taking in pupils, and by 1851 they were running a boarding school of twenty. Three years later they moved to Perth Amboy, N.J., where they opened a school in connection with the Raritan Bay Union, a communal settlement newly established by Marcus Spring, a New York merchant and philanthropist. The settlement expired after two years, by the school, Eagleswood, continued with some success until 1862. The sisters were actively interested in most of the intellectual currents and fads of their time, including diet and dress form. Henry David Thoreau, visiting Eagleswood in 1856, wrote: “There sat Mrs. Weld and her sister, two elderly gray-haired ladies, the former in extreme Bloomer costume, which was what you might call remarkable….”

In religion they became progressively less orthodox; the Millerite agitation engaged Angelina’s interest in the mid-1840’s, and spiritualists experiments were not unusual. In 1863, after a brief attempt by Theodore Weld to resume lecturing, the 3 moved to Massachusetts, settling first in West Newton and then, in 1864, in the community of Hyde Park, south of Boston. All three taught in Dio Lewis’ progressive school for young ladies in Lexington, until its destruction by fire in 1867. In addition, Sarah did some newspaper writing and translating. Though no longer active feminists, the two sisters did, in 1870, join a group of Hyde Park women in a symbolic effort to cast ballots in a local election.

The Grimkes’ belief in equality was put to the test in 1868, by their discovery that two mulatto students at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania who bore the family name were actually their nephews, sons of their brother Henry by a slave. The youngsters were promptly acknowledged and welcomed in the Weld home. With the aid and encouragement of their aunts, Archibald Henry and Francis James Grimke graduated respectively from Harvard Law School and Princeton Theological Seminary, achieved recognition in their professions, and became prominent spokesmen for equality, Archibald as leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Sarah Moore Grimke died in 1873, at age 81, her death attributed officially to laryngitis. Shortly thereafter, Angelina Grimke Weld suffered a paralytic stroke which partially incapacitated her until her own death six years later, at 74. Both sisters died in Hyde Park and were buried in Boston’s Mount Hope Cemetery. Theodore Weld survived his wife by 15 years.

For more, see Notable American Women edited by Edward T James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S Boyer, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1971

Winter in 19C America - James Brade Sword (American artist, 1839–1915)

James Brade Sword (American artist, 1839–1915) Winter Landscape

Women pictured on the North American Canadian Frontier in 19C by Dutch-born Cornelius Krieghoff 1815-1872

Cornelius Krieghoff (Dutch-born Canadian painter, 1815-1872) At the Blacksmith's Shop 1871

Cornelius Krieghoff 1815-1872 was born in Amsterdam, spent his formative years in Bavaria, & studied in Rotterdam & Dusseldorf. He traveled to the United States in the 1830s, where he served in the Army for a few years. He married a young woman from Quebec & moved to the Montreal area, where he painted genre paintings of the people & countryside of Canada. According to Charles C. Hill, Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery, "Krieghoff was the first Canadian artist to interpret in oils... the splendour of our waterfalls, & the hardships & daily life of people living on the edge of new frontiers" Krieghoff moved to Quebec from 1854-1863, before he came to Chicago to live with his daughter.

Fighting for Equality - Abby Price's Address US Women's Rights Convention 1850

Read to the "Woman's Rights Convention," at Worcester, by Mrs. Abby H. Price 1814-1878, of Hopedale, Mass.

In our account of the work of Creation, when it was so gloriously finished in the garden of Eden, by placing there, in equal companionship, man and woman, made in the image of God, alike gifted with intellect, alike endowed with immortality, it is said the Creator looked upon his work, and pronounced it good - that "the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy." Since that time, through the slow rolling of darkened ages, man has ruled by physical power, and wherever he could gain the ascendancy, there he has felt the right to dictate - even though it degraded his equal companion - the mother who bore him - the playmate of his childhood - the daughter of his love. Thus, in many countries we see woman reduced to the condition of a slave, and compelled to do all the drudgery necessary to her lord's subsistence. In others she is dressed up as a mere plaything, for his amusement; but everywhere he has assumed to be her head and lawgiver, and only where Christianity has dawned, and right not might been the rule, has woman had anything like her true position. In this country even, republican, so called, and Christian, her rights are but imperfectly recognised, and she suffers under the disability of caste. These are facts that, in the light of the nineteenth century, demand our attention. "Are we always to remain in this position" is a question we have come here to discuss.

The natural rights of woman are co-equal with those of man. So God created man in his own image; in the image of God created he him; male and female, created he them . There is not one particle of difference intimated as existing between them. They were both made in the image of God. Dominion was given to both over every other creature, but not over each other. They were expected to exercise the vicegerency given to them by their Maker in harmony and love.

In contending for this co-equality of woman's with man's rights, it is not necessary to argue, either that the sexes are by nature equally and indiscriminately adapted to the same positions and duties, or that they are absolutely equal in physical and intellectual ability; but only that they are absolutely equal in their rights to life, liberty , and the pursuit of happiness - in their rights to do , and to be, individually and socially, all they are capable of, and to attain the highest usefulness and happiness, obediently to the divine moral law

These are every man's rights, of whatever race or nation, ability or situation, in life. These are equally every woman's rights, whatever her comparative capabilities may be - whatever her relations may be. These are human rights, equally inherent in male and female. To repress them in any degree is in the same degree usurpation, tyranny, and oppression. We hold these to be self-evident truths, and shall not now discuss them. We shall assume that happiness is the chief end of all human beings; that existence is valuable in proportion as happiness is promoted and secured; and that, on the whole, each of the sexes is equally necessary to the common happiness, and in one way or another is equally capable, with fair opportunity, of contributing to it. Therefore each has an equal right to pursue and enjoyit. This settled, we contend:
* 1. That women ought to have equal opportunities with men for suitable and well compensated employment.
* 2. That women ought to have equal opportunities, privileges, and securities with men for rendering themselves pecuniarily independent.
* 3. That women ought to have equal legal and political rights, franchises, and advantages with men.

Let us consider each of these points briefly. Women ought to have equal opportunities with men for suitable and well compensated employment in all departments of human exertion.

Human beings cannot attain true dignity or happiness except by true usefulness. This is true of women as of men. It is their duty, privilege, honor, and bliss to be useful. Therefore give them the opportunity and encouragement. If there are positions, duties, occupations, really unsuitable to females, as such , let these be left to males. If there are others unsuitable to men, let these be left to women. Let all the rest be equally open to both sexes. And let the compensation be graduated justly, to the real worth of the services rendered, irrespective of sex.

However just and fair this may seem, it is far from actual experience. Tradition so palsies public sentiment with regard to the comparative privileges and rights of the sexes, that but little even is thought of the oppressions that exist, and woman seems to have made up her mind to an eternal inferiority. I say eternal , because development constitutes our greatness and our happiness

If we do not properly develope our human natures in this sphere of existence, it is a loss that can never be made up. Hence, for the sake of her angel-nature, her immortality, woman should have her inalienable rights. She cannot act freely, be true to her moral nature, or to her intellect; she cannot gratify her charity or her taste, without pecuniary independence, that which is produced by suitable and well compensated employment. Woman, in order to be equally independent with man, must have a fair and equal chance. He is in no wise restricted from doing, in every department of human exertion, all he is able to do. If he is bold and ambitious, and desires fame, every avenue is open to him. He may blend science and art, producing a competence for his support, until he chains them to the car of his genius, and, with Fulton and Morse, wins a crown of imperishable gratitude. If he desires to tread the path of knowledge up to its glorious temple-summit, he can, as he pleases, take either of the learned professions as instruments of pecuniary independence, - while he plumes his wings for a higher and higher ascent. Not so with woman. Her rights are not recognised as equal . Her sphere is circumscribed not by her ability, but by her sex. The wings of her genius are clipped, because she is a woman. If perchance her taste leads her to excellence in the way they give her leave to tread, she is worshipped as almost divine; but if she reaches for laurels which they have in view, they scream after her, " You are a woman ." She is sneered at for her weakness, while she is allowed little or no chance for development. The number of her industrial avocations are unnecessarily restricted, far more than reason demands. And when she is engaged in the same occupations with men, her remuneration is greatly below what is awarded to her stronger associates. Those women who are married, and have the care of families, have duties and responsibilities that rest peculiarly upon themselves, and which they must find their highest pleasure in performing. But while they have disciplined themselves by faithfulness and attention to all these, say not to them - you have done all you may do, keep your minds and attention within that narrow circle, though your mature and ripened intellects would fain be interested in whatever concerns the larger family of man, and your affections strong in a healthful growth, yearn towards the suffering and the afflicted of every country.

And why not allow to those who have not become "happy wives and mothers," those who are anxious of leading active and useful lives, of maintaining an honorable independence, a fair chance with men, to do all they can do with propriety?

At present it is well nigh a misfortune to a poor man to have a large family of daughters. Compared with sons their chances for an honest livelihood are few. Though they may have intellect of a high order, yet they must be educated to be married as the chief end of their being. They must not forget that they are females in their aspirations for independence, for greatness, for education. Their alternatives are few. The confined factory, the sedentary, blighting life of half-paid seamstresses, perhaps a chance at folding books, or type setting may keep them along until the happy moment arrives, when they have an offer of marriage, and their fears for sustenance end by a union with the more favored sex. This should not be so. Give girls a fair chance to acquaint themselves with any business they can well do. Our daughters should fit themselves equally with our sons, for any post of usefulness and profit that they may choose. What good reason is there why the lighter trades should not open with equal facilities for their support, and why their labor should not be well paid in any useful and profitable department? Is it fair that strong and able men capable of tilling the soil, should be paid high wages for light mechanical labor that is denied woman because she is a woman, and which she could with equal facility execute? The newspaper press, clerkships, and book-keeping, not now to mention different offices in Government, (whose duties are principally writing,) would, if they were equally open to our daughters, afford them an opportunity of well paid and congenial employment; would relieve them from the necessity of marriage or want, and thereby add dignity and energy to their character. What good reason is there why women should not be educated to mercantile pursuits, to engage in commerce, to invent, to construct, in fine to do anything she can do? Why so separate the avocations of the sexes? I believe it impossible for woman to fulfil the design of God in her creation until her brethren mingle with her more as an equal, as a moral being, and lose in the dignity of her immortal nature the idea of her being a female. Until social intercourse is purified by the forgetfulness of sex we can never derive high benefit from each other's society in the active business of life. Man inflicts injury upon woman, unspeakable injury in placing her intellectual and moral nature in the background, and woman injures herself by submitting to be regarded only as a female. She is called upon loudly, by the progressive spirit of the age, to rise from the station where man, not God, has placed her, and to claim her rights as a moral and responsible being, equal with man.

As such , both have the same sphere of action, and the same duties devolve on both, though these may vary according to circumstances. Fathers and mothers have sacred duties and obligations devolving upon them which cannot belong to others. These do not attach to them as man and woman, but as parents, husbands, and wives. In all the majesty of moral power, in all the dignity of immortality let woman plant herself side by side with man on the broad platform of equal human rights. By thus claiming privileges, encouragements, and rights with man, she would gain the following results:
* 1. A fair development of her natural abilities and capabilities, physical, intellectual, economical, and moral.
* 2. A great increase of self-respect, conscious responsibility, womanly dignity, and influence.
* 3. Pecuniary competence, or the ready resource for acquiring it in some department of human exertion.
* 4. A far higher moral character, etc.

Now take a survey of things as they are. The general opinion that woman is inferior to man, bears with terrible and paralyzing effect on those who are dependent upon their labor, mental or physical, for a subsistence. I allude to the disproportionate value set upon the time and labor of men and women. A man engaged in teaching can always, I believe, command a higher price for his services, than a woman, though he teach the same branch, and though he be in no respect superior to the woman. It is so in every occupation in which both engage indiscriminately. For example, in tailoring, a man has twice as much for making a coat, or pantaloons, as a woman, although the work done by each may be equally good. In the employments which are peculiar to women, their time is estimated at only half the value of that of men. The washer-woman works as hard in proportion as the wood-sawyer, yet she makes not more than half as much by a day's work. Thus by narrowing the sphere of woman, and reducing her remuneration of labor so unjustly, her resources are few and she finds it hard to acquire an honorable independence. Necessity, we are compelled to believe, cruel necessity , often drives her to vice, especially in our large cities; as the only alternative from starvation! Deplorable and heart sickening as the statement is, I have good authority for saying that more than half of the prostitutes of our towns are driven to that course of life from necessity! M. Duchatelet, in his investigation in Paris, established this fact in the clearest manner. In his work, Vol. I., p. 96, we read the following statement: "Of all causes of prostitution in Paris, and probably in all large towns, there are none more influential than the want of work and indigence resulting from insufficient earnings. What are the earnings of our laundresses, our seamstresses, our milliners? Compare the wages of the most skillful with the more ordinary and moderately able, and we shall see if it be possible for these latter to provide even the strict necessaries of life. And if we further compare the prices of their labor with that of others less skillful, we shall cease to wonder that so large a number fall into irregularities, thus made inevitable! This state of things has a natural tendency to increase in the actual state of our affairs, in consequence of the usurpation by men, of a large class of occupations, which it would be more honorable in our sex to resign to the other. Is it not shameful, for example, to see in Paris thousands of men in the prime of their age in shops and warehouses, leading a sedentary and effeminate life, which is only suitable for women?"

M. Duchatelet has other facts, which show that even filial and maternal affection drive many to occasional prostitution as a means, and the only means left them, of earning bread for those depending on them for support. He says, "It is difficult to believe that the trade of prostitution should be embraced by certain women as a means of fulfilling their filial or maternal duties. Nothing, however, is more true . It is by no means rare to see married women, widowed, or deserted by their husbands, becoming abandoned, with the sole object of saving their families from dying with hunger. It is still more common to find young females, unable to procure, from honest occupations, adequate provision for their aged and infirm parents, reduced to prostitute themselves in order to eke out their livelihood. I have found," says he, "too many particulars regarding these two classes, not to be convinced that they are far more numerous than is generally imagined." Had I time, I could read you pages from the London "Morning Chronicle," on the Metropolitan Poor, where the most affecting cases are stated of poverty and of destitution, enough to melt the heart of steel, where poor creatures have been driven to vice from absolute starvation , - suffering remorse and self-loathing the most intolerable. Poor outcasts! - miserable lepers! Their touch even, in the very extremity of human suffering, shaken off as if it were a pollution! They seem to be considered far more out of the pale of humanity than negroes on a slave plantation, or felons in a Pasha's dungeon! It is thought to be discreditable to a woman even to know of their existence. You may not mention them in public. You may not allude to them in a book without staining its pages. Our sisters, whose poverty is caused by the oppressions of society, who are driven to sin by want of bread, - then regarded with scorn and turned away from with contempt! I appeal to you in their behalf, my friends. Is it not time to throw open to women, equal resources with men, for obtaining honest employment? If the extremity of human wretchedness - a condition which combines within itself every element of suffering, mental and physical, circumstantial and intrinsic - is a passport to our compassion, every heart should bleed for the position of these poor sufferers. I have the authority of Dr. Ryan, and of Mr. Mayhew, persons of well known integrity, who have investigated most faithfully and patiently the matter, - though it was a difficult and painful task, which they prosecuted with the most unwearied benevolence, sometimes travelling ten miles to ascertain the characters of women who made their statements to them, - and they publicly affirm, that nearly all were driven to dissolute lives because there were no means open to them of obtaining an adequate maintenance. The writer in the Edinburgh Review, who presented extracts from the elaborate researches of Duchatelet, in Paris, says, "We believe , on our honor, that nine out of ten originally modest women who fall from virtue, fall from motives or feelings in which sensuality and self have no share. Aye, we believe that hard necessity, - that grinding poverty, - that actual want, induced by their scanty resources, drive them to vice." Now let me present his statistics.

Of the 5,183 Parisian prostitutes, his investigations show that:- 2,690 were driven to the profession by parental abandonment, excessive want, and actual destitution; 86 thus earned food for the support of parents or children; 280 were driven by shame from their homes; 2,181 were abandoned by their seducers, and had nothing to turn to for a living! You may say, this may be the case in the old countries, but not in our own cities. Very little difference exists in the state of actual society here. Women are the same proscribed class here as elsewhere. The same difference is made between male and female labor. Public opinion surrounds them with ten thousand restrictions. The law disfranchises them. Christianity, to whose influence alone woman is indebted for all social dignity that she now enjoys, is appealed to, as sustaining the present degree of dominion over her, and tortured to prove her inferiority . Thus the cause exists, and why may not the evil also? It does exist to a fearful degree. And, painful though the contemplation of the sad picture may be, it is nevertheless our duty to investigate and seek its cause - then to apply the remedy - and to do now what we may to educate a different public sentiment.

I come now to my second proposition. Women ought to have equal opportunities, privileges, and securities with men for rendering themselves pecuniarily independent. And why not? Can woman be independent, free, and dignified without the means? Can she provide for future wants, exercise proper economy, without the means for so doing? Without a certain degree of pecuniary independence, it is impossible for man or woman to rise in usefulness, excellence, and enjoyment to the height of their natural capabilities. Women at present are cramped, dwarfed, and cowed down. Mothers, with large families of girls, though they may see in them intellect and genius, which, were they boys, might open to them in the future the pathway to independence and perhaps to fame, find that to girls nearly all avenues are closed. There are some branches of the fine arts, if they are very remarkably gifted, where they may find brilliant and dazzling success, as in the case of Jenny Lind. They may perhaps excel as poets and as painters. But these are the exceptions. Greatness is rare. Though they may see in their daughters the large reasoning powers that would enable them with much advantage to pursue the study of the law, yet Blackstone and Coke must be shut to them. The bright pinions of their intellect remain unfolded, and they are perhaps permitted to learn the trade of a milliner, already crowded to excess, and miserably paid. For men, too, have monopolized the profits in that business, and hire their milliners at the lowest possible wages. Very few girls can acquire money enough to compete with the aspirants of the other sex, and so they must submit to their destiny. Again, the mother may see largely developed in her daughter qualities that might fit her eminently for a physician. A distinguished doctor once said, "there are no diseases, there are diseased people;" and this fact explains the claim of women to the profession of medicine, for who understand so well as women the peculiarities of individual character? Their marvellous powers of observation, their tenderer sympathies, their greater caution, render them peculiarly qualified for the position; yet whoever heard of a female M. D.? And that mother would run the risk of incurring the world's laugh, who should avow the design of having her daughter prepare herself to be a physician! All the education she is allowed, all the resources opened before her, have for their object marriage , that is to say, a husband. "She was made only for man," is the idea, and of what use will this or that be to her, when she is married? To develope all her faculties, as an individual, is not thought of. Does not a woman live for herself, then? Is she not a member of the race, an immortal being, - unless she is married? O yes, for above these titles of wife and mother, which depend upon circumstances, accidental and transitory, are suspended by absence and perhaps broken by death, there is for woman a title, eternal, inalienable, preceding and rising above all, - that of human being, co-existent with man; and with him she can demand the most complete development of heart and mind. In the name of eternity, then, in behalf of the race, we ask her elevation. Do you acknowledge this? Do my sisters here feel that they have relations to the Universe, - capabilities to be developed for immortality? In the name of eternity, we ask our brothers no longer to proscribe our sphere. I say, then, that we are cramped, dwarfed, and cowed down, for the want of pecuniary independence. Is not this a miserable doctrine, that woman is subject to the man, that she must, if married, ask her husband to dole out her charities for her, to say when she may sign a petition, when she may speak out for the dumb, when she may plead for the poor, when she may visit the widow and fatherless in their affliction? Does it not compel her to take off the crown of her womanhood, and lay it at man's feet? No; give her her right to the disposal of her own property, to the disposal of her own earnings. As a wife, do not compel her to explain all her needs to one who can scarcely apprehend them from his want of attention to her situation and comforts, but let her have an equal right to the disposal of her earnings, equal privileges with man to acquire, hold, and manage property. The rightfulness of this is beginning to be felt and acknowledged. Laws have been recently passed by many of the States, giving to wives the right to control property owned before marriage; and would it not be equally just to give to them also some well protected rights regarding what they may save and acquire by a faithful discharge of their duties as wives and heads of families.

Thus, employment and occupations being opened, as contended for just now under the first head, let all other opportunities, privileges, and securities of law, custom, and usage, follow. Then woman, at every step, becomes greater, in all respects; more free and dignified; less the plaything, and more a fit companion for man, - a truer and better wife and mother, more influential for good everywhere, in all the relations of life. Thus marriage, generation, education, man, the race, - all rise higher and higher. Look again, and see how things are, and the consequences. Woman degenerates, physically and intellectually. By thus narrowing their sphere, and curtailing their rights and resources, women are doomed to an endless routine of domestic drudgery, to an indoor sedentary life, with little or no stimulus to great or noble endeavors. They feel, indeed, with their narrow views and narrow interests, and their weakened bodies, that they are overcrowded and overdone with cares and labors. Dooming women to satisfy their love for excellence in household arrangements only - their love for beauty in dress, etc., is a great injury to both soul and body. We are so constituted, that exercise and great exertion, with high and soul-arousing objects, are potent to give us strength and powers of endurance. Witness wives in the times of our Revolution, think of the privations, hardships, and toil our grandmothers endured; compare them with the sickly race of wives and mothers whom modern improvements and labor-saving machinery in cloth-making are relieving from so much exertion, yet reducing their physical strength in proportion!

My remedy for this increasing degeneracy in health and consequent weakness of mind, is:- give woman her rights; acknowledge her equality with man in privileges for the improvement of all her gifts; lift off the incubus weight, that crushes half her rights; allow her to feel that she has other obligations resting upon her than the eternal routine of domestic affairs. The beautiful home duties she will none the more neglect, but with new-springing happiness she will, with new strength, perform them, stimulated and cheered by the new relations she is sustaining. Change is rest; and woman will so find it when she allows her mind to change from the narrow circle of home duties to take a general survey of the vast machinery of affairs, where she too has responsibilities and interests. If married women have too little stimulus and objects, how much less have young girls, whose very dreams of the future are restricted to getting married! Having no encouragement for great endeavors, excluded from the liberal professions by the law, how many poor victims, who are not obliged "to labor" but only "to wait," are yielded up to be the prey of that frightful disease called ennui. To suffer with pain, and to be exhausted with toil, are evils, doubtless very great afflictions, but from these we do not shrink, for they are the necessary consequences of life; but ennui, - that scourge of existence, that living death, that conscious annihilation, that painful, aching nothingness, - that it is which corrodes and destroys the soul. Painful, though true, our country abounds in young ladies whom forced idleness condemns to this torture. I say forced , because a false public sentiment restricts and condemns woman to a few crowded avocations, so that she has nothing to stimulate her ambition or to encourage her hopes. Thus she yields to her slavery, her imprisonment. Ah, it is work , approved, creditable, well-paid work, that would reanimate these wretched existences. There are hard trials on this earth, but God has appointed labor , and all are cured. Work is a pleasure unequalled in itself; it is the preserver of all other pleasures. All may abandon us, - wit, gaiety, love, - but industry may still be ours; and the deep enjoyment which it produces, brings with it life's greatest pleasure, the approval of a good conscience. It is of this good that woman is deprived. She is accused of being too imaginative, and yet she is left a prey to reverie. She is complained of for being easily impressed, and yet society does its utmost to increase that susceptibility. This is cruel, oppressive. Dispute our rights, envy us our claim as mothers, but leave us our privilege to labor . Give us our just remuneration. Allow us a fair and equal chance, if you would see the genius of woman rising in its peculiar beauty, its free and natural manifestation.

The soul needs some aliment, if it is not to be left to prey on itself. What is called instruction will not serve the purpose. What is study without an object, knowledge without practice? Instruction enlarges the circle of woman's wants, without bringing anything to satisfy them; gives thirst, but supplies no drink; for to live is not to learn, but to apply. When so large a share of the public business is writing, why are so many maiden middle-aged ladies restless with ennui, having nothing to do? Why are overseerships in female prisons, in manufactories, in asylums, filled so entirely by men? Because women are a proscribed caste, the weaker sex, invidiously called, and men, in their great wisdom, triumph.

I come now to my third proposition. Women ought to have equal legal and political rights, franchises, and advantages with men. Why not? Our laws ought to respect and protect all their rights. They ought to have an equal voice in constituting government, in administering it, in making and executing laws. Why not? This follows as the climax of what we have contended for. There may be some offices more suitable to males than females, and let matters be arranged accordingly. These are details of convenience; but for the rest let them be equal. Why not? If a woman may earn property freely, hold and dispose of it freely, etc., should she not have a free and equal voice in the government which regulates and protects her rights? She must, or be a mere ward under guardianship, a serf, a plaything, an appendage. And why should she not? Has she less at stake? Has she less moral sense? Has she less regard to the common good? Would she degrade and brutalize the exhibition at the polls? In the legislature, at the bar, etc., would the State be worse governed than it is by man alone? It is absurd to suppose it.

Is there any sound reason why women should be excluded from all political functions? At present she has no legal existence. Dr. Follen, in his Essay on Freedom in our own country, says: "Woman, though possessed of that rational and moral nature which is the foundation of all rights, enjoys among us fewer legal and civil rights than under the law of continental Europe."

Blackstone, in his chapter entitled Husband and Wife, says: "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, - or at least is consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs anything." So, the very being of a woman, like that of a slave, is absorbed in her master! All contracts made with her, like those made with slaves by their owners, are a mere nullity. Her legal disabilities are too well known to render it necessary to quote many of the laws respecting them. That she sustains the same relation that slaves do to our government is well known. That the laws are unjust towards her is believed by all who candidly give their attention to the subject.

Well, then, why should women be denied the elective franchise? It must be for one of two reasons. The first is that, though they constitute one half of the human race, women have no interest in the government under which they live, and whose laws they are bound to obey. Or, they are incapable of the degree of intelligence or the amount of knowledge presumed to be possessed by those who vote. The first objection, perhaps, few will attempt to maintain. For the answer to the second, let us look around on the first assemblage of independent electors who may happen to meet. Why is there such apathy, such indifference on this subject, manifested by women? Not more than one woman in a thousand feels the slightest interest in the subject. Are we willing forever to be thus disfranchised? The justice of this question was well stated by Condorcet, in a passage quoted by M. Legouve, though his argument was, of course, applied to France, a country that admitted universal suffrage. "In the name of what principle, of what right," he says, "are women in a republican state to be deprived of public functions? The words national representation , signifies representation of the nation. Do women, then, form no part of the nation? This assembly has for its object to constitute and maintain the rights of the French people? Are women, then, not of the French people? The right of election and of being elected, is founded for men, solely on their title as free and intelligent beings. Are women, then, not free and intelligent? The only limits now placed to that right is condemnation to an infamous punishment, or minority. Are women, then, to be regarded as criminals, or are they all minors? Will the argument be taken upon the ground of the corporeal weakness of women? It that case, we ought to make our candidates pass before a medical jury, and reject such as have the gout every winter. Shall we object to women for their want of instruction, their deficiency in political genius? It appears to me that many of our representations manage to do without either!" He proceeds to say, "The more we interrogate common sense and republican principles, the less reason we find for excluding women from political existence. The capital objection which is found in all mouths, and which assumes with it, at first, an appearance of solidity, is that to open to them the career of politics would be to snatch them from their families. This does not apply to women who have never been wives or who have ceased to be such. But all this appears an unreasonable objection. Would the exercise of the elective franchise once or twice in a year be likely to prevent a woman's properly fulfilling her important home duties? Would not the recognition, publicly, of her claims as an intelligent member of society, or any measure that would equally tend to raise the character of women, greatly contribute to the dignity and comfort of many a home, by giving to the wife and mother some better object to fill her vacant hours than unnecessary shopping or idle visiting?"

People echo the cry of "danger to home" without stopping to inquire whether any such danger exists. Our grandfathers saw great danger to home and to the female character in the decline of household spinning. No, no, you do not endanger home by giving woman her true position as equal companion in theaffairs of the nation as in the administration of home. So far from these new functions interfering in the least with the sacred and holy duties of wife and mother they would be rather their reward and crown. Plutarch relates that the Gauls called into their councils, on great occasions, the elite of the women of the nation. Lycurgus gave to virtuous women a part in great public celebrations. The festivals of Proserpine and Ceres reserved certain political and religious functions for wives and mothers of spotless reputation. And our imagination looks forward to the time, with pleasure and hope, when experienced and virtuous matrons, who have passed through years of domestic duties with fidelity and care, shall sit in the Councils of the Nation wisely to control and direct their deliberations, to speak from their deep maternal love for the suffering and oppressed, to blend with the sterner element of Government that true affection for the suffering and the erring, which only woman knows, to suppress by their presence that undignified and unworthy ruffianism, which so often disgraces the councils of the nation, and finally to encourage decision, haste, and despatch of business, as only women can do, who are attracted home by an ever abiding love, that with them would be an influence far stronger than eight dollars a day.

I think you must all feel that women's rights as human beings are greatly encroached upon, that they suffer a degree of tyranny the world over, unworthy the nineteenth century, that in view of their degraded position, women are called upon loudly to remonstrate, that patience has ceased to be a virtue, that it is time we demand our rights. Are we willing to be denied every post of honor and every lucrative employment - to be reckoned as the inferior sex , and but half paid for what we do - to feel that we are a proscribed caste, in all our aspirations for excellence and great and noble exertion, and to receive in return the fulsome, and sickening flattery of perverted taste - to be complimented about our shrinking delicacy, our feminine weakness, our beautiful dependence! And shall we with complacency receive and smile on such praise, bought by the sacrifice of our rights, our noblest endowments, while we know that he who thus compliments us for shrinking and dependence, is but a frail mortal like ourselves, and that to cower before man is to be recreant to God, false to our higher angel natures, and basely slaves! Is there a woman here, who is willing to be disfranchised, to be taxed without representation, to feel that she has no part or lot in the Government under which she lives - that she is a mere thing!

If there is a woman who is willing to be in this position, I do not envy that woman her spirit, and no wonder that such mothers have dough-faced children. I am happy to feel that in the little Commonwealth where I live, all persons have equal rights, in public deliberations. Men and women are alike recognised as having a common interest in public officers and public measures. Hence our annual meetings and elections are quiet and orderly, the business is soon despatched, for our women never forget their homes to wrangle and discuss business points of minor importance, and I have never, in the small State of Hopedale, heard of one home being neglected, or one duty less thoroughly attended to by allowing women an equal voice. I could not vote under the present wicked Constitution of the United States, but I ought to have the privilege of coming out from that Government, and of bearing my testimony by a free and voluntary choice

In view of all these oppressions, - this undervaluing our labor, - taking from us our right to choice in our industrial avocations, - infliction of pecuniary dependence , - shutting us from the trades, and the learned professions - wresting from us our legal rights, - denying us political equality, - denying us the right of free speech, - chaining us to a prescribed sphere, - we say that these, and other usurpations, demand our speedy remonstrance. "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." No matter if the yoke we wear is soft and cushioned, it is nevertheless a yoke. No matter if the chain is fastened by those we love, it is nevertheless a chain. Let us arise then in all the majesty of renewed womanhood and say, we must be free . We will attend to our previous home duties faithfully, cheerfully, but we must do it voluntarily, in obedience to our Maker, who placed these responsibilities more especially upon us. If the affairs of the nation demand the attention of our fathers, our husbands, and our brothers, allow us to act with them for the right, according to the dictates of our own consciences. Then we will educate our sons and our daughters as equal companions, alike interested in whatever concerns the welfare of the race. Our daughters, equally provided for the serious business of life, shall no longer be dependent upon the chances of marriage; teaching them not to live wholly in their affections, we will provide for them, as for our sons, a refuge from the storms of life, by opening to them the regions of high intellectual culture, of pecuniary independence, and of moral and political responsibilities. Parents, I appeal to you: are you willing to train your daughters with reference only to marriage? Are you willing they should be the prey of that sickly sentimentality, that effeminate weakness, which is produced by making that one idea the focus of life?

Husbands, are you willing to urge the cowering obedience of that being whom you admit is your "better half," especially when you consider your own frailties, and oftentimes misguided judgment? Will you assume to be her lawgiver and ruler? Are you proud to see her bend her soul to man? Brothers, are you willing to see your sisters, whose sympathy and communion in childhood was the sweetest solace of your life, prevented from future companionship, by the threatening scowl of a narrow, and heathenish public sentiment that must blast their highest aspirations - palsy the wings of their genius - dim the crown of their womanhood, and make them slaves? Again, I say - give us an equal chance. Allow us one free choice. Talk not to us of weakness when you have so long broken our spirits by the iron hand of oppression. Lift off that hand - give us our rights inalienable, and then a new era, glorious as the millenial morning, will dawn on earth, an advent only less radiant than that heralded by angels on the plains of Bethlehem.

"What highest prize hath woman won
In science, or in art?
What mightiest work by woman done,
Boasts city, field, or mart?
She hath no Raphael! Painting saith -
No Newton! Learning cries;
Show us her steamship! her Macbeth!
Her thought-won victories.

"Wait, boastful man! Though worthy are
Thy deeds, when thou art true, -
Things worthier still, and holier far,
Our sisters yet will do.
For this, the worth of woman shows
On every peopled shore,
That still as man in wisdom grows
He honors her the more.

"O, not for wealth, or fame, or power,
Hath man's meek angel striven;
But, silent as the growing flower,
To make of earth a heaven!
Soon in her garden of the sun
Heaven's brightest rose shall bloom;
For woman's best is unbegun!
Her advent yet to come!".

Women on the North American Canadian Frontier in 19C - by Dutch-born Cornelius Krieghoff 1815-1872

Cornelius Krieghoff (Dutch-born Canadian painter, 1815-1872) Bringing in the Deer

Cornelius Krieghoff 1815-1872 was born in Amsterdam, spent his formative years in Bavaria, & studied in Rotterdam & Dusseldorf. He traveled to the United States in the 1830s, where he served in the Army for a few years. He married a young woman from Quebec & moved to the Montreal area, where he painted genre paintings of the people & countryside of Canada. According to Charles C. Hill, Curator of Canadian Art at the National Gallery, "Krieghoff was the first Canadian artist to interpret in oils... the splendour of our waterfalls, & the hardships & daily life of people living on the edge of new frontiers." Krieghoff moved to Quebec from 1854-1863, before he came to Chicago to live with his daughter.

Fighting for Equality - Abby Kelley Foster 1811-1887

“Go where least wanted, for there you are most needed.”  A major figure in the national anti-slavery and women’s rights movements, she spent more than twenty years traveling the country as a tireless crusader for social justice and equality for all.

Foster was born into a Quaker family in Pelham, Massachusetts in 1811, and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts at a time when society demanded that women be silent, submissive and obedient.  After attending boarding school, she held teaching positions in Worcester, Millbury and Lynn, Massachusetts.

In Lynn, she joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society, where she became corresponding secretary and later, a national delegate to the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837.  The following year, Foster made her first public speech against slavery, and was so well received that she abandoned her teaching career and returned to Millbury.  There, she founded the Millbury Anti-Slavery Society and began lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

During the next two decades, Foster served as a lecturer, fundraiser, recruiter and organizer in the fight for abolition and suffrage.  In 1850, she helped develop plans for the National Women’s Rights Convention in Massachusetts.  There, she gave one of her most well-known speeches, in which she challenged women to demand the responsibilities as well as the privileges of equality, noting “Bloody feet, sisters, have worn smooth the path by which you come hither.”

In 1854, Foster became the chief fundraiser for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and by 1857, she was its general agent.  Through the American Anti-Slavery Society, Foster continued to work for the ratification of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

In her later years, once slavery was abolished and the rights of freedmen were guaranteed, Foster focused her activism primarily on women’s rights.  She held meetings, arranged lectures, and called for ‘severe language’ in any resolutions that were adopted.  In 1868, she was among the organizers of the founding convention of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, the first regional association advocating woman suffrage.  Foster’s efforts were among those that helped lay the groundwork for the nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Ellen "Nellie" Cashman (1845-1925) - Angel of the Mining Camps

Angel of the Mining Camps

Women, as well as men, traveled west in the 19C to pan for gold. One was an Irish immigrant named Nellie Cashman. A restless adventurer, Nellie ranged the West for 50 years prospecting for gold & helping others wherever she traveled. She ran restaurants & boarding houses, never refusing a meal or a room to some hungry, down & out miner who had no money to pay.

Ellen "Nellie" Cashman (1845-1925), better known as Nellie Cashman, became noted across the Western United States & in western Canada as a nurse, restaurateur, businesswoman, Roman Catholic philanthropist in Arizona, & gold prospector in Alaska. A native of County Cork, Ireland, she & her sister were brought as young children to the United States by their mother about 1850, to escape the poverty of the Great Famine. The family lived first in Boston, Massachusetts, where the girls also worked when old enough, before migrating to San Francisco, California, in 1865.

Following the onset of the Klondike Gold Rush, Cashman left her family home in 1874, for the Cassiar Mountains in British Columbia, Canada. A lifelong Catholic, she set up a boarding house for miners, asking for donations to the Sisters of St Anne in return for the services available at her boarding house.Cashman was travelling to Victoria to deliver $500 to the sisters of St. Anne, when she heard that a snowstorm had descended on the Cassiar Mountains, stranding & injuring 26 miners, who were also suffering from scurvy. She took charge of a 6-man search party & collected food & medicine to take to the stranded miners. Conditions in the Cassiar Mountains were so dangerous, that the Canadian Army advised against attempting the rescue. Upon learning of Cashman's expedition, a commander sent his troops to locate her party & bring them to safety. An army trooper eventually found Cashman camped on the frozen surface of the Stikine River. Over tea, she convinced the trooper & his men that it was her will to continue, & that she would not head back without rescuing the miners. After 77 days of harsh weather, Cashman & her party located the sick men, who numbered far more than 26, perhaps as many as 75 men. She administered a diet containing Vitamin C to restore the men to health. She was afterward known in the region as the "Angel of the Cassiar."

About 1880, Cashman moved to Tombstone, Arizona. She raised money to build the Sacred Heart Catholic Church, & committed herself to charity work with the Sisters of St. Joseph. She took a position as a nurse in a Cochise County hospital but also opened another restaurant & boarding house.

Her sister Fanny (Cashman) Cunningham was widowed in 1881, following the death of her husband Tom, a bootmaker. Cashman arranged for Fanny & her 5 children to move to nearby Tucson, Arizona. Fanny died in 1884 of tuberculosis, leaving her children in Cashman's care. Honoring her sister's wishes, Cashman raised the children as her own. In the late 1880s, Cashman set up several restaurants & boardinghouses in Arizona.

Soon after her sister's death in 1884, Cashman travelled to Baja California after hearing rumours of untapped gold & silver deposits. She joined 21 men in a short-lived prospecting venture. Sixteen hours into the 100-mile journey, in conditions of extreme heat & drought, the group had already nearly depleted their water supplies, & most of the men were suffering from dehydration. They abandoned their venture.

In December 1883, bandits committed the Bisbee Massacre in Tombstone, killing four innocent bystanders & wounding 2 others in the course of a robbery. The 5 men were convicted & sentenced to die by hanging on 28 March 1884. Many people were eager to make a spectacle of the execution. A local carpenter built a grandstand next to the hanging site, planning to charge for tickets. Cashman was outraged, feeling that no execution should be celebrated. She befriended the five convicts, visiting them to provide spiritual guidance. Cashman convinced the sheriff to set a curfew on the day of the hangings to prevent a crowd from forming. The night before the execution, Cashman & a crew of volunteers tore down the grandstand. The hangings proceeded as scheduled, but out of public view. When Cashman learned that a medical school planned to exhume the bodies of the convicts for study, she enlisted two prospectors to stand watch over the Boot Hill Cemetery for 10 days.

Cashman & her associate Joseph Pascholy co-owned & ran a restaurant & hotel in Tombstone called Russ House, now known as Nellie Cashman's. According to a popular legend, a client once complained about Cashman's cooking. Fellow diner Doc Holliday drew his pistol, asking the customer to repeat what he had said. The man said, "Best I ever ate."

In 1886, Cashman left Tombstone to travel across Arizona, opening restaurants & boarding houses in Nogales, Jerome, Prescott, Yuma, & Harquahala, near Phoenix.

In 1898, Cashman left Arizona for the Yukon in search of gold, staying until 1905. Her prospecting ventures took her to Klondike, Fairbanks, & Nolan Creek. She later owned a store in Dawson City. She settled in Koyukuk, along with other established miners.

When a miner was killed in a mining accident there were no benefits for the widow & her children, Nellie headed straight for the saloons with her hat turned upside down, collecting money. She always left with a hat full. She made & lost, or gave away, a number of fortunes during her adventurous lifetime.

She was always willing to grubstake some prospector on the slim chance that he might strike it rich; in which case she’d share in the bonanza. More likely though she’d lose her investment. But that never dampened her enthusiasm for betting against the odds. She loved to make money, & she spent most it on charitable causes. One of her grubstakes did pay off handsomely, netting her $100,000, enough for a secure retirement. But Nellie gave most of it away. Her philanthropy earned her the respectful title, “Angel of the Mining Camps.”

She had many marriage proposals, but she preferred to stay single. When her brother-in-law Tom & sister Frances died of tuberculosis leaving 5 orphaned children Nellie raised them & saw they all got good educations.

In 1898, Nellie joined the gold rush to the Klondike. On the way she climbed up the daunting 33 mile, snow-covered Chilcoot Pass, & then she negotiated the rapids of the Yukon River in a kayak to Dawson. She spent her last years with her dog sled team combing the vast lands of the frozen north searching for one more gold strike. She became known as the “Champion Woman Musher of the Yukon.” When she was nearly 70 years old, Nellie mushed a dog sled 750 miles across the tundra to the edge of the Arctic Circle to a mining claim she’d staked out. 

In January 1925, Cashman developed pneumonia, & friends admitted her to the Sisters of St. Anne, the same hospital which she had helped to build 51 years earlier. She died & was buried at Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria, British Columbia.  

Fighting For Equality - Quaker Lucretia Coffin Mott 1793-1880

Lucretia Coffin Mott in 1842 (1793–1880) was an American Quaker, abolitionist, social reformer, and proponent of women’s rights. She is said to be one of the first American feminists in the early 19th century, & she surely was an early advocate for women’s political power & influence in America, where women could not vote until 1920.

Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880), Quaker minister, abolitionist, & pioneer in the movement for woman’s rights, was born in Nantucket, Mass., where her ancestors had lived since the island’s first settlement in 1659. She was the 2nd daughter of 7 children born to Thomas Coffin, a sea captain in the China trade, & Anna (Folger) Coffin, who kept a shop of East India goods.

Anna Coffin’s portrait, now in the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, bears out what her daughter later said in tribute to the Quaker women of Nantucket: “Look at the heads of those women; they can mingle with men; they are not triflers; they have intelligent subjects of conversation” (Proceedings, Women’s Rights Convention, 1853, p. 65).

The Quaker community of Nantucket was in a peculiar sense a woman’s world, for the Society of Friends had always equated the spiritual gifts of women & men, & the long absences of the men folk on whaling & trading voyages left religious & practical affairs largely in the hands of the women. “I grew up,” Lucretia Mott recalled, “so thoroughly inbued with women’s rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day” (Cromwell, p. 125).

In 1804, her father having become a merchant, the Coffin family moved to Boston, where Lucretia attended both private & public schools. At 13, she was sent to the Friends’ boarding school at Nine Partners, near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where, after 2 years, she was appointed an assistant teacher without salary. The fact that even experienced women teachers were paid less than half what men received impressed her with “the unequal condition of women,” & made her resolve to claim for herself & her sex “all that an impartial Creator had bestowed” (Hallowell, p 38).

When the Coffins moved again in 1809, this time to Philadelphia. James Mott, a fellow teacher at Nine Partners, settled there too, taking a position in Thomas Coffin’s hardware business. On Apr. 10, 1811, he & Lucretia were married in the Pine Street Meetinghouse. They made a striking couple: he a tall, blond, kindly appearing man, dignified in demeanor & deliberate in speech; she a diminutive brunette with a high, broad forehead, intense, burning eyes, a vivacious manner, & a tart tongue (her schoolmates on Nantucket had caller her a “spitfire,” & that irrepressible trait still occasionally broke through the Quaker sweetness & serenity with which in later life it was overlaid). Despite differences in temperament, however, a complete harmony of interest subsisted between them throughout the 57 years of their married life. James Mott shared all his wife’s convictions, supported her in all her unpopular causes, &, by accompanying her on speaking tours, lent he public appearances a respectability which other feminist lectures lacked. Six children were born to them between 1812 - 1828: Anna, Thomas (who died in infancy), Maria, a second Thomas, Elizabeth, & Martha.

Grief over the death of her first-born son Thomas in 1817, turned Lucretia Mott’s thoughts increasingly to religion. In 1818 she made her first “appearance in the ministry” in Quaker meeting, & 3 years later she was officially recorded as a minister. It was an easy transition from the ministers’ gallery of a Friends’ meetinghouse to the public platform, from which she was presently speaking with a self-assurance, facility, & eloquence almost unknown among women in that day.

Though she always clung to Quaker plainness in speech & dress-her portraits show her in white Quaker cap, shawl, & dove tray dress- she grew restless, as years went by, within the rigid limits of the Quaker discipline. When the “Great Separation” of 1827 divided Friends into “Orthodox” & “Hicksite” branches, she & her husband associated themselves with the party of Elias Hicks, who rejected the growing tendencies toward evangelical orthodoxy & arbitrary control by the Elders. Disowned by Twelfth Street Meeting, they joined the newly formed Hicksite meeting on Cherry Street, in whose activities both soon assumed leading roles.

In her preaching Lucretia Mott avoided theological questions & stressed “practical righteousness.” It is clear, however, that her thought was steadily maturing toward a position considerably in advance of the views of most Hicksite Friends & approximating the “rational supernaturalism” of the Unitarians. Her reading of Noah Worcester & William Ellery Channing contributed to this development, but not more than her study of certain early Quaker writers such as William Penn.

Like her religious outlook, her attitude toward slavery was catalyzed by the ideas of Elias Hicks, who denounced the institution vigorously & urged Friends to abstain on principle from using the products of slave labor. From about 1825 until Emancipation, she never knowing used cotton cloth, cane sugar, or any other product of slavery, & she lost no opportunity in public speech & private conversation to forward the “free product” movement. (Her husband, not without considerable inward struggle & financial inconvenience, shifted, about 1830, from the cotton trade, in which he had established himself, to the wool commission business.)

Lucretia Mott soon moved to a more positive abolitionist position. Having become acquainted with William Lloyd Garrison about the time he was starting to publish the Liberator in 1831, she attended the convention which he called in Philadelphia in 1833, to organize a national body, the American Anti-Slavery society. Since it did not at first admit women to membership, she helped, that year, form an auxiliary, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, of which she was long a leading spirit. Later, when the policy of excluding women was dropped, she became an active member of the nation society & served on the executive committee of its Pennsylvania branch. Throughout the stormy years of dissension in the antislavery movement, she clung to the radical party of Garrison, which demanded immediate emancipation. This stand, together with her persistence in cooperation with non-Friends, frequently brought her under the condemnation of her more conservative co-religionists, who supported more moderate measures under purely Quaker auspices.

In 1837, she was one of the organizers of the Anti-Slavery convention of American Women. The following year, on May 15, the convention met in Philadelphia in the newly constructed Pennsylvania Hall. When the sessions were disturbed by an anti-abolitionist mob, it was Mrs. Mott who exhorted the women to remain calm. During the evening of May 17 the building was set afire & burned to the ground. While the hall was burning, the mob stated toward the Motts’ home on North Ninth Street, where the family sat quietly, awaiting the worst; fortunately the crowd was diverted before reaching the destination.

This was not Lucretia Mott’s only opportunity to demonstrate her courage in the face of an angry crown. In March 1840, when she was traveling through Delaware, visiting Friends’ meetings & speaking on slavery, a mob, aroused by her abolitionism, seized her traveling companion, Daniel Neall, & applied a coat of tar & feathers to him. According to her own account, she pleaded with the mob’s leaders to take her instead of Neall, since she was the offender “if offense had been committed”. They declined saying, “You are a woman & we have nothing to say to you”; to which she replied: “I ask no courtesy at your hands on account of my sex” (Cromwell, p. 42).

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 thus deprived of a voice in the proceedings, she was nevertheless described by a friendly journalist as “the lioness of the Convention” (Liberator, Oct. 23, 1840, p. 170).

The most significant sequel of the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, was the formal launching, eight years later, of the movement for woman’s rights. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had also been in London in 1840, & the two women, stuck by the irony of a “world’s convention” which had opened by excluding representatives of half the human race, found they had a common concern to promote the rights of womankind. They waited, however, until 1848 to translate their concern into decisive action. On July 19 of that year, in association with Lucretia Mott’s younger sister Martha Coffin Wright, they called a convention in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Since no woman felt equal to the task of presiding, James Mott took the chair. But Lucretia Mott & Elizabeth Cady Stanton dominated the assembly fro the floor, Mrs. Mott delivering the opening & closing addresses. They pushed through a “Declaration of Sentiments,” phrased in language reminiscent of another famous Declaration; “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it began, “that all men & women are created equal”. Twelve resolutions claiming specific rights to women were placed before the convention. Only one, a demand for the suffrage, failed to pass unanimously. On this point Lucretia Mott, perhaps because of her Quaker heritage, was less insistent than Mrs. Stanton: she never regarded the right to vote as the paramount issue in the struggle.

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. She regularly attended the ensuing annual woman’s rights conventions & in 1852 was elected president of the convention at Syracuse.

The growth of her religious liberalism matched the widening scope of her commitment to human freedom. She continued to stress the simple Quaker doctrines of “the sufficiency of the Light within the righteousness without”. Yet the tendency of her thought was clearly in line with contemporary Unitarianism, & her preaching was undoubtedly more powerful than any other influence in carrying the Hicksite Friends toward theological liberalism. She rejected the doctrine of human depravity, found herself in unison with Theodore Parker’s famous sermon on “The Transient & Permanent in Christianity,” & in 1849 frankly confessed that she was “a worshipper after the way called heresy -a believer after the manner which many deem infidel”; still, she insisted, she was “firm in the blessed, the eternal doctrines preached by Jesus & by every child of God from the creation of the world, especially….the doctrine which Jesus most emphatically taught, that the kingdom of God is within man” (A Sermon to the Medical Students, 1849, p. 6).

She often attended the Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends at Longwood, Kennett Square, Pa., a group which combined radical abolitionism with ultraliberal religious ideas, though she never formally joined them, being unwilling to promote another schism in the Society of Friends. But when a group of religious liberals met in Boston on May 30, 1867, to form the Free Religious Association, she was on the platform with Robert Dale Owen, Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, & Ralph Waldo Emerson to address its first session.

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, Mrs. 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 ministrations as a housewife, sewing carpet rags, cooking Nantucket blackberry pudding, raising vegetables in her kitchen garden.

But the years at Roadside were also filled with constant activity in causes both old & new. After the Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery, she could not agree with Garrison that there remained no further work for friends of the Negro. So she pressed for Negro suffrage & threw herself in the work of the Friends Association of Philadelphia for the Aid & Elevation of the Freedmen, which provided economic aid & established elementary schools for Negroes in the South. Higher education for the children of Friends occupied her too, & she busied herself in raising money for the Quaker college established at Swarthmore in 1864. 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.

During her last 12 years she was without the faithful support of her husband, for James Mott died in early 1868. She herself lived to the age of 87, active to the end, publicly & privately, in good causes. She died at Roadside & was buried beside her husband in the Fair Hill Friends burying ground in Germantown, PA. For more than 50 years she had dedicated herself to emancipation -the emancipation of the Negro from slavery; the emancipation of American women from an inferior status; the emacipation of the human mind from narrowness in religion. Starting from the equalitarian & libertarian principles implicit in the Quaker faith, she had broken through sectarian walls to become not only one of the first but one of the most consistently effective women every to play a major role in the American reform tradition.

This posting based, in part, on information from Notable American Women edited by Edward T James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S Boyer, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1971.