Victory for the Vote. Doris Weatherford
we have been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have submitted to brick-bats, and the tar tub and feathers in America, rather than yield to the custom…shall we yield to the parallel custom or prejudice against women in Old England? We can not yield this question if we would; for it is a matter of conscience. But we would not yield it on the ground of expediency. In doing so we should feel that we are striking off the right arm of our enterprise. We could not go back and ask for any aid from the women…if we had deserted them.
Wendell Phillips (The Free Library of Philadelphia)
The feminist arguments were of no avail. The vote to refuse to accept the credentials of the female delegates passed by an overwhelming majority. The women were fenced off behind a curtain, where they could hear but could not be heard or seen. None of the men cared enough about the principle to surrender his credentials—except for William Lloyd Garrison, who arrived too late for the debate. “Brave, noble Garrison” sat “a silent spectator in the gallery” during the ten-day convention. “What a sacrifice,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “for a principle so dimly seen by the few, and so ignorantly ridiculed by the many!” Wendell Phillips, in contrast, assured the other men that he had “no unpleasant feelings.” Stanton concluded bitterly:
Would there have been no unpleasant feelings in Wendell Phillips’ mind had African American Frederick Douglass and Robert Purvis been refused their seats? And had they listened one entire day to debate on their…fitness for plantation life, and unfitness for the forum and public assemblies, and been rejected as delegates on the grounds of color.
The sadness of her conclusion still echoes. Although she commended Phillips’s leadership, his easy acquiescence to the status quo upset the young Stanton greatly, and it changed forever her view of even good men. Although much in love with her groom of exactly one month, she was forced to acknowledge: “it is almost impossible for the most liberal of men to understand what liberty means for woman.”
“Let Facts Be Submitted to a Candid World”: 1840 to 1848
At the end of the long debate that banned them from the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton “wended their way arm in arm down Great Queen Street.” During the next nine days, they “kept up a brisk fire” of words aimed at “the unfortunate gentlemen” who shared their hotel, one of whom packed his luggage and “withdrew after the first encounter.” Not eager to return to the convention and sit behind a humiliating curtain, Mott and Stanton spent much of their time walking in the June splendor of London’s parks, where they “agreed to hold a woman’s rights convention on their return to America.”
Lucretia Mott (Library of Congress)
But life got in the way. Lucretia Mott was one of the busiest women of her era, for there was little of Philadelphia civic life in which she was not involved. By the time of the World Anti-Slavery Convention, she and merchant James Mott had been married for 29 years. He was highly supportive of his unusual wife; she was not only the mother of six, but also had been an ordained Quaker minister for almost two decades. An ardent abolitionist, she spoke in black churches as early as 1829. Moreover, she took it upon herself to boycott everything produced with slave labor, which meant finding substitutes for such staples as cotton, sugar, coffee, and rice.
When they met in England, Lucretia Mott had been married for longer than 25-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been alive. Stanton graduated from Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, and then became involved in abolitionist activity, where she met journalist Henry Stanton. He was so impressed with her that he agreed to omit the bride’s traditional vow of obedience from their May wedding—and they immediately sailed for London.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and one of her children, 1876. (From the archives of the Seneca Falls Historical Society)
After losing the debate, the Motts and Stantons adopted the utilitarian view that it was better if one partner of their marriages was represented at the convention than none, and the women thus had plenty of time to spend together. Lucretia Mott became a true inspiration for Elizabeth Cady Stanton: “I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom,” Stanton would write later, for Mott “seemed like a being from some larger planet.” James Mott similarly provided a model for Henry Stanton.
The Stantons traveled in Europe until November, and then Henry studied law with Elizabeth’s father, a judge in Johnstown, New York. While she bore the first three of their seven children, he passed the bar and they moved to Boston. During four wonderful years there, she met many inspirational women, including abolitionists Maria Weston Chapman, Lydia Maria Child, and Abbey Kelly Foster—whose husband was so feminist that he cared for their child when she went on lecture tours. In 1847, however, the Stantons again moved to a town where Henry would have fewer attorney competitors: Seneca Falls, New York.
It happened that Lucretia Coffin Mott had relatives nearby. Her youngest sibling, Martha Coffin Wright, lived in Auburn, New York. Mott was much more religious than Wright—who had been expelled from the Society of Friends for her first marriage to a non-Quaker who died young—but the sisters shared a commitment to liberal ideas. Like most women of their era, their lives were dominated by their anatomy: in July 1848, Martha Wright was pregnant with her seventh child. Her attitudes were unconventional enough that she taught her sons needle skills. One of them, she said, “had knit a bag to put his marbles in.”
Mott stayed with Wright when she came to western New York for the annual meeting of the Society of Friends, and Stanton met them for a tea party at the home of Jane Hunt, who, with her husband Richard, was considered “a prominent Friend near Waterloo,” New York. They were joined by Mary Ann M’Clintock, also a Quaker and a mother; her husband, Thomas, would later assist the women with their activism.
Desperately unhappy in Seneca Falls after the excitement of life in activist Boston, Stanton poured out her woes to her old soulmate Lucretia Mott, and, as Stanton would later write, they “at once returned to the topic they had so often discussed…the propriety of holding a woman’s convention.” With encouragement from the other women, they “decided to put their long-talked-of resolution into action, and before twilight deepened into night, the call was written, and sent to the Seneca County Courier.” When it appeared in the paper a few days later, it read:
WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the 19th and 20th of July, current; commencing at 10 o’clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention.
The women gathered on Sunday morning at Mary M’Clintock’s home (minus Jane Hunt) to write the documents that would form the agenda for discussion at the meeting—and, as it turned out, set the agenda for American women for more than seven decades. Had they known the gravity of the cause upon which they embarked, it is possible that they would not have undertaken it: none of the women who met around the parlor table lived to see the achievement of their goals.
At the end of her life, M’Clintock regretted that she was unable to have done more for the cause, but Stanton pointed out the importance of M’Clintock’s influence within her own family: her son-in-law, Dr. James Truman of the Pennsylvania School of Dental Surgery, led the fight for the admission of women to dentistry in the 1870s.
According to Stanton, the women were