Victory for the Vote. Doris Weatherford
admitted, “soon reconciled the opposition to the seemingly ridiculous experiment.” Bush humbly summarized, “from that hour I seemed endowed as from on high to serve.”
Still, some of the secretaries were so inexperienced at using their voices that they could not be heard. In a time before microphones, the crowd cried for increased volume so that they could participate. Finally, Sarah Anthony Burtis, a teacher and a Quaker accustomed to public speaking, volunteered. She “read the reports and documents of the Convention with a clear voice and confident manner, to the great satisfaction of her more timid coadjutors.”
Men once again were involved, including Frederick Douglass and a “Mr. Colton,” who traveled the long distance from eastern Connecticut to remind the audience that “woman’s sphere was home.” Lucretia Mott’s response to him indicated her exceptional awareness of seemingly every aspect of her world: she embarrassed Colton by pointing out that his church limited its Female Moral Reform Society to its basement and then only on the “condition that none of the women should speak at the meeting.” These societies had begun in the 1840s, especially in Ohio and other non-coastal areas, to encourage men to drop immoral behaviors: some were even courageous enough to publicize the names of men seen visiting brothels. Mott’s point was that Colton welcomed women to the anti-vice movement merely as listeners, even in a group ostensibly for women.
Another memorable aspect of this meeting was the appearance of a “young and beautiful stranger,” who held the audience “spell-bound.” It was near the close of the morning session when a “bride in traveling dress, accompanied by her husband, slowly walked up the aisle and asked the privilege of saying a few words.” The newlyweds were going west, heard of the convention, and rearranged their train schedule so that they could come. During a 20-minute speech, Rebecca Sanford advocated female political participation; she ended by encouraging women to “hang the wreath of domestic harmony upon the eagle’s talons.”
Ernestine Rose circa 1850. (Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America)
Perhaps the most important person to appear at this meeting, however, was Ernestine Rose, who had long labored for women’s rights in isolation. Born as Ernestine Susmond Potowski in Poland, she had gone to court at age 16 to insist on receiving her inheritance from her mother; after emigrating and marrying an Englishman, she arrived in New York in 1836. Within months, she began working to ensure property rights for American women. There were just five signatures on the first petition that she sent to the New York legislature—and those she obtained only “after a good deal of trouble.” Rose explained, “Some of the ladies said the gentlemen would laugh at them; others, that they had rights enough; and the men said the women had too many rights already.” Undaunted, her efforts put American-born women to shame: from 1837 to 1848, when she came to feminists’ attention at the Rochester convention, Ernestine Rose addressed the New York legislature five times. Supported in her travels by a feminist husband, she had lectured on women’s rights in Ohio and lobbied the legislature of frontier Michigan.
The Rochester convention also brought attention to economic needs, as several speakers reported on women’s working conditions. The upper-middle-class women in attendance, the only ones with sufficient leisure to organize such meetings, found disgraceful “the intolerable servitude and small remuneration paid to the working-class of women.” Once again, however, more time was spent on religious issues, especially on the interpretation of biblical injunctions regarding a woman’s place. The question of taking a man’s name at marriage also was debated; Elizabeth Cady Stanton reminded the others that this practice was neither divinely ordained nor universal.
After three sessions before a large and receptive audience, the convention adopted resolutions that were shorter and more concrete than those of Seneca Falls. The first called for the vote, and another commended Elizabeth Blackwell, who recently had become the world’s first female student in a traditional medical school. But the majority were based on women’s economic needs, focusing on taxation without representation, property ownership, and the inheritance rights of widows. Most meaningfully, the convention called upon the audience to be better employers: “Those who believe the laboring classes of women are oppressed ought to do all in their power to raise their wages, beginning with their own household servants.”
The strongest language centered on the right to retain one’s own earnings. “Whereas,” the document proclaimed, “the husband has the legal right to hire out his wife to service, collect her wages, and appropriate it to his own exclusive and independent benefit…reducing her almost to the condition of a slave…. [W]e will seek the overthrow of this barbarous and unrighteous law; and conjure women no longer to promise obedience in the marriage covenant.”
Amy Post moved for the adoption of the resolutions, and with only “two or three dissenting voices,” they were accepted and the meeting adjourned. The significant differences from the Seneca Falls resolutions showed that the movement’s leadership already was learning a lesson in pragmatism: they saw that, more than the intellectual and legal arguments that motivated so many of them, the average woman instead was moved on pocketbook issues. “Though few women responded to the demand for political rights,” Stanton said of the Rochester meeting, “many at once saw the importance of equality in the world of work.”
As Stanton suggested, not everyone was brave enough to respond to the call. Some of the signers of the Seneca Falls declaration withdrew their names within weeks, as soon as a derogatory volcano erupted in the press. It was largely Amelia Jenks Bloomer who served as the unintended publicity agent for the Seneca Falls convention—and, later, as a chief target for the barbs of cartoonists.
Although her name (or more aptly, her husband’s name) became synonymous with pants worn by women, Amelia Bloomer had been a rather conservative schoolteacher until she married a more liberal man. Her husband, Dexter Bloomer, owned the Seneca County Courier, and she often wrote for it. The couple also served as postmaster and postmistress for Seneca Falls.
Amelia Bloomer (Library of Congress)
Bloomer attended the historic convention but did not sign the declaration. She was there primarily as a reporter, and it would be several years before Bloomer became an advocate of voting rights. Her chief interest was temperance, and, in January 1849, she began her own paper, The Lily. It focused on ending the abuse of alcohol, with women’s rights incidental to that, and soon circulated beyond state borders. Adding more than a thousand subscribers per year, The Lily would bring women’s needs to a national audience.
Prior to that, however, other journalists learned of the unconventional convention from the Bloomers’ Seneca County Courier. Train service had come to Seneca Falls in 1841, seven years prior to the convention, and in a time before syndicated press services, journalists met the trains and read each other’s papers to discover the news. On learning of the Seneca Falls Convention, most editors responded with an incredulity that still conveys a mental picture of men rubbing their eyes in disbelief—but they rapidly spread the story. A Massachusetts paper, the Worcester Telegraph, was one of the more objective, although editorial amazement at the women’s audacity suffused its commentary:
A female Convention has just been held at Seneca Falls, N.Y…. The list of grievances which the Amazons exhibit, concludes by expressing a determination to insist that woman shall have “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens”…. This is bolting with a vengeance.
In an era when it was almost impossible to distinguish between news coverage and editorial opinion, James Gordon Bennett, publisher of New York City’s widely read New York Herald, was unusual in putting his name on his report about the Seneca Falls convention. In a long argument with himself, Bennett offered a bit of encouragement for every point of view and ended with a surprising conclusion:
This is the age of revolutions…. The work of revolution is no longer confined to the Old World, nor to the masculine gender. The flag of independence has been hoisted, for the second time, on this side of the Atlantic;