[On October
23-24, 1850, the first national
Women’s Rights Convention was held in Worcester, MA; it followed the 1848
Seneca Falls Convention but was the first to bill itself as
national, and it featured more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848
numbers). So for the convention’s anniversary, I’ll highlight and AmericanStudy
a handful of representative such attendees!]
On the
convention organizer and president who embodies the multi-layered nature of
reform.
On October 23rd,
1850, the President-elect for the National Women’s Rights Convention, named in the convention transcript
as Paulina W. Davis, rose to deliver the event’s opening Address. Davis, who would
spend her
influential life between upstate New York and Providence, Rhode Island, had
helped choose Worcester as the convention site and organize the event, and so
she knew the promotional materials well and felt free to dispense quickly with specifics
about the convention’s program and work. Instead, she offered “some general
reflections upon the attitude and relations of our movement to our times and
circumstances, and upon the proper spirit and method of promoting it.” She did
so in part by following up the 1848 convention and its “declaration of rights,”
which she sought to complement with arguments for “the adjustment of [the] work
to those conditions of the times which [the reformer] seeks to influence.” But
this was not a retreat into practicality by any stretch: “the reformation which
we purpose,” Davis argued, “in its utmost scope, is radical and universal.” The
path would not be easy; as she concluded her remarks: “In principle these
truths are not doubtful, and it is therefore not impossible to put them in
practice, but they need great clearness in system and steadiness of direction to
get them allowance and adoption in the actual life of the world.”
By 1850, Davis
would have been well-versed in the necessary combination of ideals and practicality,
principles and work, at the heart of any long-term, radical activist effort. She
and her first husband, New
York merchant Francis Wright, had been active in the abolitionist movement
since the early 1830s: they resigned their church in opposition to its
pro-slavery stance, served on the New York Anti-Slavery Society’s Executive
Committee, and organized an anti-slavery
convention in their home city of Utica in 1835 (which as that story details
was met with a rioting white supremacist mob). Although Francis Wright died in 1845,
Davis would continue those activist efforts throughout her life, and she thus illustrates
(as do many of the other attendees at the 1850 convention, as some of my later
posts in the week’s series will highlight) the deep interconnections between the
abolitionist and women’s rights movements. I’ve written for my
Saturday Evening Post Considering History
column about the racial discrimination and segregation that was all too
central to the women’s suffrage movement, but it’s worth being clear that other
activists like Davis brought those causes together—and since she was a key
member of Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage
Association, Davis brought that perspective to the national movement to be
sure.
Another
important aspect of Davis’s life and work, one situated between that
abolitionist work and the 1850 convention, reflects just how broadly the
tendrils of such activist efforts could extend. During her marriage to Wright, Davis
began studying health and medicine, and after his death she dedicated
herself to those studies, moving to New York City and giving a series of
lectures to women on anatomy and physiology. She then embarked
on a speaking tour, continuing to highlight those medical disciplines but
also urging women to study medicine and become practicing doctors. In one
of my earliest posts in this space, I highlighted the interesting literary
and cultural phenomenon of “woman doctor” novels and characters from the early
1880s, an era when that professional opportunity and role was becoming
prominent. But Davis’s efforts from forty years earlier highlight both the long
development of that trend and, most importantly, the ways in which it was
anything but coincidental or accidental—in which, instead, activist voices
helped push such professional changes and reforms alongside social and cultural
ones. One more reason to better remember the 1850 National Women’s Rights
Convention’s organizer and president!
Next 1850
attendee tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?
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