[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 convener who extends the themes of yesterday’s post and adds other, vital
contexts into the mix.
Day one of the
1850 convention was called to order by local reformer and activist Sarah
Hussey Earle. Like convention president Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, whose
opening address directly followed Earle’s brief remarks, Earle had been an
abolitionist activist for decades by the time of the 1850 convention. Born on
Nantucket, Sarah moved to Worcester in 1821 at the age of 22, when she married John Milton
Earle, longtime publisher and editor of the city’s Massachusetts Spy newspaper. Over the next three decades
she would found the Worcester
Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle and the Worcester City Anti-Slavery Society,
coordinate a number of anti-slavery fairs in the city, and along with her
husband help provide a home and family for two young African American women, Catherine
and Cynthia Gardner. Earle not only reinforces the deep interconnections between
the abolitionist and women’s rights movements about which I wrote in yesterday’s
post, but makes clear that the choice of Worcester to host the first national
Women’s Rights Convention was likewise entirely linked to the city’s prominent role
in the fight against slavery.
Earle’s links to
both Davis and the women’s rights movement extended well beyond the 1850
convention, to an aspect of Davis’s richly multi-layered life and activism that
I wasn’t able to mention in yesterday’s post: her pioneering feminist magazine The Una. Founded by Davis in 1853 in her new hometown of
Providence (she had married the Irish
American entrepreneur and Rhode Island State Representative Thomas Davis in
1849), The Una was one of the first
women’s rights journals in existence, and the first periodical in America to be
owned, published, edited, and written entirely by women. Earle was one of its
earliest supporters and financial backers, and would remain closely tied to the
magazine through its crucial early years (in late 1855 Boston publisher S.C.
Hewitt took over publication, and new associate editor
Caroline Healey Dall shifted the magazine’s focus to more of a literary
journal). As with abolitionism,
Transcendentalism,
and every other significant social and reform movement of the era, the women’s
movement would depend on periodicals to advance its ideas and voices, and
through The Una Earle lent her
support to a vital first step in that process.
Another key side
to Earle’s life and work in the years after the 1850 convention (up until her
tragically early death in 1858) reflects the more local, Massachusetts-centered
elements to the nascent women’s rights movement. Annual conventions continued
to be held in the state, and Earle was elected president for the 1854
New England Women’s Rights Convention in Boston. But she also brought the
fight for women’s rights directly to the Massachusetts State Legislature
through her leadership in assembling and presenting a couple of petitions to
that body: an
1851 petition in support of women’s suffrage; and an 1855 one
advocating for removing the word “males” from the Massachusetts Constitution. These
efforts, like Earle’s deep ties to Worcester, reflect not just the way in which
the fight for women’s rights proceeded in individual communities and states,
but also the vital role of such local and regional communities in advancing the
voices and cause of reform. As much as the 1850 convention was indeed the first
national such gathering, it nonetheless featured those more local elements as
well, as exemplified by the inspiring activist who called the convention to
order.
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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