[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 remembering,
but not over-emphasizing, the men at a women’s rights convention.
As was the case
at the 1848
Seneca Falls Convention, and as I would wager a guess would be the case for
most of the era’s other women’s rights conventions as well, the list of attendees
and speakers for the 1850 Worcester convention features a number of male
activists, including three of America’s most
prominent abolitionist leaders (that’s the first web result for “American
abolitionist leaders” I clicked on, and its header is portraits of the three):
Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. Other male
speakers in 1850 included another famous (if now less well-known) abolitionist
leader, Stephen
Symonds Foster (whose wife, the Worcester-born women’s rights and
abolitionist activist
Abby Kelley, gave one of the convention’s standout
speeches), as well as the radical Unitarian minister and author William Ellery
Channing. Phillips in particular was a founding member of the National
Women’s Rights Central Committee (along with his friend
and frequent collaborator Lucy Stone), and in that role helped organize and
direct nearly all of the 1850s women’s rights conventions around the country,
including Worcester’s.
There are at
least a couple significant reasons to better remember these male participants
in the 1850 convention. For one thing, it can be all too easy to see women’s
rights as a “woman’s issue,” and thus the women’s rights movement as solely the
province of female activists or voices. Yet in truth, as with any civil rights
issue, the struggle for women’s rights affects and implicates every one of us,
and many progressive male figures have (at every stage of the women’s rights
movement) recognized and responded to those connections. Moreover, to take a
step back from such individual (if representative) figures, the history of 19th
century social movements in America is one of deep interconnections—just as these
women’s rights and abolitionist leaders (female and male) were often the same
figures and always in conversation, so too do those interconnections extend to
the temperance
movement, to prison
reform, to progressive theories
of education, and to many other social issues and arenas. Each movement deserves
its own collective memories to be sure, but the broader story is unquestionably
one of interconnection and shared communities.
Those individual
and collective interconnections, cross-pollinating influences of identity and
history, are all important and at times under-narrated parts of the story of
American social movements, and remembering the men at the 1850 Worcester
convention offers a clear way to frame them. But at the same time, as I wrote
in the final paragraph of yesterday’s Sojourner Truth post, individual figures
and stories comprise vital elements to our collective memories. And the simple
fact is that for much of American history, we’ve featured male figures and
stories much more consistently and centrally in our collective memories than
female ones. So the very last thing we would want to do (and I believe the
opposite of their own purpose) is to focus the story of the 1850 convention on
male participants like Wendell Phillips. Remember that they were there
(literally and figuratively), absolutely; but let them take a supporting role
in our collective memories of the event and the movement, with the leading
roles given to all-too forgotten figures like the subjects of Monday’s and
Tuesday’s posts, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis and Sarah H. Earle.
Last 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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