[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 two English
activists who reveal the convention’s Transatlantic influences and legacies.
One of the
challenges in researching and writing about the 19th century’s women’s
rights and suffrage movements is teasing out the similarities, differences, and
relationships between the American and English
such movements. While I pride myself on being aware of as many contexts as
possible, this blog is called AmericanStudies for a reason—working to
understand, analyze, and narrate American histories and stories is much more
than a lifetime’s task, and I’ll never pretend to be an expert in any other
nation or culture’s histories and stories. Moreover, my belief in the fundamentally
cross-cultural and transnational
side to American identities and communities doesn’t mean that any one of us
scholars can engage every aspect of those interconnections—instead, it means
that we can and must engage with scholars
whose expertise lies in those other
national and cultural contexts, to put our voices and analyses in
conversation with theirs. One excellent example of such analyses on the
Transatlantic histories of women’s rights movements is Patricia Greenwood
Harrison’s Connecting
Links: The British and American Woman Suffrage Movements, 1900-1914
(2000), and this post is no way a substitute for such extended further
readings.
Yet individual
moments can illustrate such broader and more multi-layered histories and
contexts, and two striking such moments in the aftermath of the 1850 Worcester convention
do just that for the Transatlantic women’s rights movement. Convention
organizer and president (and subject of Monday’s post) Paulina Kellogg Wright
Davis sent a copy of the convention proceedings to her friend Harriet Martineau,
the pioneering English social scientist and reformer who had traveled the US
during an extended 1830s visit and remained close to many activists she met
there (she also authored her 1837
book Society in America, a text that
offers an important counterpoint to Alexis de Tocqueville’s more famous Democracy
in America [1835], just after returning from those travels). In an August
1851 letter back to Davis, Martineau both thanked her and reflected on the
women’s rights influences in both directions, writing, “I hope you are aware of
the interest excited in this country by that Convention, the strongest proof of
which is the appearance of an article on the subject in the Westminster Review…I am not without hope
that this article will materially strengthen your hands, and I am sure it can
not but cheer your hearts.”
The convention’s
influence on the English women’s rights movement was even more overt and
significant still. After details of the convention were published in the New York Tribune for Europe newspaper in
early 1851, a group of activists in Sheffield formed
the Sheffield Women’s Political Association, considered the first women’s suffrage
organization in the UK; they would present the first suffrage petition to the
House of Lords later that year. And Harriet Taylor
(Mill), the English philosopher and women’s rights activist, was inspired by
those same convention reports to write (with her partner
and new husband John Stuart Mill) her ground-breaking book “The
Enfranchisement of Women” (1851), which begins with an extended analysis
of the movement and cause in the US before broadening to arguments in support
of women’s rights and suffrage everywhere. The English women’s rights movement
had many origins and contexts, and again I am far from an expert in it or them.
But the 1850 Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester provided one striking
influence, as reflected by the voices and work of these two prominent English
writers and activists.
Special
Halloween week Guest Post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Figures or histories from the women’s rights movement you’d highlight?
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