Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897
with weeds. My father gave me a check and said, with a smile, "You
believe in woman's capacity to do and dare; now go ahead and put your
place in order." After a minute survey of the premises and due
consultation with one or two sons of Adam, I set the carpenters,
painters, paper-hangers, and gardeners at work, built a new kitchen and
woodhouse, and in one month took possession. Having left my children
with my mother, there were no impediments to a full display of my
executive ability. In the purchase of brick, timber, paint, etc., and in
making bargains with workmen, I was in frequent consultation with Judge
Sackett and Mr. Bascom. The latter was a member of the Constitutional
Convention, then in session in Albany, and as he used to walk down
whenever he was at home, to see how my work progressed, we had long
talks, sitting on boxes in the midst of tools and shavings, on the
status of women. I urged him to propose an amendment to Article II,
Section 3, of the State Constitution, striking out the word "male,"
which limits the suffrage to men. But, while he fully agreed with all I
had to say on the political equality of women, he had not the courage to
make himself the laughing-stock of the convention. Whenever I cornered
him on this point, manlike he turned the conversation to the painters
and carpenters. However, these conversations had the effect of bringing
him into the first woman's convention, where he did us good service.
In Seneca Falls my life was comparatively solitary, and the change from
Boston was somewhat depressing. There, all my immediate friends were
reformers, I had near neighbors, a new home with all the modern
conveniences, and well-trained servants. Here our residence was on the
outskirts of the town, roads very often muddy and no sidewalks most of
the way, Mr. Stanton was frequently from home, I had poor servants, and
an increasing number of children. To keep a house and grounds in good
order, purchase every article for daily use, keep the wardrobes of half
a dozen human beings in proper trim, take the children to dentists,
shoemakers, and different schools, or find teachers at home, altogether
made sufficient work to keep one brain busy, as well as all the hands I
could impress into the service. Then, too, the novelty of housekeeping
had passed away, and much that was once attractive in domestic life was
now irksome. I had so many cares that the company I needed for
intellectual stimulus was a trial rather than a pleasure.
There was quite an Irish settlement at a short distance, and continual
complaints were coming to me that my boys threw stones at their pigs,
cows, and the roofs of their houses. This involved constant diplomatic
relations in the settlement of various difficulties, in which I was so
successful that, at length, they constituted me a kind of umpire in all
their own quarrels. If a drunken husband was pounding his wife, the
children would run for me. Hastening to the scene of action, I would
take Patrick by the collar, and, much to his surprise and shame, make
him sit down and promise to behave himself. I never had one of them
offer the least resistance, and in time they all came to regard me as
one having authority. I strengthened my influence by cultivating good
feeling. I lent the men papers to read, and invited their children into
our grounds; giving them fruit, of which we had abundance, and my
children's old clothes, books, and toys. I was their physician,
also--with my box of homeopathic medicines I took charge of the men,
women, and children in sickness. Thus the most amicable relations were
established, and, in any emergency, these poor neighbors were good
friends and always ready to serve me.
But I found police duty rather irksome, especially when called out dark
nights to prevent drunken fathers from disturbing their sleeping
children, or to minister to poor mothers in the pangs of maternity.
Alas! alas! who can measure the mountains of sorrow and suffering
endured in unwelcome motherhood in the abodes of ignorance, poverty,
and vice, where terror-stricken women and children are the victims of
strong men frenzied with passion and intoxicating drink?
Up to this time life had glided by with comparative ease, but now the
real struggle was upon me. My duties were too numerous and varied, and
none sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into play my
higher faculties. I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty
stomach, is very depressing. I had books, but no stimulating
companionship. To add to my general dissatisfaction at the change from
Boston, I found that Seneca Falls was a malarial region, and in due time
all the children were attacked with chills and fever which, under
homeopathic treatment in those days, lasted three months. The servants
were afflicted in the same way. Cleanliness, order, the love of the
beautiful and artistic, all faded away in the struggle to accomplish
what was absolutely necessary from hour to hour. Now I understood, as I
never had before, how women could sit down and rest in the midst of
general disorder. Housekeeping, under such conditions, was impossible,
so I packed our clothes, locked up the house, and went to that harbor of
safety, home, as I did ever after in stress of weather.
I now fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to
contend with in the isolated household, and the impossibility of woman's
best development if in contact, the chief part of her life, with
servants and children. Fourier's phalansterie community life and
co-operative households had a new significance for me. Emerson says, "A
healthy discontent is the first step to progress." The general
discontent I felt with woman's portion as wife, mother, housekeeper,
physician, and spiritual guide, the chaotic conditions into which
everything fell without her constant supervision, and the wearied,
anxious look of the majority of women impressed me with a strong feeling
that some active measures should be taken to remedy the wrongs of
society in general, and of women in particular. My experience at the
World's Anti-slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of
women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my
soul, intensified now by many personal experiences. It seemed as if all
the elements had conspired to impel me to some onward step. I could not
see what to do or where to begin--my only thought was a public meeting
for protest and discussion.
In this tempest-tossed condition of mind I received an invitation to
spend the day with Lucretia Mott, at Richard Hunt's, in Waterloo. There
I met several members of different families of Friends, earnest,
thoughtful women. I poured out, that day, the torrent of my
long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I
stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare
anything. My discontent, according to Emerson, must have been healthy,
for it moved us all to prompt action, and we decided, then and there, to
call a "Woman's Rights Convention." We wrote the call that evening and
published it in the _Seneca County Courier_ the next day, the 14th of
July, 1848, giving only five days' notice, as the convention was to be
held on the 19th and 20th. The call was inserted without signatures,--in
fact it was a mere announcement of a meeting,--but the chief movers and
managers were Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, Martha C.
Wright, and myself. The convention, which was held two days in the
Methodist Church, was in every way a grand success. The house was
crowded at every session, the speaking good, and a religious earnestness
dignified all the proceedings.
These were the hasty initiative steps of "the most momentous reform that
had yet been launched on the world--the first organized protest against
the injustice which had brooded for ages over the character and destiny
of one-half the race." No words could express our astonishment on
finding, a few days afterward, that what seemed to us so timely, so
rational, and so sacred, should be a subject for sarcasm and ridicule to
the entire press of the nation. With our Declaration of Rights and
Resolutions for a text, it seemed as if every man who could wield a pen
prepared a homily on "woman's sphere." All the journals from Maine to
Texas seemed to strive with each other to see which could make our
movement appear the most ridiculous. The anti-slavery papers stood by us
manfully and so did Frederick Douglass, both in the convention and in
his paper, _The North Star_, but so pronounced was the popular voice
against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit, that most of the ladies
who had attended the convention and signed the declaration, one by one,
withdrew their names and influence and joined our persecutors. Our
friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the
whole proceeding.
If I had had the slightest premonition of all that was to follow that
convention, I fear I should not have had the courage to risk it, and I
must confess that it was with fear and trembling that I consented to
attend another, one month afterward, in Rochester. Fortunately, the
first one seemed to have drawn all the fire, and of the second but
little was said. But we had set the ball in motion, and now, in quick
succession, conventions were held in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, and in the City of New York, and have been kept up nearly
every year since.
The most noteworthy of the early conventions were those held in
Massachusetts, in which such men as Garrison, Phillips, Channing,
Parker, and Emerson took part. It was one of these that first attracted
the attention of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, and drew from her pen that able
article on "The Enfranchisement of Woman," in the _Westminster Review_
of October, 1852.
The same year of the convention, the Married Woman's Property Bill,
which had given rise to some discussion on woman's rights in New York,
had passed the legislature. This encouraged action on the part of women,
as the reflection naturally arose that, if the men who make the laws
were ready for some onward step, surely the women themselves should
express some interest in the legislation. Ernestine L. Rose, Paulina
Wright (Davis), and I had spoken before committees of the legislature
years before, demanding equal property rights for women. We had
circulated petitions for the Married Woman's Property Bill for many
years, and so also had the leaders of the Dutch aristocracy, who desired
to see their life-long accumulations descend to their daughters and
grandchildren rather than pass into the hands of dissipated, thriftless
sons-in-law. Judge Hertell, Judge Fine, and Mr. Geddes of Syracuse
prepared and championed the several bills, at different times, before
the legislature. Hence the demands made in the convention were not
entirely new to the reading and thinking public of New York--the first
State to take any action on the question. As New York was the first
State to put the word "male" in her constitution in 1778, it was fitting
that she should be first in more liberal legislation. The effect of the
convention on my own mind was most salutary. The discussions had cleared
my ideas as to the primal steps to be taken for woman's enfranchisement,
and the opportunity of expressing myself fully and freely on a subject I
felt so deeply about was a great relief. I think all women who attended
the convention felt better for the statement of their wrongs, believing
that the first step had been taken to right them.
Soon after this I was invited to speak at several points in the
neighborhood. One night, in the Quaker Meeting House at Farmington, I
invited, as usual, discussion and questions when I had finished. We all