19th century – Page 2 – Women's History and More

Susan B Anthony – “Failure is Impossible”

“I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper. When I was young, if a girl married poor she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll.” ~Susan B. Anthony

When I first began reading about woman suffrage several years ago, I wondered why the only name I remembered from school was Susan B. Anthony. There were so many women involved in the movement that played major roles – Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, two about whom I’ve already written– and that’s before you even begin to talk about the women who brought the movement home so to speak, such as Alice Paul and Lucy Burns. One reason is that women have often been slighted in history, but if you had to choose one woman to represent the movement, why Susan B Anthony?

Of course, I can’t be sure, but one reason I would choose her is because of the major players, Anthony was probably the most single minded and driven. She came to the movement late, but when she did, she never wavered, and when it was clear that the goal wouldn’t be reached in her lifetime, she spent considerable time mentoring younger women to carry on the fight. She was tireless. While Elizabeth Cady Stanton might be seen as the philosopher of the movement, Susan was the tactician, the organizer. She organized national women’s conventions almost every year after the Civil War, selecting places and speakers, raising money, organizing local women’s groups, traveling extensively to promote the cause and rally the troops. When others might have given up, she said “failure is impossible.”

Susan Brownell Anthony was the second of seven children born to Lucy Read and Daniel Anthony on February 15, 1820. While Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone grew up with the idea that it was a disadvantage to be a woman; that wasn’t the case with Susan. Daniel Anthony was a Quaker who instilled in his children a sense of their own self-worth and that of all human beings. Although women and men sat on opposite sides of the meeting house, Susan’s grandmother was an elder and her aunt preached freely when she was moved to do so. Her grandfather believed so strongly in education that he built a school on his own property for his children and the neighbors. Later when Susan’s teacher didn’t see the need to teach girls long division, Daniel Anthony did the same thing.

The Anthonys believed in education, self-determination and self-discipline. Daniel Anthony was a good Quaker, but he also had an independent streak. When he decided to marry Lucy Read a non-Quaker, his meeting disapproved, but he stood his ground. Lucy was not so sure about giving up her bright colors and dances, but gave in and they were married. As time went on they both became involved in the temperance and abolitionist movements, and they passed these values on to their children.

When Susan was young, the family was well off. Her father owned a successful cotton mill, but they didn’t live a life of leisure. Many of the mill workers boarded with the family, so Susan’s mother was constantly working and Susan helped out as soon as she was old enough. Her father started an evening school for the mill workers and as soon as Susan and her elder sister Guelma were old enough they began teaching in the home school or nearby villages.

Susan and Guelma were both able to go to Deborah Moulson’s Female Seminary, a boarding school in Philadelphia, but in the depression of 1837 their father’s business failed and they had to return home. At 17, Susan was well qualified to teach, so she did her part to support the family and work to pay off their debts. In this endeavor, she would encounter her first real disadvantage being a woman, when she realized that she was paid ¼ the salary of men doing the same job, even when she was more qualified. This experience would prompt her to advocate for equal pay for equal work during most of her women’s rights work.

After several years of hard work, in 1845 when Susan was 25, she moved with her parents and two siblings to their new home on a small farm near Rochester, NY. The farm was purchased by Lucy’s brother with money which had been left to her by her father. If the money or the farm had been put in Lucy’s name it would legally belong to Daniel and could then be seized by his creditors. The Quaker’s of Rochester welcomed the Anthony family and introduced them to a very active anti-slavery community. Here Susan learned about the Underground Railroad and began reading The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery paper.

Susan soon left the farm to accept a teaching position at the Canajoharie Academy, where her uncle James Read was a trustee. It was here that Susan made her first public speech. In both the temperance and abolitionist movements there was disagreement, sometimes violent disagreement, about whether or not to allow women to speak to “promiscuous” meetings, meetings including both men and women. In Canajoharie, the Sons of Temperance refused to allow women to speak, so the women formed the Daughters of Temperance. Most of the women were uneasy at the idea of speaking in public, but Susan, raised in Quaker meeting where women were welcome to speak, thought nothing of it. Her speech at their first meeting, attended by approximately 200 men and women, was a success.

Because of the distance to Rochester, she spent her vacations with Guelma and Hannah and their families or with Lydia Mott, one of her former teachers at Deborah Moulson’s school and cousin of Lucretia Mott. From Lydia, she learned more about the abolitionist movement. It was during this time, in 1948, that the Seneca Falls Woman Rights Convention was held, and attended by Daniel and Lucy Anthony and Susan’s younger sister Mary. All three were very impressed with the speakers, especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, the statement of resolutions for women’s rights that resulted from the convention. When Susan heard about this, she wasn’t opposed, but she found it surprising and somewhat amusing. After all, she hadn’t experienced the opposition that many women faced.

Although she didn’t embrace the women’s movement immediately, she was very intrigued by what her family was telling her about the women involved, so she welcomed the opportunity to get to know Elizabeth Cady Stanton when she met her in Seneca Falls in 1851. It was the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime and would be the foundation of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States.

In 1852, Susan attended her first women’s rights convention in Syracuse, while at the same time becoming more and more active in the abolitionist movement. She began lecturing for William Lloyd Garrisons Anti-Slavery Association in 1956, and started to experience the opposition directed at women such as the Grimke sisters, Abby Kelly, and Lucy Stone when they lectured. By the time of the Civil War, Susan was convinced of the need for women’s rights reform and suffrage, and was working closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton to bring it about.

Although, she had received a couple of offers of marriage, Susan chose to remain single. She didn’t see the need to tie her self to a man and thereby restrict her own actions and work. She was often impatient with the women who did, even with Elizabeth and Lucy, and was critical of their divided loyalties. After the Civil War, Elizabeth and Susan worked very closely. While Elizabeth still had children at home, Susan did much of the traveling to spread their message. She organized annual women’s rights conventions, doing most of the logistical work while Elizabeth did most of the writing, including many of Susan’s speeches. Together they published The Revolution, a newspaper devoted to women’s issues. Elizabeth was the editor, and Susan was the publisher and business manager. Elizabeth always had a very broad even radical view of what was needed and should be fought for; Susan felt that if suffrage was achieved all the rest would follow.

Several major strategies were used during those years to approach the suffrage question. One, championed initially by Victoria Woodhull, was that women already had the vote by virtue of the 14^th Amendment and should just do it. Women were citizens and therefore couldn’t be denied one of the rights of citizenship – voting. In preparation for the 1872 presidential election, Susan organized women to register to vote. Many were turned away, but Susan and a group of women were successful at registering and later casting their votes for president. Two weeks later, she was arrested and eventually tried and convicted for “knowingly casting an illegal vote in a federal election.” She was fined $100, which she refused to pay. The result was probably a public relations victory on her side. No attempt was ever made to make her pay the fine and she arranged for the trial transcripts to be printed and distributed, promoting her cause.

Susan lectured and campaigned in every state promoting local and state suffrage for women, but she always believed that the solution was a federal amendment to the Constitution. In 1878, she finally succeeded in getting a proposed amendment introduced into Congress. Proposing it as the sixteenth amendment, it was introduced every year until 1919 when it finally passed as the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

As with most of the original suffragists, Susan wouldn’t live to see the passage of the amendment she had worked tirelessly to bring about. Her last appearance before the Senate’s Select Committee on Woman’s Suffrage was in 1902 because of failing health, but she made one last speech in 1906 on her 86^th birthday one month before she died. Surveying the women who had joined the movement, many of whom she had mentored, she declared that “ with such women consecrating their lives – Failure is Impossible.”

Susan_B_Anthony_Birthplace — Susan B. Anthony Birthplace: 67 East Rd, Adams, MA.
Photograph by James Parrish

Resources
History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton et. al.
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony by Ida Husted Harper
Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists by Jean H. Baker
Susan B. Anthony by Alma Lutz

Trial Homepage – nice write up of her registration, vote, and the events leading up to the trial as well as links to the trial transcript.
Lucy Stone – Abolitionist and Suffragist
Elizabeth Cady Stanton – Suffragist and Women’s Rights Activist

Emmy Noether – Original in More Ways Than One

“Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” ~ Albert Einstein

If you ask anyone to name a famous woman mathematician, the names that come to mind will usually be Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Emilie du Chatelet, or Maria Agnesi, if they can name any at all. I must admit that these women were the ones who attracted my attention as well when I started reading the history of mathematics. Each of these has something that attracts us apart from mathematics: Hypatia’s brutal death, Ada’s famous father, Emilie’s famous lover, or Maria’s piety. Yet with each of these women there are debates about how much original work they actually did and how much was primarily building on the work of others. There is no doubt that they were all brilliant and deserve to be remembered, but there is one who undoubtedly did work that was so original that it changed the way we do mathematics and is virtually unknown outside of specialist circles: Emmy Noether.

Emmy Noether made groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics and abstract algebra. She developed several formulations to support Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in fact he wrote to David Hilbert, “You know that Frl. Noether is continually advising me in my projects and that it is really through her that I have become competent in the subject.” The principle behind Noether’s Theorem is foundational to quantum physics proving that the laws of physics are independent of time and space. And yes you can even blame her for “New Math,” her approach, just very, very, watered down. In spite of all of this, she worked almost her entire life without pay because she was a woman.

The facts of Emmy’s childhood are pretty normal for the time. She was born Amalie Emmy Noether on March 23, 1882, in Erlangen, Bavaria, the oldest of four children in a well-to-do Jewish family. Her mother, Ida Amalie Kaufmann, came from a wealthy family and her father was a well-respected Mathematics professor at the university in Erlangen. Emmy was the only girl and while her three brothers followed the traditional educational track for boys, she was schooled in music, religious instruction, language, child care, household management, etc. Girls were not admitted to universities in Germany, so there were no college-preparatory schools for them. When Emmy completed her instruction around age 15, she entered a teacher training program with the idea of teaching French and English. She did very well, except in her practical teaching skills.

Emmy was very likeable and easy to get along with. She was interested in mathematics, showed a definite aptitude for it, and was certainly exposed to it. One of her brothers went on to be a math professor and a good family friend Paul Gordon would be a very important mentor to Emmy in her early professional life. Her father was supportive and spent time with her teaching her mathematics even though it wasn’t part of her course of instruction. So why the teacher training? As a child Emmy was clever, friendly, and sociable, but she was also considered plain and ordinary. She spoke with a slight lisp, was near-sighted, and later in life would be described as loud and “heavy of build.” Emmy said herself that she didn’t have the patience to be a wife or mother, and she seemed to have little interest in clothes. Her mother may have expected Emmy to have to support herself, so she encouraged the teaching career.

Emmy passed her examinations to teach, but when she finished her course of instruction some of the university rules were being relaxed and she decided she wanted to study mathematics. Women still couldn’t officially enroll, but they could audit with the permission of the professor, so with the support of her father and Paul Gordon, she took classes over the next two years and prepared to take the university entrance exams. In 1903, she passed these exams and even though she still couldn’t officially enroll, she went to Göttingen to study mathematics. Göttingen had the leading math department in Germany led by Felix Klein, who was a proponent of admitting women to higher education. While there she met David Hilbert and was exposed to his work in abstract algebra. Hilbert is considered by some to be the greatest mathematician since Gauss, and he would later have a great impact on Emmy and her work.

Hilbert, considered by some to be the greatest mathematician since Gauss, was a proponent of admitting women to the university.

Emmy only spent one semester at Göttingen and returned home, possibly due to illness. During this time, the University at Erlangen had decided to admit women and Emmy officially enrolled as a student. Working closely with Paul Gordon, she completed her dissertation and in 1907 at the age of 25 was awarded highest honors. Over the next seven years, she worked at the university, writing papers, speaking abroad, and filling in for her father as his health declined, all without pay. The money wasn’t important to Emmy as long as she could do mathematics.

Emmy’s dissertation and Gordon’s style of work was very dense, full of many equations and calculations. Although, Emmy thought very highly of Gordon, she was not entirely happy with this approach, and she began to apply Hilbert’s abstract approach to algebra. She had written some very important papers already in her career, but this is where she would make her greatest contribution. In 1915, with the help of her father, she arranged to go back to Göttingen to study with Felix Klein and David Hilbert. It wasn’t long before Klein and Hilbert both felt that Emmy deserved a teaching position. They met with a lot of resistance. It wasn’t until 1919 that she was allowed to teach classes on her own, but it had to be as Hilbert’s assistant. The classes would be registered under Hilbert’s name, but Emmy would be the professor, and she still wouldn’t be paid. Fortunately, her mother’s brothers had set up a small trust fund for her, so she had some income. By 1923, she had gained more recognition and was granted a position with a small stipend.

Emmy had a unique teaching style. She had little patience with presenting established concepts, rather she would often work out her own research with the class. Needless to say many weren’t able to follow her, but the students who stuck with her were very loyal and were sometimes referred to as “Noether’s boys.” They would come to her house to discuss math and even when school was officially out, she would meet them at a local café for discussions. Gordon had often continued teaching during what he called “math walks” and Emmy adopted this style as well. One of her students from her time at Byrn Mawr in the 1930s said that they had to watch to keep her out of the streets or from running into things, because she would get so involved in talking about math. She had an enthusiastic style, often ending up disheveled by the end of class with her hair coming out of its pins.

Throughout the 1920s, Emmy established herself as one of the leading mathematicians in the new field of abstract algebra. At the same time, she contributed greatly to the work of others. There seemed to be no jealousy or resentment in her at all. In 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, many Jews lost their positions at German universities. Emmy was one of the first six to be dismissed from Göttingen. Yet she continued to hold clandestine classes in her home for the students who would come. One of her favorite students Ernst Witt would come to her home in his Brownshirt uniform. As far as the university was concerned she had three strikes against her; she was a Jew, a liberal pacifist, and she was a woman. But for Emmy, it was all about the math, nothing else mattered. If someone wanted to learn or work with her she would do it.

After her dismissal from the university, her friends began to try to find her a position out of Germany. She initially wanted to go to Oxford, or Russia where her brother went, but finally ended up at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania in the United States. This also gave her the opportunity to lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as well where Einstein was working. At the age of 51, she had her first real salary as a professor of mathematics. Her time here was good, but it was short. In 1935, Emmy went into the hospital for surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. The surgery appeared to go well, but four days later, her fever spiked and she lost consciousness. Emmy Noether died on April 14, 1935.

At her memorial, her close friend Hermann Weyl had the following to say about her:

“It was too easy for those who met her for the first time, or had no feeling for her creative power, to consider her queer and to make fun at her expense. She was heavy of build and loud of voice, and it was often not easy for one to get the floor in competitions with her. . . But she was a one-sided human being who was thrown out of balance by the over-weight of her mathematical talent . . . The memory of her work in science and of her personality among her fellows will not soon pass away. She was a great mathematician, the greatest, I firmly believe, that her sex has ever produced and a great woman.”

320px-Entrance_Bryn_Mawr — The entrance to Bryn Mawr, where Emmy spent the last year and half of her life.

Resources
Nobel Prize Women in Science by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
(Note: There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. Noether is included in this book because she contributed significantly to the mathematics involved in Einstein’s theories.)
Notable Women in Mathematics edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl
Women in Mathematics by Lynn Osen
Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Marilyn Bailey Ogilivie

Dame is a Four Letter Word – an audio recording about the life of Ada Lovelace and Emmy Noether.

Read about other Famous Women Mathematicians and Scientists.

Lucy Stone (1818 – 1893) – Abolitionist and Suffragist

Lucy Stone c. 1850, Library of Congress (source)

Common causes often draw people together, but it’s not always sufficient to keep them together. Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony are often called the “triumvirate” of the women’s suffrage movement. All three were ardent abolitionists, and all three began speaking for women’s suffrage early in the movement. In many ways that’s where the similarities end.

Lucy Stone was born in 1818, the eighth of nine children to Francis and Hannah Matthews Stone. Unlike Stanton, she was not born into a family of means. Francis Stone owned a small farm in Massachusetts where everyone in the family had to contribute to survive. The boys fished and hunted; the girls made cheese and did piecework to help make ends meet. Francis was also a drinking man and one that believed firmly in a “woman’s place.” He was physically and verbally abusive and Hannah often had to beg him for money to get things for the girls. Where Stanton’s father wished she were a boy because he wanted a boy, Lucy’s mother wished she and her sisters were boys because “a woman’s life is so hard.”

Around the age of twelve Lucy took on much of the housework because of her mother’s ill health, yet she still managed to do well in school. In 1837, at the age of 16, she started to teach. Her dream was to go to Oberlin College. Her father paid for the boys to go to boarding school and then college, but he didn’t believe it was necessary for a woman. At this point, Lucy had probably begun to be a trial for her father. She saw her mother’s position as a trap in which she didn’t want to be caught. They were members of their local Congregationalist church which reinforced many of her father’s ideas. In 1838, the officials of the church condemned the use of the pulpit for abolitionist speeches particularly by women. The Grimke sisters from South Carolina and Abby Kelley had begun to speak against slavery to mixed groups of men and women. The church viewed this as a violation of what they saw as the Bible’s prohibition against women teaching men. Lucy decided two things then: that she would study Greek and Hebrew to better understand the Biblical passages and that if she ever had anything to speak about in public that she would do it.

Between 1838 and 1843, she continued to teach and study when she could. Two of her sisters died during this time and she helped with the children, supporting her mother. One thing that she did learn from her family was her hatred for slavery. She kept up with the fight by reading The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper, with particular interest in the divisions in the American Anti-Slavery Society caused by women speaking out. She wrote to her brother that some in the Society wanted to “crush Garrison and the women. While it pretends to endeavor to remove the yoke of bondage on account of color, it is actually summoning all its energies to rivet more and more firmly the chains that have always been fastened upon the neck of woman.” Later when she began to speak publicly for the abolitionist cause, she was criticized for injecting women’s rights issues into her speeches.

In 1843, Lucy had finally saved enough money for her first year at Oberlin. She continued to work and study and was able to graduate in 1847 with honors. (Her father also insisted that she compensate him for the money that she was denying the household by being away at college, which she did.) Although Oberlin was ahead of it’s time in many ways (they admitted both African American students and women), they were still constrained by the society in others. The student body selected Lucy to write a speech for the graduation ceremony. The catch was that she would not be able to deliver the speech because she was a woman and the audience would contain both men and women. After much thought, although she had decided to pursue a career as a public speaker, she chose not to write the speech rather than compromise her principles.

One thing that helped Lucy make her decision to pursue public speaking was her experience in a debate club that she founded while at school. During her time there, she met Antoinette Brown, a young woman who was studying to be a minister. While studying rhetoric, they were not allowed to debate in the class, you guessed it, because they were women and the class contained men. They were expected to watch the men debate and keep silent. So they started their own debate club off campus. Then in October of 1847, Lucy gave her first public speech called The Province of Women and her career began.

In 1848, Lucy was hired by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Philips as a lecturer and organizer for the Boston Anti-Slavery Society. In 1850, she worked with Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis and others to organize a national convention on women’s rights. At the convention her speech met with wide acclaim. She continued her speaking engagements and organizing activities for the next ten years, until the start of the Civil War when most of the women put their activities on hold to assist in the war effort.

Henry Blackwell c. 1850, Blackwell Family Paper at the Library of Congress (source)

Like Susan B. Anthony, Lucy had decided early in her life that she didn’t want to submit herself to the constraints of marriage. Unlike Anthony, she changed her mind. Henry Blackwell noticed Lucy during one of her speeches. He was immediately smitten and began to woo her, a process which took several years. If anyone could have won Lucy over it was Henry. He was raised in a family which strongly supported both the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. His one brother Samuel Blackwell had married Antoinette Brown, Lucy’s friend, who had become a minister as well as a prominent abolitionist and suffragist in her own right, and Henry’s five sisters had all opted to remain single and pursue careers of their own, the most prominent being Elizabeth Blackwell the first female doctor in the United States. Lucy and Henry were married in 1855. As part of the ceremony they read a “Marriage Protest” where they protested the laws which gave a husband control over a wife’s person and sole control and guardianship of the children. Needless to say the word “obey” was left out of the ceremony. Lucy continued her career as a speaker and continued to use her maiden name. She did take time off the lecture circuit when she gave birth to Alice Stone Blackwell in 1857 and throughout the years of the war.

Lucy with her daughter Alice, Library of Congress (source)

After the war, the differences between some of the primary leaders within the women’s movement began to emerge. The issues are multi-faceted and I may write a future post on them, but for now, there was a split within the movement in 1869. The argument arose primarily over whether or not to fight for suffrage for black men and women at the same time within one amendment, or to work toward the vote for all men and once that was achieved return to the issue of suffrage for women. The 15^th Amendment had passed in Congress in February ensuring that no citizen could be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Stanton was incensed that it didn’t include the word sex and resorted to racist language that alienated many in the group. She refused to support ratification whereas the majority wanted to support ratification and propose an additional amendment for the suffrage of women. The final result was Stanton and Anthony’s withdrawal and formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Lucy Stone responded by creating another organization – the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Over the next 20 years Lucy and the AWSA continued to work for women’s suffrage focusing primarily on individual states. In 1870, she founded the Woman’s Journal, a newspaper that she would write for and publish for the rest of her life. At some point she realized that she was not going to see the women’s vote become a reality in her lifetime, but she had raised Alice to have the same values and knew that she would carry on the fight. She also spent time with Carrie Chapman Catt for the same purpose, preparing her to take up the mantle.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA were finally reconciled, and in 1892, Lucy spoke before the House Judiciary Committee with Stanton and Anthony in support of women’s suffrage. Her last speech was in 1893 at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago where women from over 27 countries spoke to an audience of over 150,000 people in favor of women’s rights. She died later that year.

When Stanton and Anthony began their History of Woman Suffrage, Lucy was still in disagreement with them and chose not to send a biographical sketch for inclusion. For this reason she is not represented to the degree that she probably should be. But in recent years, her tremendous contributions to the advancement of women’s rights have received more attention. She was truly one of the founders of the women’s rights movement in the United States.

Resources
History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton et. al. (6 volume work)
Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists by Jean H. Baker
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 – 1902)
Susan B. Anthony (1820 – 1906)

Ada Byron Lovelace – “Enchantress of Numbers”

Ada Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon (source)

Often women in the 18^th and 19^th centuries overcame significant odds to study mathematics or science, but as with every rule there is the exception. Ada Byron Lovelace is one of those exceptions. In Ada’s case, not only did she have a parent who approved of her interest, but one who pushed her to develop that interest; and it wasn’t her father who pushed her, but her mother.

Augusta Ada Byron, born December 10, 1815, was the daughter of Annabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. The marriage was short-lived and Ada never got to know her father. Only a few weeks after her birth, Lord Byron left England and went to the continent, her mother made the separation official and took custody of Ada, something that was unusual for the time. Annabella was well-educated with a particular interest in mathematics and was determined that her daughter would be as well. (Lord Byron referred to Annabella as “princess of parallelograms” and later as the “Mathematical Medea,” which may give us a feel for her expertise in math, but also their relationship.) She researched the best education techniques and obtained the best tutors for Ada. Because they were of the aristocracy (in 1856, Annabella became Baroness Wentworth in her own right,) Ada also had access to some of the best intellectual minds of the time; including Mary Somerville, Augustus De Morgan., Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, William Frend, Charles Wheatstone, and Woronzow Greig.

Annabella was a domineering mother. Some say that she wanted to suppress any tendency that Ada might have toward the mental instability of her father, so she insisted on strict lessons focused on rational pursuits and the avoidance of any romantic subjects such as poetry. (One anecdote says that Annabella fired a tutor for giving her daughter too much geography and not enough math.) Although Ada’s mother may have pushed her, Ada did have the talent for mathematics. Even though she was often ill as a child, suffering from blinding headaches and a period of paralysis, she worked hard to achieve the goals her mother set for her. De Morgan once wrote to Annabella that Ada had the capacity to become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” Of course, he proceeded this by saying “if she were a man entering university.”

In 1833, Ada entered London society and was introduced at court to King William IV and Queen Adelaide. During one of the many social events they attended during the year, Ada and her mother were introduced to Charles Babbage, a noted mathematician and inventor of the Difference Machine. During that time astronomical tables were created by giving the calculations to two people (often women) and then comparing the results for discrepancies. Once when going over some of these calculations with Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, and finding many mistakes, he declared that he wished the calculations could be done “by steam,” meaning by machine. Babbage went on to design such a machine which he called the Difference Machine, so when Ada and her mother met him they were both very interested in learning more about it. They arranged to go see a prototype that Babbage had built and Ada asked to see the blueprints. For whatever reason, Babbage agreed to show this teenaged girl and her mother his plans, and a life-long friendship and collaboration was born.

Ada Lovelace by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (source)

As much as she enjoyed it, mathematics didn’t interfere with Ada’s social life and in 1835 she married William King who would become the Earl of Lovelace in 1838. They had several large homes, lived well, some might say too well, and had three children: Byron (1836), Anne Isabella (1837), and Ralph Gordon (1839). Ada doesn’t seem to have had much to do with her children; in fact her mother seems to have had more to do with their upbringing than she did. Certainly after Ada became sick and died, her mother directed the education of the children. King was supportive of Ada’s continued work in mathematics and from the time she met Babbage in 1833 until around 1842, she continued studying mathematics and corresponding with the best mathematicians of the day, including Babbage.

Analyzing the personality of a historical person is difficult and a number of different things have been said of Ada; that she was a hard drinking gambler; she inherited her father’s mental instability; and that she led a rather boring life, except of course for the rather long horseback rides with a man from a neighboring estate! What does seem clear from her letters is that she had fluctuating moods and that she did go to the horse races. However, over the course of William’s life he sold off many of his estates and by the end of his life was borrowing money. Considering he lived much longer than Ada, it seems likely that he was the primary source of the gambling debt, although Ada may have contributed to it. I’m not sure about the drinking, but Ada died of what is believed to have been uterine cancer, so for the last several years of her life she surely would have been prescribed laudanum (an opiate) for pain.

Babbage meanwhile, received financial support for building his Difference Machine, but had instead designed a more complex machine, the Analytical Engine. Where the Difference Machine could only perform basic addition and subtraction, the Analytical Engine could perform many more calculations, basically the equivalent of a modern day calculator. It is the earliest design of its kind that we are aware of and quite remarkable for its time. In 1842, Babbage was persuaded to give a lecture on the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin. One of the attendees, Luigi Menabrea, an engineer and the future prime minister of Italy, wrote a paper on the Engine and published it in a Swiss Journal, in French of course.

After Menabrea’s paper was published, Babbage asked Ada to translate it into English. At Babbage’s suggestion, Ada added notes to the paper explaining the concepts in more detail and adding information. The resulting paper was three times as long as the original and was well received. Included in the notes is an algorithm, a sequence of steps, which would allow the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a series of numbers used in various branches of mathematics. Today we would call this a computer program, which is why Ada is often called the world’s first computer programmer. There is some controversy surrounding this, however. Many people believe that Ada was not the originator of the algorithm; that Babbage, in fact, wrote all the mathematics contained within the paper. She and Babbage were close friends and corresponded on a regular basis often multiple times during the day, so it is sometimes difficult to determine. He seems to have thought highly of her and referred to her as an “enchantress of numbers.”

Ada did contribute something that is significant and was acknowledged by Babbage to be her idea. She envisioned the machine being used to produce music. She was familiar with the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards similar to the Analytical Engine to produce complex patterns in weaving. Ada reasoned that if numbers could represent other things such as frequencies, that the engine could be programmed to produce frequencies in a particular way and produce music. This idea of using numbers to represent other things or as symbols was ahead of her time and prophetic of our present day computers.

Unfortunately, the paper on the Analytical Engine would be Ada’s crowning achievement. She died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36 from what seems to have been a type of uterine cancer. Her mother came to take charge preventing any of her friends from seeing her in the last months of her life, including Charles Babbage. At her request, she was buried beside her father. Many mathematicians do their best work at an early age, but Mary Somerville, one of Ada’s mentors, began doing her best work in her 40s, so who knows what Ada might have achieved had she lived.

Learn about other Famous Women in Mathematics and Science.

Resources
Notable Women in Mathematics edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl
Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Marilyn Bailey Ogilivie
Pictures of Babbage’s Difference Machine at the Computer History Museum in CA and a short NPR piece.

BBC show “In Our Time” – Melvyn Bragg with Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; John Fuegi, Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University.

Dame is a Four Letter Word – an audio recording about the life of Ada Lovelace

Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage by L. F. Menabrea – this is the translation of Menebrea’s paper with Ada’s notes.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary – Blazing the Trail for Women

Mary Ann Shadd, National Archives of Canada (source)

Not very many people accomplish as much as Mary Ann Shadd Cary did in her life, much less blaze a trail to do it. She has many “firsts” to her credit: first African American woman publisher in North America, first woman publisher in Canada, first woman to enroll in Howard University, first woman to graduate from Howard with a law degree (sort of, more to come) and only the second African American woman to practice law in the United States, at 60 years old no less! She was even commissioned by the governor of Indiana to recruit black soldiers to the Union army, the only woman to hold this position.

Mary Ann Shadd was born free in Delaware on October 9, 1823, to Abraham and Harriet Parnell Shadd, the oldest of their 13 children. Her father was a prosperous boot manufacturer and her mother a woman who wanted her children to be educated. Delaware was a slave state and it was illegal to educate black children, so when Mary was 10, the family moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania where she enrolled in a Quaker school. After graduating at 16, Mary began a career in teaching. For ten years, she taught in schools in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and amazingly returned to Wilmington Delaware to open a school for black children. It was partly through her efforts that Wilmington began to make provisions for educating free black children in 1844.

During her childhood, her parents were actively involved with many prominent abolitionists. In the 1830s and 40s, her father helped lead a series of conventions led by black leaders, and when the time came they were also involved in the Underground Railroad. This was risky enough, but when the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850, it became even more dangerous. Even the northern non-slave states were no longer safe, and, it wasn’t only escaped slaves who were at risk. Freed slaves and free-born blacks were at risk as well. In a time where civil rights were non-existent for African-Americans, the law wasn’t much help, so many free blacks as well as escaped slaves moved to the safety of Canada. Mary Ann Shadd was one of these.

In 1851, Mary and one of her brothers moved to Windsor, Ontario, after meeting Henry Bibb and his wife at the Convention of Colored Freeman in Toronto. In Windsor, she opened a school for fugitive slaves with assistance from the American Missionary Association and eventually brought the rest of her family to join them. Mary became active in the community and began to write and promote Canada to other blacks in the United States, both slave and free. Her first published pamphlet was Notes on Canada West, and it described the virtues of Canadian living. Canada had abolished slavery in 1833 and had no agreement with the United States to extradite escaped slaves. In her book Homespun Heroines, Hallie Brown recounts an incident where a young boy, pursued by slave hunters, was captured and about to be carried off when Mary “tore the boy from the slave hunters, ran to the court-house and had the bell rung so violently that the whole town was soon aroused. Mrs. Cary with her commanding form, piercing eyes, and stirring voice soon had the people as indignant as herself–denouncing in no uncertain terms the outrage perpetrated under the British flag and demanded that these man-hunters be driven from their midst.”

She definitely was not shy. In fact, she had substantial disagreements with some of the other residents of Windsor, in particular Henry Bibb, the publisher of a newspaper called The Voice of the Fugitive. When Mary moved to Windsor, she established a racially integrated school. She believed that blacks must fight for equality and integration into society, and that self-segregation would hinder the fight. Not everyone agreed, and she came under attack by Henry Bibb in his newspaper. Rather than just defending herself, she started her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. She had the help of Samuel Ringgold Ward, a newspaper man in his own right, who agreed to be the editor, but it seems likely that he was editor primarily in name only and that Mary was the driving force and primary writer and editor for the paper. The Provincial Freeman gave Mary a way to get her message out about the advantages of moving to Canada, but also about other causes important to her such as women’s rights.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary House in Washington DC (source)

Financing was difficult, and they published the paper off and on between 1853 and 1859. Mary spent a good deal of time traveling back in the United States, distributing her pamphlets, extolling the virtues of Canada, and raising money to keep the paper going. This was a challenge, because in 1856 she married Thomas Cary. Thomas was a barber with three children, but it seemed to work well for them even though she was often away. She and Thomas were both still very involved in the abolitionist cause and in 1858 attended John Brown’s Constitutional Convention. They were friends with Osborne Perry Anderson, the only surviving African-American member of the raiding party, and Mary later helped him prepare his memoir, A Voice From Harper’s Ferry, for publication in 1861.

Mary and Thomas had two children Sarah and Linton, but Thomas died while Mary was pregnant with Linton and she found herself in a position of having to support two young children and three teenagers. She continued teaching, but wanting to be of service to the war effort, she returned to the United States. In 1863, President Lincoln called for volunteers and Mary as always wanted to be of service, so she was commissioned by Levi P. Morton, the governor of Indiana, to recruit black soldiers for the Union army.

At the end of the war, Mary had a decision to make. Although she considered life in Canada a good option, she decided to remain in the United States to help in the assimilation of the newly freed slaves. A strong believer in self-determination, and believing in the importance of education for this purpose, she obtained a US teacher’s certificate and relocated in 1868 to Washington, D. C. She eventually became a principal in the D.C. public schools and enrolled in Howard University.

There seem to be different accounts of her graduation and acceptance to the District of Columbia Bar, one stating that she was the first black woman to become a lawyer in the US and others say she was the second. Mary Ann Shadd Cary is on the roles of the senior class of 1870 at Howard; however, it appears that she was refused her law degree because she was a woman. In the meantime, Charlotte E. Ray graduated in 1872 and was admitted to the bar in Washington D.C. under the name C. E. Ray. (I’m sure the assumption was that C. E. Ray was a man!) So Charlotte Ray became the first black woman lawyer in the US and Mary was awarded her law degree in 1883.

Mary was a strong believer in self-determination whether black or white, male or female. So while her primary work was as an abolitionist and in education, she was also involved in the suffrage movement. During her years in Washington D. C. she continued writing, joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. She also founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise in 1880 to work toward equal rights for women.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary continued to speak and write as long as she was able. She died on June 5, 1893, having blazed a trail for women both black and white. As a teacher, writer, publisher, speaker, in the cause of abolition and equal rights for women she was truly an amazing woman!

Resources
Mary Anne Shadd Cary: Abolitionist by Adrienne Shadd
Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction ed. Hallie O. Brown

Elizabeth Cady Stanton – Suffragist and Women’s Rights Activist

In many ways, Elizabeth Cady Stanton provided the philosophical bedrock for the women’s movement in the United States. She is known for fighting for women’s suffrage, but she never lost sight of the bigger picture of women’s rights or other reform issues. Throughout her long life she would concern herself with such things as the abolition of slavery, the right for married women to own property, birth control, custody for mothers, education for girls, and relief for suffering families after the Civil War. Her overriding concern was that all individuals have the right of self-determination and should be allowed to have all the tools necessary to do this.

Elizabeth, born on November 12, 1815, was the eighth of eleven children born to Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady. Only she and four sisters survived well into adulthood. After years of miscarriages and exhausted by childbirth, Margaret retreated to her bed in ill health, possibly to avoid any more attempts at having a boy. After menopause, she recovered her health to a degree that Elizabeth’s children remember their grandmother as fun and affectionate. In the meantime, Elizabeth was often cared for by her older sister Tryphena and her husband Edward Bayard.

It’s not uncommon for a daughter to fill the place of a son when there aren’t any boys in the family. Elizabeth Cady had the interests and mental capability to be like a son to her father, to share his intellectual interests and pastimes. She was an accomplished horsewoman, and excelled in mathematics, Latin and Greek and could play chess. She once took a young man who came to read law with her father on a 10 miles ride that left him exhausted. But in Elizabeth’s father’s eyes it wasn’t enough. At the age of eleven when her only brother (Eleazar, aged 20) died, she climbed into her father’s lap to comfort him and he said, “Oh daughter, I wish you were a boy.” As hard as she tried, she always felt inadequate simply because she was a girl and unable to take Eleazar’s place.

Elizabeth's father the Hon. Daniel Cady c. 1835 (source) — Elizabeth’s father the Hon. Daniel Cady c. 1835 (source)

Elizabeth’s father was a prominent attorney who served one term in Congress and later became a judge. As a young girl, Elizabeth would often sit quietly in her father’s office and listen to the women who came seeking help in legal matters. She became aware at an early age of the great disadvantage of women in the legal system. Her brother-in-law, Edward who studied with her father, would tease her by reading the most egregious laws and Bible passages pertaining to women. At that time, women had virtually no legal rights; they couldn’t own property, in fact any property they inherited became the property of their husbands when they married to do with as he saw fit; wages they earned became the property of their husbands; they had no custody rights; in fact they were the property of their husbands. This struck Elizabeth as unfair, in fact as a young girl she marked the worst passages in her father’s law books and planned to cut them out, but a friend revealed her plan and her father explained to her that it wouldn’t make any difference, the laws would still exist.

Growing up Elizabeth attended Johnstown academy. Working to earn her father’s love she excelled and received many honors, often out performing the boys in her classes. In spite of this, when it was time for the boys to go on to Union College, she couldn’t. They didn’t admit women. Once again, the system seemed unfair to Elizabeth. Although her father considered the subjects she excelled at unfeminine, she was encouraged intellectually by a neighbor, the Rev. Simon Hosack and at Edward’s urging, Judge Cady did agree to send her to the Troy Female Seminary where she learned subjects more “appropriate” for a young woman, such as music, dancing and French. This did little to instill in her a liking for these subjects. In fact, she particularly disliked sewing, calling the needle “that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.”

After graduating from school, Elizabeth spent time in the Bayard’s home and that of her cousin Gerrit Smith a prominent abolitionist. There she made the acquaintance of Henry Brewster Stanton a young attorney who also supported the abolitionist cause. Over the years Edward’s teasing had become affection, but Elizabeth had no desire to betray her sister, so when Henry Stanton proposed marriage to her, she accepted. Edward tried to intervene by disparaging Stanton to Elizabeth’s father who was not a staunch abolitionist, and she was convinced to break off the engagement. But, Henry was persistent.

In 1840, Henry was planning to go to England to attend the first world slavery convention. He told Elizabeth that he would be gone for 8 months and asked her again to marry him. She accepted and within a few days they were married and on their way to England. Their experiences there would set the stage for the beginnings of the suffrage movement in America.

Elizabeth and Henry arrived in London with some of the most well-known abolitionists in the United States: James and Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. When they reached the convention they were told that women were not allowed to participate; even though Lucretia was an official delegate, the women couldn’t speak or vote. In fact, they had to sit in a partitioned off space away from the men. They were outraged. William Lloyd Garrison was so incensed that he refused to participate and sat with the women. In spite of this, the situation gave Elizabeth the opportunity to get to know Lucretia Mott who would be an important mentor to her in her reform activities.

Stanton with sons Daniel and Henry c. 1848 (source)

Once Elizabeth and Henry returned from England they moved in with the Cady’s for a time while Henry read law with Judge Cady. They then moved to Boston. In Boston, Elizabeth thrived in the social and intellectual climate, but that changed when they moved to Seneca Falls in 1847. It wasn’t long before she began to feel an intense “mental hunger.” Elizabeth was an excellent mother and housekeeper. In a time when the infant mortality rate was around 50%, she raised seven children to adulthood, having her children with midwives rather than doctors, using homeopathic medicines and sticking to a strict healthy diet. But, this wasn’t enough for her, so when she met with Lucretia Mott and three other women in the summer of 1848, she was ready to campaign for a cause – women’s rights.

In July of 1848, at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention, 100 of the 300 attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments which had been written by Stanton: 68 women and 32 men. Among these were Daniel Anthony, his wife Lucy and his daughter Mary. His daughter Susan B. Anthony was away at college, but would make the acquaintance of Elizabeth soon after the convention, beginning a friendship and partnership that would last for the rest of their lives.

Initially, Susan and Elizabeth worked in the temperance movement together, but soon women’s rights and suffrage in particular took up most of their time. Their skills complemented each other. Elizabeth took speaking engagements, but was more restricted to the homefront, while Susan, who remained single, had the freedom to travel. Elizabeth was the better writer and wrote many of Susan’s speeches, where Susan, as Elizabeth said, “was the better critic. She supplies facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric.” Together they worked on the expansion of the 1848 Women’s Property Act, giving women more legal rights, and when the Civil War began, as many women did, they set their political concerns aside to found the Loyal League for the purpose of relieving the suffering of families whose men were fighting.

Stanton with Susan B. Anthony c. 1900, Library of Congress digital ID cph.3a02558 (source)

Elizabeth worked hard with all the abolitionists toward passage of the 13^th Amendment gathering signatures and campaigning to ensure its passage in 1865, but when discussion of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments began there were disagreements. The question was whether to fight for suffrage for African-American men first and then for women, or to fight for both at the same time. With Andrew Johnson in the White House, the situation for freed slaves was desperate in many ways. Southern states were passing laws making life very difficult, such as the law that would require the arrest of any black man without a job. In one incident in Memphis TN, in May of 1866, when former black Union soldiers were discharged and ordered to turn in their arms, former confederate soldiers attacked a large community targeting hospitals and schools run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. The riot which lasted for 2 days before federal troops could arrive resulted in the deaths of 46 black men, women, and children, 285 maimed, and over $100,000 worth of damage to property owned by African-Americans. There were no deaths or injuries of white people, and no one was arrested.

Elizabeth and Susan wanted suffrage for black men, but they wanted it for women at the same time. They wanted the removal of the word male in the amendments, making them applicable to all citizens, but many of the prominent men and some women were afraid that the inclusion of women in the right to vote would result in the defeat of the amendments. The 14^th Amendment was presented and passed with the word male included. When work began on the 15^th Amendment, the disagreement caused a major split among women and their supporters resulting in the formation of two separate organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association founded by Stanton and Anthony, joined by Sojourner Truth and Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the American Woman Suffrage Association which included Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, among others.

Over the next 20 years, Elizabeth and Susan would work together publishing a weekly paper, Revolution, with articles covering a wide range of women’s issues. They would tour the country speaking, work toward suffrage in various states, and write. When it was proposed that the two Women’s Suffrage organizations merge in 1890, Stanton was opposed. Many of the more conservative and religious women had distanced themselves from her over the years. In spite of this she was elected the first president of the new National American Woman Suffrage Association.

In many ways Elizabeth became even more radical over the years, supporting divorce rights, birth control, employment rights, and even interracial marriage, issues that more religiously conservative women didn’t want to get involved in. She also created intense controversy when she wrote The Woman’s Bible, a reinterpretation of the Bible from a feminist perspective. This and the fact that Anthony actively mentored younger women in the movement, may have contributed to the fact that Susan B. Anthony came to be seen as the founder of the movement. In recent years though, Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been recognized more and has reemerged in many ways as the Mother of the Suffrage movement.

Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt and Lucretia Mott on a 1948 stamp commemorating 100 years since the Seneca Falls Convention (source)

After her death on October 26, 1902, Susan B. Anthony was asked about their relationship and the movement.

“Through the early days, when the world was against us, we stood together. Mrs. Stanton was always a courageous woman, a leader of thought and new movements. I always called her the philosopher and statesman of our movement.”

Some of her writings include
History of Woman Suffrage; Volumes 1–3 (written with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage; vol 4–6 completed by other authors, including Anthony, Gage, and Ida Harper) (1881–1922)
The Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898)
Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898)
Solitude of Self – originally delivered as a speech and considered by some to be the best thing she wrote.

Read Solitude of Self

Resources
Along with Stanton’s own works, you might be interested in these.
New York Times Obituary for Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith

Anti-suffrage Cartoons

Once the suffrage movement got going, it met with fierce resistance in some circles. These women were ridiculed and reviled, portrayed as neglecting their homes, as “unsexed” bitter women, or just simply ridiculous. Here are a few cartoons meant to convince people that if women won the right to vote, it would be a disaster.

“It is time that the women who are opposed to the concession of the parliamentary franchise to women should make themselves fully and widely heard. The matter is urgent. Unless those who hold that the success of the women’s suffrage movement would bring disaster upon England are prepared to take immediate and effective action, judgement may go by default and our country drift towards a momentous revolution, both social and political, before it has realised the dangers involved.” Manifesto of the Anti-Suffrage League 1908

Surely, women couldn’t keep up with their housework AND vote!

The argument that empowering women automatically meant dis-empowering men.

I guess marriage would have “tamed” them.

Considering several prominent suffragists were involved in the free love movement, this doesn’t really hold water.

Women such as Fanny Wright and Anna Dickinson were eloquent and gifted speakers.

Being pro-woman doesn’t mean being anti-man, although some people would like you to think that.

Regardless of what many people want, time moves on and we will never be crammed back into our “grandmother’s pattern.”

The Anti’s Alphabet

The Woman’s Protest, an anti-suffrage newspaper, published this “Anti’s Alphabet” in August, 1912.

A is for Antis with Banner afloat;
B is for Battle against woman’s vote.
C is for Children we fight to protect;
D is for Duties we never neglect.
E is for Energy strengthened by hope.
F is for Folly with which we must cope.
G is the germ of unrest in the brain.
H is for Home, which we mean to maintain.
I is Insurgency now in the air;
J is calm Judgement we’re bringing to bear.
K is for Knights, our American men;
L, Loyal Service far out of our ken.
M is for Might in our cause to prevail;
N, Noble standards that naught can assail.
O, Obligations we cannot ignore;
P is for Principle marching before.
Q is the Quibble which we must combat;
R is for Reason that answers it pat.
S is Sound Sense, which we have on our side;
T is for Truths that cannot be denied.
U is for Union, whose aid we entreat;
V, Votes for women, we’re sworn to defeat.
W is wages the suffragettes claim;
X is for Xanthic, the color and fame.
Y is for Yankee, of Red, White and Blue;
Z is the Zeal to protect them for you.

What are your thoughts? Does any of this sound familiar? Let us know.

Fanny Wright – “or a goose that deserves to be hissed”

“It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor.” ~ Francis Wright

When the people gathered at Seneca Falls made their Declaration of Sentiments, and voted on their resolutions, the ideas weren’t new. There had been a number of women and men who had championed women’s rights over the years and laid the groundwork for the meeting in New York in 1848. The fact that Lucretia Mott could speak before a mixed group of men and women without ridicule, is testament to the fact that other women had paved the way. One of these women was Frances (Fanny) Wright.

Born September 6, 1795 in Dundee, Scotland, Fanny grew up well-taken care of, but somewhat isolated. Orphaned at the age of 2 and raised by relatives of moderate means, she was unusually well-educated for the time, partly due to access to a college library where an uncle taught. When she was 18, Fanny was introduced to intellectual circles in Glasgow and began writing poetry and plays. Thomas Jefferson filled pages of his commonplace book with quotes from her A Few Days in Athens, a fictionalized exploration of the philosophy of Epicurus, saying “it was a treat to me of the highest order.”

One thing that caught Fanny’s imagination was the new country across the Atlantic. Between 1818 and 1820 Fanny and her sister Camilla traveled around the new United States. They were well received into society, made many new friends, and even had Fanny’s play, Altorf, produced and published. To many it was a brazen act, having her name associated with a public production. On returning to Britain, she published an account of her travels as Views of Society and Manners in America. It was very complementary of the US and thus controversial as well. Fanny was becoming a woman to take seriously.

I think it’s fair to say she became enamored of the country and its possibilities. There was one blot, however, slavery. It disgusted her, but she seemed to understand the economic realities of the institution. In 1825, she wrote A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South. In it she details a plan to provide slaves a way to earn their freedom while developing skills and education they would need to make it as free individuals. She was unable to get support from the government for her plan, but she was willing to invest her own resources to put her plan to the test.

In 1826 with support from Lafayette and then senator Andrew Jackson, Fanny purchased acreage in Tennessee, near Memphis, and established her utopian community – Nashoba. Starting with just over 300 acres, 30 slaves, her sister Camilla, and ten white volunteers, they began the experiment. It was hard work and although unaccustomed to manual labor Fanny worked alongside the slaves and volunteers.

At the end of the first year, having been ill much of the time, possibly with malaria, she was in need of rest and a different climate, so Fanny returned to England to raise funds and support for her vision. While she was gone things fell apart. Accounts of harsh treatment of slaves, and sexual relationships outside of marriage and between whites and blacks, reached the newspapers and caused a general uproar among the public. Although Fanny’s unconventional views of marriage and sexual freedom meant that she was not overly concerned with much of the behavior, the community had drifted away from her original vision. It was not a success financially and they had been unable to sustain the atmosphere of cooperation and respect that she envisioned. In 1829, Fanny granted the slaves their freedom and transported them to Haiti where they could begin new lives.

Fanny moved to New Harmony, Indiana, another failed utopian settlement started by a friend from England, Robert Owen. Although the communal aspects of New Harmony were unsuccessful, it was still a secular community, where Fanny’s ideas were more welcome than in Tennessee. She joined Robert Dale Owen, the son, in publishing the New Harmony Gazette where she found a powerful vehicle for spreading her ideas. And she had plenty of ideas. Fanny spoke out for women’s rights, birth control, sexual freedom, equality between the sexes and races. She advocated a system of free, secular public schools, greater separation of church and state, and challenged organized religion.

On July 4, 1828, Fanny spoke at the Independence Day celebration in New Harmony. She was a tremendous success and decided to set out to take her message to others in the country. Not only was she an excellent writer, but she was an eloquent speaker. Frances Trollope said, “all my expectations fell far short of the splendor, the brilliance, the overwhelming eloquence of this extraordinary orator.” People flocked to hear her, some because they were interested in her ideas, but many because of the controversy. She was controversial, not only because of her topics, but because it was unheard of for a woman to speak in front of a mixed crowd, leading to accusations of “promiscuity” in her meetings and being called “The Great Red Harlot.”

490px-1829-Frances-Wright-goose-caricature — ‘A DownWright Gabbler, or a goose that deserves to be hissed –,’ an 1829 caricature of Frances Wright.

After touring, Fanny and Robert Dale Owen relocated to New York, renamed the New Harmony Gazette the Free Enquirer and became leaders in the free thought movement and increasingly in the labor movement. Many of Fanny’s society friends distanced themselves from her, and as time went on the public became increasing hostile, even threatening. It was at this time that Fanny went to Haiti to relocate the slaves whom she had freed. She was accompanied on her trip to Haiti by Guillaume D’Arusmont. They became lovers and on her return she found that she was pregnant. Deciding that she couldn’t face the increasing hostility of the public, she left for Europe with Guillaume.

Fanny and D’Arusmont married, had one daughter, Sylva, and lived in a kind of self-imposed isolation in Europe. Eventually, in 1835, they returned to America settling in Cincinnati. After a brief speaking tour in support of President Jackson, where her appearance provoked near riots, Fanny retired from public life. She died in Cincinnati in 1852.

It would be easy to see Fanny’s life as a failure, but it takes time for new and radical ideas to take root in the consciousness of society, and there has to be someone who is willing to begin that process. Fanny Wright paved the way for women to speak in public rallies, edit newspapers, and represent radical causes. Each time one person speaks up, it makes it easier for the next person, and brings us closer to the goal.

“An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.” A Few Days in Athens (1822) Vol. II

Resources
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The Utiopian Visions of Franny Wright
Frances Wright (1795 – 1852)

Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention

“Father what is a Legislature?
A representative body elected by people of the state.
Are women people?
No my son, criminals, lunatics, and women are not people.
Do legislators legislate for nothing?
Oh no; they are paid a salary.
By whom?
By the people.
Are women people?
Of course, my son, just as much as men are.”
(Are Women People? by Alice Duer Miller)

The more I read about the women’s suffrage movement the more I stand in awe at what the many woman who went before us accomplished against great odds. They educated themselves and spoke out at a time when it was considered inappropriate at best and scandalous by many. They were arrested, went on hunger strikes, and in the case of Emily Davison died after being run over by a horse. Many had the support of fathers or husbands who agreed with them and supported them, but others opted not to be constrained by the bonds of marriage.

The women who fought for the right to vote in the United States and Great Britain were as varied as women are today. They were Atheists and Quakers, school teachers, writers, speakers, and housewives. Many of them were abolitionists. There were harsh disagreements between them about what the goals were and how they could be achieved. For many the original goal wasn’t even the right to vote, but simply the right to be seen as equal before the law in things such as property rights.

It is difficult to say when the women’s suffrage movement began. One landmark event, however, was the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, held July 19 – 20, 1848. According to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s own account it was organized on short notice. Lucretia Mott and her husband were visiting the area and five women met for tea – Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Coffin Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Jane Hunt. Together they decided to hold a convention and placed an ad in the local newspaper the next day, July 14, 1848.

Lucretia and James Mott – Lucretia was an eloquent speaker at the convention. James presided over the second day.

Prior to the convention Stanton, with help from the other women, drafted a Declaration of Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that “all men and women are created equal.” Attached to this was a list of grievances. The Convention would take place over two days, the first of which would include only women where the Declaration of Sentiments would be discussed one paragraph at a time and modified as necessary. The second day, men were invited to attend. Ironically, Lucretia Mott’s husband, James, was asked to moderate the meeting on the second day because it was considered inappropriate for a woman to preside over a meeting with men in attendance.

During the discussion of the second day, the only resolution to cause much dissent was the ninth, added by Stanton.

Resolved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.

Even Lucretia Mott thought it shouldn’t be included. Most were concerned that it would detract from the other resolutions that they believed were more reasonable. The tide turned when Fredrick Douglass rose to speak. He was an eloquent speaker and convinced the crowd that the country would be better off if women were involved in the political sphere as well as social and religious affairs. The resolution passed.

In spite of the passage of all the resolutions, there were undercurrents of disagreement and discontent. Of the 300 attendees, only 100 signed the Declaration. Word got back to Stanton in the following days of the condemnation of the convention from various pulpits, even though the convention had been open to comments from the floor. Newspapers published opinions from both ends of the spectrum. As contentious as the feminist movement in recent times has been you can imagine the reaction they received in a time when women were in many ways considered the property of the men in their lives.

Over the next seventy years, there would be many disagreements between the women and men involved in this fight. The fight to achieve the vote for African-American men after the Civil War, would cause division, some feeling that the two causes must be separated or risk losing the right for black men. When it became clear that the resistance in Congress to women’s suffrage was too strong, the issues were separated and the Fifteenth Amendment passed giving African-American men the right to vote. Another major disagreement would be over the approach, fighting for the right one state at a time or pushing for a constitutional amendment. Ultimately, each of these things occurred.

Some consider the Seneca Falls convention a minor event in the history of suffrage. Women had been working in small local groups for women’s rights for years. Two years later, in 1850, the National Women’s Rights Convention organized by Paulina Wright Davis and Lucy Stone would draw women from across the country. Seneca Falls may only be symbolic, but regardless the movement was on its way.

There are many women who contributed to women’s rights in general and suffrage in particular over the years. Most of the women at Seneca Falls wouldn’t live to see the Nineteenth Amendment pass. In future posts I want to look at women in this earlier generation, but also at some of the women who brought the dream to fruition here in the US and also in Great Britain.

To see the entire Declaration of Sentiments click here.
Read more about the suffrage movement here.

Resources
Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times by Alice Duer Miller
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
Eight Years and More by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith

Bicycles and Women’s Emancipation

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.”

Susan B. Anthony, 1896

For a little fun today, let’s look at something simple that made a big impact of the freedom of women – the bicycle! By the 1890s, bicycling had become very popular in the United States as well as in Europe, and women weren’t going to be left out of the fun. Bicycles allowed women more freedom of movement out of their own neighborhoods and into the world at large. They could go farther in less time and it was much cheaper to maintain than a horse!

Susan B. Anthony said in an interview with the New York World in 1896, that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” Francis Willard, president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, even wrote a book about how she learned to ride a bicycle later in life.

But, for a woman to be truly comfortable on a bicycle, not to mention safe, their clothing needed to be modified. In the 1970s when bell-bottoms became popular, we used to put rubber bands around our ankles to keep our pants legs from getting tangled up in the gears. I can’t imagine trying to ride with long skirts.

“Her miserable style of dress is a consequence of her present vassalage not its cause. Woman must become ennobled, in the quality of her being. When she is so, . . . she will be able, unquestioned, to dictate the style of her dress.” Lucy Stone

So in the 1890s, “Bloomers”, or Turkish trousers, which had come and gone from fashion in the 1850s, made a comeback. This was an outfit that included full trousers gathered at the ankle with a short dress over them. (Although not developed by Amelia Bloomer, she advocated them in her magazine The Lily.)

Around the same time there was a movement toward more rational dress for women, due in part to the unhealthy nature (not to mention extreme discomfort) of corsets. Bloomers were soon displaced by an even more “radical” getup – rationals.

“Woman will never hold her true position, until, by a firm muscle and a steady nerve, she can maintain the RIGHTS she claims . . . but she cannot make the first move . . . until she casts away her swaddling clothes.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Were increased freedom of women on bicycles and the corresponding change in dress in part responsible for a move toward women’s liberation, or were they the result of it? It’s an interesting question, but there will always be those who, even when they accept a new found freedom will try to control it. Women were cautioned not to develop the “bicycle face” and warned that their vocal chords were changing because of bicycle riding, making women loud talkers with harsh voices. Check out this long list of don’t’s for women cyclists at Brainpickings.org, including such things as the following:

“Don’t chew gum. Exercise your jaws in private.”

“Don’t try to ride in your brother’s clothes ‘to see how it feels.’”

“Don’t scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run.”

Sigh. . . Enjoy your freedom ladies. It was hard fought for and not every woman in the world has the same freedoms today. The fight isn’t over!