The National Women's Rights Convention was an annual series of meetings that increased the visibility of the early women's rights movement in the United States. First held in 1850 in Worcester, Massachusetts, the National Women's Rights Convention combined both female and male leadership and attracted a wide base of support including temperance advocates and abolitionists. Speeches were given on the subjects of equal wages, expanded education and career opportunities, women's property rights, marriage reform, and temperance. Chief among the concerns discussed at the convention was the passage of laws that would give women the right to vote.
Background
Seneca Falls Convention In 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton traveled with their husbands to London for the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, but they were not allowed to participate because they were women. Mott and Stanton became friends there and agreed to organize a convention to further the cause of women's rights. It was not until the summer of 1848 that Mott, Stanton, and three other women organized the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention. It was attended by some 300Mani, 2007, p. 62. people over two days, including about 40 men. The resolution on the subject of votes for women caused dissension until Frederick Douglass took the platform with a passionate speech in favor of having a suffrage statement within the proposed Declaration of Sentiments. One hundred of the attendees subsequently signed the Declaration.
Other early women's rights conventions Signers of the Declaration hoped for "a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country" to follow their own meeting. Because of the fame and drawing power of Lucretia Mott, who would not be visiting the Upstate New York area for much longer, some of the participants at Seneca Falls organized another regional meeting two weeks later, the Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848, featuring many of the same speakers. The first women's rights convention to be organized on a statewide basis was the Ohio Women's Convention at Salem in 1850.Wellman, Judith (2008). "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention and the Origin of the Women's Rights Movement", pp. 15, 84. National Park Service, Women's Rights National Historical Park. Wellman is identified as the author of this document here.
Planning
In April 1850, Ohio women held a convention to begin petitioning their constitutional convention for women's equal legal and political rights. Lucy Stone, who had agitated for women's rights while a student at Ohio's Oberlin College and begun lecturing on women's rights after graduating in 1847, wrote to the Ohio organizers pledging Massachusetts to follow their lead.Million, 2003, pp. 77–87, 102–04.
At the end of the New England Anti-Slavery Convention on May 30, 1850, an announcement was made that a meeting would be held to consider whether to hold a woman's rights convention. That evening, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis presided over a large meeting in Boston's Melodeon Hall, while Lucy Stone served as secretary. Stone, Henry C. Wright, William Lloyd Garrison, and Samuel Brooke spoke of the need for such a convention. Garrison, whose name had headed the first woman suffrage petition sent to the Massachusetts legislature the previous year,Million, 2003, pp. 99–100, 292n. 23. said, "I conceive that the first thing to be done by the women of this country is to demand their political enfranchisement. Among the 'self-evident truths' announced in the Declaration of Independence is this – 'All government derives its just power from the consent of the governed.'" The meeting decided to call a convention and set Worcester, Massachusetts, as the place and October 16 and 17, 1850, as the date. It appointed Davis, Stone, Abby Kelley Foster, Harriot Kezia Hunt, Eliza J. Kenney, Dora Taft, and Eliza H. Taft a committee of arrangements, with Davis and Stone as the committee of correspondence."Women's Rights Convention," Liberator, June 7, 1850, p. 91.
Davis and Stone asked William Elder, a retired Philadelphia physician, to draw up the convention callMillion, 2003, p. 105 while they set about securing signatures to it and lining up speakers. "We need all the women who are accustomed to speak in public – every stick of timber that is sound," Stone wrote to Antoinette Brown, a fellow Oberlin student who was preparing for the ministry., Lasser, Carol, and Marlene Deahl Merrill, eds. Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846–1993. University of Chicago Press, 1987, . pp. 72–73. On Davis's list to contact was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who sent her regrets along with a letter of support and a speech to be read in her name. Stanton wished to stay at home because she would be in the late stages of pregnancy.
After completing her part of the correspondence, Stone went to Illinois to visit a brother. Within days of her arrival, he died of cholera and Stone was left to settle his affairs and accompany his pregnant widow back east. Fearing she might not be able to return for three months, she wrote to Davis asking her to take charge of issuing the call., Million, 2003, 293n. 16. The call began appearing in September, with the convention date pushed back one week and Stone's name heading the list of eighty-nine signatories: thirty-three from Massachusetts, ten from Rhode Island, seventeen from New York, eighteen from Pennsylvania, one from Maryland, and nine from Ohio.Stanton et al, 1881, 820–21. While the call began circulating, Stone lay near death in a roadside inn. Having decided not to tarry in the disease-ridden Wabash Valley, she had begun a stagecoach trek back across Indiana with her sister-in-law, and within days contracted typhoid fever that kept her bed-ridden for three weeks. She arrived back in Massachusetts in October, just two weeks before the convention.Million, 2003, pp. 105–06.
1850 in Worcester The first National Women's Rights Convention met in Brinley Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, on October 23–24, 1850.Proceedings of the Woman's Rights Convention, Held at Worcester, October 23rd and 24th, 1850. Boston: Prentiss and Sawyer, 1851. Some 900 people showed up for the first session, men forming the majority, with several newspapers reporting over a thousand attendees by the afternoon of the first day,McMillen, 2008. p. 108. and more turned away outside.Kerr, 1992, p. 59. Delegates came from eleven states, including one delegate from California – a state only a few weeks old.American National Biography. "Stone, Lucy". Retrieved March 10, 2009.
The meeting was called to order by Sarah H. Earle, a leader in Worcester's antislavery organizations. Paulina Wright Davis was chosen to preside and in her opening address called for "the emancipation of a class, the redemption of half the world, and a conforming re-organization of all social, political, and industrial interests and institutions".
The first resolution from the business committee defined the movement's objective: "to secure for [woman] political, legal, and social equality with man until her proper sphere is determined by what alone should determine it, her powers and capacities, strengthened and refined by an education in accordance with her nature".Proceedings ... 1850, p. 14. Another set of resolutions put forth women's claim for equal civil and political rights and demanded that the word "male" be stricken from every state constitution. Others addressed specific issues of property rights, access to education, and employment opportunities, while others defined the movement as an effort to secure the "natural and civil rights" of all women, including women held in slavery.Proceedings ... 1850, pp. 15–17.
The convention considered how best to organize to promote their goals. Mindful of many members' opposition to organized societies, Wendell Phillips said there was no need for a formal association or founding document: annual conventions and a standing committee to arrange them was organization enough, and resolutions adopted at the conventions could serve as a declaration of principles. Reflecting its egalitarian principles, the business committee appointed a Central Committee of nine women and nine men. It also appointed committees on Education, Industrial Avocations, Civil and Political Functions, and Social Relations to gather and publish information useful for guiding public opinion toward establishing "Woman's co-equal sovereignty with Man". Proceedings ... 1850, pp. 16, 18.
Convention speakers included William Lloyd Garrison, William Henry Channing, Wendell Phillips, Harriot Kezia Hunt, Ernestine Rose, Antoinette Brown, Sojourner Truth, Stephen Symonds Foster, Abby Kelley Foster, Abby H. Price, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass. Stone served on the business committee and did not speak until the final evening. As an appointee to the committee on Civil and Political Functions, she urged the assemblage to petition their state legislatures for the right of suffrage, the right of married women to hold property, and as many other specific rights as they felt practical to seek in their respective states. Then she gave a brief speech, saying, "We want to be something more than the appendages of Society; we want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was the "relict" of somebody."Kerr, 1995, p. 60.
Susan B. Anthony, who was not at the convention, later said it was reading this speech that converted her to the cause of women's rights., Hays, 1961, p. 88.
Stone paid to have the proceedings of the convention printed as booklets; she would repeat this practice after each of the next six annual conventions. The booklets were sold at her lectures and at subsequent conventions as Woman's Rights Tracts.Blackwell, 1930, p. 100.
The report of the convention in the New York Tribune for Europe inspired women in Sheffield, England, to draw up a petition for woman suffrage and present it to the House of LordsMillion, 2003, p. 110. and Harriet Taylor Mill in 1851 to write The Enfranchisement of Women.About.com. A Soul as Free as the Air: About Lucy Stone. Retrieved on March 18, 2009; Sunshine for Women. Book Summaries. The Enfranchisement of Women (1851) , Harriet Taylor Mill. Retrieved on March 18, 2009. Harriet Martineau wrote a letter to Davis in August 1851 to thank her for sending a copy of the proceedings: "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."Spender, 1983, p. 187.
1851 in Worcester A second national convention was held October 15–16, 1851, again in Brinley Hall, with Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis presiding. Harriet Kezia Hunt and Antoinette Brown gave speeches, while a letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton was read. Lucretia Mott served as an officer of the meeting.National Park Service. Women's Rights. More Women's Rights Conventions. Retrieved on April 1, 2009.
Wendell Phillips made a speech which was so persuasive that it would be sold as a tract until 1920:
Elizabeth Oakes Smith, journalist, author, and member of New York's literary circle attended the 1850 convention, and in 1851 was asked to take the platform. Afterward, she defended the convention and its leaders in articles she wrote for the New York Tribune.Spender, 1983, p. 377.