Hannah Maria Conant Tracy Cutler (December 25, 1815Alexander Street Press. Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000. Author Details: Cutler, Hannah Maria Conant Tracy, 1815–1895 . Retrieved on May 28, 2009. – February 11, 1896James, Notable American Women) was an American abolitionist as well as a leader of the temperance and women's suffrage movements in the United States. Cutler served as president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Cutler helped to shape the merger of two feminist factions into the combined National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
Cutler wrote for newspapers and journals; she drafted laws and authored several books. She lectured on physiology and attained a medical degree at the age of 53. Cutler presented petitions to state and federal legislatures, and helped to form temperance, abolition, suffrage and women's aid societies in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Vermont.
Early life and Oberlin Hannah Maria Conant was born in Becket, Massachusetts, on Christmas, 1815; the second daughter of John Conant and Orpha Johnson Conant. Hannah Maria Conant began at age 14 to study rhetoric and philosophy on her own, and she studied Latin with the family doctor. In 1831, the Conant family moved to Rochester, Ohio.
In 1833, nearby Oberlin College began accepting women students, and Conant asked her father for tuition. He refused; he considered coeducation improper. In response, she married John Martin Tracy (1809–1844), an Oberlin theology student, in 1834. The new Mrs. Hannah Conant Tracy studied her husband's textbooks and the newlyweds discussed what he had learned in class. John Tracy turned to study law, and his wife continued to study his legal homework with him, discovering in the process the common law limitations placed on women, especially married women. Later, John Tracy became an anti-slavery lecturer and activist. The couple had two daughters, Melanie in 1836 and Mary in 1841, and a son was on the way when in August 1844, John Tracy died of pneumonia taken as a result of exposure and abuse suffered when he was pursued by a mob while helping escaped slaves. The young widow Hannah Conant Tracy moved with her children to Rochester, Ohio where her father still lived, and bore her third child: John Martin Tracy, named after his martyred father.Bonham, Fifty Years' Recollections, 1883. To support her family, Tracy wrote for Ohio newspapersGarrison, 1976, p. 324 including for Cassius Marcellus Clay's True American (writing under a pseudonym) and for Josiah A. Harris at the Cleveland Herald. Through her writing she gained a respectable status as a minor literary figure in the West as well as a reputation for her views on woman's rights.Million, 2003, 77 Tracy also taught school, and helped to form a temperance society and a Women's Anti-Slavery Society, which attracted only three members at first.
In the fall of 1846, Tracy received a letter from Lucy Stone at Oberlin College, with whom she had already developed a warm friendship. Stone had decided to become a women's rights reformer after graduating the following summer, and Tracy was one of several known advocates of women's rights from whom Stone sought advice on how to begin. Tracy cautioned that to make woman "both physically and intellectually man's equal" would require a societal revolution that would take at least a generation to accomplish. But saying that much could be done by one woman alone "if she possesses courage enough to act up to her convictions," Tracy advised "a quiet but thorough agitation" among the women at hand. And she asked, "Please write me again and let me know your plan, and also what I can do."Hannah Tracy to Lucy Stone, Oct. 26, 1846, National American Woman Suffrage Association Records, Library of Congress, reel 6:327-29; Million, 2003, p. 77
In early 1847, Hannah Tracy went to Oberlin, opened a boarding house, and enrolled in the ladies' course. She was one of a handful of women who, with Stone, formed an off-campus women's debating club to gain practical rhetorical exercise denied them in their classes.Woman's Journal, Sept. 26, 1896; Million, 2003, p. 81 In June, Tracy spearheaded a brief effort to establish a women's newspaper at the college. The Young Ladies Association voted themselves into an Association of the Oberlin Ladies Banner, the name chosen for their paper, and appointed Tracy editor. But the project failed to win the approval of college officials needed to go forward."Young Ladies Association of Oberlin Collegiate Institute, 1846–50," Oberlin College, entries for June 9, 16, and 23, 1847; Million, 2003, p. 83
After a year of study, Tracy accepted the position of matron of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum at Columbus, Ohio (now the Ohio Institution for the Deaf and Dumb). In Columbus, Tracy met Frances Dana Barker Gage, another abolitionist and feminist; both were interested in advancing the Free Soil Party with its anti-slavery platform. Tracy helped in the effort to elect abolitionist Salmon P. Chase to the United States Senate. Because the Deaf and Dumb Asylum allowed only one of her children to remain in residence with her, in 1849 Tracy accepted a position as principal of the "female department" at Columbus' new public high school. Tracy attended a Presbyterian church in Columbus.
Journalism and women's rights To augment her income as principal, Tracy continued to write for newspapers, especially the Ohio Cultivator, a farmer's newspaper for which she contributed two long-running columns, popular with the readership. One column was "Letters to Housekeepers" directed at farmer's wives, and the other was an advice column for farm girls, where Tracy answered letters under the pen name "Aunt Patience".
Tracy and Gage led the drive to organize a women's rights convention in Akron, in May 1851. Gage was elected president and Cutler secretary of the women's convention, where they met Sojourner Truth and witnessed her famous speech: Ain't I a Woman?. Following the Akron conference, Tracy attended a Peace conference in Columbus, and was chosen as delegate to the upcoming Peace Congress to be held in London in August.
The owner of the Ohio Statesman, Colonel Samuel Medary, asked Tracy to become his special correspondent at The Great Exhibition in London. After the Akron convention, the newspaper paid for Tracy's trip to London so that she could report on the World's Fair.One Half the People Tracy also carried credentials as the United States delegate to the Peace Congress, but arrived one day late, and was able to hear only the closing speeches. While in London, Tracy gave a series of women's rights lectures, the first ones that addressed women's legal rights, and found herself with great authors and members of Parliament taking in her words. The result was that she was invited to speak at colleges and in front of professional organizations; she refused a proposal to become a stage actress. Other speeches she gave covered temperance and physiology. She met Joseph Sturge and William Ewart Gladstone, but was more interested in hearing details about the Emancipation of the British West Indies from anti-slavery activist Anna Knight. Tracy introduced the Bloomer costume to English women.
Upon her return to the United States, Tracy paused in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so she could attend the Free Soil Convention; there she was urged to take the platform and speak about human rights. At the convention in Massillon, Ohio, held in 1852, Tracy was chosen president of the Ohio Woman's Rights Association. Later that year, Tracy married Colonel Samuel Cutler, a widower who had children of his own. The two bought farm land in Dwight, Illinois, near a proposed rail line, and together assumed farm duties. The new Mrs. Hannah Tracy Cutler carried out much of the work herself, including "spinning, weaving, knitting, tailoring, baking, dairying, basket-weaving, shoe-making, and hat-braiding," according to a later account by her daughter Mary. Cutler home-schooled all the children of the family.
Cutler wrote an article for The Una defending the essential difference between men and women:
National stature
Although Tracy did not attend the first three National Women's Rights Conventions, held in the East, she did attend the 1853 convention, held in Cleveland,Million, 2003, p. 155. as well as the 1854 convention, in Philadelphia, where she spoke alongside Ernestine Rose, Frances Gage, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and William Lloyd Garrison.Garrison, 1976, p. 322. Cutler expressed to the convention her belief that the spirit of the Bible was more important than the letter. Rather than focusing on isolated passages that had no modern-day application, Cutler recommended her audience "proclaim the beautiful spirit breathed through all its commands and precepts."Carr, 1996, p. 170. After the 1855 convention that met in Cincinnati adopted a plan of circulating woman suffrage petitions in as many states as possible, Tracy agreed to take up the work in Illinois.Million, 2003, p. 215.
In late May 1856, Cutler was on her way to preside over a Woman's Temperance Convention in Chicago when she heard about arson and crimes committed in Lawrence, Kansas against abolitionists. During the successful temperance convention, Cutler conceived and planned for a Woman's Kansas Aid Convention to follow two weeks afterward, for the purpose of helping displaced citizens and preventing Kansas from becoming a slave state. Frances Dana Barker Gage and Josephine Griffing assisted in the work of gathering supplies and forwarding them to those in need in Kansas. Spurred by the women's effort, Gerrit Smith, Thurlow Weed and other politically active men organized a National Kansas Aid Convention in Buffalo, New York, beginning July 10. Cutler and Gage attended; soon, the Woman's Society was consolidated into the national group.
In October 1859, Cutler joined with Susan B. Anthony on a lecture tour of New York state,Harper, 1899, p. 178. resulting in legislation for expanded property rights for New York women passed the next year. In late 1860, Cutler toured the interior and western parts of Illinois with Gage to influence legislation under consideration in that state.Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III, pp. 561–562. Cutler consulted repeatedly with Abraham Lincoln before he left for Washington, D.C., and she drafted a law affecting married women's property which saw passage in February, 1861. In the spring of 1861, Cutler returned to Ohio to join a group of women arguing before a joint House–Senate committee regarding a woman's right to keep her own earnings, and for a woman's right to joint guardianship of her children.
A year or two later, Cutler presented to the Illinois Assembly petitions for a law which proposed to give a woman guardianship of her children, and to allow a woman to easily assume the estate of her deceased husband if the estate were not more valuable than $5,000, in a manner similar to a state law applying to male widowers. Cutler described the scene in the Assembly: