Women's Movement In America

Part 2

The Struggle for Education. Along with criticism, there was carried
on a constructive struggle for better educational facilities for women
who had been from the beginning excluded from every college in the
country. In this long battle, Emma Willard and Mary Lyon led the way;
the former founded a seminary at Troy, New York; and the latter made the
beginnings of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Oberlin College in
Ohio, established in 1833, opened its doors to girls and from it were
graduated young students to lead in the woman movement. Sarah J. Hale,
who in 1827 became the editor of a "Ladies' Magazine," published in
Boston, conducted a campaign for equal educational opportunities which helped to bear fruit in the founding of Vassar College shortly after the
Civil War.

The Desire to Effect Reforms. As they came to study their own history
and their own part in civilization, women naturally became deeply
interested in all the controversies going on around them. The temperance
question made a special appeal to them and they organized to demand the
right to be heard on it. In 1846 the "Daughters of Temperance" formed a
secret society favoring prohibition. They dared to criticize the
churches for their indifference and were so bold as to ask that
drunkenness be made a ground for divorce.

The slavery issue even more than temperance called women into public
life. The Grimk sisters of South Carolina emancipated their bondmen,
and one of these sisters, exiled from Charleston for her "Appeal to the
Christian Women of the South," went North to work against the slavery
system. In 1837 the National Women's Anti-Slavery Convention met in New
York; seventy-one women delegates represented eight states. Three years
later eight American women, five of them in Quaker costume, attended the
World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, much to the horror of the men,
who promptly excluded them from the sessions on the ground that it was
not fitting for women to take part in such meetings.

In other spheres of activity, especially social service, women steadily
enlarged their interest. Nothing human did they consider alien to them.
They inveighed against cruel criminal laws and unsanitary prisons. They
organized poor relief and led in private philanthropy. Dorothea Dix
directed the movement that induced the New York legislature to establish
in 1845 a separate asylum for the criminal insane. In the same year
Sarah G. Bagley organized the Lowell Female Reform Association for the
purpose of reducing the long hours of labor for women, safeguarding "the
constitutions of future generations." Mrs. Eliza Woodson Farnham, matron
in Sing Sing penitentiary, was known throughout the nation for her
social work, especially prison reform. Wherever there were misery and
suffering, women were preparing programs of relief.