Womens Rights

NATIONAL STRUGGLE FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE

The Beginnings of Organization. As women surmounted one obstacle
after another, the agitation for equal suffrage came to the front. If
any year is to be fixed as the date of its beginning, it may very well
be 1850, when the suffragists of Ohio urged the state constitutional
convention to confer the vote upon them. With apparent spontaneity there
were held in the same year state suffrage conferences in Indiana,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts; and connections were formed among the
leaders of these meetings. At the same time the first national suffrage
convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the call of
eighty-nine leading men and women representing six states. Accounts of
the convention were widely circulated in this country and abroad.
English women, for instance, Harriet Martineau, sent words of
appreciation for the work thus inaugurated. It inspired a leading
article in the "Westminster Review," which deeply interested the
distinguished economist, John Stuart Mill. Soon he was the champion of
woman suffrage in the British Parliament and the author of a powerful
tract _The Subjection of Women_, widely read throughout the
English-speaking world. Thus do world movements grow. Strange to relate
the women of England were enfranchised before the adoption of the
federal suffrage amendment in America.

The national suffrage convention of 1850 was followed by an
extraordinary outburst of agitation. Pamphlets streamed from the press.
Petitions to legislative bodies were drafted, signed, and presented.
There were addresses by favorite orators like Garrison, Phillips, and
Curtis, and lectures and poems by men like Emerson, Longfellow, and
Whittier. In 1853 the first suffrage paper was founded by the wife of a
member of Congress from Rhode Island. By this time the last barrier to
white manhood suffrage in the North had been swept away and the woman's
movement was gaining momentum every year.