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“It is the nation’s time”: How women won the vote
Nice long informative article-a lot of bio
“Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had said, but it seemed that no one had. “I have argued with [Wendell] Phillips and the whole fraternity and all will favor enfranchising the negro without us,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Susan B. Anthony as soon as the war was over. “Woman’s cause is in deep water.”
For almost two decades Stanton had been passionately committed to securing equal rights for American women. The author of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments that had been read at the Seneca Falls woman’s rights convention in 1848, which she had helped to organize, Stanton had been married for twenty-five years to Henry Brewster Stanton, a well-known abolitionist whom she had met at the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. Defying stereotypes about women activists being mean, mannish, and unmarried, she had given birth to seven children; she was round and rosy; her hair was snow white, her manner amiable, her dress an unoffending and forgettable calico. Said a friend of the fossilized men who sat open-mouthed when Stanton appeared in public, “Our fossil is first amazed—next bewildered—then fascinated—then convinced—not exactly of the doctrine of woman’s suffrage, perhaps—but at any rate that a woman to be an advocate of that doctrine need neither be a fright nor a fury.”
As a girl, she had been accomplished in chess, horseback riding, Greek, and the law (her father was a judge), and now, at fifty years old, she had not forgotten being told she should study only French, music, and dance—or that her father wished she had been a boy. She hadn’t wanted to be a boy; she just wanted to be a person who enjoyed the same privileges.
Growing up in Johnstown, New York, she had been influenced by the remarkable evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, one of the burned-over district’s most charismatic preachers. At twenty-nine, while practicing law in Adams, New York, Finney had undergone a conversion experience during which he committed himself to teaching the Gospels. He was ordained three years later, in 1824. In cities such as Utica, Auburn, and Troy and then Boston and New York, he sermonized in a plain but vigorous evangelical style that galvanized listeners; speaking at a giant revival in Rochester, New York, he told his audience that each individual was a moral agent, that slavery was wrong—he refused to give communion to slaveholders—that liquor, tobacco, and caffeine were pernicious, and that men, and women too, could relinquish sin, renew themselves, and love God without intermediaries. He actually welcomed women into the prayer meeting, where they were invited to testify, and took his sense of equal rights to Oberlin College, a pioneering institution in coeducation that, regardless of race, admitted women as well as men. “Men came to Oberlin for various reasons,” the activist Lucy Stone would say, “women, because they had nowhere else to go.”
For almost two decades Stanton had been passionately committed to securing equal rights for American women. The author of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments that had been read at the Seneca Falls woman’s rights convention in 1848, which she had helped to organize, Stanton had been married for twenty-five years to Henry Brewster Stanton, a well-known abolitionist whom she had met at the home of her cousin Gerrit Smith. Defying stereotypes about women activists being mean, mannish, and unmarried, she had given birth to seven children; she was round and rosy; her hair was snow white, her manner amiable, her dress an unoffending and forgettable calico. Said a friend of the fossilized men who sat open-mouthed when Stanton appeared in public, “Our fossil is first amazed—next bewildered—then fascinated—then convinced—not exactly of the doctrine of woman’s suffrage, perhaps—but at any rate that a woman to be an advocate of that doctrine need neither be a fright nor a fury.”
As a girl, she had been accomplished in chess, horseback riding, Greek, and the law (her father was a judge), and now, at fifty years old, she had not forgotten being told she should study only French, music, and dance—or that her father wished she had been a boy. She hadn’t wanted to be a boy; she just wanted to be a person who enjoyed the same privileges.
Growing up in Johnstown, New York, she had been influenced by the remarkable evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, one of the burned-over district’s most charismatic preachers. At twenty-nine, while practicing law in Adams, New York, Finney had undergone a conversion experience during which he committed himself to teaching the Gospels. He was ordained three years later, in 1824. In cities such as Utica, Auburn, and Troy and then Boston and New York, he sermonized in a plain but vigorous evangelical style that galvanized listeners; speaking at a giant revival in Rochester, New York, he told his audience that each individual was a moral agent, that slavery was wrong—he refused to give communion to slaveholders—that liquor, tobacco, and caffeine were pernicious, and that men, and women too, could relinquish sin, renew themselves, and love God without intermediaries. He actually welcomed women into the prayer meeting, where they were invited to testify, and took his sense of equal rights to Oberlin College, a pioneering institution in coeducation that, regardless of race, admitted women as well as men. “Men came to Oberlin for various reasons,” the activist Lucy Stone would say, “women, because they had nowhere else to go.”
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/18/it_is_the_nations_time_how_women_won_the_vote/