Votes for Women!: Preface–Chapter 1

Burn was running for reelection in the fall, and most of his constituents were opposed to female suffrage.

Burn was running for reelection in the fall, and most of his constituents were opposed to female suffrage.

The year before, the United States Congress had passed legislation giving women the right to vote, but before it could become the law of the land, three-fourths of the forty-eight states needed to ratify or approve it.

Pearson took over the hotel mezzanine and decorated the room with American flags, red roses, and a sign that read Anti-Ratification Headquarters.

She left the lobbying to a group of young, beautiful pro-suffrage Tennessee wives and mothers, whose presence undermined the argument of the “antis”—those who did not support women’s right to vote—who said that the suffrage movement was run by outsiders and bitter, ugly old spinsters.

On the morning of August 18, a stiflingly hot day even by Nashville standards, elected officials gathered at the statehouse.

“Then and there,” she later wrote in her autobiography, “I resolved that I would not give so much time as heretofore to play, but would study and strive to be at the head of all my classes and thus delight my father’s heart.”

Eager to oblige, Reverend Hosack would boast about how bright Elizabeth was and how well she was doing, but her father would only sigh.

She wrote, “Though gentle and tender, he had such a dignified repose and reserve of manner that, as children, we regarded him with fear rather than affection.”

Addressing a “promiscuous” audience—a group of women and men—was considered scandalous.

Elizabeth enjoyed sparring with the young apprentices.

Her intelligence and take-no-prisoners approach to playing made her a formidable opponent.

Behavior that had seemed clever and precocious in childhood would have been considered uncouth in a young woman.

Behavior that had seemed clever and precocious in childhood would have been considered uncouth in a young woman.

However, Elizabeth was disappointed at the prospect of attending an all-girls’ seminary instead of Union College.

“The thought of a school without boys, who had been to me such a stimulus both in study and play, seemed to my imagination dreary and profitless,” Elizabeth later wrote.

Elizabeth’s confidence vanished later that year, however, when she and some of the other girls at school attended a six-week series of religious revival meetings led by the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney, a dynamic evangelical minister, whom Elizabeth later called “a terrifier of human souls.”

He lectured about the personal choice between salvation and damnation, and although Elizabeth tried to remain on the side of righteousness, she was haunted by the prospect of hellfire and eternal damnation.

For a time, she fulfilled her father’s expectation of living a frivolous, carefree life; she loved riding horses, singing, dancing, socializing, and flirting with the law students who studied with her father.

Gerrit Smith (1797-1874) was one of the richest men in the United States, heir to a vast fortune acquired through fur trapping and land speculation.

He used his fortune to finance liberal causes, including abolition, temperance, and women’s rights.

“Here one was sure to meet scholars, philosophers, philanthropists, judges, bishops, clergymen, and statesmen,” Elizabeth wrote.

“Harriet,” Smith said, “I have brought all my young cousins to see you. I want you to make good abolitionists of them by telling them the history of your life.”

“We needed no further education to make us earnest abolitionists,” she wrote.

A pastoral letter from the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts denounced the sisters as unwomanly and unchristian, arguing that they would fall in “shame and dishonor in the dust.”

A pastoral letter from the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts denounced the sisters as unwomanly and unchristian, arguing that they would fall in “shame and dishonor in the dust.”

Unrepentant, the Grimkés continued with their work.

He was tall and handsome, charismatic, and, in Elizabeth’s words, “the most eloquent and impassioned orator on the anti-slavery platform.”

“As I had a passion for oratory, I was deeply impressed with his power,” she wrote.

Elizabeth hadn’t met a man like Henry before, and she was smitten.

“The enthusiasm of the people in these great meetings, the thrilling oratory, and lucid arguments of the speakers, all conspired to make these days memorable as among the most charming in my life,” Elizabeth wrote.

“When walking slowly through a beautiful grove,” she remembered, “he laid his hand on the horn of the saddle and, to my surprise, made one of those charming revelations of human feeling which brave knights have always found eloquent words to utter, and to which fair ladies have always listened with mingled emotions of pleasure and astonishment.”

Bayard offered to divorce his wife and marry Elizabeth, according to family lore.

“Heretofore my apprehensions had all been of death and eternity,” she wrote.

This was a scathing criticism for a man who had just traveled three thousand miles to attend an abolitionist convention.

Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793-1880) was a gifted public speaker who became an ordained Quaker minister at age twenty-eight.

The taboo against women speaking in public did not apply in Quaker meetings, where women were encouraged to speak freely.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention, but she sat with the wives of delegates and shared the female delegates’ “humiliation and chagrin.”

She later wrote: “It struck me as very remarkable that abolitionists, who felt so keenly the wrongs of the slave, should be so oblivious to the equal wrongs of their own mothers, wives, and sisters....To me there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past.”

She later wrote: “It struck me as very remarkable that abolitionists, who felt so keenly the wrongs of the slave, should be so oblivious to the equal wrongs of their own mothers, wives, and sisters....To me there was no question so important as the emancipation of women from the dogmas of the past.”