The First National Women's Rights Convention

The National Women's Rights Convention (23 and 24 October 1850)

Earlier this year, we looked at the two-day convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. (If you missed those posts, click here and here.) Less well known is the first National Women's Rights Convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850.

Harriot Kezia Hunt
addressed the National
Women's Rights Convention
on the medical education
of women

About 300 people had attended the Seneca Falls Convention, which famously approved the Declaration of Sentiments. Two years later, there were 1,000 attendees for the first of what would eventually be twelve national conferences. (The tenth took place in 1860--the conventions were suspended during the years of the Civil War, the eleventh held in 1866. A gathering in Washington, D.C. was called the "twelfth National Convention" was held in January 1869.)

Many of the prominent organizers and speakers at the first convention--including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott--were still active in the 1869 gathering. Over nearly two decades, the issues remained the same: equal wages, access to education, access to work and careers, property rights, marriage rights, and, always, voting rights. Susan B. Anthony would later say that it was reading the text of the speech given by Lucy Stone that drew her to the suffrage movement.

Speakers included the abolitionist and suffragist William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. (You can see the entire program and read the speeches by clicking here.) Interestingly, however, while one of the major themes of this first convention was opening the medical profession to women, physician Elizabeth Blackwell, who, she says, has "read through all the proceedings carefully," had deep reservations--"I feel a little perplexed by the main object of the Convention--Woman's Rights."

While Blackwell does express "respect and sympathy" and says she is prepared to do what she can, she also is clear that her "energy" is reserved for other causes. There were certainly deeper criticism and outright mocking from members of the press and the public. I thought I'd include here a section from the New York Herald's convention coverage, the paper's summary of "the actual designs of that piebald assemblage called the Women's Rights Convention":

1. abolish the Bible;

2. abolish the constitution and the laws of the land;

3. reorganize society upon a social platform of perfect equality in all things, of sexes and colors;

4. establish the most free and miscellaneous amalgamation of sexes and colors;

5. elect Abby Kelley Foster President of the United States and Lucretia Mott Commander-in chief of the Army;

6. To cut throats ad libitum [at their pleasure];

7. To abolish the gallows.

What struck me about this list, so fearful of women's "designs," is how closely it resembles Pat Robertson's view of feminism, from a 1992 fundraising letter (he was running for President). The "feminist agenda," he claimed, was not about equal rights: "it is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

Those women! Always wanting stuff, like equal rights. 

Lucy Stone, with a quotation from the
speech she made at the 1850 convention

Dorothea Dix: Social Reformer

Dorothea Lynde Dix (died 17 July 1887)

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in Hampden, Maine, on 4 April 1802. Her father, Joseph Dix, is variously reported as a religious fanatic, an "itinerant Methodist preacher," and an abusive alcoholic--although I suppose he could well have been all three. It's not exactly an either/or proposition. Her mother, Mary Bigelow Dix, is also described as an alcoholic and a depressive.

Dorothea Dix, c. 1850-55

Whatever the problems of her parents, Dorothea, the eldest of three children, found herself caring for her younger siblings, two brothers. About her role in the unhappy household she would later write, "I never knew childhood."

Her father did teach her to read and write, however, and she attended school. During the War of 1812, the family moved to Vermont, then afterwards, when Dorothea was about twelve, the household relocated to Worcester, Massachusetts.

By this point, her parents proved so incapable that Dorothea and her brothers were taken in by Joseph Dix's mother, a wealthy Bostonian who provided stability and hoped to turn Dorothea into a lady; when Mrs. Dix encountered a little resistance, Dorothea was sent back to Worcester to live with her grandmother's sister, where she would remain for the next few years.

It was at this point that a cousin, Edward Bangs, encouraged her to open a school for girls, a "dame school"; girls could not attend public schools, but they could enroll in private schools and be taught by women. In 1816, then, when Dorothea was just fifteen, she opened a school for twenty girls between the ages of six and eight.

Three years later, feeling pressured by Edward Bangs, who had declared his love for her, Dorothea closed her school and moved back to Boston with her grandmother. There she formulated a plan to open two kinds of "schools," both in the Dix Mansion--one for wealthy girls, and another, a charity school poor girls who could attend for free. While expecting opposition from her grandmother, she received instead her support, and the school was opened. 

The school(s) remained open from 1822 to 1836, despite Dix's own ill health which often required breaks from her teaching duties. She also began to write, publishing textbooks and and devotional books for children, including Conversations on Common Things (1824), Meditations for Private Hours (1828), The Garland of Flora (1829) and American Moral Tales for Young Persons (1832).

Dix's ongoing health problems forced her to close her schools in 1836, and, at the advice of her doctors, she took what was to be a recuperative trip to England with friends. She returned to the U.S. in 1837, following the deaths, in rapid succession, of both her mother and grandmother.  

Her inheritance from her grandmother left her comfortably well off. Dorothea Dix returned to England and found her life transformed. Her friendship with the Rathbone family introduced her to the philosophy and campaign of British "lunacy reform" (as it was called), men and women investigating the conditions of madhouses and asylums and working toward change in the care for those who were mentally ill. 

She transferred the work of the lunacy reform movement to America when she returned in 1840. She began teaching Sunday school in a Cambridge prison. After conducting an investigation into the "prisons and almshouses," the "jails and asylums" for the poor, she issued a report, Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, detailing the deplorable conditions she found and to "present the strong claims of suffering humanity." The abuses she details in thirty brief pages are appalling. 

Her researches moved beyond the commonwealth of Massachusetts, eventually extending through all the states east of the Mississippi. She helped in the founding, reforming, or enlarging of thirty-two mental hospitals, fifteen schools for the mentally disabled, a school for the blind, and training facilities for nurses in the states of Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Dix Hill Asylum, 1872,
Raleigh, North Carolina

Dix spent six years, between 1848 and 1854, lobbying for the U.S. Congress to pass the Bill for the Benefit of the Indigent Insane; this legislation was intended to create the facilities and provide funds for the long-term care of the "indigent insane" (a plan that included a request that millions of acres of federal land [accounts differ] be set aside to provide for the mentally ill and for the "blind, deaf, and dumb"). The bill passed Congress but was vetoed by President Franklin Pierce.

When that bill failed, Dix spent the next two years in Europe, continuing the campaign for reforming the ways the mentally ill were treated--she traveled to England, Scotland, France, Austria, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Germany before returning to the United States to continue her campaign.

During the Civil War, Dix was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union forces (she was appointed rather than the physician Elizabeth Blackwell), in charge of setting up field hospitals, recruiting nurses (she mandated that they be "plain-looking"), managing supplies, and setting up training programs. She was not particularly successful in this role, and she would later consider her war-time activities to be a failure, although her dedication to nursing both Union and Confederate soldiers earned her an enduring respect by those whom she treated.

After the war, she continued her role as a social reformer, though she contracted malaria in 1870, which weakened her considerably. Dorothea Dix lobbied for reform until her death in 1887 at the New Jersey State Hospital, Morris Plains, New Jersey--the first hospital to be built as a result of her efforts, some forty years earlier. She was eighty-five years old. 

Andrew Wood's excellent biographical essay on Dorothea Dix is available through American National Biography Online, which you can access by clicking here.  This essay includes a bibliography, but there are several newer volumes about Dix currently available, including one for children. 

Update, 1 April 2017: I recommend Gil Troy's excellent essay, "Meet Dorothea Dix, the Mother of Health Care Reform," as a timely comment on Dorothea Dix:

If today, in the twenty-first century, Americans are starting to consider free national health care as a basic right, it’s only because in the twentieth century Americans started considering every individual’s welfare a governmental responsibility. That assumption first required a nineteenth-century compassionate revolution, wherein Americans started taking on fellow citizens’ suffering as a communal concern—and feeling the national responsibility for everyone’s health that Dorothea Dix nurtured.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: A Medical Pioneer

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (born 9 June 1836)

Born in London and unsatisfactorily educated (at least in her opinion--she was later to complain she had no opportunity to learn science or mathematics), Elizabeth Garrett was expected to do what women of her social class usually did: marry and become mothers.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,
c. 1889

Instead, inspired by two women we have met before, the American doctor Elizabeth Blackwell and the English feminist Emily Davies, Elizabeth Garrett became a medical pioneer and political activist. 

After having been turned down by all the medical schools to which she applied (she was a woman), Elizabeth Garret devised a way to fulfill her goal of becoming a doctor. She trained as a nurse, studied with tutors, found a way into lectures and dissection rooms with male students, and, finally, arranged for private study through the Society of Apothecaries.

In 1865, via a loophole, she completed her medical exams, becoming the first English woman to earn a medical degree. (The Society of Apothecaries did not specifically forbid women from taking their exams and qualifying as doctors--but after Garrett qualified in this way, the loophole was closed.) Later in her career, in 1870, Garrett would complete a medical degree through the University of Paris, which was open to women students.

Meanwhile, unable to find a position after finishing her British training, in 1865 Garrett decided to set up her own practice. Within a year, she had opened a dispensary serving women and children--in 1866 alone, she treated 3,000 patients. There followed a series of firsts: Garrett became the first woman elected to the London School Board, the first woman appointed to a post a medical post in Britain (she was appointed to the East London Hospital for Children), co-founder of the first medical school for women (the London School of Medicine for Women), the first female member of the British Medical Association, and the first woman elected as mayor of a city in England (Aldeburh).

And she also became active in the women's suffrage movement. With Davies, in 1866, she presented a petition to Parliament asking for the vote for women and joined the British Women's Suffrage Committee. (We will meet up with Elizabeth Garrett's sister, Millicent Garrett Fawcett later this week.)

Oh! And she did manage to do those things "expected" of a woman--she married (James Anderson, in 1871) and had three children. Elizabeth Garrett's daughter, Louisa Garrett Anderson, followed her mother into a medical career and was also active in the suffrage movement--she was arrested in 1912 and briefly imprisoned in Holloway Prison. 

There is a great biographical essay by Jacqueline Banerjee about Elizabeth Garrett Anderson at The Victorian Web; you can access it by clicking here. Jo Manton's biography, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, is out of print but used copies are available. Jenifer Glyn's biography of the Garrett sisters, The Pioneering Garretts: Breaking the Barriers for Women, gives you a great look at the entire family (this book is also out of print, but used copies are available).

Elizabeth Blackwell, First in Medicine

Elizabeth Blackwell (born 3 February 1821)

Born in England, Elizabeth Blackwell was eleven years old when her family relocated to the United States, first to New York, later to Cincinnati. After her father's death in 1838, Blackwell took up a series of teaching position before deciding to pursue a career in medicine. 

Elizabeth Blackwell

But it was not easy for a woman to get a medical education. No woman in the United States had been able to enroll in medical degree programs.

After resistance and denial from all of the institutions where she hoped to study, she was, at last, accepted as a student by Geneva Medical College (now Hobart and William Smith) in 1847--although, as the story goes, administrators would not admit her without a vote of the male students enrolled in the medical school.

Convinced the request was a joke, the male students unanimously approved her application. On 23 January 1849, she graduated, becoming the first woman in the United States to earn an M.D.

Blackwell traveled to Europe in order to continue her medical education. She worked at clinics in Paris, at La Maternité, a maternity (or "lying in") hospital, and then at St. Bartholomew's in London before returning to New York. Since it was impossible for her to find a position as a doctor, she set up her own medical practice in 1851, and opened her own clinic in 1853. By 1857, this had become the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children. In November 1868, along with her sister, physician Emily Blackwell, she opened the Women's Medical College. A year later, she returned to England, where she would live for the remainder of her life.

Because medical degrees earned outside Great Britain were recognized under the Medical Act of 1858, Blackwell had been able to have her named entered in the British medical register in 1859--she was the first woman on the register. In England she helped to organize the National Health Society and established the London School of Medicine for Women. She died in England in 1910.

In addition to her long career in medicine--and her many firsts in the medical field--Blackwell worked tirelessly for a number of social, educational, and medical causes. 

There are many excellent biographies, including several for children. In addition, Blackwell's own autobiography, Pioneering Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women is in print, but it is also freely available online (here's a link to the version on the Internet Archive). The online entry for Blackwell at the National Women's History Museum has an extended biography as well as links to many online resources.