Journal Notes

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On Wednesday, January 25, 1911, physicians across the world gathered at the great hall at the Academy of Medicine in New York to honor America’s first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell. The tenacious pioneer in the fight for the right of women to study and practice medicine had died nine months prior to the event honoring the contributions she made to the field. The audience was composed largely of women, all of whom owed a debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Blackwell.

Born in Bristol, England on February 3, 1821, Elizabeth immigrated to America in 1832 with her parents. Her desire to attend school and study medicine began at an early age. Elizabeth was twenty-six years old when she was admitted to New York’s Geneva College in 1847. She had applied to twenty institutions before being accepted as a medical student at the prestigious university. The male students there believed Elizabeth’s request was a joke and agreed to let her attend the classes based on that idea, but the daring young woman was not playing around. She prevailed and triumphed over taunts and bias while at school to earn her degree only two years after enrolling.

While in her last year of school, she treated an infant with an eye infection. As she was washing the baby’s eye with water, she accidentally splattered the contaminated liquid in her own eye. Six months later she had the eye removed and replaced with a glass eye. Hospitals and dispensaries refused to admit her to practice at their facilities, and she was denounced by the press and from the pulpit.

After graduating in 1849, Elizabeth found herself socially and professionally boycotted. Public sentiment was so against her for pursuing a career in a field deemed unladylike that she could not find a place to live anywhere in New York. Using funds given to her by her family she built her own home.

In 1854, she borrowed the capital needed to build the first hospital for women in the country. Most of the patients she worked with were poor. Patients were charged a mere $4 a week for services that would cost them $2,000 at another facility. Elizabeth also founded the Women’s Medical College of New York, and, when the Civil War broke out, she assisted in launching the Sanitary Aid Association. In addition to maintaining her practice and creating benevolent community services, Elizabeth also wrote a number of books on the subject of medicine. Two of her most popular titles were Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession for Women and Essays in Medical Sociology.

By the turn of the century, Elizabeth Blackwell had retired from medicine and returned to England. In the spring of 1907, she was injured in a fall from which she never fully recovered. She died on May 31, 1910, from a stroke. The epitaph below the Celtic cross which marks her grave at Kilmun Churchyard on the Holy Loch, near Clyde, includes these words: “The first woman in modern times to graduate in medicine (1849) and the first to be placed on the British Medical Register (1859).

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

When Susan B. Anthony and Abigail Scott Duniway stood before the Women’s Rights Convention in Olympia, Washington, in 1871, they were joined by three women who had come west as “Mercer Girls,” young women recruited by Asa Shinn Mercer to come to the Pacific Northwest to work as teachers—and as prospective brides for the men who made up the vast majority of the population in Washington Territory. Women went west for a variety of reasons during the Great Migration of the nineteenth century, coming along with husbands and fathers, but also traveling solo for reasons that included job opportunities, homesteads in some places where they were allowed for single women, and the prospect of more freedom.

Myth and the historical record both place women in professions in the West, where there were shortages of doctors, dentists, lawyers, and journalists, when they might have been denied those same opportunities in the East. Bethenia Owens-Adair, for example, emigrated to Oregon with her family as a small child and then returned to the East to go to medical school, eventually setting up a practice in Portland, Oregon, where she participated in the suffrage movement in the 1880s. Martha Hughes Cannon was a doctor in Salt Lake City in the 1890s, when she also ran for—and won—a seat in the Utah legislature. May Arkwright Hutton went west to the silver camps of Idaho where she started out as a cook in a mining town and became a silver tycoon and philanthropist in her own right. Other women went west to be singers, other performers, photographers, social workers, restaurateurs, scouts, and homesteaders—as well as to take up less savory professions and to be mail-order brides.

Perhaps because educated women went west to practice their careers, perhaps because the mere fact that they were pioneers gave them the conviction that anything was possible, and perhaps because the nascent governments of the West offered pathways to reform that were simply more straightforward than those in more established states, the reforming zeal swept across the West, and by 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the women of the West were already voting.

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No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Born in Massachusetts in 1818 and educated at Oberlin College, Lucy Stone lectured widely against slavery and, on behalf of women’s suffrage, helped organize the first national women’s rights convention and the American Woman Suffrage Association and published the influential Woman’s Journal.

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, one of the leading abolitionist organizations of its time. Stone became convinced that parallels existed between the positions of women and slaves. In her view both were expected to be passive, cooperative, and obedient. In addition, the legal status of both slaves and women was inferior to that of white men. Stone persuaded the society to allow her to spend part of her time speaking on the topic of women’s rights. In 1850 she organized the first national Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts.

In 1855 Stone married Henry B. Blackwell, an Ohio merchant and abolitionist. The couple entered into the marriage “under protest”; at their wedding they read and signed a document explicitly protesting the legal rights that were given to a husband over his wife. They omitted the word “obey” from the marriage vows and promised to treat each other equally. Stone also announced that she would not take her husband’s name and would be addressed instead as Mrs. Stone. This action drew national attention, and women who retained their maiden names were soon known as “Lucy Stoners.”

After the Civil War, Stone and Blackwell shifted their energies to women’s suffrage. Although Stone was in agreement with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony on the goal of women’s suffrage, she differed as to the best way to secure the vote for women. In 1869 Stone helped form the AWSA. The AWSA worked for women’s suffrage on a state by state basis, seeking amendments to state constitutions. Stanton and Anthony established a rival organization, the NWSA, which sought an amendment to the U.S. Constitution similar to the Fifteenth Amendment that gave nonwhite men the right to vote. Whereas the AWSA concentrated on women’s suffrage, the NWSA took a broader approach, lobbying for improvements in the legal status of women in areas such as family law as well as for suffrage.

Stone also helped found the Woman’s Journal, a weekly suffrage journal, in 1870. She edited the journal for many years, eventually turning the task over to her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, in 1882. As editor, Stone focused on the AWSA’s goal of suffrage.

In 1890 the AWSA and the NWSA merged into the NAWSA. Stone became the chair of the executive committee, and Stanton served as the first president.

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No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who signed the first call for a woman’s rights convention in the United States, was born in Johnstown, New York, on November 12, 1815. She was the daughter of Judge Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady, both persons of exceptional educational refinement. As a child Elizabeth displayed unusual intelligence and began her education at Johnstown Academy. After finishing the coursework at her homeschool, she went to Mrs. Emma Willard’s seminary in Troy, New York, where she was graduated in 1822.

In 1839 she met Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery orator of some note, and in 1840 they were married. Immediately after their wedding they went to London where the international anti-slavery convention was to be held.

Mrs. Stanton was one of the delegates from America but was denied participation in the proceedings because she was a woman. While in London she met Lucretia Mott and with her signed the first call for a women’s rights convention. Returning to Boston, Mr. and Mrs. Stanton made their home there until Mr. Stanton was compelled to move to Seneca Falls, New York, because of his health. It was in Seneca Falls on the 19th and 20th of July 1848, in the Wesleyan chapel, that the first women’s rights convention was held. Mrs. Stanton was at the head of the movement at that time and, besides caring for the delegates, wrote the declaration of aims which became the subject of ridicule and jest throughout the United States.

From 1867 to 1874 she went from state to state campaigning for woman’s suffrage and became associated with numerous organizations having that end in view. She became a candidate for Congress from the Eighth New York District, having the support of the New York Herald. She became associated in the management of the resolution with Susan B. Anthony and was the joint author of many books on woman’s suffrage.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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In the acknowledgments from the book According to Kate, I wrote that “writing this book has been a lesson in uninterrupted anguish.”  I was apprehensive about tackling her story because I just knew there would be a barrage of criticism from historians and Earp-family enthusiasts.  Indeed, there was a fair share of that behavior to contend with once the book was released.  My good friend Stuart Rosebrook, senior editor at True West Magazine, help me through much of the aggravation early on.  Earlier this month I learned that According to Kate won the Academy of Western Artists Elmer Kelton Book Award and on Friday, Kate was listed among the best biographical books in 2019 by Foreword Review Magazine.  The other nine books in the category all feature men and women who were WWII heroes, civil rights heroes, and celebrated artists.  And then there’s Kate.  A prostitute whose claim to fame was being in love with a tuberculosis suffering dentist turned gambler and gunfighter.

Today, I was notified of a review of According to Kate that appeared in the March edition of the Wild West History Association journal.  Kate received praise from the reviewer and I couldn’t be happier for her.  Kate Elder’s story of her life on the frontier as a soiled dove and her time with one of the West’s most recognizable characters has value.  She was strong willed.  She made as much money as possible as fast as she could, spent it just as quickly, and outlasted most sporting gals of that time.  She was known by several names throughout her life.  Kate Elder, Kate Fisher, Big-Nose Kate, Mrs. J. H. Holliday, and Mary K. Cummings were a few of the most common titles.  According to Kate, “I’ve been called many things.  Some not so kind.  I only ever cared what those I loved called me.” Not a bad attitude to have as a harlot and critic of Old West royalty.

Good for you, Kate.

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Lucretia Coffin grew up in Boston, where she attended public school for two years in accordance with her father’s wish that she become familiar with the workings of democratic principles. At age thirteen she was sent to a Friends (i.e., Quaker) boarding school near Poughkeepsie, New York, where two years later she was engaged as an assistant and later as a teacher. It was then that her interest in women’s rights began. Solely because of her sex, she was paid only half the salary male teachers were receiving.

In 1811 she married James Mott, a fellow teacher from the school, and the couple moved to Philadelphia. About 1818 Lucretia Mott began to speak at religious meetings, and three years later she was accepted as a minister of the Friends. She joined the Hicksite (Liberal) branch of the Society of Friends when a rift occurred in the 1820s, and in that decade, she began to travel about the country lecturing on religion and questions of social reform, including temperance, the abolition of slavery, and peace.

In 1833 Mott attended the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and immediately thereafter she led in organizing its women’s auxiliary, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, of which she was chosen president. She met opposition within the Society of Friends when she spoke of abolition, and attempts were made to strip Mott of her ministry and membership. In 1837 she helped organize the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and in May 1838 her home was almost attacked by a mob after the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, Philadelphia, where the convention had been meeting. Rebuffed as a delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because of her sex, Mott still managed to make her views known.

In 1848, taking up the cause of women’s rights, she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton called a convention at Seneca Falls, New York, the first of its kind “to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women.” The convention issued a “Declaration of Sentiments” modeled on the Declaration of Independence; it stated that “all men and women are created equal.” From that time, Mott devoted most of her attention to the women’s rights movement. She wrote articles (“Discourse on Woman” appeared in 1850), lectured widely, was elected president of the 1852 convention at Syracuse, New York, and attended almost every annual meeting thereafter. At the organizing meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, she was chosen president. The following year she joined Robert Dale Owen, Rabbi Isaac M. Wise, and others in the organization of the Free Religious Association.

A fluent, moving speaker, Mott retained her poise before the most hostile audiences. After the Civil War she worked to secure the franchise and educational opportunities for freedmen; since passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, she and her husband had also opened their home to runaway slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad. She continued to be active in the causes of women’s rights, peace, and liberal religion until her death. Her last address was given to the Friends’ annual meeting in May 1880.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Massachusetts and began her work as a woman’s rights leader before the Civil War.

Possibly no woman ever lived who gave so many years of active work to a reformatory measure and so well retained her vitality as did Susan B. Anthony. Friends and acquaintances said she was a gentle woman who went up and down the country for two generations demanding that women be allowed to vote.

Anthony made her home in Rochester, New York. It was there she met many leading abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, Wendell Phillips, William Henry Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison. Soon the temperance movement enlisted her sympathy and then, after meeting Amelia Bloomer and through her Elizabeth Cady Stanton, so did that of woman suffrage.

The rebuff of Anthony’s attempt to speak at a temperance meeting in Albany in 1852 prompted her to organize the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society, of which Stanton became president, and pushed Anthony further in the direction of women’s rights advocacy. In a short time she became known as one of the cause’s most zealous, serious advocates, a dogged and tireless worker whose personality contrasted sharply with that of her friend and coworker Stanton. She was also a prime target of public and newspaper abuse. While campaigning for a liberalization of New York’s laws regarding married women’s property rights, an end attained in 1860, Anthony served from 1856 as chief New York agent of Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society.

During the early phase of the Civil War, she helped organize the Women’s National Loyal League, which urged the case for emancipation. After the war she campaigned unsuccessfully to have the language of the Fourteenth Amendment altered to allow for woman as well as African American suffrage, and in 1866 she became corresponding secretary of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association. Her exhausting speaking and organizing tour of Kansas in 1867 failed to win passage of a state enfranchisement law.

In 1868 Anthony became publisher, and Stanton editor, of a new periodical, The Revolution, originally financed by the eccentric George Francis Train. The same year, she represented the Working Women’s Association of New York, which she had recently organized, at the National Labor Union convention. In January 1869 she organized a woman suffrage convention in Washington, D.C., and in May she and Stanton formed the NWSA. A portion of the organization deserted later in the year to join Lucy Stone’s more conservative AWSA, but the NWSA remained a large and powerful group, and Anthony continued to serve as its principal leader and spokeswoman.

In 1870 she relinquished her position at The Revolution and embarked on a series of lecture tours to pay off the paper’s accumulated debts. As a test of the legality of the suffrage provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, she cast a vote in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester, New York. She was arrested, convicted (the judge’s directed verdict of guilty had been written before the trial began), and fined, and although she refused to pay the fine, the case was carried no further. She traveled constantly, often with Stanton, in support of efforts in various states to win the franchise for women: California in 1871, Michigan in 1874, Colorado in 1877, and elsewhere.

In 1890, after lengthy discussions, the rival suffrage associations were merged into the NAWSA, and after Stanton resigned in 1892, Anthony became president. Her principal lieutenant in later years was Carrie Chapman Catt.

By the 1890s Anthony had largely outlived the abuse and sarcasm that had attended her early efforts, and she emerged as a national heroine. Her visits to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and to the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon, in 1905 were warmly received, as were her trips to London in 1899 and Berlin in 1904 as head of the U.S. delegation to the International Council of Women (which she helped found in 1888). In 1900, at age eighty, she retired from the presidency of the NAWSA, passing it on to Catt. Anthony died in 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

The movement for woman suffrage, which began in 1846, was for a time overshadowed by the abolition movement. Virtually all women’s rights advocates supported abolition, but not all abolitionists supported woman suffrage. Numerous abolitionists believed it was inappropriate for women to engage in public political actions. Feeling that their servitude was more deplorable than the political, legal, and economic disabilities of the women of the United States, many women suffragists gave their time, energy, and money to the freeing of African Americans.

When the Civil War had ended, and the Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other leaders learned with amazement and indignation that it was proposed to put the word “male” in the Constitution of the United States, which before that time had not discriminated against women. The suffragists immediately petitioned Congress. When the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was pending, the women had been encouraged by both Republicans and abolitionists to send petitions to Congress. They collected more than three hundred thousand names. Several Republican senators applauded the efforts of women everywhere and told them, “You are doing a noble work.” However, when the women petitioned for their own rights, they received little sympathy and much active opposition.

Republicans had declared that suffrage was a natural right belonging to every citizen who paid taxes and helped support the state and that the ballot was the only weapon by which one class could protect itself against the aggression of another. Despite this, the Republicans failed to help the women in favor of the abolitionist movement. Many abolitionists refused to sign the women’s petition, saying, “This is the African American’s hour.” African American men warned that “women must not block our chance, lumbering the Republican Party with woman suffrage.”

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

In 1911, actress, playwright, and “suffragette” Vida Sutton coined the term “suffragent.” A suffragent referred to a man who was big enough to see that women should be given the right to vote. “This type of man is one of the most powerful allies of the cause of women,” Vida explained to a reporter for the New York Times. “He not only does not hinder but does all that he can to help.”

From the time the woman suffrage movement was first launched in 1846, there were many prominent suffragents who played significant roles in helping women secure the right to vote.  At the urging of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, California senator Aaron Augustus Sargent introduced the first federal woman suffrage amendment in 1878. The amendment was reintroduced in every succeeding Congress until adopted in 1920. “I believe the time is rapidly coming when all men will conclude that it is no longer wise or judicious to exclude one half of the intelligence and more than one half of the virtue of the people from the ballot box,” Sargent remarked in April 1878.

San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro echoed those sentiments in March 1896. “I believe equality is the basic principle of our government—hence women should assume all the responsibilities that arise out of her moral and mental endowments as a citizen,” Sutro told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Woman’s advent as a voter will be the means through which the government may be perpetuated, as embodying justice, equality, and righteousness.”

Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist, orator and lecturer, was present at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and advocated for women’s rights along with abolition and the rights of African Americans. At a meeting of the National Council of Women in 1895, he reminded an enthusiastic crowd of what he had written about the issue in 1848. “A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land than would be a discussion of the rights of women. . . . We hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for man.”

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

The watershed year of 1848, in the strife-filled period before the American Civil War, saw the rise of women at Seneca Falls who declared that they were equal to men and not just worthy of the vote—deserving of it by the divine right of being human and citizens. Of course, while that organized group was determined to fight for the equality of women, they were fighting at a time when the equality of all people was the central question of the day. The denial of rights to women and blacks (freed and slave) was incongruous with the enlightenment ideals of democracy and the hopes of a new republic—but those in charge of the new republic were having a tough time seeing past the blinders of their race and sex.

During and immediately after the Civil War, many abolitionists and suffragists worked together toward the common goal of ending slavery, and in 1866, after the end of the war, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association intending to continue the fight for voting and civil rights for all citizens.  That was when things got complicated.

As part of the process of reconstructing the Confederate states into the Union, Congress became absorbed in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, amendments that defined both who qualified for citizenship regardless of race and sex and that drew criteria for who could vote in elections. The interpretation of the language in both amendments drew challenges from all sides—and ultimately split the previously strong movement in favor of suffrage for all former slaves and women into factions who were in favor of the political expedience of allowing males of African descent the right to vote regardless of their previous state of servitude while letting women’s interest be pushed to the side.

But the split was more complicated than that. In the late 1860s, a further division erupted between women’s suffrage advocates after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth were the law of the land. The faction led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony favored taking swift action to enact national woman suffrage through yet another constitutional amendment. The faction led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe—once staunch allies of Stanton and Anthony in the struggle for suffrage and the end to slavery—favored using the clause of the Fifteenth that gave the states the right to decide who could vote. They wanted to approach the woman suffrage issue one state at a time.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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