The Culmination of Susan B. Anthony’s 1st Major Project For Women’s Rights

The first Woman’s Rights Convention met on July 19 and 20, 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY; two weeks later a reconvened session met in Rochester. Anthony, who was then headmistress of the Female Department at the Canajoharie Academy, did not attend the conventions. Her parents and sister Mary, however, were present at the Rochester meeting and signed petitions in support of the resolutions. In 1849 Anthony became dissatisfied with teaching and returned to Rochester to help manage the family  farm. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other abolitionists and reformers often visited the farm, and their fervent discussions of the events of the day soon turned her interest to reform work.

Initially Anthony was not in total sympathy with the women’s rights movement, and she instead devoted her energies to temperance and the abolition of slavery. This changed when in 1851 she traveled to Seneca Falls to attend an abolitionist meeting and met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who along with Lucretia Mott had organized the first women’s rights convention. It was Stanton who convinced Anthony that women could not be effective in helping others if they themselves were denied their rights. Anthony’s first women’s rights activity was to attend a convention in September 1852.

In November of 1853, Anthony took up her first cause, and her first campaign, for women. Her chosen focus was the “legal disabilities of woman,” and specifically she wanted to secure for married women the right to retain their own wages and have equal guardianship of their children. She organized local activists around New York to obtain signatures on petitions to place before the state legislature in Albany, urging them to enact these changes to law. A group of petitions containing some 10,000 signatures was presented to the legislature in early 1854, but opposition in that body was strong and it took no action. In late 1854 Anthony determined to take the political issue personally in hand and do what no other American woman ever had: to launch a personal speaking tour to every county throughout the state to obtain more support everywhere she could, to get more petitions to present, and to create an upswell of pressure from constituents to influence the balking legislators. Supporters in each locale assisted Anthony by making arrangements for these county “conventions” and in gathering signatures for the petitions. On Christmas Day Anthony embarked on this journey, which came to be known to history as the “County Canvass.” Short of funds and often having to travel by sleigh because of the snow, she nonetheless would visit all 60 counties, speaking almost every day.

By late January 1855 Anthony felt she had enough signatures and petitions, and decided to suspend her speaking tour to present them to the New York legislature. Autograph Letter Signed, Rochester, January 27, 1855, to one of her local organizers, a Mrs. Dibble, discussing arrangements and relating that the petitions portion of her program had reached its culmination. “Your petitions are received. We present our petitions to the Legislature on the 12th February. Enclosed is a notice for the Washington County W.R. [women’s rights] convention. Please get it published in your village papers until date – if they make any charge, send their bills to me at the Salem meeting.” An Anthony letter this early is a real rarity; our search of public records reveals that none have reached the market in over 30 years. That it is about her first important work is all the better.

The petitions were presented in February, and her tour resumed. In the end her efforts were successful. In 1860, the New York legislature enacted the law for which she had worked so hard.