Salem Women's
History and
Business Community
History and
Business Community
Woman Suffrage Club
Salem sites:
• Lyceum Hall
Associated Salem women:
• Eliza J. Kenney
• Delight R.P. Hewitt
• Sarah .G. Wilkins
• Lyceum Hall
Associated Salem women:
• Eliza J. Kenney
• Delight R.P. Hewitt
• Sarah .G. Wilkins
Men and women were both actively engaged in the struggle for woman suffrage in Salem. Many were also abolitionists, viewing both causes as issues of equal justice under the law and equal human rights.
The first women's rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It was attended by mostly local women, including its organizers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.
In 1850, the first national convention took place in Worcester, Massachusetts; this convention attracted participants from many cities and states. The women from Salem who attended were Eliza J. Kenney (who also spoke), Delight R.P Hewitt, and Sarah G. Wilkins. The Woman Suffrage Club of Salem met regularly in private homes to work for change. Interestingly, the club is not listed in the Salem City Directories of this time period.
From November 17-18, 1873, the Woman Suffrage Club hosted the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association for a Woman Suffrage Convention at Salem's Lyceum Hall. Among the more well known women speakers were Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) and Lucy Stone (1818–93). One of the subjects discussed at the convention, and subsequently in the Salem Observer, was the "glaring injustice" done to women teachers in public schools whose salaries were so much lower than those of male teachers performing the same work.1
Several outstanding essays on woman suffrage published in the Woman’s Journal (the newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association) came from William I. Bowditch, an attorney living in Brookline whose family was from Salem and who was also a leading anti-slavery activist. In Woman Suffrage a Right, Not a Privilege, Bowditch argued:
“If suffrage for a man cannot be infringed upon even once without doing him an injury, can we deny it to women altogether and yet do them no wrong? If women had ever consented to be governed by us, our rule over them would of course be just. But women have never given any such consent. On the contrary, it has only been after long years of effort and struggle on their part against all sorts of ridicule and opposition on the part of men, that the women of the State have finally wrung from our unwilling hands the measure of property right which they now possess. The existing subjection of women is merely what remains of the former universal slavery of women, and the slavery of women at the time of its existence was deemed by the very best and noblest of men to be as natural a state for women as their present state of subjection is now deemed by any of us men to be their natural condition.”2
And in 1874, George B. Loring, president of the Woman Suffrage Club of Salem stated:
“In this work of reform let man give up and let woman hold not back.
The history of our country, from its colonial organization to the present hour of republican success, teaches us that not by restraint, but by the largest freedom consistent with personal and public safety, have the human faculties been developed with symmetry and health. Grateful for the rights and opportunities I myself possess under institutions thus animated and inspired, I would extend an open hand to all who would enter in and enjoy the healthful air of freedom.”3
Sources
1 Salem Observer, 22 November 1873.
2 William I. Bowditch, Woman Suffrage a Right, Not a Privilege (Cambridge, Mass., 1879), 31.
3 George B. Loring, “The Right of Woman Suffrage,” Boston Daily Advertiser, December. 18, 1874.
The first women's rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It was attended by mostly local women, including its organizers Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.
In 1850, the first national convention took place in Worcester, Massachusetts; this convention attracted participants from many cities and states. The women from Salem who attended were Eliza J. Kenney (who also spoke), Delight R.P Hewitt, and Sarah G. Wilkins. The Woman Suffrage Club of Salem met regularly in private homes to work for change. Interestingly, the club is not listed in the Salem City Directories of this time period.
From November 17-18, 1873, the Woman Suffrage Club hosted the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association for a Woman Suffrage Convention at Salem's Lyceum Hall. Among the more well known women speakers were Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) and Lucy Stone (1818–93). One of the subjects discussed at the convention, and subsequently in the Salem Observer, was the "glaring injustice" done to women teachers in public schools whose salaries were so much lower than those of male teachers performing the same work.1
Several outstanding essays on woman suffrage published in the Woman’s Journal (the newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association) came from William I. Bowditch, an attorney living in Brookline whose family was from Salem and who was also a leading anti-slavery activist. In Woman Suffrage a Right, Not a Privilege, Bowditch argued:
“If suffrage for a man cannot be infringed upon even once without doing him an injury, can we deny it to women altogether and yet do them no wrong? If women had ever consented to be governed by us, our rule over them would of course be just. But women have never given any such consent. On the contrary, it has only been after long years of effort and struggle on their part against all sorts of ridicule and opposition on the part of men, that the women of the State have finally wrung from our unwilling hands the measure of property right which they now possess. The existing subjection of women is merely what remains of the former universal slavery of women, and the slavery of women at the time of its existence was deemed by the very best and noblest of men to be as natural a state for women as their present state of subjection is now deemed by any of us men to be their natural condition.”2
And in 1874, George B. Loring, president of the Woman Suffrage Club of Salem stated:
“In this work of reform let man give up and let woman hold not back.
The history of our country, from its colonial organization to the present hour of republican success, teaches us that not by restraint, but by the largest freedom consistent with personal and public safety, have the human faculties been developed with symmetry and health. Grateful for the rights and opportunities I myself possess under institutions thus animated and inspired, I would extend an open hand to all who would enter in and enjoy the healthful air of freedom.”3
Sources
1 Salem Observer, 22 November 1873.
2 William I. Bowditch, Woman Suffrage a Right, Not a Privilege (Cambridge, Mass., 1879), 31.
3 George B. Loring, “The Right of Woman Suffrage,” Boston Daily Advertiser, December. 18, 1874.
