Dear John--Abigail's Note to Hubby

                 

Abigail Adams, painted here as the first mistress of the Executive Mansion in Washington D.C., kept up a frequent and detailed correspondence with her husband John while he was in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress.

Note—This has become a semi-traditional wind-up for Women’s History Month here. 

 

On this date in 1776 as the Revolutionary War was still young and Boston was besieged by George Washington Abigail Adams sent a letter to her husband John who was in Philadelphia as a Delegate to the Continental Congress from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. The success of the war against the most powerful empire in the world was far from being assured and the Declaration of Independence, of which John was a prime mover, was yet months away. But amidst the turmoil Mrs. Adams admonished her husband not to neglect, as male governors had done from time immemorial, rights and needs of women. 

 

In the midst of a lengthy, chatty letter filled with news from home she included one remarkable passage, not even a full paragraph: 

 

I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. 

 

Abigail may have regarded the threat of rebellion with tongue firmly in cheek. For his part John did not seem to take it seriously, although he frequently relied on his wife’s advice. Certainly, neither he nor Congress did anything about it. To lawyer Adams, women’s rights and privileges would certainly continue to be constrained by English Common Law which is to say they hardly existed. Women were and would remain virtual chattel first of their fathers and then of their husbands. Even widows and spinsters had precious little control of their property or affairs. 

 

Abigail's noted comment was contained in a short passage of the lengthy three page letter.

Mrs. Adams was 32 years old that year and the mother of five children. She was every inch the match of her husband, well read, keenly intelligent, strong willed, and independent. She comfortably mastered raising her brood and managing the affairs of the family and their small stone farm during the long absences—months, even years—while her husband was away helping to invent America and serve its interests. In New England where many wives of merchant traders, fishermen, and seafarers had to cope with such long absences perhaps women were more used to self-sufficiency than in other regions where they mostly stayed with their mates on family farms or tended house in villages and towns. 

 

Since the letter was not a public document, it roused no movement among women who might have been similarly disposed. It was not published until 1848 when Abigail’s grandson Charles Francis Adams included it in his multi-volume compendium of their correspondence. Of interest mostly to serious historians, the books were not widely read, and little special notice was given to a single passage which was not echoed anywhere else in the collection of missives. 

 

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton cited Abigail's phrases in the first volume of their monumental History of Woman Suffrage more than 100 years after she wrote it.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton took note of the letter in the first volume of their epic History of Woman Suffrage which was first published in 1886. Slowly the quote spread in the suffrage movement largely to add a connection to the nation’s founders. 

 

But it was the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and ‘70s that really made the passage famous. Gloria Steinem featured it in early issues of MS. Magazine and was featured on t-shirts, bumper stickers, and demonstration placards. 

 

 

Dozens of widely circulated memes keep Abigail's words alive on the internet.

In the 21st Century it has become widely shared as a meme. Whatever Abigail intended by her passing comment, it certainly has grown legs.

Aged Wyoming Quaker Louisa Ann Swain Was the First Woman Voter

Frank Leslie's Illustrated carried this "sketch of Grandma Swain voting based on eye witness accounts bit there were no other women in line when Louisa Ann Swain asked officials to open the polls early while she was out and about running errands.

I believe I have mentioned before my considerable pride that my home state of Wyoming was the first jurisdiction in the United States to give women free and equal suffrage with men in all elections.  This was accomplished in 1869 when the sparsely populated U.S. Territory was still largely raw frontier. 

A fair amount has been written on pioneer women office holders like Esther Hobart Morris, a Justice of the Peace in South Pass or Bailiff Mary Atkinson* in Laramie, both in 1870.  Less well known is the first woman to actually cast a ballot in a general election on September 6, 1870, Louisa Ann Swain.

The best known of Wyoming's pioneer office holders was Esther Hobart Morris who was appointed Justice of the Peace in South Pass in 1870.  She is usually cited as the first woman to hold public office in the United States, but a handful of women had previously been elected to school boards.  This photo was taken in 1902 decades after her service.  A nephew was my 6th grade social studies who enthusiastically told her story in his Wyoming history class not long after a statue in her honor was erected on the state capitol grounds.

White women were still scarce in a place where adventuresome men were seeking fortunes in mining, ranching, farming, and the fine art of separating other fortune seekers from their gains in saloons and whore houses.  Others were laborers on the railroad, hard rock miners, cowboys, and soldiers.  The very scarcity of women raised their esteem and value in the rough and tumble railheads and mining boom towns.

Women came in two classes, although it was quite possible to move up—or down—between them.  First on the scene were, almost inevitably, the whores.  Many suffered and were abused.  But others prospered, saved their money and often became local landowners and businesswomen.  More than a few married their more prosperous Johns and by the acceptable alchemy of the time and place were soon respectable ladies. 

Gentlewomen came first as the wives of officers and non-coms at Army posts, with the bosses and foremen on the Union Pacific railroad construction crews, as the sun-bonnet pioneer wives of would-be sod busters.  Then, as the towns became a little more settled, they came as the wives of merchants, as school marms, and as single fortune hunters.   Many of these women, too, went into business running laundries, hotels, boarding houses, and such. With their husbands mostly too busy grubbing money to pay attention to civic affairs, women of both classes, sometimes in an uneasy and suspicious alliance, sometimes at each other’s throats, became de facto civic leaders even before the Territorial legislature extended the franchise.

For their part the powers in Cheyenne were amenable to this radical new experiment because they hoped sooner rather than later to become a state even though the population was far below the usual requirement.  They knew that the Territory’s chances of admission to the Union would be enhanced if it was safely Republican—the party of the rising cattle barons, mine owners, merchants, and professional classes.  But Democrats—laborers, miners, homesteaders, and small ranchers threatened to swamp Republicans at the polls.  Women, especially respectable women, were considered to be reliably Republican and adding them to the voting rolls gave the party an edge.

Leslie's was still fascinated by the oddity of women voting 20 years after Louisa Ann Swain cast a ballot.  This cover featured women in Cheyenne lined up to vote.  The tower of the Union Pacific Depot is recognizable in the background.

Republicans did come to dominate the state but extending the vote to women frightened the Eastern Establishment and, in the end, probably delayed admission to the Union until 1890.  Certainly, Harper’s Weekly and other popular newspapers and magazines mocked Wyoming women voters mercilessly.  But Wyoming stuck to its guns anyway—some said because Territorial legislators were afraid of their wives.

Modest Louisa Ann Swain, a demure Quaker grandmother, probably did not set out to make history.  She was up and about early and left her home in Laramie carrying a small tin pail, intent on purchasing some yeast at a general store for her baking.  On her errand she happened to pass a polling place that was still being set up and not yet officially open.  Wanting to get on with her baking without having to come back downtown, she inquired if she might be allowed to cast her vote then.

The accommodating election official obliged and as a small crowd of the usual loafers and political hacks looked on, she marked her ballot.  One of the observers was a reporter for the Laramie Sentinel who described her as “a gentle white-haired housewife, Quakerish in appearance.”  The same paper congratulated the good behavior of witnesses, “There was too much good sense in our community for any jeers or sneers to be seen on such an occasion.”

Of course, other women made it to the polls that day.  And it is even possible that in some other town bereft of documentation someone else actually voted earlier.  But let’s give Swain the credit she deserves. 

She was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1800 as Louisa Ann Gardner, the daughter of a sailing captain who was lost at sea in her childhood.  Her widowed mother moved to Charleston, South Carolina where she died sometime later leaving young Louisa an orphan.

Sent to live with an uncle in Baltimore, Maryland Louisa met and married Stephen Swain, who operated a successful chair factory, in 1821.  The couple had four children.  But with the youngest still in swaddling, Stephen got the itchy feet that seemed epidemic among 19th Century men.  He sold the factory and moved west, first to Zanesville, Ohio, and later to Indiana.

When the couple’s oldest son moved his family to Wyoming in 1868, the elder Swains came with him.  Not that they stayed long.   Within a year or so of fateful election with Stephen ailing, the couple returned to Maryland where he died in 1872.  In 1880 Louisa was laid by his side in the Friends Burial Ground.

                              Mrs. Strong in her proper Quaker cap with a book of devotions.

The Louisa Swain Foundation dedicated the Wyoming House for Historic Women in downtown Laramie in 2005.  A life size bronze statue of Swain stands in a plaza in front of the building which houses a sort of Wyoming Women’s Hall of Fame.  Thirteen honorees inside include Esther Hobart Morris, bailiff Mary Atkinson, Nellie Tayloe Ross, first woman elected Governor in the United States and first woman Director of the U.S. Mint, and former Congresswoman Liz Cheney who made headlines as a rare GOP critic of Donald Trump and the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021.

Louisa Strain's life size statue stands in front of Laramie's Wyoming House for Historic Women.  She is shown with her yeast pail and ballot.

In 2008 Congress declared an official Louis Ann Swain Day.

*A decedent, Otis Halverson of Cheyenne informs me that the bailiff is misidentified, an error perpetuated in various sources.  Her first name was Martha, not Mary, although it is possible that she used Mary as a nickname.  And at the time she served as a bailiff she was known as Boise, the name of her second husband.  After being widowed for the second time she married Mr. Atkinson years later.  As far as I can tell the confusion arose due to reliance on newspaper interviews conducted late in her life which naturally referred to her as Mrs. Atkinson.  Since Mary Atkinson is the name I found most usually cited, I have let it stand in the body of the article and noted the clarification here.

 

Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party Brought the 19th Amendment to Ratification

 

  

Women's Equality is celebrated on August 26 in honor of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution for women's suffrage in 1920. 

Alice Paul, the Feminist and Suffragist whose steely nerves and militancy did much to finally secure passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was born in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey on January 11, 1885.  Her father was a wealthy and successful banker who raised his family at Paulsdale, a gentleman’s farm.  The family were devout Hicksite Quakers who lived simply, if comfortably and who valued social responsibility and gender equality.  Paul later credited her family and upbringing for the strength to dedicate her life to the cause of women’s equality.  She said that her mother taught her, “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until you get to the end of the row.”

Growing up in this loving environment, Paul excelled at school both as a scholar and as an athlete, competing in basketball, baseball, and field hockey in addition to playing tennis on her home court, and becoming a fine horsewoman.

 

Paulsdale, the Paul family estate in New Jersey--comfortable but not ostentatious in keeping with their Quaker modesty and simplicity. 

In 1901 Paul entered Swarthmore College, the elite Quaker school which her maternal grandfather Judge William Parry helped to found with Lucretia Mott.  She studied under many of the leading female academics in the country.  The advice of mathematics professor Susan Cunningham became her lifelong motto, “Use thy gumption.” She was an outstanding student, elected the class poetess and a commencement speaker at graduation in 1905.

Upon graduation, Paul became a social worker at a New York City settlement house.  In 1907 she went to England to study advanced methods at the Woodbrooke Settlement in Birmingham.  While in the country she met Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, leaders of a new militant suffrage movement which was making a sensation by using direct action tactics such as publicly heckling politicians, window smashing, and rock throwing, to raise public awareness. Although the press and establishment were outraged, the movement was building pressure for change in a way that years of genteel persuasion had not.  Paul enthusiastically joined the movement and was arrested several times.  On one occasion she boasted that she broke more than forty windows before she was pinched.  

 

Alice Paul on shipboard returning from Britain where she was schooled in the direct action militancy of the English Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst. 

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she was determined to introduce the British methods to the languishing American movement.  Although there had been some success in getting some states to extend the franchise to women, particularly in the West following the example of Wyoming, resistance in the East and South had ground progress to a halt.  As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization remained committed to a state-by-state strategy as its top priority, Paul was made Chair of the Congressional Committee with the responsibility of lobbying for Federal action.

In 1912 Paul, Lucy Burns and Crystal Eastman went to Washington.  Adopting the Pankhurst model, the trio organized a massive suffrage parade to correspond with the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.  The parade on March 3 down Pennsylvania Avenue was led by the beautiful blonde lawyer and activist Inez Milholland astride a white horse in flowing Greek robes.  Behind her, Paul and her friends, also on horseback, led thousands of women and a few men on parade.  The procession was quickly attacked by mobs of men along the route, throwing rocks and battering participants with clubs and fists as the police stood by without intervening.  The subsequent national front-page publicity crowded out news of the inauguration and put suffrage squarely back at the center of the national debate.

 

Alice Paul always had a flair for the dramatic.  She knew that lovely Inez Millholland in her flowing robes atop a snow white horse would attract massive attention to her 1912 Washington, D.C. Suffrage Parade timed to upstage Woodrow Wilson's first inaugural.  Paul and other leaders rode their own horses behind Millholland and at the head of thousands of marching women and a few male supporters.  The parade was viciously attacked by mobs as police stood aside. 

Paul’s continued militancy in Washington soon put her at odds with the venerable leader of the NAWSA, Carrie Chapman Catt, who stood by her state-by-state strategy and had endorsed Wilson for President and was trying to woo Democrats to support suffrage.  Paul wanted to “hold the President accountable” for failing to press for action.  After working as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union, the breach became irreparable in 1914 and Paul’s group severed ties with the national organization.  Two years later they reorganized as the National Women’s Party (NWP.)

The NWP began to organize regular Silent Sentinel protests at the gates of the White House holding signs harshly criticizing the President.  Wilson treated the protestors with bemusement at first, even tipping his hat to them as he passed by.  But the savagery of their attacks stung him.  He fully expected that when the U.S. entered the World War in 1917, the protests would end in a display of national unity.  

 

National Women's Party protesters at their daily vigil at the White House gates.  After the U.S. entered the Great War, President Wilson ordered the women arrested and jailed. 

They did not.  Paul stepped up the rhetoric, even referring to the President as Kaiser Wilson.  On several occasions Paul and her friends were physically attacked.  Wilson finally ordered the arrests of the women on charges of interfering with traffic.  They had to be hauled away physically, struggling the whole time.

The charges themselves were not serious, but Paul and others refused to pay fines or cooperate in any way.  They were jailed.  When let out they returned and were arrested again.  Eventually they were sent to a prison in Virginia, the Occoquan Workhouse.  Conditions were harsh and the women were abused and beaten.  In protest Paul led a hunger strike.  As the women grew weaker from the strike, they were ordered to be force fed raw eggs though a tube physically shoved down the struggling their throats. Several elderly and frail protestors were seriously injured in this way.  Paul remained defiant and she was placed in an asylum as authorities sought to have her declared insane.

But several of the women had high social connections, including the spouse of a Congressman.  Word of their brutal treatment began to leak out.  Public sympathy began to swing to the defiant women and against the Wilson administration.  Exasperated, Wilson finally declared his support of a Federal Constitutional Amendment for women’s suffrage as a war measure and in recognition of the contribution of women to the effort.  He made no mention of Paul or the NWP, but no one doubted that their stubborn militancy had forced his hand.

 

 Lucy Burns, Paul's closest friend and accomplice in custody at the brutal Occoquan Workhouse where the NWP prisoners were abused and force fed.

Upon release from prison, Paul stepped up lobbying efforts on behalf of the amendment.  Both Houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures.  The state-by-state struggle long advocated by Catt was back on.  The NAWSA and NWP played a kind of “good cop/bad cop” tag team on state legislatures with Catt’s group wooing them with compliments and kindness, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance. 

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920 Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote, securing the necessary support to become a part of the Constitution.  When the Secretary of State certified the adoption on August 26, Paul and her cohorts proudly unfolded a banner on the NWP headquarters building in Washington and toasted the event—with grape juice, of course.

 

 Alice Paul toasts the triumphant banner draped at National Women's Party Headquarters in Washington after the final ratification of the 19th Amendment.

The achievement of the long-sought goal actually perplexed women’s organizations.  Many did not know what they should do.  The NAWSA dissolved.  Many of its leaders went on to found the League of Women Voters.  Others shifted their attention to other social causes.

Paul remained determined to achieve complete social equality.  For her, the franchise was just one step.  Many states still had discriminatory property laws, marriage still made women virtual chattel of their husbands, and women’s employment opportunities and wages everywhere lagged men.

In 1923 on the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, Paul announced that she would be working for a new constitutional amendment called the Lucretia Mott Amendment.   Drafted by Paul, the amendment read:

Section 1. Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

The amendment would soon become better known simply as the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).  Paul would spend the rest of her life trying to win its support and passage.  By the late 1940’s both Republicans and Democrats endorsed the amendment in their platforms and several states had adopted it.  But progress stalled until a new generation of feminists took up the struggle in the 1970’s.

After the victory in 1923 Paul went on to earn three law degrees from Washington University and American University.  She travelled extensively in Latin America and Europe promoting the cause of women’s equality everywhere.  In 1938 she settled in Geneva, Switzerland where she founded the World Woman’s Party (WWP), which tried to advance women’s rights through the League of Nations.  

 

 Paul was author and life long champion of the Equal Rights Amendment.  The quote comes from a psychiatrist's evaluation notes when she was jailed for her White House protests.

She returned to the U.S. in 1941.  In the post war years, she used her experience with the WWP and the League of Nations to support the inclusion of gender equality in the United Nations Charter and backed the establishment of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

Paul led a coalition that won approval—some say by convincing some Southern law makers to support an amendment in hopes of killing the whole bill—of the inclusion women in the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would have greater and farther reaching consequences for equality than any action since the adoption of the 19th Amendment.

 

Alice Paul at her home and former NWP Headquarters Belmont House in Washington in 1972.  She never stopped campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment. 

Paul never married.  He work was her life.  From 1929 her primary residence was the house on Capitol Hill that her wealthy friend Alva Belmont bought years earlier as the headquarters of the NWP.  Today it is preserved as the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, dedicated to Paul, and the U.S. women’s suffrage and equal-rights movements.

After suffering a disabling stroke in 1974, Paul eventually moved to the Quaker Greenleaf Extension Home in Moorestown Township, New Jersey, near her family home of Paulsdale.  She died there at the age of 92 on July 9, 1977.

In 1985 the Alice Paul Institute was formed to preserve Paulsdale and establish it as a women’s heritage and leadership center.

Despite her many accomplishments, Paul’s memory faded.  Public awareness centered on the first generation of suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Caddy Stanton.  Paul’s aggressiveness—and her embarrassment to the memory of Woodrow Wilson, who had unjustifiably been canonized as a liberal saint primarily for his support of the League of Nations—caused her to be written out of many popular accounts of the fight for suffrage.  Her reputation got a big boost with the 2004 HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels starring Hillary Swank as Paul.  The film is still regularly shown and has become a staple of women’s history classes and projects.