boston teenagers debate the woman question, 1837-1838

Boston Teenagers Debate the Woman Question, 1837-1838Author(s): Margaret McFaddenSource: Signs, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Summer, 1990), pp. 832-847Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174644 .

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BOSTON TEENAGERS DEBATE THE WOMAN QUESTION, 1837-1838

MARGARET MC FADDEN

Two women who took part in Margaret Fuller's "Conversations" in the early 1840s began their dialogue on women's rights while yet teenage school girls. Ednah Dow Littlehale (later Cheney), 1824- 1904, and Caroline Wells Healey (later Dall), 1822-1912, became friends at Joseph Hale Abbot's school in Boston. In the latter half of the century both women moved to the forefront of the Boston women's rights and reform movements; each chose different ave- nues of work-Caroline Wells Healey Dall primarily as journalist, writer, and speaker; and Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney primarily as reformer and organizer.' Both lived much of their adult lives as single women with children to support. Caroline's husband was a missionary to India for thirty years, and Ednah was widowed when her son was a toddler. Thus, they experienced no opposition from

1 There is no full-scale biography of either of these women. For Dall, see her memoir Alongside (Boston, 1900) as well as Essays and Sketches (1849). For secondary work, see Barbara Welter, "The Merchant's Daughter: A Tale from Life," in her Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic, 1980), esp. chap. 10; and the sketch by Stephen Nissenbaum in Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 428-29. Dall's voluminous papers are in the

Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Mass., and the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. For Cheney, see her Reminiscences (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1902), and the pamphlet transcript of the memorial meeting of the New England Women's

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1990, vol. 15, no. 4] ? 1990 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/90/1504-0007$01.00

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husbands. Their four-part exchange of letters in 1837-38 (when they were thirteen and fifteen years old) is important because it shows how the key argumentative themes that structured the debate about women for the next 150 years were present and accessible quite early in the nineteenth century. It also reveals in a striking way how such themes had a dramatic impact even on adolescent schoolgirls. It constitutes, because of its lively and sparkling display of the issues, a small treasure in the library of historic feminist thinking.

Caroline Wells Healey Dall became one of the most prolific of the nineteenth-century women's rights writers. Forced by a change in the fortunes of her father, a Boston merchant, to make her own living, she began teaching school at age nineteen. After her marriage to Unitarian minister Charles Dall in 1844, she found herself sometimes without sufficient funds to live in the style she considered necessary.2 When her husband went to India as the first Unitarian missionary in 1855, she began to support herself and her two children by writing and lecturing. Charles remained in India for over thirty years, except for brief visits home. Caroline and the children never accompanied him.

When Dall first wrote on women's rights as an adult ("Woman in the Present," in The Liberator, 1849), her arguments were substan- tially the same as her teenage ones, although she expanded her case and eventually advocated the vote for women. The continuity is striking; even the philosophic basis of her argument remained unchanged in all her writings over the years, despite the varying practical conclusions she drew from it. Dall's position combined an Enlightenment humanism with reasoning drawn from "special spheres" gynocentrism, a perspective whose origin was theologi- cal. The College, the Market, and the Court (1867) distills the

Club, Ednah Dow Cheney, 1824-1904 (Boston, 1905). The biographical sketch by Shirley Phillips Ingebritsen in Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (325-27), is use- ful; Cheney's correspondence is available at the Boston Public Library, the Massachu- setts Historical Society, the Sophia Smith Collection, and the Schlesinger Library.

2 In 1851 she wrote from Toronto (where Charles then had his pastorate) to her father, Mark Healey; the letter is a response to his denial of her request for money. She meticulously details the costs of furnishing and keeping a house in Canada (June 5, 1851, 72 v. Box 5, Caroline Healey Dall Collection, Schlesinger Library). The document is remarkable because it shows the depth of her desire for approval; she even alludes to the possibility of her father's disowning her. Written upside down in the back of a manuscript volume of short essays for various publications, it seems to have been left there unintentionally (because such revelations of herself are unusual in her editing of her own papers). It is probably a copy of the letter that she presumably sent.

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material of many of her lectures and is her mature statement. Here she maintains that woman-both because she is female and because she is human-has a special position to fulfill, a special place in society, and a right to equality of opportunity in all areas and professions, especially education, employment, and law.3

Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney became an independent woman after her artist husband's early death left her a widow with an eighteen-month-old child. Her family's intellectual and political preoccupations decisively shaped her early views; her father was a Universalist, abolitionist, and advocate of women's rights. She too joined the Boston women's movement, agitating for the establishment of a school of design for women and helping to found the New England Female Medical College, the New England Hospital for Women and Children, and the New England Women's Club. She lectured and wrote for the New England Woman Suffrage Associ- ation and the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association; she also served as secretary to the Freedmen's Aid Society, helping to send teachers from Boston to the South after the Civil War. In addition, she authored children's books, poetry, and biographies. Cheney was the first woman to speak in Divinity Chapel at Harvard, a fact that aroused much opposition from the faculty. From the early age of thirteen, her position was much more egalitarian than was Dall's. Cheney believed that the real differences between male and female were minimal and that women-because of their equal possession of human dignity-should have the same rights as men.

It is important to consider some of the contextual factors that turned the two women toward feminist concerns. Still young when they attended Margaret Fuller's "Conversations" in 1841, both were profoundly influenced by that experience. In later life, they often recalled those formative years.4 The correspondence pre- sented below predates their acquaintance with Fuller, however, and thus shows with greater purity the manner of their early engagement with the ideas and issues of the late Jacksonian period. The girls were at this time both pupils of Joseph Hale Abbot, the

3 Caroline Dall, "Woman in the Present," Liberator 19, no. 22 (June 1, 1849): 88, and The College, the Market and the Court (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1867).

4 See Dall, Margaret and Her Friends (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895) for Caroline's recollections. Much has been written on Fuller and her circle and on the

importance of these early women-only groups for education and confidence building among women. See esp. Bell Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); and Elizabeth K.

Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Defining Voices, 1837-1883 (New York: Garland, 1983).

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principal of a private school "for young ladies" in Boston from 1833 to 1855. Abbot had previously been a tutor at Bowdoin College (after his graduation there) and a professor of math and natural philosophy at Phillips (Exeter) Academy. The philosophy of the school was one of Republican Motherhood: that it is even more important to educate girls than boys, since mothers are charged with almost the whole education of young children.5 Nancy Cott has cogently discussed the establishment of a system for educating women "because of their sex, not despite it." Cott asserts that it was the "orientation toward gender" in girls' education during this period that helped foster group consciousness and the possibility of a later women's movement.6

Both girls were from liberal religious families, Unitarian or Universalist, and they would likely have been familiar with the ongoing debates in such journals as the Monthly Repository (Lon- don) and the Boston-based Universalist and Ladies' Repository. The former periodical was edited by W. J. Fox (who introduced Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill) and often ran articles about women's rights by people such as Harriet Martineau. There was not a Unitarian "position" on women's rights, but Unitarians and Universalists were unusually active on behalf of women's rights and other liberal reform issues such as abolition and moral reform.7

Caroline and Ednah's debate took place in the turbulent late 1830s, when various events had brought women's rights issues to the notice of a large part of society. Female antislavery societies were well organized in Boston and other parts of the Northeast, and the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women had been held in New York in May 1837, just six months before Ednah and Caroline held their own debate. The convention was remarkable not only for prohibiting male attendance but also for the strong language in which it spoke of the sisterhood of all women. It is the duty of women, said a resolution written by Angelina Grimke, "no

5 Thomas Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States, 2 vols. (New York: Science Press, 1929), 1:348.

6 Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 101-25, esp. 118, 125.

7 The two denominations, Unitarian and Universalist, did not merge until 1952; in the early nineteenth century many Unitarians embraced Universalist beliefs and vice versa. In fact, the influential Monthly Repository was begun in London in 1797 as the Universalist's Miscellany by William Vidler, a Universalist minister who was also a Unitarian. See James Edwin Odgers, "Universalism," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (New York: Scribner's, 1928), 12:529-35; and John C. Godbey, "Unitarian Universalist Association," in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 15:143-47.

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longer [to] remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her," and therefore to help abolish slavery.8

Additionally, Sarah and Angelina Grimke were at this time abolitionist public lecturers, and their appearances in Boston had prompted a heated exchange from local pulpits about the impropri- ety of women speaking in public. Catharine Beecher and Angelina engaged in a written debate about women's rights, with Angelina's side of this debate being published in 1836.9 Sarah's famous Letters on the Equality of the Sexes was written in 1837.10

Such public discussion of the woman question cannot fail to have reached the girls' ears. Ednah recalls the circumstances of their exchange as arising from a public lecture on women's rights:

At this time Amasa Walker made a brave address on Woman's Rights at the Lyceum.1 My sister and I worked out some very prosaic stanzas, which, I believe, were printed in the "Transcript." As schoolgirls, of course, we must have a finger in every pie, and the discussion became so warm in the school as to interrupt the lessons. Mr. Abbot therefore gave us leave to hold a meeting in the schoolroom in the afternoon. Caroline H , since so able an advocate of the cause, then opposed it, while I strongly advocated it. The day was set, but when the hour came for me to go, a little sick sister had fallen asleep in my arms, and I would not disturb her even to fulfill my engagement. Imagine the jeers to which I was exposed,-Caroline declaring that this settled the whole question, that a woman could not and should not vote!12

As for the intellectual substance of the exchange, I have suggested above that the two main positions in the woman question debate of the nineteenth century-the "minimizers" stance and the

8 Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in New York City May 9-12, 1837, intro. Dorothy Sterling (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 13.

9 Angelina Emily Grimk6, Letters to Catharine Beecher (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1836).

10 Sarah M. Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838).

1 The Boston Lyceum sponsored a debate on the equality of the sexes in January 1838. Amasa Walker (1799-1875), one of the founders of the Lyceum, spoke in favor of the proposition, but the Lyceum voted against it (see the Liberator [January 12, 1838], 7).

12 Cheney, Reminiscences (n. 1 above), 20.

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"maximizers" position (called by others the "equality" and "difference" arguments or "justice" and "expediency")-find vivid ex- pression in Caroline and Ednah's letters.'3 Ednah takes the mini- mizer human rights position, insisting that women have as much right to rule as men do (document 3). Her strategy is to deempha- size differences between the sexes, as a matter of justice in light of their common humanity. In this, she unconsciously relies on the philosophic arguments of the Enlightenment feminists, of such people as Mary Wollstonecraft and the Marquis de Condorcet, arguments later taken up by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill. One notices immediately that the younger Ednah is much more radical than Caroline, arguing in the first letter for a marriage strike: "Let them not lead you to the altar of matrimony, until you are allowed your full political rights." In the third letter Ednah argues for disobeying laws "we don't have a hand in making." Angelina Grimke had proposed civil disobedience in 1836 in her "Appeal to the Christian Women of the South," but her case was based on the concept of a Higher Law, at odds with unjust human law.14 Ednah's justification for civil disobedience uses the same grounds Thomas Paine gave in his appeals for independence.

Caroline, on the other hand, takes the maximizer position: women are different from men, and these differences give them strength and power in different, separate areas. Abandoning those separate spheres will denigrate women, take away their power, and make them "mannish" instead of "ladylike." The last of her pieces reprinted here, written for The Casket, reads like a tract from the present-day New Right.'5 One of the most felicitous summary

13 See Maggie McFadden, "Anatomy of Difference: Toward a Classification of Feminist Theory," Women's Studies International Forum 7, no. 6 (1984): 495-504. Nancy Cott's article, "Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements: The Past before Us," in What Is Feminism? ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 49-62, gives a good summary of both the historical positions and the historiographical discussion (with different authors' terminology) surrounding the topic. Most enlightening for this discussion is Cott's demonstration that not only were both positions held throt ghout the nineteenth century, but also the positions were often held simultaneously.

14 Angelina Grimk6, "Appeal to the Christian Women of the South," Anti-Slavery Examiner 1, no. 2 (1836): 16-26.

15 The Casket was published under various titles (The Casket: Flowers of Literature, Wit and Sentiment, Atkinson's Casket, The Casket, and Philadelphia Monthly Magazine) from 1826 to 1838 in Philadelphia. See Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 544-45. There was also The Casket published in London from 1827 to 1836. I have been unable to ascertain whether Caroline Wells Healey's essay was, in fact, ever printed.

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sentences in that piece is this: "To women belong the gentler, the sweeter duties of the fireside; man's proper element is the bustle of political or commercial action." She does, however, admit in this last response (document 4) that the radical differences between males and females in bodily strength and thinking patterns may be caused by socialization: "Education may have much to do with this."

It is clear that while Ednah and Caroline operate within a strongly Christian and, indeed, pietistic worldview, Caroline is the more theologically minded of the two. Of great interest is her fear that any violation of the two-spheres understanding of the sexual division of labor will plunge the world into "its original chaos" (document 4). Despite her Unitarian background, Caroline is here evincing the lingering power of Puritan and Miltonic categories. Her assumption is that social realities, no less than physical matter, are not independent and self-sustaining but are, rather, dependent on the sovereign will of God. There is a "glorious economy of nature" whose inner workings testify to the purposiveness of the Creator. Were that power to abate, the world would collapse back into a primeval and meaningless chaos. By contrast, Ednah's ideas have obviously been much influenced by Lockean (and perhaps even Rousseauist) accounts. For her, clearly, the "original condition" is a "state of nature" wherein basic equality and the free enjoyment of natural rights flourish.

Caroline was later to revise and soften her gynocentric position as she sought to succeed in the male world, but her stance never relinquished the separate spheres argument; women, she held, must simply excel in both private and public domains. Nancy Cott's analysis of some nineteenth-century activists' simultaneous (but logically contradictory) emphases on women's difference from, and sameness to, men is very suggestive in understanding Caroline Wells Healey Dall's mature position. "'Woman's sphere,' " says Cott, "was both the point of oppression and the point of departure for nineteenth-century feminists."16 In the early letters, however, Caroline seems to reject that "superwoman" position: "I hear someone say, 'I can do this, and go to Caucus too.' No! You cannot, as soon as you become accustomed to it, political and public life will be exciting and necessary to you; and your homes and your children?-would be left to the care of Heaven, and your husbands!" (document 4). One might note her implicit assumption that

16 Cott, "Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements," 51.

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the political world is so uniquely compelling and fascinating that it tempts women to abandon the hearth.

That Caroline and Ednah were at such early ages debating this subject, using sophisticated Enlightenment language, can be seen as doubly remarkable given the atmosphere of moralizing sentiment in which they lived and moved. Typical of that atmosphere is the writing found in the album of young Mary B. Low of Boston, an autograph album of advice, maxims, poetry, and friendship epi- grams from various friends and well-wishers, written from 1834 to 1843. One of these, from J. H. W., offers "Maxims for a Wife" as a gift to Mary Low on her impending marriage. Its opening sentences are a masterpiece of claustrophobic style and sensibility:

Thinking Something applicable to the interesting event in which you are about to become an actor, might not prove unacceptable to you, I have conceived the prospect of recording a few brief maxims, all that space will admit of, relative to the duties of a wife toward her husband; which if observed, will be eminently calculated to render the connec- tion agreeable to both, So long as it may continue. And may it continue, many, many happy years; and when the dark portals of the inexorable toomb [sic] shall have finally closed upon you, may it be resumed in that Celestial World which knows neither Suffering nor seperation [sic].

Maxims for a Wife Primarily. Love and respect your husband. 2. Be faithful, and a comforter to him in adversity should

it unfortunately visit him. 3. Be industrious in household affairs, and prudent in

expenditures. It will acquire his esteem and confidence. 4. Require nothing from him which he cannot give you,

conveniently. 5. Should your husband perchance give utterance to any

sentiment opposed to your notions or feelings, do not con- tradict him; for contradiction begets dispute; dispute, resentment; resentment, a prolonged quarrel, the consequence of which if often repeated, who can forsee [sic]?

6. Do not disparage his friends, especially his relatives; for it will prove another fruitful source of quarrels.

7. And conceal no transaction of your own from him. Since if discovered by him it will generate jealousy and distrust.

8. But rely affectionately on his support-trusting in his strength-as doeth the slender vine upon the sturdy oak,

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around which it entwines itself in instinctive acknowledg- ment of its physical superiority.'7

J. H. W. (n.d.)'8

It is likely, though impossible to determine, that the interests suggested by the contents of Mary B. Low's album were shared by many white teenage girls of the era. Nevertheless, many women were also exposed through printed materials and public debate to alternative views on the woman question, such as those expressed in Caroline and Ednah's letters. These views may have been available even to many lower-class women, for literacy was virtu- ally universal among white women in New England by 1840.19

In sum, Caroline and Ednah's teenage correspondence adds to the evidence that both the human rights minimizers argument and the women's rights maximizers argument were present in the woman question debate during the whole of the nineteenth century, as scholars such as Nancy Cott, William Leach, Dale Spender, and Karen Offen have argued. That both positions in the debate were found in many parts of the Atlantic community is testament to the importance and significance of the ideas themselves as well as to the fact that, as Cott has observed, women's rights advocates were always able to adapt their arguments to the context.20

Additionally, this correspondence shows how early thought and discussions of women's roles can shape later work. Both Dall and

17 Note here the use of the favorite tree and vine metaphor for males and females. Sarah Grimke, in her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman, appropriated the metaphor (which had been used against her and Angelina) for her own argument by turning it on its head: "Ah! how many of my sex feel .. . that what they have leaned upon has proved a broken reed at best, and often a spear" (letter 3).

18 Mary B. Low of Boston, album, 1834-43, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Accession number 79-M212. Reprinted by permission of the Schlesinger Library.

19 Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (n. 6 above), 101. For an interesting later

dialogue (1850) between Dall and a working-class woman, Harriet Farley, on the woman question, see Tom Dublin, "Working Women and the 'Women's Question," Radical History Review 22 (Winter 1979-80): 93-98.

20 Cott, "Feminist Theory and Feminist Movements," 51; Leach (n. 1 above), esp. 190-212; Dale Spender, Women of Ideas (And What Men Have Done to Them) (London: Ark, 1983); Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1983), esp. vol. 1; Karen Offen, "Defining Feminism: A Comparative Histor- ical Approach," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 119-57, and "Liberty, Equality, and Justice for Women: The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 335-73.

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Cheney continued in their independent thinking and belief in the importance of women. It also suggests that education is an essential factor in developing a "feminist" consciousness, although in this case the acquisition of the vocabulary and ideas of the Enlighten- ment and liberal Protestantism-belief in human value, egalitari- anism, and women's worth-was gained from the home and public debate as well as from school. Moreover, the letters are an example of female friendship that provides support and a sounding board for ideas, beginning with the formative early adolescent years. Finally, the correspondence counters current contemporary despair over neofemininity in young people. Teenage correspondence is not merely juvenile ephemera (as usually noted in catalogs of archives) but is also an important side to any study of nineteenth-century women's lives. That this correspondence has been saved at all must surely be a result of Dall's and Cheney's having been women's rights activists in their later lives as well as of Dall's consciousness of the historic importance of her correspondence.

Written in November 1837 and February 1838, when Ednah was thirteen and Caroline a much older (or so Caroline thought) fifteen, the letters are preserved in the Dall Collection at the Schlesinger Library and were kept by Caroline, who was her own best historian. (A notebook kept by her is inscribed, "Left as a specimen of my style of getting up my lectures. 1 June 1870.") Her own notes are found throughout her papers. She writes at the top of the first of these letters, "Part of a curious discussion with Ednah D. Cheney-age 14 1/2."21

Department of Women's Studies Appalachian State University

* * *

[Document 1]22 To C. Healey from E. D. L.

You say Caroline that fame cannot make us happy, that it will be a source merely of misery: and you advise me not to seek it. Many thanks Carry for this good advice, but I think it will go up to the

21 At this time (November 1837), Ednah was thirteen and a half and Caroline was fifteen and a half.

22 Letters from Caroline Healey Dall Collection, MC 351, Folder 19. Reprinted with permission of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization have not been changed in the following transcriptions.

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moon, for I have not the least idea of following it. I may sink down into obscurity, I may become a humble member of society, but it will not be willingly. While I live my powers shall be devoted to a different purpose.

Caroline, there was much in that piece23 that was sinful, I wrote to you, much, & I am heartily ashamed of it; but my wicked thoughts have been committed to paper, and I cannot recall them, but I do most heartily wish I had never written them. You say that fame is incompatible with happiness; I believe it not: if my ambitious wishes are ever realized, I may not be happy, but be assured I never shall, unless they are. Take but one class of famous characters, say authors. What must have been the delight of Scott, to have heard his works spoken of, and praised and the author enquired for in his very hearing; of Hannah Moore,24 to see the good her works had done, of thousands of great illustrious writers, to know their single pen had done; of Cervantes, to see chivalry and knight errantry expiring under the hand of Don Quixote-was this not a holy pleasure. But you will say, think of their sufferings, think of hearing yourself criticised, and torn to pieces, even your private life not safe from the inroads of these harpies, again I answer 't is distressing truly, and I can never read such a review without pitying the poor author. But still I think this does not balance the pleasure derived. The heart cannot be satisfied with the common every day life; the mind must at times burst the bonds of its prison house, and be free. Does it not seem as though you would speak out before the whole world in words of eloquence sometimes? And yet what have we to say! Caroline you & I have both the same misfortune: we have the misfortune to be women: we must see ourselves despised, deprived of our rights & liberties, & yet cannot raise a hand to strike a blow in their defence; we must see ourselves slaves, Slaves to what? To custom, a tyrant worse than the most tyrannical king, or emperor of any age. It is a crime for a woman to speak her thoughts, according to the creed of the Lords of Creation: She is fit to be but a bauble, a toy a doll, to be played with for one hour, then cast away.

Such is the fate of many women, preserve us from the like. There is but one way to save ourselves: break the shackles, burst the bonds and declare ourselves free.

23 This is the first letter extant in the Dall collection; I have not been able to locate the letter that Ednah Littlehale refers to here.

24 Hannah More (1745-1833), English evangelical, educator, and moralist; she

argued in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) that females should have a different education than males since the two sexes had contrasting characteristics. Her works were popular and influential in the United States as well as in Britain.

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American Women, ye are by your Declaration of Independence declaredfree. Yet ye are denied all political rights, ye are subjected to your tyrants men: and yet you hug the chains that bind you, you court the favor of these same men. Shame on ye, be women. Stand up, and assert your rights, be slaves no longer; or at least spurn your tyrants; grant them no favor; let them not lead you to the altar of matrimony, until you are allowed your full political rights; the rights of free women. Caroline I should be ashamed to let even you see this foolish piece; foolish, but alas! too true! but I cannot bring myself to conceal it, but for pity's sake let no one else see it.

Nov. 13th 1837. [Boston] E. D. Littlehale

[Document 2] Nov. 13th, 1837

To E. D. Littlehale I felt ashamed when I read your reply that I had written so

weakly, the more so, when I recollected that it was written by one so much younger than myself.25 There are seasons, however, when the bosom is too full to be emptied by mere words. There is much sense in your reply-and there is much nonsense! I believe I am growing too egotistical & think too much of the little pronoun I. I am apt to speak of people in particular rather than people in general. I never shall be happy, unless I reach the hill-top my ambition aspires to;-I never shall be happy, if I do. Fame may add to happiness, but fame alone, can never cause it. If the affections have been blighted, if the mind is diseased, fame can only add to the bitterness of the cup, and the grave, and unwelcome teacher, will soon cause you to be sensible of it. Fame may render you happy, but it will never render me so. Again, I advise you not to seek it, it's path is thorny, and now you have a heart at ease! I do not as Johnson did, envy every one who attempts to travel with me. I speak-I lift the warning finger-for your happiness & refer you to Felicia Hemans,2 for the truth of what I say-but enough! we will talk no more of this, 'tis a subject that affects me much-'tis foolish-thus to dwell upon it. For my beloved father's sake,27 I

25 Two years separated them. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), British Romantic poet, novelist, essayist. Her

husband, an Irish officer, left her in the 1820s with the care of their five sons. She was widely published and known in both England and the United States.

27 Mark Healey (1782-1879), Boston merchant who lost most of his fortune in the panic of 1837. See Welter (n. 1 above) and Leach (n. 1 above) for discussion of Caroline's relationship with her father. In her memoir Alongside (n. 1 above), Dall writes, "[Father] required great neatness in our dress, and exquisite care of books or articles of any kind in daily use. I used to write a great folio sheet to my grandmother in the country every Sunday. No envelopes had been invented, and to fold such a sheet and seal it neatly was a work of art. No slipshod result was ever allowed to

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would look over the heads of the rest of the world, Heaven grant I may succeed.

What mean you, by the political rights of women? for here it is, that you become nonsensical. Are you a friend of Harriet Martineau's,28 would you wish your husband to stay at home, and take care of your children? for you to go to Caucus? No! you do not know what you are saying. I think any woman is a fool to be married; any wife will tell you so, & I think you are a ninny to call yourself a slave. I am not one, nor are my race. I should be ashamed to acknowledge it;-You want to read Lucy Aikin,29 and a few more books on the state of Society throughout the world; at the present day; to set you right. I thought just so, at your age, & I hope I never shall think so again. I know I am voted masculine to this day & have nearly vetoed the vote myself, but the act shall not pass, if I can help it. I wish to be a perfect lady, however far short I may fall of the mark.

[Document 3] To C. Healey

I am going to begin in critic's style, now Caroline, and have got all the marks made in the beginning. First, as to your feeling ashamed that's all wrong, you know you felt dreadful proud to think you knew So much more than I did; if you did not, you had a right to. You say there is much sense, & much nonsense, now what you call the sense I call the nonsense, & what you call the nonsense I call the Sense. You never will be happy do not think so.

Do you know Caroline you commit Sin in saying so, you doubt the power of your Heavenly Father, unless you have committed some great crime, there is no earthly reason for your never being happy, and if you have, you have a Saviour to whom you can go for pardon, and he will grant you peace. Perhaps I am presumptuous to tell you so, & I would not dare to, were it not that I think much of you. Peace is destroyed by this idea. Your affections have been blighted, who have you ever been in love with? For I *30 do not know what else you mean. You advise me not to seek fame; you

pass. Often have I been obliged to write the whole sheet over, before I could satisfy his fastidious demand" (92). She inscribed her work Woman's Right to Labor; or, Low Wages and Hard Work (1860), "The best I can give to my father."

8 Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), British writer and economist. In her Society in America (1837), she castigated American treatment and education of women; see

esp. the chap. entitled "Political Non-Existence of Women." 29 Lucy Aikin (1781-1864), British poet, historian, essayist. 30 Asterisk in manuscript. At bottom of page, "*You dont know much, C." in

Caroline Healey Dall's hand.

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throw away your ink, time and advice, when you say so, for I shall not follow your advice. "I have a heart at ease," good gracious, deliver me from those that have not then. Caroline, you think you can see right through me, but you cannot; you don't know half as much about me as you think you do. You refer me to F. Hemans. Unfortunately she is dead, and if she were alive I do not think she would honor me with her acquaintance: political-what do I mean by the rights of women!!! mean, I mean what I say-we have as good a right to rule men as they have to rule us. And to go to Caucus as they have; If we don't have a hand in making laws, I don't think we ought to obey them & if I could break a law without committing a moral wrong I should not scruple to do it. You ask me if I am a friend of H. Martineau's No, No; if there is a woman I despise and dislike it is H. Martineau and you need never fear, I shall become a disciple of hers. As I never intend to be married, (because I shall never have a chance) I shall not have any husband or children to take care of. I know what I am saying, I am equal to the men, and not superior to them. I am a slave until I am free, & I am not free yet. You may call me a ninny, but I call myself Ednah. I do not know what book Lucy Aikins is, but if you will lend it to me I shall be happy to read it. If you thought as I do, when at my age, you were wiser than you are now, & if you keep on growing silly as fast as you have done, I hope I shan't have to live with you, when you are fifty. If you don't think women have as good a right to vote as men you ought to be ducked in the frog pond.

Nov. 14th, 1837 E. D. Littlehale

[Document 4] For the Casket

The Rights of Woman My subject has been nearly exhausted by the ridiculous efforts

of many writers to prove that woman has and should excercise the right of legislation and public speaking. "Why then do I select it?" Simply that I may add my share to the modicum of absurdity. I am a woman and have the right to speak; gentlemen, you are bound to listen.

I do not deny that woman may have the right to vote; the right of legislation, for I am very tenacious of my sex's privileges, and am not prepared to argue, as I could wish, to the contrary:-but what lady would claim the right?

Truly, when I see a woman, arguing with grace and skill, and more than this, with ardor and earnestness upon this subject, I am inclined to believe her a fanatic; or a candidate for Bedlam. Neither am I one, who will attempt to prove that woman is inferior to her

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helpmeet; for I believe and I know, that the sexes are equal in mental, though not in bodily strength; and that the latter difference is induced by Education and not caused by Nature!

God, Our Benefactor and Creator, has formed man and woman for different purposes. To woman as a sex, he has given superior delicacy and suppleness of form-angelick beauty of feature; To her belong the finer susceptibilities and the tenderer, stronger affections of the heart. To her belongs gentle decision and submis- sive firmness, and to her in many, in most, instances the higher qualities of intellect, are vouchsafed; but in no way does she so visibly betray her weakness, as in vindicating what she calls her rights.

To man, he has given a firmer mould of body, a stronger cast of mind. His are the closer powers of reasoning; his, the more logical, and mathematically exact, habits of thought. His affections are more fickle, his sentiments more coarse, but his powers of apprehension are in general more ready.

A Hemans and a Bacon, an Edgeworth3' and a Scott, are good illustrations of the two sexes. Few men die of broken hearts, many women do! I have explained what I consider, the radical differences, between man and woman. In the former, the brain presides, in the latter, the heart! Education may have much to do with this.

To return to my subject. It has been agreed, I think in all ages, and among all nations (is a very important branch) (that division of labor) of Economy.32 To women belong the gentler, the sweeter duties, of the fireside; man's proper element is the bustle of political or commercial action.

As soon as these great parties interfere with each other, every- thing returns to it's original chaos. True, one wife exclaims: "I only wish to vote, and go to Caucus." and so do I, exclaims another, and another, and another. Very well! good people, coax your husbands, to nurse your children, cook your dinner, and superintend the domestic menage-and you may go to Caucuses.

Things would only return to their original condition if the experiment should succeed; women would be the iron; men the water of the human race. But the former class, for want of education would make sad work, at the caucus, or in the senate; while men would learn by instinct many feminine duties. "But I don't want my husband to do all this," I hear some one say, "I can do this and go to Caucus too." No! You cannot, as soon as you become accustomed to it, political and public life will be exciting and necessary to you;

31 Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), Anglo-Irish Gothic novelist. 32 Sentence incomplete in manuscript.

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and your homes and your children?-would be left to the care of Heaven, and your husbands! I am too young to argue well on this subject but if I could express myself as readily as I can think, the matter should be settled at once!

Thank Heaven! the bonds of habit are not easily broken, and women are in no danger of rendering themselves more ridiculous than they are at present. Content yourselves, my companions, with things as they are ordered by Beneficent and All-seeing Provi- dence, and believe that thus is best. Listen not to the specious arguments of those who would persuade you to the contrary; listen to the pleadings of your own hearts!

My young friends, if this subject were argued among you, the minority might prevail, and the majority be left without an argument. I will tell you why. Not because your cause is the wrong cause! Do not be disheartened, though your adversary have the most words, if you have the most ideas.

You are not old enough to perceive to perceive [sic] the relation between man and woman, taken in this view. You are not old enough to understand the beautiful, the glorious economy of nature, and you cannot now perceive or if you can perceive, you cannot now avail yourselves of the fallacious logic and weak arguments of your opponent. You are not old enough to take a full and comprehensive view of the arguments you have a right to use. Much talent, much knowledge of the world, much readiness of pen, and much humorous tact, is necessary to the task you have under- taken, is necessary to the faithful support of your argument!

It is easy to make assertions, but it is difficult to produce facts. Farewell then, let me hope that if the jewel I have added to your

Casket, do not prove a Gem, that it's modest lustre, may not be entirely dimmed by the superior brilliancy of it's companions. Feb. 10th, 1838 Part of a discussion on Suffrage with E.D. (Cheney)- age 15 1/2 by C. H. (Dall) [in Dall's hand]

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