The July 1848 convention in Seneca Falls, New York, is often highlighted as the start of a national women’s rights movement; it was indeed important, and out of it came the crucial “Declaration of Sentiments” that helped guide the movement.
But it was a gathering two years later, the October 1850 convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, that billed itself as the “First National Women’s Rights Convention,” drawing more than 900 attendees (triple the 1848 numbers) and truly launching a nationwide movement. Highlighting a handful of the Worcester convention’s impressive and inspiring women highlights the connections of women’s activism and history to every part of American society.
The convention’s organizer and President-elect was Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, a longtime activist whose opening address noted the importance of applying the 1848 “Declaration of Sentiments” to “those conditions of the times which the reformer seeks to influence.” Yet she made clear that “the reformation which we propose … is radical and universal.” By this time, Davis had been seeking such reformations for decades through her work as an abolitionist, including organizing an 1835 anti-slavery convention in Utica, New York with her first husband, Frances Wright. After Wright’s death she continued to pursue those goals and to link them with women’s rights activism, not only at the Worcester convention but also in Washington, D.C. alongside her second husband, Rhode Island Congressman Thomas Davis. And for the final quarter-century of her life, she dedicated much of her work to advocating for women’s health and medical needs and rights, including a speaking tour that urged women to study medicine and become doctors.
The local organizer who called the convention to order, Sarah H. Earle, further illustrates the connections of women’s rights to abolitionism. Earle had moved to Worcester from her native Nantucket in 1821 at the age of 22, and over the next three decades she became a key player in the city’s abolitionist community, founding the Worcester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle and the Worcester City Anti-Slavery Society and providing a home and family for two orphaned African American girls, Catherine and Cynthia Gardner. Three years after the Worcester convention, Earle co-founded (with Paulina Davis and others) and personally funded The Una, the first periodical in America to be owned, published, edited, and written entirely by women. And throughout these years she fought for women’s political and legal equality in her home state, authoring an 1851 petition to the State Legislature in support of women’s suffrage and an 1855 one to remove the word “males” from the Massachusetts Constitution.