19th. Resolved, That, as woman is not permitted to hold office, nor have any voice in the Government, she should not be compelled to pay taxes out of her scanty wages to support men who get eight dollars a day for taking the right to themselves to enact laws for her.
20th. Resolved, That we, the women of Ohio, will hereafter meet annually in Convention, to consult upon and adopt measures for the removal of the various disabilities—political, social, religious, legal, and pecuniary—to which women, as a class, are subjected, and from which results so much misery, degradation, and crime.
After the Akron Convention in 1851, The New York Sunday Mercury published a woodcut covering a whole page, representing the Convention. Every woman in coat and breeches and high-heeled boots, sitting cross-legged smoking cigars (truly manly arguments for equal political rights). There was not a Bloomer present.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
To the Woman's Convention, held at Akron, Ohio, May 25, 1851:
Dear Friends:—It would give me great pleasure to accept your invitation to attend the Convention, but as circumstances forbid my being present with you, allow me, in addressing you by letter, to touch on those points of this great question which have, of late, much occupied my thoughts. It is often said to us tauntingly, "Well, you have held Conventions, you have speechified and resolved, protested and appealed, declared and petitioned, and now, what next? Why do you not do something?" I have as often heard the reply, "We know not what to do."
Having for some years rehearsed to the unjust judge our grievances, our legal and political disabilities and social wrongs, let us glance at what we may do, at the various rights of which we may, even now, quietly take possession. True, our right to vote we can not exercise until our State Constitutions are remodelled; but we can petition our legislators every session, and plead our cause before them. We can make a manifestation by going to the polls, at each returning election, bearing banners, with inscriptions thereon of great sentiments handed down to us by our revolutionary fathers—such as, "No Taxation without Representation," "No just Government can be formed without the consent of the Governed," etc. We can refuse to pay all taxes, and, like the English dissenters, suffer our goods to be seized and sold, if need be. Such manifestations would appeal to a class of minds that now take no note of our Conventions or their proceedings; who never dream, even, that woman thinks herself defrauded of a single right. The trades and professions are all open to us; let us quietly enter and make ourselves, if not rich and famous, at least independent and respectable. Many of them are quite proper to woman, and some peculiarly so. As merchants, postmasters, and silversmiths, teachers, preachers, and physicians, woman has already proved herself fully competent. Who so well fitted to fill the pulpits of our day as woman? All admit her superior to man in the affections, high moral sentiments, and religious enthusiasm; and so long as our popular theology and reason are at loggerheads, we have no need of acute metaphysicians or skillful logicians in our pulpits. We want those who can make the most effective appeals to our imaginations, our hopes and fears.
Again, as physicians. How desirable are educated women in this profession! Give her knowledge commensurate with her natural qualifications, and there is no position woman could assume that would be so pre-eminently useful to her race at large, and her own sex in particular, as that of ministering angel to the sick and afflicted; an angel, not capable of sympathy merely, but armed with the power to relieve suffering and prevent disease. The science of Obstetrics is a branch of the profession which should be monopolized by woman. The fact that it is now almost wholly in the hands of the male practitioner, is an outrage on common decency that nothing but the tyrant custom can excuse. "From the earliest history down to 1568, it was practiced by women. The distinguished individual first to make the innovation on this ancient, time-sanctified custom, was no less a personage than a court prostitute, the Duchess of Villiers, a favorite mistress of Louis XIV. of France." This is a formidable evil, and productive of much immorality, misery, and crime. But now that some colleges are open to woman, and the "Female Medical College of Pennsylvania" has been established for our sex exclusively, I hope this custom may be abolished as speedily as possible, for no excuse can be found for its continuance, in the want of knowledge and skill in our own sex. It seems to me, the existence of this custom argues a much greater want of delicacy and refinement in woman, than would the practice of the profession by her in all its various branches.
But the great work before us is the education of those just coming on the stage of action. Begin with the girls of to-day, and in twenty years we can revolutionize this nation. The childhood of woman must be free and untrammeled. The girl must be allowed to romp and play, climb, skate, and swim; her clothing must be more like that of the boy—strong, loose-fitting garments, thick boots, etc., that she may be out at all times, and enter freely into all kinds of sports. Teach her to go alone, by night and day, if need be, on the lonely highway, or through the busy streets of the crowded metropolis. The manner in which all courage and self-reliance is educated out of the girl, her path portrayed with dangers and difficulties that never exist, is melancholy indeed. Better, far, suffer occasional insults or die outright, than live the life of a coward, or never move without a protector. The best protector any woman can have, one that will serve her at all times and in all places, is courage; this she must get by her own experience, and experience comes by exposure. Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another. We have had women enough befooled under the one system, pray let us try the other. The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession. Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle—that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays its thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.
Teach the girl it is no part of her life to cater to the prejudices of those around her. Make her independent of public sentiment, by showing her how worthless and rotten a thing it is. It is a settled axiom with me, after much examination and reflection, that public sentiment is false on every subject. Yet what a tyrant it is over us all, woman especially, whose very life is to please, whose highest ambition is to be approved. But once outrage this tyrant, place yourself beyond his jurisdiction, taste the joy of free thought and action, and how powerless is his rule over you! his sceptre lies broken at your feet; his very babblings of condemnation are sweet music in your ears; his darkening frown is sunshine to your heart, for they tell of your triumph and his discomfort. Think you, women thus educated would long remain the weak, dependent beings we now find them? By no means. Depend upon it, they would soon settle for themselves this whole question of Woman's Rights. As educated capitalists and skillful laborers, they would not be long in finding their true level in political and social life.