The transition of the country from peace to the tumult and waste of war was appalling and swift, but the regeneration of its women kept pace with it. They lopped off superfluities, retrenched in expenditures, became deaf to the calls of pleasure, and heeded not the mandates of fashion. Their work was that of relief and philanthropy, and, for the first time in the history of the world, the women of America developed a heavenly side to war. They cared for the needy families of soldiers, nursed the sick in camp and the wounded in hospitals, ministered to the dying in the rear of battle-fields, and kept the channels of beneficence full to overflowing, which extended from Northern homes to the army at the front. For their multiform work they needed immense sums of money, and now the latent business abilities of women began to show themselves.
They went to Washington, and competed with men for government contracts for the manufacture of army clothing, and obtained them. When their accounts and their work were rigorously inspected by the War Department they received commendation, and were awarded larger contracts. They planned great money-making enterprises, whose largeness of conception and good business management yielded millions of dollars, to be expended in the interest of sick and wounded soldiers. The last two of the colossal Sanitary Fairs, held in New York and Philadelphia, yielded respectively $1,000,000 and $1,200,000. Women were the creators, the inspiration, and the great energizing force of these immense fairs, and also, from first to last, of the Sanitary Commission. Said Dr. Bellows, “There was nothing wanting in the plans of the women of the Commission, that business men commonly think peculiar to their own methods.” Men awoke to the consciousness that there were in women possibilities and potencies of which they had never dreamed.
Clara Barton, doing clerical work in a department of the government, and declining to receive compensation therefor, attracted no attention. But Clara Barton in hospitals, and on hospital transports, bringing order out of chaos, hope out of despair, and holding death in abeyance—Clara Barton at Andersonville, where twelve thousand soldiers had succumbed to the horrors of life in the military prison of the enemy and had been ignominiously buried in long trenches, unpitied and unknown, aroused the attention and awakened the gratitude of the nation. For she ordered the trenches opened, the unknown dead exhumed and decently buried, each man in a separate grave, with a headstone recording his rank, his name, and the date of his death, when it could be ascertained.[[164]]
Anna Dickinson, working for a pittance in the Philadelphia mint, and making speeches, on occasion, in behalf of the enslaved black man, was regarded as a nuisance. But Anna Dickinson on the platform, with impassioned speech and fervid moral earnestness pleading the cause of the slave before large audiences, and receiving one and two hundred dollars a night for the service—Anna Dickinson in the Connecticut and New Hampshire Republican campaigns, thrilling both States with her eloquence, and capturing both for Abraham Lincoln and Republicanism, became the heroine of the hour, and was hailed as the Joan of Arc of the century.
The development of those years, and the impetus they gave to women, which has not yet spent itself, has been wonderfully manifested since that time. At the close of the war there was but one college open to women, and that was grand old Oberlin in Ohio. Vassar received its first class of students in September, 1865, and now the colleges and universities which admit women are more in number than those which reject them. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from a medical college in Geneva, N. Y., in 1849, and afterward had access to the highest instruction and the best cliniques in Paris. She became the pioneer of the great host of women physicians and surgeons, who, since the war, have entered the ranks as medical practitioners, and have been thoroughly trained and duly qualified for their profession. Reverend Antoinette L. Brown was graduated from the theological school at Oberlin, Ohio, in 1850, and ordained in 1853. But not until after the war were theological schools opened to women in the Methodist, Unitarian, Universalist, Christian, and Free Baptist denominations. The United States Census of 1880 gave the number of women ministers as one hundred and sixty-five, resident in thirty-four States. During the last twenty-five years law schools have admitted women, and the National Census of 1880 states the number of women lawyers as seventy-five. The next Census will reveal a great increase in the numbers of women physicians, lawyers, and ministers.[[165]]
It has been since the war, and as the result of the great quickening of women which it occasioned, that women have organized missionary, philanthropic, temperance, educational, and political organizations, on a scale of great magnitude. Without much blowing of trumpets, or unseemly boasting, they have overcome almost insuperable obstacles, have brought business abilities to their management of affairs, and have achieved phenomenal success. Their capacity for public affairs receives large recognition at the present time. They are elected, or appointed to such offices as those of county clerk, register of deeds, pension agent, prison commissioner, state librarian, overseer of the poor, school superintendent, and school supervisor. They serve as executors and administrators of estates, trustees and guardians of property, trusts, and children, engrossing clerks of State legislatures, superintendents of women’s State prisons, college presidents and professors, members of boards of State charities, lunacy and correction, police matrons, and postmistresses.
They are accountants, pharmacists, cashiers, telegraphers, stenographers, typewriters, dentists, bookkeepers, authors, lecturers, journalists, painters, architects, and sculptors. In many of these positions women serve with men, who graciously acknowledge the practical wisdom and virtue that they bring to their duties. “And although many women have been appointed to positions in departments of government, and to important employments and trusts,” said Senator Blair of New Hampshire, from his seat in Congress, “as far as your committee are aware no charge of incompetence or malfeasance in office has ever been sustained against a woman.”
Only a little more than a quarter of a century ago women were allowed to enter very few remunerative occupations. In 1836, when Harriet Martineau visited this country, to study its new institutions, that she might be able to forecast the type of civilization to be evolved from them, she especially investigated the position of women in the young republic. She was surprised to find them occupying a very subordinate position in a country calling itself free, and to find that they had entered only seven paying occupations. They were allowed to teach, to be seamstresses, tailoresses, milliners, dressmakers, household servants, and factory operatives. Hon. Carroll D. Wright, Chief of the National Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, in a recent report, has announced the number of remunerative professions and occupations in which women are working as three hundred and forty-two. In the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, women have established hospitals, and have managed them with admirable wisdom.[[166]] Two of the ablest legal journals of the West have been established by women, who are their editors and proprietors.
Side by side with this phenomenal development of women, and always subsidiary to it, when not its direct cause, the movement for woman’s enfranchisement has proceeded with deepening earnestness, urged onward by the spur of continual victories. A great host of women have come to regard this as the largest question before the world to-day, and as underlying and involving the just settlement of the great social and moral problems of the time. It is not possible for one sex to settle aright the matters that equally concern both sexes, like questions of marriage and divorce laws, the regulation of the liquor traffic, the management of public schools, the care and cure of insane and criminal people, and many others that may be mentioned. There is not a question casting its shadow athwart the political horizon that is not underlaid by a moral basis, and women have a vital interest in all moral matters. This has greatly extended the area of the woman suffrage debate, and added to its ranks large numbers of able workers, who stood aloof while the reform was treated as an abstraction.
It is not possible to rehearse, in detail, the progress of the movement since the close of the war. The brief space allotted in these pages is insufficient for its complete history—volumes would be necessary. There can be recorded here only the briefest mention of its unflagging struggle, and its steady gains, year by year. In 1869, two great National organizations were formed. One styled itself “The National Woman Suffrage Association,” and the other was christened “The American Woman Suffrage Association.” The first established its headquarters in New York, and published a weekly paper, The Revolution, which was ably edited by Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony. The American made its home in Boston, and founded The Woman’s Journal, which was edited by Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Lucy Stone, William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas W. Higginson.[[167]] The State Woman Suffrage Associations became auxiliary to one or the other of these parent societies, and very frequently to both. “The National” invariably held its annual meetings at Washington, while Congress was in session. “The American” itinerated from State to State, and held its annual meetings where it was thought they would do the greatest amount of missionary work.