Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, Held at the Church….Parkhurst.
Proceedings Of First Woman’s Rights Convention Held After Civil War
Inscribed By Anthony To Her Cousin Elizabeth M. Lapham
Anthony, Susan B. Proceedings of the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention Held at the Church of the Puritans, New York, May 10, 1866. Phonographic Report by H. M. Parkhurst. New York, Robert B. Johnson, Printer, 1866.
8vo; 80pp; 11 page appendix of Caroline H. Dall’s report on the progress of women in education, labor and law since 1860, plus list of officers of American Equal Rights Association and list of women’s rights publications available from Susan B. Anthony (as Secretary of the organization), original wrappers. Covers soiled (with dine-sized ink spot on front), moderate chipping to wrappers at spine extremities, else very good. Extremely scarce.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed by Susan B. Anthony on top of front wrapper and signed by her in full: Cousin Elizabeth M. Lapham / Susan B. Anthony. OCLC locates one copy and that is in the Susan B. Anthony Collection at the Library of Congress and RLIN locates only two other copies (Princeton and Library Company of Philadelphia).
On March 31, 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as President of the National Woman’s Rights Committee and Susan B. Anthony as Secretary, issued a call for the first Woman’s Rights Convention to be held after the Civil War. This was the eleventh such convention, and it was held on May 10th, 1866 at the Church of the Puritans in New York. At this convention, it was proposed that the Woman’s Rights Societies be merged with those attempting to secure the vote for the “Negro” under the name “The American Equal Rights Association.” This pamphlet contains addresses by Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Francis D. Gage, Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Lucretia Mott, as well as Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Tilden. There are also interesting letters regretting inability to attend the convention, given at the end, including those of Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Maria Severance, Frances Ellen Burr, Anna E. Dickinson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass.
Susan B. Anthony introduced several resolutions for consideration; all were concerned with woman suffrage and, in particular, removal of the word “male” from the Joint Resolution before Congress. Despite the early signs of abolitionist’s defections, women’s rights advocates, with this convention, made one major effort to link the black votes and the women’s votes together. Anthony, Stone, and Stanton devised the ploy of the Equal Rights Association of 1866, which was dominated by women but with support of senior abolitionists, such as Parker Pillsbury and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Petitioning and lobbying through 1866 and 1867, the Equal Rights Association took its major stand in Kansas, an old antislavery battlefield, where it hoped to remove the word “male” from the new state constitution and ensure the votes for women. The Kansas Campaign failed. The Kansas voters, as it turned out, rejected both woman suffrage and black suffrage. The aftershocks included a split between the women advocates and abolitionist organizations who withdrew funds and support from the cause of the women’s vote. At this point, with great resentment, the women activists had autonomy thrust on them. These desertions were not lost on Anthony and Stanton: “Standing alone, we learned our power,” they later concluded. “Woman must lead the way to her own enfranchisement and work out her own salvation.”
The Laphams were cousins of Susan B. Anthony. Republican Senator Elbridge B. Lapham was a signatory of the minority report of 1882 that took the ground that suffrage was a matter to be solely regulated by states – a position that Anthony and Stanton advocated. He was later part of the minority favoring passage of the 16th amendment. Susan often stayed with Semantha in New York City in the 1880’s and 1890’s.
The History of Women’s Suffrage, Vol. II,
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