Address on Woman's Rights…
An Address from the “Queen of the Platform”
[Suffrage]. Rose, Mrs. E. L. An Address of Woman’s Rights. Delivered before the people’s Sunday meeting, in Cochituate Hall, on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 19th, 1851. Boston: J.P. Mendum, 1851.
Slim 12mo.; some foxing throughout; verso of upper cover offset; stained on rear cover; tan wrappers, sewn; printed in black; bottom inch of spine frayed; otherwise crisp. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this scarce pamphlet, a transcription of Rose’s 1851 Address in Boston. Published by J.P. Mendum, a leading free-thought publisher of the Boston Investigator, and Rose’s close friend. This book is recorded as being in only one library (see NUC, supplement; also Brown and Stein’s Freethought in the United States, pp. 33-34; DAB; and Vol. III of William Lloyd Garrison’s Letters). Cochituate Hall was located in Boston.
Rose was a reformer who championed free school and thought, abolition, temperance and woman’s rights; this pamphlet specifically addresses the last category. In October, 1850 she attended the first national Women's Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she introduced a resolution calling for "political, legal and social equality with man" (Suhl, p. 112). Unfortunately, a stenographer was not in attendance to record her speeches. As Suhl notes in his biography of Rose, “The published proceedings of the convention contain a footnote commenting on this regrettable fact: ‘The rich gems of thought and the thrilling eloquence of the extempore speeches are lost to those who were not present to listen…Ernestine L. Rose of New York, gave utterance to her clear, strong thoughts in her own peculiarly graceful style of eloquence’” (pp. 111-112). In her 1851 Address, delivered almost exactly a year later, a few days after the second Women’s Rights Convention, she continues her support for these freedoms; this time, thankfully, a stenographer was present. Suhl praises, “It was a brilliant speech and its effect on that large audience was so profound that twenty years later when Paulina Wright Davis recalled that event she wrote, ‘In this convention Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose made an address of an hour in length, which has never been surpassed’” (p. 120).
It appears that Rose borrowed some elements from her earlier speech; certainly, however, the same problems for women that she originally addressed still persisted; “It is high time, then, to denounce such gross injustice, to compel man by the might of right to give woman her political, legal, and social rights. …Away with that folly that her rights would be detrimental to her character – that if she is recognized as the equal to man, she would cease to be woman!” (Rose, p. 11).
Her passion for this cause is evident throughout; her arguments are clear and her manner direct, and she is thoughtful and persuasive in her approach. One can imagine the effect her words might have had on an audience, especially in this paragraph:
Do you not yet understand what has made woman what she is? Then see what the sickly taste and perverted judgment man now admires in woman. Not health and strength of body and mind, but a pale delicate face; hands too small to grasp a broom, for that were treason in a lady; a voice so sickly, sentimental, and depressed, as to hear what she says only by the moving of her half-parted lips; and, above all, that nervous sensibility that sees a ghost in every passing shadow – that beautiful diffidence that dare not take a step without the arm of a man to support her tender frame, and that shrinking (mock) modesty that faints at the mention of a leg of a table! I know there are many noble exceptions that see and deplore these irrationalities, but as a general thing it is so, or else why set up the hue-and-cry of ‘manish,’ (sic) ‘unfeminine,’ ‘out of her sphere,’ &c., whenever she evinces any strength of body or mind and takes part in any thing deserving of a rational being? (
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