Alice Bradley Neal, of Philadelphia, ridiculed this Woman's Rights Convention in her husband's73 paper, and Jane Grey Swisshelm indignantly replied in her Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor as follows:
Mrs. Neal can not be ignorant that the principal object of the Convention, and all the agitation about woman's rights, is to secure to the toiling millions of her own sex a just reward for their labor; to save them from the alternative of prostitution, starvation, or incessant life-destroying toil; and yet the whole subject furnishes her with material for scorn and merriment! Tell it not in Gath! Publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the sons of the Phillistines rejoice that one of the daughters of Eve, beautiful and gentle, throws down her knitting-pins, and tries her strength to wield the hammer of old Vulcan to aid them in forging fetters for the wrists of her unfortunate sisters. We would that it had been some one else than the gentle Alice Neal who had volunteered to soil her white hands and sweat her fair face, laboring in such a blacksmith-shop.
While ever and anon during the last forty years Mrs. Swisshelm has seized some of these dilettante literary women with her metaphysical tweezers, and held them up to scorn for their ridicule of the woman suffrage conventions, yet in her own recently published work in her mature years, she vouchsafes no words of approval for those who have inaugurated the greatest movement of the centuries. She complains that in some of the woman suffrage conventions she attended, there was not a strict observance of parliamentary rules, and that the resolutions and speeches were unworthy the occasion. Yet the only time Mrs. Swisshelm ever honored our platform at a National Convention, her speech was far below the level of most of the others, and the resolutions she offered were so verbose and irrelevant, that the Committee declined to present them to the Convention.
It is quite evident from her last pronunciamento that she has no just appreciation of the importance and dignity of our demand for justice and equality. A soldier without a leg is a fact so much more readily understood, than all women without ballots, and his loss so much more readily comprehended and supplied, that we can hardly blame any one for doing the work of the hour, rather than struggling a life-time for an idea. Hence it is not a matter of surprise that most women are more readily enlisted in the suppression of evils in the concrete, than in advocating the principles that underlie them in the abstract, and thus ultimately doing the broader and more lasting work. On this ground we can excuse the author of "Half a Century" for giving the reader one hundred and twenty-five pages of her own work in hospitals and three to the Woman Suffrage movement, but considering the tone of the three pages, the advocates of the measure should be thankful she gave no more.
Mrs. Swisshelm's contempt is only surpassed by Mrs. Hale's "Jeremiad" over the infidelity of the noble leader of our movement. For a woman so thoroughly politic and time-serving, who, unlike the great master she professed to follow, never identified herself with one of the unpopular reforms of her day, whose pen never by any chance slipped outside the prescribed literary line of safety, to cheer the martyrs to truth in her own generation; lamentations from such a source over Lucretia Mott, are presumptuous and profane. If such a life of self-sacrifice and devotion to the best interests of humanity; such courage to stand alone, to do and say the right,'mid persecution, violence and mobs; such charity and faithfulness in every relation of life, as daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend; such calm declining years and peaceful death could all be realized without a belief in the creed of Sarah Josepha Hale; the philosophical conclusion is that there may be some Divine light and love outside of Mrs. Hale's horizon; that her shibboleth may after all not be the true measure for the highest Christian graces.
Sarah J. Hale, shuddering over the graves of such women as Harriet Martineau, Frances Wright, Mary Wollstonecroft, George Sand, George Eliot and Lucretia Mott, might furnish a subject for an artist to represent as "bigotry weeping over the triumphs of truth."
Nevertheless, as Mrs. Hale lived in Pennsylvania forty years, the women of that State may rejoice in the fact that in her great work, "Woman's Record," she has given "Sketches of all the distinguished women from the Creation to a.d. 1868"; a labor for which our sex owe her a debt of gratitude. To exhume nearly seventeen hundred women from oblivion, classify them, and set forth their distinguished traits of character, was indeed an herculean labor. This is a valuable book of reference for the girls of to-day. When our opponents depreciate the achievements of woman they can turn to the "Woman's Record" and find grand examples of all the cardinal virtues, of success in art, science, literature, and government.
In Jane Grey Swisshelm, Pennsylvania can boast a successful editor of a liberal political newspaper during the eventful years of our anti-slavery struggle. The Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor was established Jan. 20, 1848. It was owned and edited by Mrs. Swisshelm for some years; merged into The Family Journal and Visitor in 1852, in which she was co-editor until 1857, when she removed to Minnesota. In spite of a few idiosyncrasies, Mrs. Swisshelm is a noble woman, and her influence has been for good in her day and generation. However much we may differ from her in some points, we must concede that she is a strong, pointed writer.
Among the editors of Pennsylvania, Anna E. McDowell deserves mention. In The Una of January, 1855, we find the following:
THE WOMAN'S ADVOCATE.
We have received the first number of a paper bearing the above name. It is a fair, handsome sheet, seven columns in width, edited by Miss Anna E. McDowell, in Philadelphia. It claims to be an independent paper. Its design is not to press woman's right to suffrage, but to present her wrongs, and plead for their redress. It is owned by a joint stock company of women, and is printed and all the work done by women. We most heartily bid it God-speed, for the great need of woman now is work, work, that she may eat honest bread.
Miss McDowell continued her paper several years, and has ever since been a faithful correspondent in many journals, and now edits a "Woman's Department" in The Philadelphia Sunday Republic. She pleads eloquently for the redress of all the wrongs of humanity. Jails, prisons, charitable institutions, the oppression of women and children, the laborer, the Indian, have all in turn been subjects of her impartial pen.
Philadelphia was the first city in this country to open her retail stores to girls as clerks, and among the first to welcome them as type-setters in the printing offices.
In the city press, from 1849 to 1854, we find the following announcements, which show the general agitation on woman's position:
The Pennsylvania Freeman: "A Discourse on Woman," to be delivered by Lucretia Mott, at the Assembly Buildings, December 17, 1849.
Lectures by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, April 6, 8, and 10, 1853, on "Manhood," "Womanhood," "Humanity."
North American and United States Gazette: Lucretia Mott will deliver a lecture on the "Medical Education of Woman," February 2, 1853.
Horace Mann will lecture on "Woman," February 3, 1853.
Philadelphia Public Ledger, January 20, 1854: Lucy Stone will deliver a lecture on "Woman's Rights," at Musical Fund Hall, Saturday evening, January 21.
April 12, 1854: Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose will lecture on Thursday evening, April 13, at Spring Garden Institute, on "The Education and Influence of Woman"; and on Friday evening, April 14th, at Sansom Street Hall, on "The Legal Disabilities of Woman." Tickets, 25 cents.
WOMAN'S MEDICAL COLLEGE OF PENNSYLVANIA.
In September, 1850, in a rented building, No. 229 Arch Street, Philadelphia, the College began its first session with six pupils; others were added before the class graduated, so that it then numbered eight:—Hannah E. Longshore, Ann Preston, Phebe W. May, Susanna H. Ellis, Anna M. Longshore, Pennsylvania; Martha M. Laurin, Massachusetts; Angonette A. Hunt, New York; Frances G. Mitchell, England. Since its foundation, the "Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania" has prospered, and on its lists of graduates we see, among other familiar names, those of Dr. Laura Ross Wolcott (1856), Dr. Mary J. Scarlett Dixon (1857), and Dr. Emeline H. Cleveland (1855).
Chief among those interested in placing the medical education