Emily Parmely Collins
In the early nineteenth century, by law or by custom, an unmarried woman didn’t vote, speak in public, hold office, attend college, or earn a living other than as a school teacher, a seamstress, a domestic servant, or a mill worker. A married woman couldn’t divorce an abusive husband or own property, even the clothes she wore. Legally, a wife’s life was totally controlled by her husband.
Some women openly expressed their desire for equality, but it wasn’t until 1848 that a few reformers met in Seneca Falls, New York, calling the occasion “A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of Woman.”
Although no organized national society was formed in 1848, the men and women who gathered at Seneca Falls demanded the vote, among other reforms. This spark ignited the women's movement. These women worked for the reform of oppressive laws and institutions and tried “to transform men's ideas about women, and women's ideas about themselves.”
But this would not come easily. In September 1852, the New York Herald bluntly asked, “Who are these women? What do they want? What are the motives that impel them to this course of action?”
Emily “summoned a few women in our neighborhood together and formed the Equal Suffrage Society, and sent petitions to our Legislature, but our efforts were little known beyond our circle, as we were in communication with no person or newspaper. Yet there was enough of wrong in our narrow horizon to rouse some thought in the minds of all.”
The Equal Suffrage Society met in alternating women’s homes once every two weeks “for discussion and interchange of ideas.” Emily was elected president of the group. Its members “drafted a petition” on behalf of women’s suffrage. The petition contained sixty-two signatures of men and women, and was sent to their representative in Albany. But the legislature viewed the notion of women’s suffrage “as something absurdly ridiculous,” and took no action.
“In those early days,” Emily wrote, “a husband's supremacy was often enforced in the rural districts by corporeal chastisement, and it was considered by most people as quite right and proper. I remember in my own neighborhood a man who was a Methodist class-leader and exhorter, and one who was esteemed a worthy citizen, who, every few weeks, gave his wife a beating with his horsewhip. He said it was necessary, in order to keep her in subjection, and because she scolded so much.
“Now this wife, surrounded by six or seven little children, whom she must wash, dress, feed, and attend to day and night, was obliged to spin and weave cloth for all the garments of the family. She had to milk the cows, make butter and cheese, do all the cooking, washing, making, and mending for the family, and, with the pains of maternity forced upon her every eighteen months.
“All through the Anti-Slavery struggle, every word of denunciation of the wrongs of the Southern slave, was, I felt, equally applicable to the wrongs of my own sex. Every argument for the emancipation of the colored man, was equally one for that of woman; and I was surprised that all Abolitionists did not see the similarity in the condition of the two classes.
“I read, with intense interest, everything that indicated an awakening of public or private thought to the idea that woman did not occupy her rightful position in the organization of society, and, when I read the lectures of Ernestine Rose and the writings of Margaret Fuller, and found that other women entertained the same thoughts that had been seething in my own brain, and realized that I stood not alone, how my heart bounded with joy!”
Emily moved to Rochester, New York, in 1858, where she lived until 1869. While there, she wrote newspaper articles in support of the rights of women, and continued to petition the legislature.
As the nineteenth century progressed, women increasingly ventured out into the world, forging antebellum revivalism, female associations, and reform movements. By 1860, women were calling for equal rights for women as citizens, advocating economic independence for women, as well as the right to vote.
Then came the Civil War, which was a turning point in the women’s movement. Women began to operate outside of their “sphere.” They left the safety of their homes, donned uniforms and fought as Union and Confederate soldiers, nursed the ill and wounded in the North and the South, ran farms and plantations, gathered and reported intelligence to the armies.
Emily was 47 years old when the Civil War began. She worked as a volunteer nurse in Virginia. Two of her sons, one of whom was a surgeon, served during the Civil War.
In 1868, Emily attended a meeting of Rochester’s Female Moral Reform Association. This group was part of the nation’s “Magdelen Movement,” whose mission it was to reform women prostitutes. She proclaimed that “only by enfranchising women and permitting her a more free and lucrative range of employment” would it be possible to suppress this “social evil.”
In 1869, Emily and her family moved to Louisiana. There, her second husband died. Her suffrage activities continued. In 1879, when a Constitutional Convention met to create a new constitution for the State of Louisiana, she took part in the petition movement there for the expansion of women’s rights.
In the early 1880s, she moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where for many years she wrote for the Hartford Journal under the pen name of “Justitia.” In her columns, she supported human rights, especially women’s rights. She also wrote stories for Pacific Rural and other journals. In 1885, she and Frances Ellen Burr organized the Hartford Equal Rights Club.
In 1907, when Emily was 93 years old, her efforts to win women the right to vote were acknowledged by a telegram of appreciation from the Convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
Emily died on April 14 1909, and was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.
Copyright © 2006 Maggie MacLean
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