The Citizens’ Suffrage Association Meets in Philadelphia, July 1876

On July 19, 1876, the Citizens’ Suffrage Association held its meeting at 333 Walnut Street in Philadelphia — a site that is now the 18th-Century Garden in Independence National Historical Park. The date was deliberate: it was the twenty-eighth anniversary of the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the meeting the next day.

Who was there

White women suffragists filled the program, but the room was not all white. The Black poet and educator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke, drawing on her race as well as her sex, and the social activist Robert Purvis served on a committee beside Susan B. Anthony. The women’s suffrage movement often shut women of color out of leading roles, or out entirely; at this meeting, Harper had a voice.

The speeches

With E. M. Davis in the chair and Virginia Barnhurst as secretary, the meeting heard from a roll of the movement’s pioneers:

• Lucretia Mott spoke of the progress made since Seneca Falls.
• Anthony read a letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, recalling the 1848 convention in the Methodist church at Seneca Falls and how women had held their ground despite attacks from press and pulpit. She also read letters from Catharine Neff Stebbins, who had been at Seneca Falls; from Mrs. Nichols, one of the earliest workers for the cause, then in California; and from Ernestine L. Rose.
• Davis observed that half the country’s adults had to obey laws they had no part in making.
• A visitor from England, John Dexter, said Englishwomen already held every right except voting for Parliament, and that some 30,000 women in London voted for school board officers.
• Miss Hindman of Pittsburgh argued that women would accomplish nothing until they learned to work in organizations as men did.
• Harper said the great thing was to get women themselves interested. She had suffered in her day as a Black woman, she said, and women should seek the vote to make society more holy.

Protest against General Hawley

The meeting’s sharpest business concerned the Fourth of July. At the national Centennial celebration on Independence Square, General Joseph Hawley, president of the Centennial Commission, had tried to keep women out of the proceedings. Anthony had handed the Women’s Declaration of Independence to Vice President Ferry, who thought it should be preserved, but Hawley ruled it no part of the program. So Anthony took it to a platform in front of Independence Hall and read it aloud to the crowd. She told the meeting she admitted the intrusion was impertinent — but otherwise the people would never have heard the women’s protest at being refused a part.

A committee of Anthony, Caroline Spear and Purvis then reported a resolution condemning Hawley for trying to stop the Declaration from being presented and read, and for a later attempt to suppress its publication. The meeting adopted it.

Sources

Based on "Citizen Suffrage Association Meeting, The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 1876," Independence National Historical Park, National Park Service, which transcribes “Citizen Suffrage,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 1876; the park’s description is in the public domain, and the 1876 article is quoted and summarized here.