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o 13 Free Platform, Free Love, Free Lust Informing the Nation FOR MANY years, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, with help from Martha Wright and others, had lobbied in Albany, the capital of New York, to improve state laws pertaining to women, such as married women’s property rights, child custody, and liberalized divorce. Starting in January 1869, they focused on Washington, lobbying Congress for a sixteenth amendment establishing woman suffrage.1 A description of the prominent participants in the 1869 Washington Convention includes “Mrs. Wright, of Auburn, a woman of strong, constant character, and of rare intellectual culture.”2 The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) met again in Washington in January 1870, as it would every January for many years to come.3 Stanton presided, except for one session when Martha replaced her (while Stanton attended a White House reception hosted by Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant). “The Convention was a great success,” Martha reported, “the interest was so great, that a third days session was decided on.”4 Encouraged by the 1869 adoption of woman suffrage in the Territory of Wyoming, part of the NWSA strategy became to persuade Congress to institute woman suffrage in the District of Columbia as a step toward passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. 187 free platform, free love, free lust Anthony, whom Martha described as “the leading spirit of the Convention,” presented a resolution to that effect that was passed by the Convention. A deputation of eleven NWSA women, including Martha, was granted a joint hearing on January 22 with the District Committees of the House and Senate. The hearing was arranged by Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, who was a prime supporter of woman suffrage, both in the District of Columbia and in the nation. (In 1868 he had proposed to Congress a fifteenth amendment for universal suffrage, and in 1869 a sixteenth amendment for woman suffrage. Speaking at the 1870 NWSA Convention, Pomeroy declared, “The negro’s hour is passed, and it is woman’s hour now.”)5 With about a dozen members of the House and Senate in attendance, Senator Hannibal Hamlin, chairman of the Senate Committee (and Abraham Lincoln’s vice president from 1860 to 1864) called the meeting to order and introduced Stanton. Her speech arguing for woman suffrage in the District was later published in the Revolution, along with a list of the women and Congressmen in attendance.6 Anthony also spoke at the two-hour hearing, and Paulina Wright Davis, organizer of the 1850 Worcester Convention, and Isabella Beecher Hooker, a relative newcomer to the movement, “ventured a few timid words,” according to Martha. She reported proudly to David, “This hearing marked an era in the history of our movement & of course in the nation. It may still be long, before the demand for suffrage is acceded to, but it is evident that thinking people everywhere are considering the matter, instead of ridiculing.” Among those at the hearing was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who “said he had never, among all the exciting questions of the last 20 years, attended a meeting so full of interest.”7 Despite supportive statements from Sumner and others, the committees took no action in support of woman suffrage. Martha also wrote to David, “We were invited to sit for Photographs in Brady’s Gallery.”8 Mathew Brady, the best-known of nineteenth-centuryAmerican photographers, had made it a practice of photographing as many of the famous people of his time as he could. His invitation to the women is itself an indication that by 1870 Stanton, Anthony, and other NWSA leaders, including Martha, were achieving a significant degree of public recognition. On March 24, the weekly newspaper the Nation carried the first of a series of articles on woman suffrage entitled “The Vexed Question” signed by “M.” The author was J. Miller McKim, one of the editors of the Nation and a 188 chapter thirteen longtime friend of Lucretia’s who argued with her over numerous issues, including woman suffrage. Starting with the point that “there is almost, if not quite, as much opposition to woman’s voting among women as there is among men,” M went on to claim, “Not an instance is known in the country’s history in which women, duly authorized to speak for their sex, have asked for legislation and been denied.” Martha knew McKim and respected his earlier efforts in the abolition cause but his arguments against woman suffrage, she proclaimed to Lucretia...

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