Women's rights Archives - Lavinia Goodell

May

2023

“Ignorance is always dangerous.”

Lavinia Goodell, May 1871

In the second installment of her series of Woman’s Journal articles rebutting commonly touted reasons why women should not vote (read the about the first installment here), Lavinia Goodell focused on the claim that voting would disrupt the tranquility of the home and take women away from their traditional duties. Rubbish! declared Lavinia.

Lavinia queried how much of a woman’s time would be spent in voting and what important duties would she be neglecting while doing so? She pointed out that no one seemed bothered that men, too, had to step away from their jobs to vote. “The mechanic, in voting, does not neglect his workshop, the merchant his counting room, nor the farmer his fields. Neither would woman forsake the kitchen and the nursery. The duties of a husband and father in providing for his family are as numerous as those of the wife and mother in her position as housekeeper. Yet experience teaches that the exercise of his duties as a citizen do not interfere with them. Neither would woman’s interfere with her home duties.”

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Mar

2023

“Dined with Dr. Wolcott”

Lavinia Goodell, October 17, 1879

Lavinia Goodell was acquainted with many pioneering women of her day, including Dr. Laura Ross Wolcott, Wisconsin’s first woman physician.

Laura Ross was born in Maine in 1826. She graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1856 and was the third woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree. (Janesville, Wisconsin gained a woman physician in 1878 when Dr. Clara Normington set up practice there.) Dr. Ross moved to Milwaukee in 1857, but was denied admittance to the Medical Society of Milwaukee County because she was a woman. She went to Paris in 1867, and sat in on lectures at the Sorbonne and worked in a hospital. She returned to Milwaukee and was admitted to the Milwaukee County Medical Society in 1869, in part due to the support of an older physician, Erastus Wolcott, whom she married that same year.

1869 was a busy year for Dr. Wolcott since in addition to being admitted to the Medical Society and getting married, she helped organize a woman’s rights convention in Milwaukee (Lily Peckham, who was an aspiring lawyer and later became a minister also participated in the convention) and was a founder of the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association, serving as its president until 1882.

The Milwaukee newspaper the Semi-Weekly Wisconsin, described the 1869 convention as follows:

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Mar

2023

“The devil has come down in great wrath knowing that his time is short.”

Lavinia Goodell, February 29, 1872

In early 1872, media accounts – especially on the east coast – were abuzz with the scandalous story that a woman had been allowed to preach in a Brooklyn Presbyterian church. The brazen woman in question was Sarah Smiley, a Quaker.

Ms. Smiley was born in Maine in 1830. She initially wanted to become a teacher but after the Civil War went South to “relieve human suffering.” She later began speaking to audiences and eventually was invited to speak in liberal-minded churches. In January 1872 she became the first woman to ever speak in a Presbyterian church when Rev. Theodore Cuyler invited her to address his congregation in Brooklyn. Rev. Cuyler had lived with Quakers and had been invited to address a Friends revival meeting in Brooklyn, so in return he invited Ms. Smiley to speak from his pulpit on a Sunday evening.

By all accounts Ms. Smiley’s address was well received (she spoke about the vision of Jacob wrestling with an angel), and it is unlikely that either she or Rev. Cuyler could have anticipated the firestorm that soon followed. Two days after the event a scathing letter signed by Jon Edwards appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Mr. Edwards accused Rev. Cuyler of “degrading the teachings of St. Paul.” He wrote:

This is no time to encourage even in the remotest way the pretensions of those graceless women who are engaged in the unholy work of turning society upside down, and whom I hear in our families and social gatherings, ridiculing St. Paul as an old Jewish bachelor, unworthy of respect.

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Feb

2023

“Went to inquire about Lily Peckham.”

Lavinia Goodell, June 3, 1874

In the weeks leading up to Lavinia Goodell’s admission to practice law in Rock County, Wisconsin circuit court, she had begun to despair whether she would ever get the opportunity to take the bar examination. The lawyer who was supposed to move her admission seemed to be dragging his feet, and no one knew whether the judge would allow a woman to take the exam. (Read more about all that here.) In her efforts to get the chance to be examined, Lavinia mustered all the ammunition she could. Her June 3, 1874 diary entry noted that she first went to see a Mrs. Newman (according to the 1876 Janesville city directory, Mrs. Newman was possibly a Janesville dentist’s wife) and then wrote to the Milwaukee County circuit court clerk to “inquire about Lily Peckham,” a young woman who, according to some accounts, had briefly practiced law in Milwaukee prior to dying in 1871 at age 28.

Elizabeth (Lily) Peckham’s grave, Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

We do not have the Milwaukee clerk’s response, but there is no record that Lily Peckham ever asked the Milwaukee court to admit her to practice law. In fact, finding any information about Peckham is a challenge. The problem starts with her name. While her birth name was Elizabeth, contemporary sources alternately referred to her as Lily, Lilly, Lillie, Lila, Lilia, and Lillian. Through a great deal of persistence and a little luck (a helpful hint to all historical researchers: always try multiple spellings of names), we have been able to piece together parts of Peckham’s biography. She was clearly an intelligent and able young woman who accomplished a great deal in her short life – although it is unclear whether she ever practiced law.

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Jan

2023

“The Old Maids’ Convention, under the title of Woman’s Rights, met at Syracuse yesterday.”

Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16, 1855

Lavinia Goodell worked tirelessly for women’s rights in the 1870s, and she encountered a fair amount of resistance to her views from both men and women. But even though Lavinia struggled to win people over to her cause, societal attitudes toward women’s roles had already evolved considerably from the 1850s when Lucy Stone, one of Lavinia’s mentors, began advocating for equal rights for women.

Lucy Stone was born in Massachusetts in 1818. In 1850, she helped organize multiple women’s rights conventions. A convention held in Salem, Ohio in April declared: “The laws should not make a woman a mere prisoner on the bounty of her husband, thus enslaving her will, and degrading her to a condition of absolute dependence.”

The Liberator, a publication edited by William Lloyd Garrison, announced a convention to be held in Worcester, Massachusetts in October 1850 and said, “The signs are encouraging; the time is opportune.” The announcement continued:

Woman has been condemned, from her greater delicacy of physical organization, to inferiority of intellectual and moral culture, and to the forfeiture of great social, civil and religious privileges…. But, by the inspiration of the Almighty, the beneficent spirit of reform is roused to the redress of those wrongs.

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Sep

2022

“Abject submission is not the way to an honorable peace.”

Lavinia Goodell, September 1879

Lavinia Goodell never married or had children, but she was a lifelong proponent of full equal rights for women, including marriage equality. In the fall of 1879, she wrote a series of articles (read more here) countering pieces that appeared in the Christian Union newspaper that admonished women to defer to their husbands. Lavinia’s rebuttals ran in Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal. Lavinia’s first offering, titled “The way to peace,” was written in late August 1879 and appeared in the September 13 Woman’s Journal issue.

Lavinia began by quoting the Christian Union’s premise that wives should submit themselves to their husbands because “a two-headed creature is always a monstrosity.”

For Lavinia, this was “enough to make the blood of any intelligent, self-respecting woman boil with indignation.”

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Aug

2022

“The heavy, barred gates of the professions creak on their hinges.”

Lavinia Goodell, November 1875

In November of 1875, the seventh annual meeting of the American Woman Suffrage Association was held at Steinway Hall in New York. Over 200 delegates, both men and women, attended.

Lavinia Goodell was unable to attend, but she wrote a letter for the occasion, and her friend and mentor, Lucy Stone, chairman of the executive committee, read it to the group. The letter was published in the Woman’s Journal, Lucy Stone’s publication, in early December.

Lucy Stone’s own address apparently caused a stir. The New York Daily Herald reported that it “was an exposition of what she considers the indecorum and absurdity of the Centennial celebration of independence by men who deny to one-half of the citizens of the United States the right of self-government, and urged all women to refuse to participate in the mockery.” A male delegate from Pennsylvania took issue with Lucy Stone on this issue and said while it was true that the Revolution did not enfranchise women, the new government was based upon principles which would naturally and inevitably lead to woman’s suffrage, so women should join in the Centennial celebration.

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Jun

2022

“The extent to which wives flatter the vanity and humor the weaknesses of their husbands is humiliating to both men and women, and degrading to matrimony.”

Lavinia Goodell, October 1876

Lucy Stone, a lifelong advocate for women’s rights, was one of Lavinia Goodell’s mentors.

In 1870, Lucy and her husband, Henry Blackwell, launched the Woman’s Journal, a paper promoting suffrage and women’s rights. Lavinia Goodell wrote numerous articles for the paper and shortly before her death she was added to the masthead as a contributor.

In a September 28, 1876 diary entry, Lavinia wrote, “Commenced piece for Woman’s Journal.” She finished the article four days later. It appeared in the paper’s October 28, 1876 issue.

In the piece, titled “Ownership of Wives,” Lavinia outlined how society required women to subordinate themselves to men, to the detriment of women’s intellectual and moral development.

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