“This congress ought to be attended by every intelligent woman in the state.”

Janesville Gazette, October 3, 1879

In October of 1879, less than six months before her death, Lavinia Goodell attended the American Women’s Association congress in Madison.

According to the Wisconsin State Journal:

The aim of the congress is to render women more helpful to each other, and more useful to society. It desires to bring together, in friendly counsel, women of diverse experience – the educator, the philanthropist, the house-keeper, the scientist – that from the little candle each has lighted at the daily altar, where her daily service has been offered, a flame may be kindled which shall send light into the dark corners, where, in spite of our boasted civilization, sin, misery and ignorance still lurk.

“Woman is man’s equal.”

Declaration of Sentiments issued at Seneca Falls, New York, July 1848

“The equal right of Woman to social, civil and political equality, has always been to me like an axiom which it were as idle to dispute as to undertake to controvert the multiplication table.” – Lavinia Goodell, 1875

On July 19, 1848, the first woman’s rights convention held in the United States convened in Seneca Falls, New York.

The event was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a distant cousin of Lavinia Goodell’s mother, and Lucretia Mott. The women had met at an anti-slavery convention in London eight years earlier. Stanton and Mott were barred from the convention floor because of their gender, and their indignation formed the seeds of the women’s rights movement in America.

“I am dying to see a sensible woman. And they don’t abound here.”

In June 1919, Wisconsin became the first state to ratify the 19^th Amendment giving women the right to vote. In celebration of this great achievement many have repeated an enchanting origin story of Wisconsin’s women’s suffrage movement published in The Milwaukee Journal on December 21, 1924:

Way down in the southwestern corner of Wisconsin, the little town of Richland Center has been glorified above all towns in the state in that it is the cradle of women’s suffrage in Wisconsin.

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