Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
At Lawrence, the objective point of all the Free State immigration,
where I spent six weeks in assisting my sons to make a home for the
winter, I mingled freely with the incoming population, and gave
several lectures to audiences of from two to three hundred, the entire
population coming together at the ringing of the city dinnerbell. I
returned to Vermont early in January, 1855, and in April following,
with two hundred and fifty emigrants (my husband and younger son
accompanying me), rejoined my other sons in the vicinity of Baldwin
City, where we took claims and commenced homes. I presented the whole
subject of Woman's Rights on the boats in going and returning, as at
first, by invitation. In the summer of 1855, delegates were elected to
a Constitutional Convention, which later convened at Topeka. Governor
Robinson, who with six other delegates voted for the exclusion of the
word "male" from qualification for elector, sent me an invitation to
attend its sessions, speak before it for woman's equality, and they
would vote me a secretary's or clerk's position in the Convention. My
husband's fatal illness prevented me from going.
In January, 1856, I returned from Kansas to Vermont, widowed and
broken in health, to attend to matters connected with my husband's
estate. Prevented by the ruffian blockade of the Missouri from
returning as intended, I spent some time in the summer and all of the
autumn of 1856 and January, 1857, lecturing upon Kansas, the character
and significance of its political involvements, its promise and
importance as a free or slave State, and its claims to an efficient
support in the interest of freedom. In September, being appealed to by
the "Kansas National Aid Committee," at the instance of Horace
Greeley, I engaged for two months in a canvass of Western New York,
lecturing and procuring the appointment of committees of women to
collect supplies for the suffering people of Kansas; my two oldest
sons, C. H. and A. O. Carpenter being among its armed defenders, the
latter having been wounded in the fight between the invaders under
Captain Pate and the forces under John Brown and Captain S. Shores, at
Black Jack.
Between May, 1856, and February, 1857 (not counting my engagement with
the Aid Committee), I gave some fifty Kansas lectures in the States of
Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and
New York, followed occasionally by one or two lectures on the legal
and political disabilities of women; receiving more invitations on
both subjects than I could possibly fill.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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