Women’s Rights and Career Achievements, 1850–1860
Cowles celebrated her fortieth birthday in February 1850 amid a five-month tour of the East Coast. She visited a dozen or more cities, including Buffalo, Rochester, Bristol, Hartford, Boston, Providence, and New York City. Staying with friends, family, and antislavery colleagues, she relaxed, forged networks, and prepared for a new decade that would bring her to the pinnacle of her career. She was able to indulge in this extended trip because she had made the decision to leave her position at Massillon after the fall 1849 term. Tired and ready for a change, her eastern tour was a well-earned break from teaching. As she rejuvenated in the East, her antislavery colleagues in the West were busy initiating a new movement for equality.
In March 1850, a small group of Ohio abolitionists, including Betsy’s friends Benjamin and Lizzie Jones, decided to organize a women’s rights convention to be held the following month in Salem. They knew that the Ohio legislature would be meeting to revise the state constitution in May and wanted to prepare a powerful argument in support of a more woman-friendly document. Frustrated with women’s low wages, lack of access to higher education, limited occupational opportunities, and disenfranchisement, they hoped to convince their state representatives to eliminate these glaring inequalities.
The Ohio meeting was the third women’s rights convention in the nation. New York activists first met in Seneca Falls in 1848 and later that year in Rochester. These gatherings resulted from changes in women’s lives since the Revolution, many of which Cowles had experienced. More women attended school, and a tiny number even followed Betsy’s lead and attended Oberlin. This increased access to education inspired many to participate in lively international conversations about philosophy, art, science, religion, and literature. Women like Harriet Beecher Stowe began to publish their own books, pamphlets, and magazines. They wrote letters to newspapers and engaged in well-publicized debates about a variety of civic issues. Women also entered the paid workforce in greater numbers, though they were limited to “feminine” jobs like sewing, cleaning, and teaching. They experienced lack of opportunity, low wages, and other types of discrimination. Women also entered public life through charitable, reform, and antislavery groups and became skilled at organizing, raising funds, and working with political organizations. The more women entered the civic arena, the more they experienced inequality and developed a desire to eliminate the laws that supported it.
The abolitionist movement was especially important in sparking the women’s rights movement. Most women’s rights supporters were also abolitionists. The Garrisonians in particular had been among the earliest exponents of women’s equality. In the West, this relationship was very strong. Cowles’s Garrisonian friends Mary Whiting and Lizzie Jones, along with many more antislavery activists, would participate at the Salem convention. Abolitionists taught women’s rights activists how to frame their call for social change, what methods were most effective, and what constituencies to develop. They provided a schematic for building a social movement.
Antislavery also catalyzed women’s rights by further awakening women to the boundaries of the woman’s sphere. Cowles grew increasingly aware of the limits placed on her because of her sex during her years of leadership in antislavery. Like many other women who felt moved to oppose slavery because they believed it was a sin and an ugly stain on the fabric of the nation, Betsy experienced criticism because she dared to voice what many considered a political opinion. Indeed, Betsy and many of her sister abolitionists spent much of their energy in defending their right to hold an opinion on the topic and express that opinion in the larger civic world. Female antislavery societies like the Ashtabula group developed mission statements explaining their opposition to slavery in religious terms and explicitly supported their right as women to advocate for slaves. As an Indiana group declared in 1842, “Notwithstanding our sex are looked upon by many as being out of their proper sphere when laboring in this cause, yet . . . if we refuse to employ our talents on behalf of the oppressed [we will] be called upon to answer . . . at the solemn day of account.”1 Despite these efforts, they were attacked as unladylike in newspaper editorials, political diatribes, and churches.
Reeling from these relentless attacks, many abolitionists began to see connections between the treatment of slaves and women. Men, as husbands and owners, held almost complete power over both groups. With few exceptions, neither women nor slaves had the right to vote in elections, hold property in their name, serve on a jury, run for office, or enter most professions. Negative and powerful stereotypes also held both in bondage.
This inequality came into focus during the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic gathered to share ideas, develop policy, and bring unity to the international antislavery movement. They hoped to garner significant media attention and gather support from leading politicians as well as influential businessmen. They worked cooperatively with religious leaders and other reformers to organize a successful meeting. The role of women at this gathering, however, became a contentious issue from the very start.
When the American contingent showed up with several women representatives, the British organizers immediately refused to seat the women. Arguing that it was not their custom to allow women to participate in such meetings, they suggested that the American women could watch the proceedings from behind a curtain in the balcony. The American women were not surprised by this treatment. British abolitionists had already united with the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a group that openly opposed women’s leadership in the movement. Unlike the Americans, the British divided all their antislavery groups by sex. Women in England, Scotland, and Ireland were not used to participating in mixed-sex groups and therefore did not question their exclusion from the 1840 meeting.
The American women fought their marginalization. When a group of British abolitionists attempted to convince Lucretia Mott, a leading Philadelphia representative, to withdraw her challenge to the ruling excluding women, she refused. An articulate abolitionist and experienced Quaker minister, Mott had not traveled across the Atlantic just to sit on the sidelines because she was a woman. As a result of the American women’s challenge to their subordinate status, the first action of the convention was to debate whether to seat them. Only men were allowed to participate. After being told by his wife, “Don’t shilly-shally,” famed Garrisonian orator Wendell Phillips gave a spirited speech in favor of women’s participation. But few British men supported Phillips, and the all-male audience voted to exclude the women. When William Lloyd Garrison made a tardy appearance several days later, he refused to participate because of the women’s expulsion and sat with the rejected group in the balcony. Most British women abolitionists disapproved of their American sisters’ behavior, and in a tense meeting following the convention, the women were unable to find common ground.
In an historic moment, Mott and American abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who attended the London convention with her abolitionist husband, agreed that the treatment of women at the gathering was reprehensible and pledged to hold a women’s rights convention back in the United States. Though it took them eight years to follow through on their vow, Stanton and Mott organized the Seneca Falls meeting in 1848.
The Seneca Falls convention had other roots besides the famous Mott-Stanton meeting in London. Many had already begun to question the limitations placed on women because of their sex. Sarah Grimké’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes was published in book form in 1838 and sold well. Understanding that the Bible served as a rationale for women’s subordinate status, Grimké dismantled popular scriptural arguments that justified inequality. She asserted that God created men and women as equals. Foreshadowing Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1895 best-selling revision of the Bible from the woman’s perspective, Grimké contended that men had corrupted God’s word in the scriptures in order to elevate their own power and status. God did not subordinate women, she claimed; men did. God expected women to take their place beside men, not beneath them. Grimké also offered a global history of men’s abusive and selfish treatment of women and concluded her letters with a discussion of the legal disempowerment of women. The law was anything but fair and just, she argued, when it came to women. The legal system treated women like slaves and thus prevented them from reaching their full potential as citizens and Christians.
Wives’ lack of legal rights in regard to property was particularly frustrating to many women, and they confronted this inequity in many states in the 1840s. Upon marriage, brides lost legal ownership of all their property. Their money, land, homes, and even slaves became the property of their husbands. Married women could not make contracts, sell or transfer property, or bring a lawsuit. For wives who worked, their wages belonged to their husbands. Despite the efforts of many women, lawmakers resisted making any meaningful changes to these laws. When a slight legal adjustment was made, it was linked to protecting men instead of empowering women. For example, some states—such as Mississippi in 1839—began to pass laws that gave married women the right to own property as a way to protect husbands from creditors. Other states, including Ohio in 1846, passed similar laws protecting the property women brought into marriage but not their earnings after they wed.
Some women went further in demanding equal rights. In 1846, a small, close-knit group in rural New York agreed that women should have full citizenship rights and petitioned the state legislature for female suffrage. A full two years before the Seneca Falls convention would demand the right to vote, these six ordinary women from Jefferson County claimed that they had a natural right to participate in the political system. In some ways this petition should come as no surprise. The normal tasks of their daily lives gave these women intimate familiarity with important economic, political, and legal issues. Jefferson County boasted many dairy farms, and women participated in producing, selling, and distributing cheese and butter. They became acquainted with local economies and distant markets. Land was often bought and sold in this area, and wives were required to sign off on land deals involving their husbands. This process introduced them to the legal system. Many women also attended political picnics and meetings, particularly those sponsored by the antislavery Liberty Party, which brought them into direct contact with partisan debates and policy making. In other words, women like these New York dairy wives often found themselves participating in what was popularly considered “men’s” civic arena. This small group, however, wanted to participate as equals.
Although the Jefferson County petition for suffrage was very unusual, the experiences of the participants were fairly common. Women across the country engaged in economic bartering, legal maneuvering, and partisanship despite the understanding that these activities were supposed to be reserved for men. The great majority of these women did not seek the vote; nor did they consider themselves wrongly subordinated. Many did feel, however, that certain aspects of the legal and political system should be revised to allow women more freedom. Issues like access to higher education and all professions would attract the most support at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and become the hallmark of Cowles’s involvement in women’s rights.
Forty men joined the three hundred or so women who attended the meeting at Seneca Falls, including Frederick Douglass, the famed ex-slave and Garrisonian abolitionist, who enthused about it in his newspaper, the North Star. While Lucretia Mott’s husband chaired the meeting because it was considered too radical for a woman to chair a mixed-sex group, several women offered eloquent speeches throughout the two-day gathering, including Stanton and Mott. The women cleverly used the Declaration of Independence as a model for their mission statement: “All men and women are created equal,” they proclaimed, attempting to link themselves to the nation’s revolutionary past. They debated many of the key issues that would continue to dominate women’s rights for decades to come, including woman’s suffrage, the most controversial topic at the meeting. Mott herself worried that a call for the vote would alienate potential supporters because it was too radical. When Stanton insisted on including the suffrage resolution, Mott huffed, “Why Lizzie thou wilt make the convention ridiculous.”2 During the debate on suffrage, Frederick Douglass offered a rousing speech in which he argued that women’s presence in politics would be a welcome moral influence on the nation. Probably because of Douglass’s eloquence, the suffrage resolution passed, though it was the sole resolution not to receive unanimous support.
Other resolutions proved less controversial for the audience, including calls for equal educational opportunity, access to lucrative employment, and especially property rights. New York had just passed the expansive Married Woman’s Property Act, which gave wives the right to the property they brought into marriage and also that which they gained afterward, but most states limited married women’s control over their holdings. Convention attendees also criticized restrictive and unfair divorce laws that made it impossible for women to end their marriages and guaranteed fathers custody of their children. They pointed to the differing societal expectations for men and women regarding morality and demanded that both sexes should follow the same virtuous standard set for women.
The Seneca Falls convention consciously avoided some more controversial issues. The absence of African American women at the gathering meant that the issues of most concern to them, including racial discrimination and educational segregation, were ignored. Working-class women’s issues were largely unaddressed as well. No one discussed the need for an equal division of labor within the home, and domestic work continued to be linked to women. Reproductive rights were also absent from the debate. Many women’s rights activists were more concerned with women’s right to refuse sex with their husbands than with access to birth control or abortion. During this time certain medical leaders such as H. R. Storer were attempting to regulate abortion as a part of the larger effort to professionalize medicine and exclude unlicensed practitioners like midwives. Prior to this, abortion was a largely acceptable practice as long as it occurred before “quickening”—the time when the baby’s movement is first felt (which occurs around twenty weeks).
The Seneca Falls meeting met with mixed reviews from the press. Some reform-minded newspapers applauded the women’s gathering and considered it one step toward a fairer and more just society. Horace Greeley editorialized in his influential New York Tribune that although the demand for women’s political rights was “unwise and mistaken,” female equality was nonetheless a “natural right” that “must be conceded.” Other journalists ridiculed the meeting and derided its female participants as unladylike. Some worried that if women gained equal rights, they would abandon their domestic responsibilities, and chaos would ensue. Men would be forced to clean pots, darn socks, and tend babies. These very same arguments would be used half a century later as antisuffragists confronted a growing national sentiment in favor of women’s voting rights.
Cowles applauded the Seneca Falls meeting because it pushed for the very rights that she had long since supported. She was thrilled to join the three hundred people gathered in March 1850, in Salem, Ohio, at the Second Baptist Church to inaugurate the first western women’s rights gathering. Though focused on many of the same issues as their eastern sisters at Seneca Falls, western women brought with them a sturdiness and steadiness that encouraged practical goals and frank conversations. This pragmatic attitude should not be mistaken for weakness or fear; it was merely recognition that compromise was often required for achieving egalitarian goals. Salem participants understood that many of their fellow Ohioans wondered how women’s rights would affect their family lives and town politics. Would women’s involvement in partisan politics mean that men would have to stay home and tend to children? Would women stop cooking and start running for office?
While participants hoped to allay these fears, they were also determined to lay new ground in the movement and remain true to their principles. Indeed, this was just the blend of integrity and pragmatism that Cowles had applied to all her reform efforts. When she joined the Garrisonians, she sometimes parted ways with her inflexible eastern colleagues, as when she wrote her Plea for the Oppressed on the Black Laws. In other words, Cowles was guided by a clear set of values and a keen sense of what was possible.
As one of the most admired and respected attendees at the Salem gathering, Cowles was appointed president of the convention. The nominating committee understood that she would represent the movement well. Cowles had a national reputation as an antislavery leader and modeled independent womanhood through her Oberlin education and successful career in education. She was an experienced activist who understood how to achieve goals. Equally importantly, people liked her. She was down-to-earth and fun but also committed and knowledgeable. She could discuss women’s legal disabilities with insight but also laugh at a good joke. One attendee described her as “a woman of rare intellect and a playful disposition.”3 She was, in sum, the perfect candidate for the public face of the Ohio women’s rights movement.
After Cowles and the other officers of the convention were named, the meeting began in earnest. The Business Committee presented its guiding principles and goals and the remainder of the two-day meeting was devoted to discussing these resolutions. Throughout the meeting only women’s voices could be heard. The organizers of the convention decided from the beginning to exclude men from speaking. They argued that women needed to be at the forefront in order to highlight their leadership abilities and determination. Relying on men to publicly articulate women’s goals seemed to fly in the face of the goals themselves. These women desired equality and independence. They wanted to express their own opinions without restriction. As the editors of the Anti-Slavery Bugle stated, “This is a Reform in which women themselves must take the lead.” No other antebellum American women’s rights convention would adopt this policy.
When Cowles accepted the presidency of the convention, she endorsed this unique position. Indeed, she may have considered the decision to exclude men as sensible. Beginning with the creation of separate female antislavery societies in the 1830s, women knew that single-sex groups would engender less public hostility. Participating in a women’s antislavery sewing circle did not easily lead to accusations of acting “promiscuously” in mixed-sex gatherings. It was understood that the exclusion of men could lessen criticism of the convention. Also, at a practical level, women knew men might easily dominate a conference because they were more comfortable with public speaking. At the next major Ohio women’s rights meeting in Akron, in fact, men participated with such exuberance that one man “inquired whether this was not designed to be a woman’s convention and urged [that] the gentlemen should be silent.” Ironically, the men who were talking too much were busy supporting a resolution that condemned the “gross tyranny” of men.4
Men were not entirely excluded from the Salem gathering. Organizers arranged a well-attended postconvention meeting for male advocates. Dozens of eager men cheered on their sisters, mothers, wives, and friends in a lively show of support for women’s rights. The men passed a resolution declaring, “Women are entitled by the laws of Nature and of God to the same rights, civil, social, political and religious, which belong to men.”5 Cowles certainly applauded the men’s gathering as she understood that any successful reform effort must involve the cooperation of men and women. Throughout her reform career she regularly ensured that male power and prestige strengthened her antislavery efforts. She invited men to contribute to fairs and sewing societies through donations, sponsorships, and financial support. Though she never married, Cowles developed many close friendships with men and employed these relationships in her networking strategy for women’s rights.
One of the challenges of the Salem gathering and the western women’s rights movement in general was counteracting the negative image painted by opponents. They rejected the idea that their movement was a radical hotbed that threatened the family and the stability of the nation. They focused on empowering women as mothers, wives, and workers. Western newspaper editor and women’s rights supporter Jane Swisshelm reassured readers that the movement did not seek to turn women into men. It offered mothers the hope that they would have legal guardianship over their children, abused wives the opportunity to gain a divorce, young women access to college, and needy women the aid they desperately required. Frances Dana Gage, also known as “Aunt Fanny,” wrote a folksy column for the Ohio Cultivator that offered domestic advice to rural housewives and adamantly advocated for women’s rights. An abolitionist with eight children, Gage brought a motherly legitimacy to the movement. She wanted readers to see and feel women’s rights as a comfortable, safe, family-friendly movement.
At the conclusion of the Salem convention, the leaders reminded participants of the need to organize a contingent of women to attend the upcoming Ohio legislature meeting on revising the state constitution and to speak in favor of women’s education, employment, and voting rights. Sadly, no woman could be convinced to set aside her fears and insecurities to attend. Few women had public speaking experience, let alone the confidence to lecture before such a powerful group of politicians.
The Salem convention nonetheless had regional and national influence. “The Women’s Convention lately held in this place has excited a great deal of discussion upon the subject of Woman’s Rights & Wrongs, in all parts of the country,” declared the editors of the Anti-Slavery Bugle. After attending a women’s rights gathering in Worcester, Massachusetts, several months later, Garrisonian Parker Pillsbury pronounced, “The proceedings [of the Worcester meeting] have not awakened half the public interest and attention that [Salem] did some months since in Ohio. That meeting struck by its novelty. It jogged the wheels of society considerably. It seemed like an insurrection among slaves. Every body was astonished at its audacity. That woman had her rights, was something new and startling enough. That she should demand them, was monstrous indeed.”6 In the long term, Salem helped initiate a western women’s rights movement by sparking organizational development, leadership, and widespread community conversation. After reading about the Salem convention in the newspaper, one local man declared his support for women’s full political, legal, and social equality and encouraged women to demand their rights with stronger force.
In the wake of Salem, women’s rights efforts in the West gained more traction. Ohio became host to several women’s rights newspapers including the Cincinnati-based Genius of Liberty, edited by Elizabeth Aldrich, and the Kindred Spirit, edited by Rebecca Sanford. The Salem-based Anti-Slavery Bugle continued its relentless push for an end to all laws that subordinated women. The Salem meeting also led to dozens of western women’s rights gatherings throughout the 1850s, making the topic a constant source of debate and discussion in the region. Ohio hosted at least three additional state conventions including the 1851 Akron meeting at which Sojourner Truth gave her impromptu discourse later immortalized as the “And Ar’n’t I a Woman?” address. Though the popular version of the speech is likely inaccurate, it captured the essence of what would become one of the most important women’s rights speeches of the antebellum period. Probably more accurate was abolitionist editor Marius Robinson’s version, recorded immediately following the convention. According to Robinson, Truth proclaimed, “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?” She concluded, “The poor men seem to be in all confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.”7 Indiana hosted statewide women’s rights conventions every year between 1851 and 1857. National women’s rights conventions occurred in the West as well, including in Cleveland in 1853 and Cincinnati in 1855.
In coordination with these larger efforts, Cowles developed a two-pronged approach to advancing women’s rights in the West. Instead of focusing on the more controversial issue of suffrage, as did many eastern women’s rights activists, Cowles highlighted education and employment. Among all the topics discussed at Salem, these resonated the most with Cowles. They also served a strategic purpose. Many Americans favored at least high school learning for women, even if they did not understand the need for a college education. It was also widely acknowledged that some women needed to work for a living and should have access to various occupations.
In response to her concern about women’s limited employment opportunities, Cowles attended the state women’s rights convention at Akron in 1851 along with Sojourner Truth and presented her “Report on Labor,” which expounded on the need for better paying work for women. This decision to give a public speech marked an important change in Cowles’s reform career and highlights her increased confidence and personal commitment to women’s rights. Why were women limited to difficult, poorly paid jobs, she asked? Was it because of their physical limitations and presumed weakness? Was it because men wanted to protect delicate, virtuous womanhood? No, she argued, these were just excuses to exclude women from lucrative employment. She offered a brief history of women’s “backbreaking” labor to show that women had always been expected to slog through physically exhausting work. From the Chinese woman who dragged “the plow with the infant tied to her back” to the Flemish girl who carried a “heavy basket of coal,” women toiled alongside men.8
Cowles pointed out that in the United States, women factory laborers often lived in decrepit, unventilated housing and worked up to twenty hours a day to ensure a minimal existence. Domestic workers were not much better off. They were expected to be at work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and often endured physical and mental abuse from their employers. Some girls began working as servants at a very young age, eliminating the opportunity to attend school.
Teachers received better pay than servants or factory workers, but they too earned much less than their male counterparts and worked longer hours. Women teachers in Ohio, Massachusetts, and Connecticut earned half men’s wages. Connecticut was the worst; men received $20 per month compared to women’s $8.69.
Women’s low wages were directly linked to their limited job opportunities, according to Cowles. As long as women flooded into only two or three types of occupations, their wages would remain low. Employers could simply fire any woman who questioned her pay and hire one of the desperate, hungry women waiting in line for work. Once women gained access to more occupations, they would have increased opportunity to negotiate their salaries.
But popular stereotypes about women were translated into legal and social traditions that prevented women from entering most professions. Colleges, medical schools, and seminaries rejected female applicants, preventing them from gaining the education they needed to succeed. If a woman happened to receive the necessary knowledge, the state then created an obstacle by refusing to license her. Women’s rights advocates like Cowles scoffed at this inherent contradiction: How was it that women were “protected” from jobs in well-paid law firms but not from employment in low-paying, abusive factories? Who was this restriction really protecting, they wondered? Certainly not women who sought to practice the law. In fact, it guaranteed men’s exclusive access to this prestigious profession.
In her women’s rights activism, Cowles also continued to push for expanded educational opportunities for girls and women. As a teacher and college graduate, she was immersed in education. She was intimately familiar with the imperfect curriculum in most schools and knew that many girls did not consider education as particularly important for their future. Women’s education in its current form, according to the Salem convention, “was calculated to cultivate vanity and dependence.” Most parents hoped their daughters would be able to read, write, and perform basic math; beyond that, learning was for boys. Women’s rights advocates knew that limiting girls’ education meant limiting their opportunities. As long as a woman’s education remained “in harmony with the position allotted her by the laws and usages of society,” there was no hope for advancement. Certainly women needed to have the basic knowledge to teach their own children. Aunt Fanny Gage wrote in a women’s rights newspaper about how her shame at being unable to answer her children’s questions led her to became an adult learner and eventually a poet and writer. She strongly supported education for girls and women.9
Improved education was critical for independence, dignity, and responsibility. Cowles learned this at Oberlin and hoped that as a teacher she could instill this educational fever in her female students. But she also recognized that a change in the general attitude toward women’s education at the national level was necessary. In pushing for a more challenging curriculum in public schools, Cowles hoped to transform girls’ outlook on life. She wanted them to become productive and thoughtful citizens who took seriously their duty to the nation. She dreamed of well-educated women doctors, lawyers, ministers, and scientists. Colleges must be open to women for this dream to come true. Her Oberlin education remained the exception to the rule.
In the wake of the Salem convention, Cowles returned to her teaching career, but she continued supporting women’s rights throughout the 1850s. She served on the Executive Committee of the Ohio Woman’s Rights Association in 1852 and attended many women’s rights gatherings. But her most lasting contribution to the movement was her successful career in education, which allowed her to model the potential of womanhood to young girls. Indeed, as Betsy busied herself with abolition and women’s rights during the 1840s and 1850s, her reform efforts and her teaching became increasingly intertwined. She saw her effort to promote gender and race equality as a central part of her job. Teaching offered her the perfect opportunity to guide students toward tolerance and social activism just as she instructed them in history and math. And this was fairly typical. Many women teachers imbued girls with a moral code that included kindness and generosity as well as respect for others. Betsy expected her students to apply their moral code to the civic world, bringing their commitment to virtue into their communities and even partisan politics.
In the fall of 1850, Cowles accepted a position as superintendent of all the girls’ grammar and high schools in Canton, Ohio. As she was likely the only woman superintendent in the nation, this was a very prestigious promotion. She demonstrated independent womanhood for her students. Her intelligence, knowledge, and career success were living confirmation for many young girls that they could realize their dreams. Continuing to offer girls and young women advice and guidance, she took many under her wing and developed close, personal relationships with them that lasted for years. These students admired her, and many attempted to follow in her footsteps. They regularly asked Cowles for support in the form of letters of recommendation. One former student described herself as “full of hope and ambition” and asked if Cowles had any openings at her school. Cowles liked to share stories about her college days at Oberlin, regaling eager young women with tales of unlikely friendships, struggles won and lost, and the joys of scholarship. Several of her more talented and energetic students also attended Oberlin, and Cowles must have been thrilled by their achievements. They often wrote to her and shared their own college adventures with their favorite teacher. “How often I think of the times that once were, when we were all . . . in your room—listening to Oberlin stories or receiving words of encouragement ‘to persevere on in a high and holy calling,’” wrote Cowles’s former student Mollie during her first term as a student at Oberlin.10 In many ways Betsy’s greatest achievement was her ability to inspire in young women a thirst for knowledge and the courage to pursue nontraditional occupations. Unknowable numbers of women achieved more than they ever imagined possible due to her influence.
As she modeled success for her students, Cowles also incorporated women’s rights into her personal and religious life through her involvement with the spiritualist movement. Blending science and religion, spiritualism offered believers the opportunity to speak with deceased friends and relatives through séances. Young sisters Kate and Margaret Fox first popularized the movement in 1848 by claiming they could converse with the dead through “spirit rappings.” Though it was later revealed that the girls were surreptitiously cracking their knuckles to create the “rappings,” Kate and Margaret convinced thousands that it was possible to communicate with long-lost loved ones. Spiritualism appealed to those Americans who had experienced a crisis of faith because it seemed to offer scientific proof of the immorality of the soul, bolstering their wavering Christian beliefs. Though it is difficult to know how many people embraced spiritualism, some historians estimate that half the population may have believed. The movement was especially popular among reformers. William Lloyd Garrison, the Grimké sisters, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Todd Lincoln became spiritualists.
Spiritualism appealed to women’s rights advocates like Cowles because it offered equality. All mainstream churches in the nation refused to ordain women, and most expected them to remain silent, but spiritualism invited women into leadership. Women had equal voice, equal authority, and equal representation. They were more attuned “mediums” because they were associated with the same negative electricity that spirits traveled along. The movement took place in the domestic arena—the one sphere governed by women. Séances occurred in the home, around a table, with family and close friends.
Cowles and her friend Dr. Lorenzo Whiting created a small spiritualist circle in Canton during the 1850s that met regularly to commune with spirits. In their hushed séances, a medium offered communications from the spirit world, including Betsy’s father and feminist writer Margaret Fuller. Betsy was thrilled with these messages. She had great faith in the idea of an afterlife, and this new movement seemed to offer proof of her conviction. She continued her commitment to Christianity; indeed, she saw spiritualism as a supplement to her religious life. The messages she received from her father provided Cowles with hope about life and death. One medium described her father as “being in a high sphere” with an elevated degree of “spiritual development.”11 Even after many mediums were revealed as fakes, Cowles remained a passionate spiritualist. She often shared descriptions of the séances she attended in letters to her sister Cornelia, who was also intrigued by spiritualism.
Spiritualism offered a sense of religious empowerment to both Betsy and Cornelia. It reveals how their commitment to women’s equality penetrated all aspects of their lives, from private to public. Though Cornelia was never a leader in women’s rights or abolition like her sister, she was sympathetic to both movements and incorporated them into her everyday life as much as possible. For example, Cornelia embraced dress reform for women by donning the new comfortable “Bloomer” outfit, named for Amelia Bloomer, the woman who publicized it. It featured Turkish-style pants combined with a loose-fitting dress that reached halfway down the calf. Women who wore the Bloomer outfit in public were subject to derision because most people saw it as a symbol of the destruction of natural gender differences and social order. Even women’s rights supporters occasionally ridiculed the outfit. Whiting, a longtime advocate of women’s equality and a man with a good sense of humor, explained to Cornelia that a mutual friend had claimed “he would give a dollar to see you in your Bloomer & I think it would be worth that.” Despite its unpopularity, the Bloomer outfit helped to initiate a loud call for change in women’s clothing, especially in the West, where women often required comfortable, practical clothing. Celia R. Colby, a rural Ohio abolitionist and women’s rights supporter, argued in favor of a practical approach to shoes for western girls and women: “A neat, well fitting pair of boots is an essential article which should be found in the wardrobe of every country dame or damsel, who has an eye to her own comfort or convenience, nor should she hesitate to wear them whenever and wherever health and prudence may dictate.”12
Though there is little reference to dress reform in Cowles’s extant correspondence, she encouraged girls to approach all aspects of their lives, whether dress or study, with commitment and thoughtfulness. She undoubtedly applauded the call for pragmatic clothing offered by the Indiana women’s rights convention in 1851: “We believe the present style of female dress is highly inconvenient, unnatural, and destructive of health, and a mark of the degradation of woman. Therefore, resolved, that the women of this convention pledge themselves before our common families, to throw off the bondage imposed upon us by Parisian milliners and adopt a style of dress more in accordance with reason.”13 The abolitionist influence on women’s rights can be seen in the suggestion that French designers enslaved women and endangered their health. While Betsy and Cornelia both prided themselves on their immaculate, professional appearance, their clothes also reflected their egalitarian values and commitment to women’s rights and abolition. The few surviving images of Betsy show her in a modest, attractive dress with a striking shawl draped across her shoulders. Beauty and pragmatism were perfectly compatible in her life.
Cowles continued to model professional success for her women students in the 1850s through her leadership in the Ohio State Teachers’ Association (OSTA), a professional organization that promoted educational reform across the state. A lifelong reformer and teacher, Cowles was a natural fit for this influential organization that helped develop statewide trends in teaching, administration, and organization. It was the OSTA that pushed the Ohio legislature in 1853 to pass a series of laws that streamlined, simplified, and codified the public educational system. As an experienced administrator known for her integrity, good judgment, and sense of humor, Cowles was well liked in the OSTA. She participated in annual meetings, served as an instructor at teachers’ institutes, and wrote for the group’s periodical.
Cowles was passionate about the need to professionalize teaching. She had seen too many unqualified and uninspired teachers destroy children’s love of learning. In a piece for the Ohio Journal of Education (May 1853), Betsy distinguished between what she called “school-keepers” and “schoolteachers.” The school-keeper tended to simply show up for her job, bringing neither skills nor energy. Young female school-keepers saw teaching as a stopgap before marriage, a way to spend their time and earn a little money before the right man came along. They spent their free time flirting, socializing, and keeping up with fashion. Young male school-keepers saw teaching as a stepping-stone toward a better career; these men did not bother to prepare and did not care about their pupils. Schoolteachers, on the other hand, focused on the moral and intellectual development of their students. They went beyond simply imparting facts; they encouraged independent thinking and a love of learning. They spent their free time improving their minds through reading on a variety of topics.
Teaching would soon experience a period of professionalization in the coming decades that resulted in more “schoolteachers,” so Cowles was ahead of her time. Many of the improvements that she hoped for came much later. This did not deter her from implementing the changes that were possible, however. After spending six years as an administrator and teacher at the Canton Union School, Cowles accepted a position at the McNeely Normal School of Ohio. This position appealed to her because it encouraged reform and allowed her to put her innovations into practice.
Beginning in 1855, the McNeely institution, which included normal, academic, and model schools, was controlled by the Ohio State Teachers’ Association and became a kind of test institution for educational advancements. As the only teacher-association-run school in the nation, it demonstrated Ohio’s continued cutting-edge commitment to educational progress. Cowles was appointed principal of the model school for young children and a teacher in the normal school for older youth. The model school was designed for educational innovations and training—older students who were learning to become teachers could practice their new craft in the monitored model school classrooms. Cowles hoped that the school would incorporate her ideas about building a foundational love of learning in young students through creative work and adoring support by teachers. She believed it was critical to instill an ardor for knowledge and freethinking at a very early age. This would pay off in a lifelong commitment to self-improvement and scholarship.
Unfortunately, the McNeely experiment failed due to financial difficulties. Cowles’s high hopes for the original institution were disappointed, but she did not leave downhearted. Though she had to fight to receive her full pay, which did not arrive until 1861, nearly four years after the school closed, she did have the opportunity to practice what she preached. She became convinced that educational reform could produce generations of excited, knowledgeable young people. Her devoted students expressed their gratitude for her teaching excellence and their sorrow at her departure. “I go to school but I do not like to go as well as I did when you was here,” wrote one frustrated student. “I do not [like] our teachers as well as you.”14
Her next position did not allow her much time to act on her convictions. It also reminded her of the continued need for women’s rights agitation. She accepted a teaching job at the Illinois State Normal College in Bloomington in the spring of 1858, only to be immediately replaced by the board of directors with a male teacher. This was not her first experience with clear gender discrimination, but it was one of the most galling. As a highly experienced, talented, and innovative educational leader, she expected to be treated with respect. She was not surprised by the discrimination, but she had hoped that her level of skill would immunize her against it. Despite her short stay in Bloomington, Cowles inspired fervent feelings among her students, who appreciated her warm personality and her extensive knowledge and skill. After only a few months with her, many become lifelong correspondents and friends.
Despite enduring two frustrating employment experiences in a row, Cowles landed her most prestigious position yet following the Illinois fiasco. She became the superintendent of the Union schools of Painesville back in Ohio. As one student proclaimed, this was an “unusual” leadership station “for a woman.” Cowles was in charge of hiring and firing, choosing the texts used in the classroom, and general oversight of the school system. She received countless requests from talented young women eager to teach for the famous Miss Cowles. One protective brother wrote to Cowles inquiring about a position for his seventeen-year-old sister: “Your own experience has been extensive, and your study of human nature great, and your reputation for good order, and the strictest rules of etiquette unsurpassed.”15 This young man knew that Cowles was an outstanding model of leadership and respectability who would protect and nurture his sister.
Cowles’s professional colleagues across the North also looked to her for advice, favors, and information during her leadership at Painesville. A state commissioner in Missouri asked Cowles for guidance in improving his state’s educational system, even in what school-books to choose: “I shall . . . unhesitatingly adopt them, because I have heard that you were a lady of long experience in teaching and universally popular.”16 Betsy was, by and large, her own boss, though she reported to the Board of Trustees. She had reached the pinnacle of her profession despite the obstacle of her gender. She would spend two years as a well-loved and respected superintendent and finally step down in 1860 at the age of fifty.
Cowles developed a vital leadership role in the western women’s rights movement of the 1850s. She served as president of the most important and unprecedented woman-only women’s rights convention at Salem in 1850. This convention set the stage for women’s rights activism in the West in the coming decade. Cowles helped prioritize the most important issues for western activists, including educational and employment opportunities, through her leadership at Salem. She facilitated advancement in these areas through both her career and her public speaking. Her well-researched and persuasive “Report on Labor” provided activists with the facts and data that they needed to push their demands for equality in the workplace. Her educational leadership as a superintendent at Canton and then Painesville inspired countless young women to achieve beyond societal expectations. Her commitment to spiritualism allowed her women’s rights beliefs to penetrate even the most intimate and personal areas of her life. Her legacy as a women’s rights advocate can be characterized through her early organizational leadership and long-term modeling of liberated, high-achieving womanhood.
As Cowles moved up the ladder in her career and promoted women’s rights through her professional life and influence on young women, she never lost sight of the abolitionist movement. Though she did not attend as many antislavery conventions as she used to, she continued to keep abreast of the movement by reading the Anti-Slavery Bugle and Garrison’s Liberator throughout the decade. During her eastern travels she regularly visited with abolitionist leaders, who requested her presence at their gatherings to regale the audience with her antislavery songs. In 1857, she traveled to Philadelphia and met up with Garrison, abolitionist editor Oliver Johnson, and women’s rights leader Lucretia Mott. They all took the train from Philadelphia to Westchester, where they participated in a series of antislavery meetings. “I shan’t give any public notice of your coming before hand,” Johnson assured Cowles as they planned her visit. “So, when you break forth in song you will take the people all by surprise.”17
On the eve of the Civil War and at the end of Cowles’s career as an educational leader, she moved to Delhi, New York, to resume a less-demanding position at the Female Seminary School there. So beloved was she among parents back in Ohio that one determined father sent his daughter, Ida Saxton, all the way to Delhi to be taught by Cowles at the female seminary. Ida excelled at the school and met her husband, another student of Cowles’s, William McKinley. So deep and inspiring was her influence on the young couple that the future U.S. president supposedly asked Betsy for her permission before proposing to young Ida.
As the Civil War broke out, Cowles continued her work toward ending slavery and empowering women as she had done for most of her adult life, though physical decline forced her to limit her activism at a time when both abolition and women’s rights experienced unprecedented successes.