Betsy Mix Cowles’s name is unfamiliar today, but her life deserves a wide audience. Her distinguished career as an educator, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist embodies the most noteworthy and consequential reform movements of the nineteenth century. Her leadership in social movements was guided by an unwavering commitment to equality. Though her modest personality and pragmatic approach to reform resulted in her absence from the history books, her career as a reform leader has much to teach us about women’s lives in the antebellum North.
The first half of the nineteenth century was a period of tremendous change, especially for those white northerners who experienced the market, transportation, and communication revolutions in their daily lives. Men and women began to think about themselves differently as jobs changed and contributions to the household economy shifted. Some men began to labor for wages outside the home, meaning that work was no longer defined by the mutual contributions of entire families. Women’s lives were now perceived to be limited to the “private” sphere that characterized domesticity. Despite this pervasive ideology, women experienced increased access to civic spaces and roles through their interactions with expanded markets, educational opportunities, and benevolent organizations. Religious revivals were especially important in opening doors for women.
As Cowles came of age in the 1820s, the Second Great Awakening taught many newly roused Christians that they had an important and necessary role to play in perfecting the world. Spurred by a desire to purify their communities and spread Christian spirituality, men and women began to initiate reform organizations to aid the needy and directly confront sinfulness. Women began charitable establishments to help the poor, sick, disabled, unemployed, and orphaned. They confronted perceived illicit sexuality and the problem of prostitution through moral reform groups that demanded men follow the same moral code as women. Temperance associations attracted widespread support among benevolent women who connected drunkenness to family violence, poverty, and illness. By the 1830s, a minority of women in the North embraced antislavery as the ultimate reform because they identified slavery as the worst sin confronting the nation. These civic engagements brought women into contact with businesses, financial affairs, and local governments.
In the 1840s and 1850s, national politics began to change with the erosion of the Second Party System, and this impacted women’s reforming lives also. Some became involved in partisan politics by joining the Whigs, the Democrats, or the small antislavery Liberty Party and expressing their political convictions. For women interested in moral reform, politics offered the opportunity to influence policy and further advance their causes. Confronted with criticism for stepping outside their sphere, these women used notions of women’s moral nature to excuse their presence in politics. They sought only to address issues of sinfulness, they contended. A few women even began to argue that as citizens of a republican nation, women deserved equal rights, including the vote.
Cowles embraced many of these new reform movements because she too believed Christian evangelicals had a responsibility to improve their communities. Her father was a clergyman and a missionary who taught his children that worldliness was only a distraction from the spiritual fulfillment of doing good works. Empowered by her religious life as well as increased access to civic life for women, Cowles created and led the largest female antislavery society in the North. Her exuberant and shrewd support for women’s abolitionism resulted in a nationally influential petition drive and a successful effort to increase educational opportunities for African Americans. Her advocacy of racial equality and antislavery permeated all aspects of her life, including her wildly successful teaching career. She challenged racial segregation and exclusion in schools even at the risk of losing her job and alienating her community. As she continued climbing higher in her academic career, serving as principal and superintendent—extraordinary achievements for a woman of the period—she brought her values to her work. She labored to ensure that girls and women gained increased access to knowledge and learning, and she persistently pushed doors open for black students.
Cowles played a vital role in the burgeoning women’s rights movement. She created a variety of women’s organizations that promoted equality and enriched women’s intellectual and spiritual life. She served as president of the groundbreaking Ohio Women’s Rights Convention of 1850 and modeled educated, successful womanhood to thousands of students, colleagues, and friends throughout her career.
Whether it was antislavery, women’s rights, or education, Cowles employed a flexible and pragmatic approach to initiating change. She learned to work with all brands of reformers and built bridges with skill and dexterity. Friends, colleagues, and even opponents loved and respected her. She employed traditional notions of womanhood to her advantage, relying on women’s association with piety and virtue to gain access to civic life. Always cognizant of her goals but willing to slow her pace or change course if necessary, Cowles established an effective method for social reform that appealed to a broad cross-section of the population.
Her practical approach to change meant that her name did not usually make the headlines. She preferred to play the roles of negotiator, policy maker, and motivator. She was a leader who chose to avoid the spotlight. Shedding light on her life is the job of the historian. This book recognizes Betsy Mix Cowles as a champion of equality.