Harriet Tubman leads slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad, a system of people willing to aid escapees. She said, “I had reasoned this out in my mind, there were two things I had a right to: liberty and death. If I should not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive.”
Abolitionist and educator Myrtilla Miner overcomes serious opposition to establish and maintain the Miner School for Free Colored Girls. Miner, though white, spends all of her professional career helping educate African American women. Contributions from Quakers and from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who gives a portion of the royalties from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, help fund Miner’s work. In 1879, the Miner Normal School, a teacher training institution, becomes part of the District of Columbia’s public school system. In 1929, it becomes Miner Teachers College.
Suffragist Amelia Bloomer promotes dress reform for women. She advocates for a shorter, less restrictive skirt and pantaloons instead of heavy hoops and stays.
Camilla Urso plays her violin (a heretofore “masculine” instrument) in concerts around the United States.
Abolitionist and author Harriet Beecher Stowe is galvanized into action by the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act. Her best-selling book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sells three hundred thousand copies in the first year, shocks the country with its frank exposé of the harsh conditions of slavery. Upon meeting her after the onset of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln is rumored to have said, “So, you are the little lady that started this great war.”
Suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage enters the women’s rights movement as a speaker. She is highly respected for her thorough organizing and her writing. She joins Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to produce the first three volumes of the monumental History of Women’s Suffrage. Her work for the cause is tireless; at one point she corresponds with people in forty-seven counties and circulates 2,500 tracts. Carved on her tombstone is her lifelong motto: “There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven; that word is Liberty.”
Catharine Beecher founds the American Woman’s Educational Association to recruit and train teachers to staff frontier schools. She inspires the founding of several women’s colleges in the Midwest, and her writings do much to introduce domestic science into the American school curriculum. She is a strong advocate for physical education for women, incorporating calisthenics into physical education courses in the first school she establishes, Hartford Female Seminary in Hartford, Connecticut.
Emily Dickinson, who becomes a major literary figure, publishes her first poem in the local newspaper. Some critics argue that she is the greatest woman poet in the English language. Her work is studied today both in high school and on the university level. During her lifetime, she is known as a private, reclusive person who lives quietly in Amherst, Massachusetts. At the time of her death, only seven of her thousands of poems had been published. A stanza of one of her most famous poems reads:
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.