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The latest Parisian craze is the stare! A crazier-looking picture it would be hard to find; but the stare is, nevertheless, the fashion. In order to “do it” you must assume a look of utter abstraction and appear to be gazing at something all unseen by your friends and well-wishers; but which, in its contemplation, causes you to open your eyes very wide, and to persevere in doing this strange and uncalled-for thing. What you see apparently appalls you. And yet, the prettiest women are staring persistently in this insane way. What will not fashion’s votaries do?

Fashions are growing more eccentric daily; the more extreme they are, the more popular they become. Lace is regaining much of its past favor, although always popular, it has not been so universally used for the last few years; but now all kinds are in great demand. Black lace flounces have been in oblivion for some time; but the happy possessors can bring them forth, as they are growing in favor for trimming silks and velvets, and Worth has the daring to festoon them on the light cloth gowns now worn in the evening, while some of the famous Paris milliners are trimming felt hats with black lace. There are jetted net flounces that must be scantily gathered to show their beauty, and others lightly wrought with gold, steel or silver, or with tinsels of many colors. Raised figures of gold or of steel are most effective on black laces, others are jeweled in Russian fashion, and some of the prettiest are studded with turquoises amid gold, or pink coral with silver. The three-inch trimming laces with turquoises or corals have also pretty insertions of similar designs.

The first National Women’s Rights Convention began on October 23, 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts in the USA.

The National Women’s Rights Convention became an annual series of meetings that increased the visibility of the early women’s rights movement in the United States.

Parker Pillsbury

The National Women’s Rights Convention combined both male and female leadership, and attracted a wide base of support including temperance advocates and abolitionists. Speeches were given on the subjects of equal wages, expanded education and career opportunities, women’s property rights, marriage reform, abolition, racial equality, and temperance.

Chief among the concerns discussed at the convention was the passage of laws that would give suffrage to women.

A letter in a Pittsburgh newspaper criticized the convention for statements made for the record to include people of color in the demands for equality.

This is Parker Pillsbury’s response to that criticism. It appeared in the December 5, 1850 issue of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star. This paper can be found in Accessible Archive’s African American Newspaper Collection.

Parker Pillsbury (1809-1898) was an American minister and advocate for abolition and women’s rights.

DEAR MRS. SWISSHELM: – In the last Visitor, you say of a resolution relating to people of color, offered by Mr. Wendell Phillips in the late Convention of Women, at Worcester, Mass.

“We are pretty nearly out of patience with the dogged perseverance with which so many of our Reformers persist in their attempt to do everything at once.”

And again:

“In a Women’s Rights Convention , the question of color had no right to a hearing.”

It seemed as though the usually kindly spirit and good judgment of the Visiter were a little wanting in these two utterances. I should not have noticed it at all in most of the public journals – indeed, I neither know nor care what but few of them do say; for I should no more think of having them in my house, political or religious, than I would of inoculating the family with the foulest leprosy that ever unjointed the bones of a son of Abraham. But your Visiter finds a ready entrance and cheerful greeting so that we are a little solicitous about its bearing towards the few other … we have invited.

“Dogged and perseverance ” are two ugly words standing together, and Mr. Phillips has ever been very watchful to prevent any other topic from creeping to whatever platform he occupied, devoted to any particular reform. And those two words look strange indeed to some of us, standing in connection with his name and the resolutions to which you have taken exception.

In the 1910s, Frank Leslie’s Weekly had an increase in news by and about women. Kate Upson Clark* and the paper’s “In the World of Womankind” page is a good example. After sharing news tidbits from around the world, she would respond to letters from readers:

FOR A EUROPEAN TRIP

Dear Mrs. Clark: I am going abroad for a six-weeks’ trip. I take a steamer trunk, two suitcases and a hand-bag. Please advise me about what dresses to take. I have a good tailor-made suit, and a charmeuse (short) dinner-dress. Our party will travel, stopping only a few days in any one place. Is this enough? I shall have three or four blouses to wear with the skirt of my tailor-made gown.—L. B., Trenton, N. J.

That supply should serve for so short a trip. Take stout, comfortable shoes, and new underclothes.

DEAR BALLOT BOX: Do you know that this interminable drudgery imposed on American mothers of petitioning—petitioning for the ballot—this humiliation of forever praying to their own sons to be allowed to enjoy their birthright with the men born of them, furnishes me with stronger evidence of the Darwinian theory than anything I am able to find elsewhere. Were it not for this relic which has no parallel in the history left us of the dark ages—of the long ago buried past, there would be little proof of such an age having once enshrouded the earth.

The brutish vulgarity which we see cropping out in men who ignorantly disgrace themselves by ignoring their own mothers, is conclusive evidence to me that the race must have come up through the long line of animal ancestry to the “man in the dugout,” and from thence to the men in our present Congress, some of whom still seem inclined to root, and grunt, and squeal, if others assert rights equal to their own: lest the visual line of their own pen be the world’s extent, and, if others should be allowed to enjoy like blessings, they would be crowded, off the stage of action. While there are other men on the same floor, who, I am proud to say, are infinitely in advance of all this, which is a promise and prophecy of the oncoming of those others, for which I thank God and take courage; and love to accept this theory because it gives us a better outlook—this law of eternal progress must in cycles of years lift the most sordid to a higher plane of nobler action.

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From time immemorial, the part of woman in war has been the hardest. It has been her lot to send her loved ones away as sacrifices on the altar of her country and to remain at home, torn by all the emotions that rend the spirit of mothers, wives and sweethearts. She has been forced in the ages past to await with fearful forebodings the news from the scenes of conflict; she has suffered the pangs of sudden bereavement, and has borne the consequent burdens in the future years.

The success of any nation’s arms has been due largely to the fortitude of its women. What we of the present day know as morale and which is maintained by large organizations in and out of the army, was just as important a factor in the years that have gone as it is today. But then there were no well organized bodies to see to it that our soldiers were kept in good spirits and guided in the right paths. The burden of the task lay with the women of our country.

It was their bravery at the parting, their cheerfulness in adversity, their fortitude in bereavement, their happiness in victory which inspired men to do or die, and which has demonstrated that “they also serve who stand and wait.” The ancient Spartan mother said to her son when he left her to do battle for Sparta, “Return with your shield or on it.” Human nature has not changed a great deal in the last two thousand years, and although the mother of today does not say so in so many words to her son, when he goes forth to battle, “acquit yourself honorably or do not return home,” she teaches him from childhood the value of bravery and the wretchedness of the coward. (more…)