Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

These dissidents were reinforced by Whittier, who¹ wrote home to his Pennsylvania Freeman that the last day's debate over the question of admitting women to membership had ‘nothing to do with the professed object of the Convention; and a discussion of the merits of animal magnetism, or of the Mormon Bible, would have been quite as appropriate.’ Nay, he even made a virtue of resisting what he assumed to be an attempt² to engraft the practices of Quakerism—‘connecting our sectarianism with the cause’; and declared, ‘We will not be guilty of treason to humanity by pitiful attempts to smuggle into public confidence and favor our peculiar sentiments upon other topics, under the guise of abolition.’ Mr. Garrison, calmly (for old friendship's sake), contended, as against such sentiments—‘The “woman³ question,” so far as it respects the right or the propriety of Requiring women to be silent in Anti-Slavery Conventions, when they affirm that their consciences demand that they should speak, is not an “irrelevant” question, but one which it is perfectly proper to discuss in such bodies whenever the right alluded to is claimed. . . . Is it not as proper to discuss the means as the end of our organization?’ It would not, indeed, be relevant then and there to discuss woman's rights; but when a woman responds aye to a proposition, or rises to express her conviction, from a sense of duty, shall we ‘apply the gag’? He reminded his colleagues at the Convention of 1833, to form the American Anti-Slavery Society, that women were allowed to speak on that important occasion.

This phase of ‘woman's rights’ was shortly to be made a touchstone in other fields of reform—in that of peace, for example. ‘This delightful yet awfully⁴ momentous subject,’ as Mr. Garrison styled it, had been popularized in Boston in a series of weekly lectures by