Loretta Cody
    Biography
    Press
    Lectures
Phebe Hanaford
    Biography
    Suffragist
    Minister
    Author
Feminists
   Jane Croly
   Olympia Brown
   Antoinette
   Brown Blackwell
   Lucy Stone

Links
Email
Home

Rev. Phebe A. Coffin Hanaford was a charter member of the Equal Rights Association and the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association in the 1860s. Born on Nantucket Island and ministering to parishes in New England she was closely associated with Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and Caroline Severance, signees of the letter that sparked the formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association. In August 1869, Rev. Phebe Hanaford received the circular letter from Lucy Stone dated August 5.

"Many friends of the cause of Woman Suffrage desire that its interests may be promoted by the assembling and action of a Convention, devised as a truly national and representative basis, for the organization of an American Woman Suffrage Association. Without depreciating the value of Associations already existing, it is yet deemed that an organization at once more comprehensive and more widely of the representative than any or these is urgently called for.

In this view, the Executive Committee of the New England Woman Suffrage Association has appointed the undersigned a Committee of Correspondence to confer, by letter, with the friends of Woman Suffrage throughout the country, on the subject of the proposed Convention.

We ask to hear from you in reply, at your earliest convenience. Our present plan is that the authority of the Convention shall be vested in delegates, to be chosen and accredited by the Woman Suffrage Associations existing, or about to be formed, in several States of the Union. The number of delegates to be sent by each Association, and the precise time of the meeting of the Convention, can be determined as soon as we shall have received such answer to our present application as shall assure us of an active and generous co-operation in the measure proposed, on the part of those addressed."

Phebe Hanaford signed the request from Lucy and was one of twelve delegates from Massachusetts along with William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe and Caroline Severence to the first Convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association scheduled for November 24 and 25,1869, in Cleveland.

Phebe was 21 when Lucy Stone organized the First Woman’s Rights Convention in 1850. A Baptist wife with two children, she read about Stone’s revolutionary ideas in newspapers. At age forty Phebe had moved into the world of Universalist women and been ordained a Universalist minister. She was a pioneer in New England Suffrage Organization and a charter member of the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. Rev. Hanaford brought her beliefs into her ministry, preaching the feminist gospel, anticipating "the day when the ballot is given to woman and her place as a citizen is fully acknowledged."

Eighteen eight-four marked ten years since Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite ruled in Minor v. Happersett, (1874), that suffrage was not conferred on anyone by the Constitution and that the question was entirely one of State discretion. State Suffrage Associations worked to secure voting rights in schools and in local elections with limited success. Ever since Senator A.A. Sargent of California introduced the Suffrage Amendment in Congress in 1878 the bill was introduced on a regular basis and was not submitted to a vote. It stated: "The right of a citizen of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex." A woman at the polls was viewed by the majority of men and women as a way to destroy the authority of the head of the family. When a woman lectured on the cause of suffrage she was accused of destroying the foundation of society. When the woman was a minister she was going against her vocation to preserve and protect the family, the foundation of society, as a God given value. This ever-present attitude was a constant irritation confronting Rev. Hanaford in her work. She did not let this influence her goal of achieving equal rights for women.

At the National Woman’s Suffrage Association Convention held in Washington DC in March 1884, the right of suffrage as an amendment to state constitutions was the unifying factor. Such an amendment required passage of the measure in two successive sessions as well as in a referendum. Members of the convention knew if they failed now, their amendment could not be resubmitted for five years. Rev. Hanaford was the speaker from New Jersey.

"Mrs. Hanaford spoke of the State of New Jersey as being not only the oldest land on the continent, according to scientists, but as having been the first to admit women to political equality. The Quaker settlers of New Jersey framed articles of agreement whereby universal Suffrage was secured. These governmental laws were made public March 3rd, 1676. Until 1790 this equitable Constitution was in force. Then a provincial law confined voters to male freeholders. On the 2d of July, 1776, two days before the Declaration of Independence, New Jersey adopted a Constitution, which was in force till 1844, in which women were in every way counted the political equals of men, and under which they voted as freely, In 1807 an arbitrary act of the Legislature took away the right to vote from women and negroes. In 1844 a new Constitution was framed and adopted, those who had been illegally deprived of their votes not concurring, and until the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the National Constitution, only white males voted. Congress restored the negro’s right. Congress ought, by a Sixteenth Amendment, to restore woman’s right to the ballot, or New Jersey herself should spring to the front and be a leader, as in the colonial days. If not, she may be outstripped by distant Oregon. The present Governor, Leon Abbott, has signalized his gubernatorial career by an act of justice to the negro. His fame would be greater still if he would champion the rights of woman."

The three pioneers who lived to see the passage of the 19th amendment were ministers, Revs. Phebe Hanaford, Olympia Brown and Antoinette Brown Blackwell. On the passage of the passage of the amendment in 1920 Lucy Stone’s daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, wrote to 91 year old Phebe at her home at 380 Pullman Avenue, Rochester, New York:

Dear Mrs. Hanaford:

It gives me real pleasure today to think that you will be voting - although you have had that priveledge since 1917, while I exercise it today for the first time.  But in thinking of the women to whom we owe it, you come to my mind, and mrateful thoughts go out to you.

Cordially,

Alice Stone Blackwell

Reference & Further study

Stanton, Anthony, Gage and Harper. History of Woman Suffrage.

© 1999 Loretta Cody
All Rights Reserved