Lucy Stoners & Bloomers

I attended a most interesting online talk today on "Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement" with Professor Allison Lange.  Thank you Peabody Institute!  Lange's new book traces "ways that women's rights reformers and their opponents used images to define gender and power in the United States."

Several of the images she presented from the early woman's suffrage and anti-suffrage movements were new to me and will help in the effort to make Mary Upton Ferrin's past present.  Upton Ferrin's political activism spanned from 1848 to 1854, although she did later collect signatures for NAWSA after the Civil War.

We know she was a "Lucy Stoner" - perhaps we should envision Mary in bloomers as well?   Would she wear the shocking attire or would it get in the way of her petitioning?  Since she walked 400 miles through the years, bloomers would have been much more comfortable.

Anti-suffrage cartoons from 1851 used bloomer-clad, pipe-smoking, bulldog-owning women activists to mock the movement.  The cartoons depict what would happen if women gained power.

 

Woman's Emancipation, engraving, published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, August 1851. p 424.

Adama Weingartner, Bloomerism in Practice, Humbug's American Museum Series (1851) , plate 17.

If Mary was a supporter of dress reform, she may have  also been interested in the work of Mary Gove Nichols (1810-1884) in nearby Lynn.  In March 1838, she lectured on Anatomy at the Lynn Society of Friends.  She was the same age as Mary Ferrin.  Read Gove's Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology.

In 1847, a year before Mary Ferrin left her marriage, Mary Gove Nichols was operating a successful hydropathic practice in New York City and had recently left her abusive husband, Hiram.  

Because she admitted to having left her husband, the state granted a "Legal Separation for Voluntary Abandonment," but this designation did not allow either Mary Gove or Hiram to remarry.  As a victim of abandonment, only the husband had the clear right to sue for divorce.  

Mary Gove's experience previews the road map Mary Upton Ferrin would follow out of her marriage.

Works Cited

Allison K. Lange, PhD,  www.allisonklange.com/?fbclid=IwAR2Hpen9-y8Lfgls1y4xPNFgf75ntB_uSu1Eg6GuzhYpkN4inc6_WZbw7dc.

"Be Proud to Be Called a Lucy Stoner.” HISTORICAL WALKING TOURS | BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, www.walkbostonhistory.com/be-proud-to-be-called-a-lucy-stoner.html.

Lange, Allison K. Picturing Political Power: Images in the Womens Suffrage Movement. The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

“Lectures to Ladies on Anatomy and Physiology.” Google Books, Google, books.google.com/books?vid=HARVARDHN5C5N&printsec=titlepage#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Mary Upton Ferrin, www.the-smollers.com/muferrin/mgnichols/mgnichols6.htm.Silver-Isenstadt, Jean L. 

Shameless: the Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002.