Brinley Hall: Where Women Demanded the Vote

In October of eighteen fifty, more than one thousand people from eleven states descended on Worcester for a gathering that had never happened before in American history: the first National Women's Rights Convention.

They met in Brinley Hall, right in the center of the city. The convention had been organized largely by Paulina Wright Davis, a Rhode Island reformer and abolitionist, and it drew some of the most remarkable figures of the era. Frederick Douglass was there. William Lloyd Garrison was there. Sojourner Truth delivered a speech. Ernestine Rose, Lucretia Mott, and Antoinette Brown all addressed the assembly. Abby Kelley Foster, Worcester's own radical Quaker, was a central presence.

The convention was radical in its breadth. It demanded equal wages, expanded educational opportunities, women's right to own property, marriage reform, and the right to vote. It passed a resolution declaring that it stood for "equality for all, without distinction of sex or color," a statement that set it apart from many of the era's reform movements.

The press did not know what to make of it. The New York Herald ran a headline calling it an "awful combination of socialism, abolitionism, and infidelity." The editors meant this as an insult. The delegates took it as a fairly accurate description of their goals and kept going.

The Worcester convention launched what became an annual National Women's Rights Convention, held most years through eighteen sixty, with further meetings in eighteen sixty-six and eighteen sixty-nine. Historians trace the organized American women's suffrage movement directly to this hall.

It would take another seventy years, until nineteen twenty, for the Nineteenth Amendment to be ratified. But the argument that changed the law was assembled here in Worcester, in October, eighteen fifty, by a thousand people who had no legal right to vote and demanded one anyway.