Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

• Anna Dickinson
• Born: October 28, 1842
• Died: October 22, 1932

Antislavery, black-rights and women’s-rights advocate, was born in Philadelphia to a poor Quaker family of English descent. She was the second daughter and youngest of five children of John Dickinson, a dry-goods merchant who died when she was two, and Mary (Edmondson) Dickinson. She received her early education from her mother and had five years of formal education at Quaker schools.

At fifteen Dickinson went to work as a copyist to help support her family. Applying for a schoolteacher’s job, she was told that as a female she would be paid less than a male. She reportedly replied: “Sir, are you a fool or do you take me for one?” and stalked out.

The Dickinson home was a station on the Underground Railroad and Anna Dickinson and her sister often discussed slavery and women’s rights. At fourteen, the year of her conversion to Methodism, she had an antislavery article published in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator. In 1860, when she was eighteen, she gave her first public speech. The following year, with the encouragement of Lucretia Mott, she gave her first paid lecture, on the topic “The Rights and Wrongs of Women,” arguing for woman suffrage and the entrance of women into the professions.

After losing her job at the U.S. mint in Philadelphia for calling General George B. McClellan a traitor, Dickinson, determined to make her living as a public speaker, asked Garrison and the Rhode Island reformer Elizabeth Buffum Chace to arrange lectures for her in New England, where she electrified audiences with her antislavery message. The press hailed her as a “juvenile Joan of Arc,” a title she relished. Radical Republican leaders in New Hampshire and Connecticut hired her as a campaign speaker in 1863. The twenty-one-year-old Dickinson, whose speeches were strong on sarcasm and invective, was enormously successful; she attracted an audience of more than 5,000 in New York City. In 1864 she addressed a group of statesmen and military leaders in Washington, D.C., to urge adoption of the Radicals’ program of punitive reconstruction of the South.

After the Civil War Dickinson became a star lecturer on the lyceum circuit, earning more than $20,000 a year. Her speeches decried racial prejudice, big business, and the double standard of sexual behavior and encouraged the liberation of women from the financial and legal protection of fathers and husbands. In 1868 she spoke on behalf of the Working Women’s Association in defense of Hester Vaughn, a domestic servant sentenced to death for the murder of her newborn baby; the child had been fathered by Vaughn’s employer, who then abandoned her, leaving her with no means of support—a typical example, Dickinson said, of the mistreatment of working women. She put her views on education, vocational training, prison reform, and race relations into two books, What Answers? (1868), a novel, and .A Paying Investment (1876).

Dickinson delighted in asserting her independence. She abandoned Quaker garb and lived extravagantly in a Philadelphia town house. For many years she was the close friend of Whitelaw Reid, the diplomat and editor of The New-York Tribune.

Although she aroused thousands of listeners with her impassioned denunciations of slavery, racial injustice, and discrimination against women, she was, at heart, an individualist for whom personal fame came before any cause. Women’s-rights leaders such as Lucretia Mott, though annoyed, continued to seek speaking engagements for her because they recognized the effectiveness of her oratory.

By 1873 lyceum lecturing was in decline and Dickinson, no longer a child prodigy and increasingly taking unpopular antimonopoly and antiunion stands, went out of favor. She turned to writing and acting for the theater in 1876, much to the chagrin of her reformer friends. Critics ridiculed her work. She was rehired as a political speaker in 1888, but her language was so caustic that she was suspected of being mentally ill. In 1891, after an episode of severe depression, Dickinson, who was living in West Pittston, Pennsylvania, was confined for five weeks in the State Hospital for the Insane in Danville. She passed the last forty years of her life in Goshen, New York, writing plays that were never published. She died there of cerebral apoplexy a week before her ninetieth birthday and was buried in Slate Hill Cemetery, Goshen.

The Anna E. Dickinson Papers are in the Library of Congress. Dickinson recounted her years as a lecturer in A Ragged Register (of People, Places, and Opinions) (1879). Biographical articles appear in Notable American Women (1971) and the Dictionary American Biography, supplement 1 (1944). A full-length biography is G. Chester, Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson (1951). See also L. B. C. Wyman and A. C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, vol. 1 (1914), and F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967).