Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis

• Paulina Davis
• Born: August 7, 1813
• Died: August 24, 1876

One of the earliest activist American feminists, was born in Bloomfield, New York, one of five children of Captain Ebenezer Kellogg and Polly (Saxton) Kellogg. She had one sister.

In 1817 the family moved to a farm on the frontier of western New York; there both parents died. The children were reared by relatives. Paulina, sent to the home of a strict and conservative Presbyterian aunt in Le Roy, New York sought escape in religion, especially revivals. For a while she thought of becoming a foreign missionary.

In 1833, when she was nineteen, she married Francis Wright, a prosperous merchant in Utica, New York. The couple shared a deep commitment to many reform issues, such as abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. Their prominent role in the Utica antislavery convention of 1835 provoked an attack on their house by proslavery men.

For Paulina Wright, as for many female abolitionists, the question of black emancipation led to a consideration of women’s rights. She became aware that other women in New York State were also interested in discussing women’s rights, and out of these informal contacts there arose some of the first public acts of the female emancipation movement.

In the early days of the movement, there was less concern with obtaining the vote than with gaining opportunities for education and work, and with reforming state laws on property and marriage. In most states women were devoid of legal rights over property and earnings. The first petition for a woman’s property act was sent to the New York State legislature in 1837 by Ernestine Rose. In 1840 Paulina Wright and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were among many signatories of another similar petition. Welcome support came from many of the politically powerful old families of Dutch descent that feared losing their wealth to sharp young men. In 1848 the legislature passed a Married Woman’s Property Act that allowed a woman who brought real estate into marriage to retain it under her own name; property so held could not be attached to pay the debts of her husband. This protection had actually been obtainable under common law, through trusteeships and marriage contracts, but the 1848 law made it readily available to all women, not just those of the upper class.

Meanwhile, in 1845, Francis Wright died. There had been no children, and Paulina Wright was left financially secure. During the four years of her widowhood, she traveled throughout the East and Midwest, giving lectures on female anatomy and hygiene. She had prepared herself with courses in physiology and had imported the first female anatomical model to be displayed before a female audience in the United States. She persisted in her illustrated lectures, despite much criticism from both men and women, who were embarrassed by her straightforward discussions of the human body. Among her listeners were several who went on the become the first generation of women physicians.

These activities ended in 1849 when she married Thomas Davis, of Providence, Rhode Island, a state representative and antislavery Democrat. This marriage, like her first, was childless, but the couple eventually adopted two daughters. When her husband was elected to the House of Representatives in 1852, she accompanied him to Washington for the duration of his single term.

Paulina Davis was now convinced that the time was ripe for some form of national action. She was one of the prime movers in calling the first two national women’s rights conventions, and she presided over both. The meetings were held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850 and 1851; the first grew out of a Boston antislavery meeting. Both gatherings were convened to call attention to women’s enslavement and to arouse women to protest their condition. At the first convention, the resolutions included one declaring that “women are clearly entitled to the right of suffrage” and are to be “considered eligible to office.”

Soon after the conventions, Davis began her most ambitious venture, the publication at her own expense of a monthly magazine for women. The Una was one of the earliest publications devoted exclusively to the cause of women’s emancipation. Published for over two years (1853-55), it reached a small but highly educated national audience, providing a forum for discussion and a rallying point for action. Davis, like her good friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton, based much of her work on the need for a reform of marriage, both in law and custom. She sought true equality between husband and wife in the belief that this would improve the rearing of children and thus produce a better society.

The issue of women’s rights became quiescent during the Civil War but revived with the advent of peace. The Equal Rights Association was formed to advance suffrage for all citizens, including men and women, black and white. The Republican administration in Washington, however, focused on suffrage for blacks only, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, in defining who should vote, brought the word male into the Constitution for the first time. When the Republicans introduced the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed the vote to black men, the suffragists split. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton led those who opposed the Fifteenth Amendment and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Others, led by Lucy Stone, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which supported the Fifteenth Amendment and favored a Sixteenth Amendment for woman suffrage. The groups remained separate until 1890.

Davis was one of the few New Englanders to support the NWSA. When the New England Woman Suffrage Association, which she helped found in 1868, entered the camp of the AWSA, she founded a Rhode Island suffrage association that remained loyal to the NWSA. She was president of the state organization until 1870.

Her career then began to draw to a close. Crippled by rheumatic gout, she made no public appearances after 1871. She died at sixty-three of heart disease in Providence and was buried there in Swan Point Cemetery.

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis was proud of the fact that she did not fit the conventional mold of a feminist. Beautiful, elegant, and always stylishly dressed, she contradicted all the nineteenth-century stereotypes. In a letter to a friend written in 1852, she said that she was determined to “remove the idea that all the woman’s rights women are horrid old frights with beards and mustaches who want to smoke and swear.”

The best account of Davis’s life is in Notable American Women (1971). Also useful is the sketch in E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1 (1881). Davis’s place in the early women’s movement is discussed in B. G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (1978). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1930). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, August 25, 1876.