|
Hannah Maria Conant Tracy Cutler (1815–1896) was an abolitionist as well as a leader of the temperance and women's suffrage movements in the United States. Cutler served as president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).〔 Cutler helped to shape the merger of two feminist factions into the combined National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).〔 Cutler wrote for newspapers and journals; she drafted laws and authored several books. She lectured on physiology and attained a medical degree at the age of 53. Cutler presented petitions to state and federal legislatures, and helped to form temperance, abolition, suffrage and women's aid societies in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Vermont. ==Early life and Oberlin== Hannah Maria Conant was born in Becket, Massachusetts, on Christmas, 1815; the second daughter of John Conant and Orpha Johnson Conant. Hannah Maria Conant began at age 14 to study rhetoric and philosophy on her own, and she studied Latin with the family doctor.〔 In 1831, the Conant family moved to Rochester, Ohio. In 1833, nearby Oberlin College began accepting women students, and Conant asked her father for tuition. He refused; he considered coeducation improper.〔 In response, she married John Martin Tracy (1809–1844), an Oberlin theology student, in 1834.〔 The new Mrs. Hannah Conant Tracy studied her husband's textbooks and the newlyweds discussed what he had learned in class. John Tracy turned to study law, and his wife continued to study his legal homework with him, discovering in the process the common law limitations placed on women, especially married women.〔 Later, John Tracy became an anti-slavery lecturer and activist. The couple had two daughters, Melanie in 1836 and Mary in 1841, and a son was on the way when in August 1844, John Tracy died of pneumonia taken as a result of exposure and abuse suffered when he was pursued by a mob while helping escaped slaves.〔 The young widow Hannah Conant Tracy moved with her children to Rochester, Ohio where her father still lived, and bore her third child: John Martin Tracy, named after his martyred father.〔Bonham, ''Fifty Years' Recollections'', 1883.〕 To support her family, Tracy wrote for Ohio newspapers〔Garrison, 1976, p. 324〕 including for Cassius Marcellus Clay's ''True American'' (writing under a pseudonym) and for Josiah A. Harris at the ''Cleveland Herald''.〔 Through her writing she gained a respectable status as a minor literary figure in the West as well as a reputation for her views on woman’s rights.〔Million, 2003, 77〕 Tracy also taught school,〔 and helped to form a temperance society and a Women's Anti-Slavery Society, which attracted only three members at first.〔 In the fall of 1846, Tracy received a letter from Lucy Stone at Oberlin College, with whom she had already developed a warm friendship. Stone had decided to become a women’s rights reformer after graduating the following summer, and Tracy was one of several known advocates of women’s rights from whom Stone sought advice on how to begin. Tracy cautioned that to make woman “both physically and intellectually man’s equal” would require a societal revolution that would take at least a generation to accomplish. But saying that much could be done by one woman alone “if she possesses courage enough to act up to her convictions,” Tracy advised “a quiet but thorough agitation” among the women at hand. And she asked, “Please write me again and let me know your plan, and also what I can do.”〔Hannah Tracy to Lucy Stone, Oct. 26, 1846, National American Woman Suffrage Association Records, Library of Congress, reel 6:327-29; Million, 2003, p. 77〕 In early 1847, Hannah Tracy went to Oberlin, opened a boarding house, and enrolled in the ladies’ course. She was one of a handful of women who, with Stone, formed an off-campus women's debating club to gain practical rhetorical exercise denied them in their classes.〔Woman’s Journal, Sept. 26, 1896; Million, 2003, p. 81〕 In June, Tracy spearheaded a brief effort to establish a women’s newspaper at the college. The Young Ladies Association voted themselves into an Association of the Oberlin Ladies Banner, the name chosen for their paper, and appointed Tracy editor. But the project failed to win the approval of college officials needed to go forward.〔“Young Ladies Association of Oberlin Collegiate Institute, 1846-50,” Oberlin College, entries for June 9, 16, and 23, 1847; Million, 2003, p. 83〕 After a year of study, Tracy accepted the position of matron of the Deaf and Dumb Asylum at Columbus, Ohio (now the Ohio Institution for the Deaf and Dumb).〔 In Columbus, Tracy met Frances Dana Barker Gage, another abolitionist and feminist; both were interested in advancing the Free Soil Party with its anti-slavery platform.〔 Tracy helped in the effort to elect abolitionist Salmon P. Chase to the United States Senate. Because the Deaf and Dumb Asylum allowed only one of her children to remain in residence with her, in 1849 Tracy accepted a position as principal of the "female department" at Columbus' new public high school.〔 Tracy attended a Presbyterian church in Columbus.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hannah Tracy Cutler」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|