Hannah Tracy Cutler facts for kids

Hannah Maria Conant Tracy Cutler (December 25, 1815 – February 11, 1896) was an important American leader. She worked to end slavery and fought for temperance (meaning less alcohol use). She also led the women's suffrage movement, which worked to get women the right to vote.

Cutler was the president of the Ohio Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). She helped bring together two big groups of women's rights activists. This led to the creation of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Hannah Tracy Cutler wrote for newspapers, helped create new laws, and wrote several books. She also taught about the human body and became a doctor when she was 53. She asked state and federal lawmakers to change laws. She also helped start many groups in different states that supported temperance, ending slavery, women's voting rights, and helping women.

Early Life and Education

Hannah Maria Conant was born in Becket, Massachusetts, on Christmas Day in 1815. She was the second daughter of John and Orpha Johnson Conant. When she was 14, Hannah began to study subjects like public speaking and philosophy on her own. She also learned Latin from the family doctor. In 1831, her family moved to Rochester, Ohio.

In 1833, Oberlin College started letting women attend classes. Hannah asked her father if she could go, but he said no. He thought it was not proper for boys and girls to study together. So, in 1834, she married John Martin Tracy, who was studying theology at Oberlin.

Hannah studied her husband's textbooks and they talked about what he learned in class. John Tracy later studied law, and Hannah continued to learn with him. This is how she found out about the old laws that limited women's rights, especially for married women. John Tracy became a speaker and activist against slavery.

The couple had two daughters, Melanie and Mary. In 1844, John Tracy died from an illness he got while helping escaped slaves. Hannah, now a young widow, moved with her children back to Rochester, Ohio. She later had her third child, a son named John Martin Tracy, after his father.

To support her family, Hannah wrote for Ohio newspapers. She wrote for True American using a different name, and for the Cleveland Herald. Her writing made her known as a writer and for her ideas about women's rights. She also taught at a school. She helped start a temperance group and a Women's Anti-Slavery Society, which worked against slavery.

In 1846, Hannah Tracy became friends with Lucy Stone, who was at Oberlin College. Stone wanted to become a women's rights reformer. Tracy told her that making women equal to men would take a long time. But she also said that one woman could do a lot if she was brave enough. She advised Stone to quietly but strongly talk about women's rights among the women she knew.

In 1847, Hannah Tracy went to Oberlin and opened a boarding house. She also enrolled in the ladies' course at the college. She joined a group of women, including Lucy Stone, who started a debating club outside of class. This helped them practice public speaking, which they couldn't do in their regular classes. Tracy also tried to start a women's newspaper at the college, but the college officials did not approve it.

After a year of study, Tracy became the matron at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum in Columbus, Ohio. In Columbus, she met Frances Dana Barker Gage, another activist who fought against slavery and for women's rights. Both women supported the Free Soil Party, which was against slavery. Tracy helped work to elect Salmon P. Chase, an abolitionist, to the United States Senate.

Because the asylum only allowed one of her children to live with her, Tracy took a new job in 1849. She became the principal of the "female department" at Columbus' new public high school. She also attended a Presbyterian church in Columbus.

Journalism and Women's Rights Advocacy

To earn more money as a principal, Tracy kept writing for newspapers. She wrote two popular columns for the Ohio Cultivator, a newspaper for farmers. One column was "Letters to Housekeepers" for farmers' wives. The other was an advice column for farm girls, where she answered letters using the pen name "Aunt Patience."

Tracy and Gage led the effort to organize a women's rights meeting in Akron, Ohio, in May 1851. Gage was chosen as president and Cutler as secretary of this meeting. There, they met Sojourner Truth and heard her famous speech, Ain't I a Woman?. After the Akron meeting, Tracy went to a Peace conference in Columbus. She was chosen to be a representative for the Peace Congress in London that August.

The owner of the Ohio Statesman newspaper, Colonel Samuel Medary, asked Tracy to be his special reporter at The Great Exhibition in London. The newspaper paid for her trip so she could report on the World's Fair. Tracy also had papers saying she was the United States representative to the Peace Congress. However, she arrived a day late and only heard the last speeches.

While in London, Tracy gave several talks about women's rights. These were the first talks that focused on women's legal rights. Important writers and members of Parliament listened to her speak. She was invited to speak at colleges and for professional groups. She also gave speeches about temperance and how the human body works. She met important people like Joseph Sturge and William Ewart Gladstone. She was especially interested in learning about the end of slavery in the British West Indies from activist Anna Knight. Tracy also showed the Bloomer costume (a new style of clothing) to English women.

When she returned to the United States, Tracy stopped in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She attended the Free Soil Convention there and was asked to speak about human rights. At the convention in Massillon, Ohio, in 1852, Tracy was chosen as president of the Ohio Woman's Rights Association.

Later that year, Tracy married Colonel Samuel Cutler, who was also a widower with children. They bought a farm in Dwight, Illinois, near a planned train line. Hannah Tracy Cutler did much of the farm work herself. This included spinning, weaving, knitting, baking, and making baskets, shoes, and hats. Cutler also taught all the children in their family at home.

Growing Influence and National Work

Hannah Tracy Cutler did not attend the first few National Women's Rights Conventions held in the East. But she did go to the 1853 convention in Cleveland and the 1854 convention in Philadelphia. There, she spoke alongside other famous activists like Ernestine Rose and Lucretia Mott. Cutler believed that the spirit of the Bible was more important than just following every rule. She told people to focus on the "beautiful spirit" of its teachings. After the 1855 convention, which decided to collect petitions for women's voting rights in many states, Tracy agreed to do this work in Illinois.

In May 1856, Cutler was going to lead a Woman's Temperance Convention in Chicago. On her way, she heard about attacks and crimes against abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas. During the successful temperance convention, Cutler planned a Woman's Kansas Aid Convention. This meeting, held two weeks later, aimed to help people who had lost their homes and to stop Kansas from becoming a slave state. Frances Dana Barker Gage and Josephine Sophia White Griffing helped gather supplies for those in need. Because of the women's efforts, important men like Gerrit Smith organized a National Kansas Aid Convention in Buffalo, New York. Cutler and Gage attended, and their women's group joined the national group.

In October 1859, Cutler joined Susan B. Anthony on a speaking tour in New York state. This led to new laws the next year that gave New York women more rights over their property. In late 1860, Cutler toured Illinois with Gage to influence new laws there. Cutler talked many times with Abraham Lincoln before he went to Washington, D.C. She wrote a law about married women's property, which passed in February 1861. In the spring of 1861, Cutler returned to Ohio. She joined a group of women who spoke to lawmakers about a woman's right to keep her own earnings and to have equal care of her children.

A year or two later, Cutler asked the Illinois Assembly to pass a law. This law would give women legal care of their children. It would also let a woman easily take over her deceased husband's property if it was worth less than $5,000. This was similar to a law for male widowers.

During the Civil War, Cutler was the president of the Western Union Aid Commission in Chicago. From 1862 to 1864, this group helped war refugees who came to Chicago. Her son, John Martin Tracy, and Colonel Samuel Cutler's sons fought in the Union Army.

Cutler heard that President Lincoln wanted abolitionists to strongly push him to free the slaves as a war measure. So, Cutler started collecting signatures for petitions in the West. Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony were told by Cutler and began collecting petitions in the East. Charles Sumner presented these many petitions to the Senate. He told Cutler that four men were needed to carry all the papers.

While in Washington, Cutler was invited to speak to the Union League. She gave a speech called "The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is." She argued that slavery had always been against the national constitution, even with states' rights. Many important lawyers agreed that Cutler's speech was very strong and convincing. Cutler also worked with Dorothea Dix to ask the surgeon general to let doctors give sick soldiers longer breaks or release them if they were badly hurt. They succeeded in this mission.

Colonel Samuel Cutler learned that one of his sons had died in the Second Battle of Fort Wagner. John Martin Tracy survived the war and was praised for his secret scouting work. Hannah Tracy Cutler's last war service was helping the Union Aid Society gather and send six thousand bushels of corn seeds to farmers in the war-torn Southwest. Samuel Cutler was tired and weakened by age and the loss of his son. They could no longer work the farm in Dwight. They moved to Cobden, Illinois, where his health improved.

In the fall of 1868, Cutler moved with her husband to Ohio. She wanted to attend the Women's Homeopathic College of Medicine and Surgery in Cleveland. She received her medical degree in February 1869. Cutler was offered a teaching job at the college and started working as a doctor in Cleveland.

Cutler never stopped writing for journals and newspapers. She wrote for the Farmer's Advocate and the Rural Messenger.

From 1866 to 1869, Cutler was the president of the Ohio group for the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). In 1869, Anthony and Stanton asked Cutler to join their new, more radical group of feminists. Cutler took notes of the meetings. She gave Lucy Stone a written account of how the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed without Stone's knowledge. Cutler described in detail how Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton planned this.

The Ohio Equal Rights Society held a meeting in Cincinnati in September. Stone and her husband Henry Browne Blackwell gave speeches. A proposal was made to form an Ohio Equal Rights Society, and Cutler was made president. Stone responded to Anthony and Stanton by forming the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in November 1869, in Cleveland. Cutler led the afternoon session on the second day. She then served as president of AWSA in 1870–1871. Cutler spoke in Battle Creek, Michigan in January 1870 and in Dayton, Ohio, in April. Because Samuel Cutler "could not endure the spring winds on the Lakes" at their home in Cleveland, they moved back to Illinois in 1870.

The AWSA held a large meeting at Steinway Hall in New York City in May 1870. There were three sessions each day for two days. Cutler was the first speaker for the first evening session. She compared the rights of enslaved people to the rights of women. She quoted the Declaration of Independence, which says "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." She explained that American women paid taxes to support the government, so their agreement should be asked for in matters that affect their lives. She said that the only way to fix the problem was to get the right to vote.

In June 1870, Cutler and Amelia Bloomer held two meetings in Des Moines, Iowa. One was about temperance, held outdoors where a new capitol building was planned. The second was in a Baptist church, about women's voting rights. A women's suffrage meeting was held in Mount Pleasant, Iowa in June. Cutler was the main speaker and helped the people of Iowa form the Iowa Woman Suffrage Society. Later that summer, Bloomer and Cutler spoke in Oskaloosa, Iowa. This led to the creation of a women's suffrage group there. In December 1870, Cutler spoke several times in Lincoln, Nebraska, on her way to California. People said her "womanliness and logic won and convinced her hearers," but a local women's suffrage group wasn't formed until Susan B. Anthony visited later.

In 1871, Cutler gave the opening and closing speeches at the yearly AWSA meeting in Philadelphia. After speeches by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others, Cutler spoke about the right to vote:

Some say it is not a right but a privilege. I maintain the contrary. I say it is an inalienable right. You can not maintain a republican form of government and deny to half the population its right to vote.

Samuel Cutler died in 1873. Hannah Tracy Cutler returned to Ohio to work hard to add women's voting rights to the state constitution. Throughout the late summer and fall, Cutler traveled across Ohio, giving speeches and collecting signatures for the petition. Cutler's style was friendly and feminine, and her way of speaking made her listeners feel comfortable. Cutler introduced ideas about women's voting rights within a more traditional religious setting. She also included voting rights in speeches about temperance, which were more popular with conservative audiences. During the Ohio campaign, another suffragist described her as "Strong in body as well as mind, she endures with comparative ease the fatigues and discomforts of the lecture field, and sends the truth to the hearts of her hearers with a force and directness that is seldom surpassed."

After the campaign, which was not successful, Cutler was "completely exhausted." She went to France with her son, John Martin Tracy, who was a landscape artist. Cutler became very ill and stayed in France until 1875. She returned to the United States to work as a doctor in Cobden, Illinois, and later in Brentwood, California. Her daughter, Mary Tracy Mott, lived and wrote there.

Cutler attended the Ninth Annual Meeting of the AWSA in Indianapolis in 1878. Speaking about the fight for women's voting rights, she said, "Many of us have grown old in this work, and yet some people say, 'Why do you work in a hopeless cause?' The cause is not hopeless. Great reforms develop slowly, but truth will prevail, and the work that we have been doing for thirty years has paid as well as any work that has ever been done for humanity."

From December 1881 to April 1882, Cutler lived in Hollister, California. She gave a well-received speech from a Congregational church pulpit one Sunday in Hollister in early April. It was reported that she was "en route for the East."

In 1882, Nebraska was considering a change to its constitution that would remove the word 'male'. This would allow women to vote. Both AWSA and NWSA held their yearly meetings in Omaha, Nebraska in September to influence the votes. Lucy Stone, Henry Browne Blackwell, and Cutler were among the main speakers at the AWSA meeting. All three stayed afterward to speak throughout the state. From October 2 to November 4, Cutler gave 24 speeches while traveling by train. The effort failed, but one of the 11 counties that passed the measure was where Cutler spent the days just before the vote. Cutler finished writing a story about her first husband and her own life's work. This story was published in a collection of biographies about "Eminent Citizens" of Illinois.

In 1883, Cutler gave a series of talks in rural Vermont. Her influence led to the creation of the Vermont Woman Suffrage Association. On December 13, 1884, Cutler published a tribute to her long-time friend, Frances Dana Barker Gage, in the Woman's Journal.

On December 21, 1887, Anthony and Stone appointed Cutler to a committee. This committee was tasked with combining the AWSA and the NWSA to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). For the next two years, Cutler worked with Alice Stone Blackwell and Rachel Foster Avery to help create a shared structure and goals for the new combined organization.

Later Life and Legacy

Cutler's daughter, Melanie Tracy Earle, became a journalist like her mother. Melanie died in Ocean Springs, Mississippi in 1889. Melanie's daughter, Mary Tracy Earle, born in 1864, published seven fiction stories in Harper's Magazine.

In 1892, at her daughter Mary Tracy Mott's home in Ocean Springs, Hannah Tracy Cutler suffered a stroke. She also had a worsening eye condition called glaucoma.

Cutler's son, John Martin Tracy, became a landscape painter known for including hunting dogs in his art. He came to Ocean Springs from Greenwich, Connecticut with his wife after his sister Melanie died. He passed away four years later in March 1893.

Hannah Tracy Cutler died on February 11, 1896, at the age of 80. She was buried in Ocean Springs at Evergreen Cemetery. An Episcopal church service was held at her funeral. Mary Tracy Mott finished her mother's autobiography and sent it to Alice Stone Blackwell. It was published in a series of Woman's Journal issues from September to October 1896.

Speeches and Writings

• Woman as She Was, Is, and Should Be (New York, 1846)
• One of Sixty Thousand
• The Fortunes of Michael Doyle, or Home Rule for Ireland (Chicago, 1886)

See also

In Spanish: Hannah Tracy Cutler para niños