"Female Petitioners Can Lawfully Be Heard": Negotiating Female Decorum, United States Politics, and Political Agency, 1829-1831

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It may be, that female petitioners can lawfully be heard, even by the highest rulers of our land.-Catharine Beecher, 1829Circular Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the U. StatesCatharine Beecher kept it a secret for decades. 1829 Beecher, best known as a leader of the nineteenth-century domestic economy movement and as an active, life-long proponent of women's education, went home to Boston to visit her family. Her visit coincided with the visit of her father's friend, Jeremiah Evarts. Evarts and Lyman Beecher worked together in evangelical reform, and a prominent national issue troubled both men: the federal government's plan to remove Native Americans from within the boundaries of six southern states. Almost fifty years later, in Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions, Catharine remembered Evarts describing to her the distressing and disastrous consequences that would result from the cruel measures undertaken by the federal government against the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole southern tribes. Catharine also remembered Evarts telling her that women might save these poor, oppressed natives. Inspired by Evarts's personal request that she devise some method of intervention, Catharine returned to Hartford Female Seminary, the school for girls of which she was founder and principal. Upon her return, Catharine Beecher granted Evarts's request. She initiated and orchestrated the first national women's petition campaign in United States history. Amazingly, nearly 1,500 women followed her lead.1But later in her public debate with Angelina Grirnke on women's antislavery petitioning, Beecher adamantly denied women the right to petition the federal government. 1837 she told Grirnke and her readers, In this country, petitions to congress, in reference to the official duties of legislators, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without the sphere of female duty. Beecher subsequently became the target for Grimke's thoughtful, spirited, and committed essays in support not only of the women's antislavery petition campaign but also women's rights more broadly.2 Yet only eight years earlier Beecher had urged women to petition Congress in protest of the federal government's Indian removal policies.This seeming contradiction has puzzled scholars. an award-winning 1999 Journal of American History essay, Mary Hershberger seeks to explain Beecher's reversal. She argues that the unsettling experience of congressional attacks . . . seems to have contributed to the end of both [Beecher' s] work at the Hartford Seminary and her advocacy of women's political petitioning. But only one congressman attacked women for their antiremoval activism. Despite the door being opened for attack, other congressmen were neutral about or inattentive to the sex of petitioners.3 Hershberger also seems to be overstating the antiremoval campaign's relevance to Beecher's move away from Hartford. As Beecher's biographer Kathryn Kish Sklar explains, in 1831 Beecher grew bored at Hartford and decided to join her father in his move to Cincinnati, where Beecher believed she could support her father's work and bring national attention to the improvement of female education.4 Certainly on the surface Catharine Beecher's reaction to later petitioning is both puzzling and worthy of scholarly attention. However, close examination of Beecher's advocacy of a women's petition campaign and the Indian Removal petitions themselves, recently recovered from the National Archives in Washington, DC, provides a different explanation for Beecher's seemingly disparate attitudes, an explanation that repositions conservative voices within our understanding of women's political activism in the early nineteenth century.Before 1830, women petitioned local, city, and state governments, and they often used a discourse of domesticity to do that work. Those petitions dealt with issues such as city services, orphanages, and female education, however-not issues of federal policy. …