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Woman's Influence: An Episode (1829-30)
When Catharine Beecher published her memoir in 1874, she proclaimed in the chapter "Woman's Influence: An Episode" that the anti-Indian removal activism in which she took part "illustrates the moral power in the hands of the highest class of American women."1 Beecher reflected on her Boston vacation of 1828, when she encountered Jeremiah Evarts, corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). During their encounter, Evarts lamented the threat of removal to Cherokees and other southern American Indians and claimed that "American women might save these poor, oppressed natives." Evarts urged Beecher to "devise some method of securing such intervention."2 And upon her return to Hartford, Beecher took up her pen, drafting the statement destined for fame in her time and our own. Beecher then turned to female peers for input, and together, they gathered signatures from women far and wide. Their "Circular Addressed to Benevolent Ladies of the U. States," published in the Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion's Herald on Christmas Day, 1829, laid out a series of principled arguments against Indian removal and petitioned the U.S. Congress to continue "acknowledg[ing] these people as free and independent nations, and . . . protect[ing] them in the quiet possession of their lands."3 The public success of the petition campaign was monumental.4
American studies and U.S. history scholars have heralded this campaign as inaugural in women's activism and political identity formation. Alisse Portnoy describes the event as follows: "[Beecher] urged women to intervene on behalf of Native Americans. . . .Within two years, almost fifteen hundred women from seven northern states submitted to Congress antiremoval petitions. . . . Together these women conducted the first national women's petition campaign in United States history."5 Mary Hershberger writes that "Catharine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney organized the first national women's petition campaign and flooded Congress with antiremoval petitions, making a bold claim for women's place in national political discourse."6
White middle-class and elite women had indeed taken a remarkable leap into the world of national politics through this antiremoval work, a world defined by Euro-American culture as beyond their scope of influence. Their accomplishment deserves the scholarly attention it has received. Through their writing and organizing, Beecher, her famous...