er. They then circulated the Appeal as a tract that included the call for the convention. Anthony opened the convention and nominated Lucy Stone as president of the meeting. Other officers of the convention included such well-known figures as Martha Wright, Amy Post, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Angelina Grimke and Ernestine Rose.
Nine months later, in February 1864, the League's first 100,000 signatures were delivered to Senator Charles Sumner in two trunks. Each contained a scroll of the amendment petitions glued end to end. He accepted the petitions with his speech The Prayer of 100,000. During the next two years, they enlisted the assistance of numerous other leading feminists. Widely praised for its work, the League ultimately collected some 400,000 signatures.
Before war's end, their signatures, combined with other voices and pressure from Lincoln, persuaded the U.S. Senate (April 8, 1864) and the House of Representatives (January 31, 1865) to pass the proposed Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. It was ratified by enough states to become law in December 1865.
New Frontiers for Women
When the Civil War broke out, men from all over the country enlisted in the military, leaving behind jobs and duties that women quickly filled. The war gave women the opportunity to enter the public sphere, be involved in national affairs, and function with a type of independence foreign to most of them.
Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, a female soldier from the 153rd Regiment serving the New York State Volunteers, was one of the few who openly wrote home about her gender and the struggles she faced in the course of the war. In one letter she wrote her family "I am as independent as a hog on ice." She saw the war as a source of freedom from her strict home.
Women did not have to be soldiers to experience this new independence. Women on the home front ran businesses, joined national organizations and supported the cause through any means available. Many were excited to leave behind the strict restrictions society had placed on them. Like Little Women author Louisa May Alcott, who served as a nurse, there was an urge to contribute. She wrote in the beginning of her Hospital Sketches: "I want to do something."
The Civil War also granted women greater access to newly developing industrial jobs and economic household power. With more and more men entering the conflict, women were required to oversee farm production, plantations and rural businesses. These tasks became increasingly difficult in the South following the introduction of the Union blockade. Unable to secure goods from foreign sources, Southern women assumed responsibility for sustaining the food supply for both the troops and the home front.
Other shortages forced them to produce cotton and wool clothing, construct tents, sew flags and manufacture medical bandages. Wealthy women supervised lumber mills, widows served as government clerks, and other women became schoolteachers. Although critical shortages would contribute to their ultimate defeat, Southern women performed duties well beyond their prewar domestic sphere, and their efforts enabled the Confederate Army to withstand and survive countless material hardships.
Wartime production created an unprecedented need for industrial goods in the North. Clothing, munitions and other manufactured goods were in high demand, and with the loss of income because their husbands and sons were fighting at the front, women flocked to the mills. These opportunities, however, did not result in increased prosperity.
Women were forced to accept substandard wages, and many barely escaped starvation. In New York City, more than twenty thousand women were employed in the clothing industry as stitchers and sewers. Working fifteen-hour days, they were forced to pay for their own thread and any damaged goods, but these women refused to accept their fate.
In 1863, they formed the Working Women's Union, and by the end of the war, they were able to mobilize female clothing workers throughout the Northern industrial belt. These efforts eventually helped to pr