by Marilyn Fish
In recognition of Women’s History Month, the Becket Beat honors Hannah Conant Tracy Cutler, M.D. A celebrated leader of the abolitionist, temperance, and women’s suffrage movements, author, physician, wife and mother, she lectured with Susan B. Anthony, sought advice from Abraham Lincoln, and served as president of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association. Born Hannah Mariah Conant in 1815 to John and Orpha Conant, she was part of an extended Becket family that began moving west in 1811. An intelligent and ambitious girl, she attended public school in Becket until age 14 and studied rhetoric, philosophy and Latin at home.
Hannah and her family moved to Ohio in 1831, specifically to Rochester, a town of only 1.13 square miles located 16 miles south of Oberlin. At age 19 Hannah married Oberlin theology student John Martin Tracy. John soon turned from theology to the law and together the young couple studied the weighty issues of the day, particularly the removal of legal limitations placed on married women. John died in 1844, leaving Hannah pregnant and with two young daughters. She returned to her parents’ home, where she bore her third child, John Martin Tracy. Ambitious and self-reliant as ever, Hannah soon began to write for Ohio newspapers, teach school, and form societies promoting women’s rights, abolition and temperance, while her mother tended to her children.
In 1846 Hannah enrolled in Oberlin College and upon graduation accepted a position as principal of the “female department” at Columbus, Ohio’s new public high school. She continued to write for newspapers in 1851 the Ohio Statesman sent her to cover the Great Exhibition in London. While there she lectured on women’s rights and temperance, establishing her reputation as a reformer. Back in the States in 1852, she married Colonel Samuel Cutler (1808- 1873), a widower with two sons. The couple bought farmland in Dwight, Illinois. There the new Mrs. Cutler embraced the role of housewife, “spinning, weaving, knitting, tailoring, baking, dairying, basket-weaving, shoe-making, and hat- braiding,” according to a later account by her daughter Mary. Cutler also home- schooled the family’s children. Meanwhile, she continued to pursue her reform agenda. In 1853, she wrote in the Una, the first feminist periodical, “…the moral
harmony of the world demands women’s interest and influence. We ask to use it, not that we may become like men in our moral natures, but because we are unlike them; and hence harmony demands the counterbalancing influence of our softer sympathies, our more gentle natures, to balance the stern, cold, calculating spirit of the other sex.” These relatively mild words presaged her more strident pronouncements of the coming years when she joined with Susan B. Anthony and others, demanding women’s rights to property, control of personal earnings, and joint guardianship of children.
Working through the Civil War years to ensure fair treatment of soldiers and veterans, Cutler moved with her husband to Ohio in 1868 so that she could attend the Women’s Homeopathic College of Medicine and Surgery in Cleveland. She received her medical degree in February, 1869, was offered a professorship at the college, and went into medical practice in Cleveland. Still, she continued her reform work, sparking
the formation of women’s suffrage societies wherever she spoke. Dr. Cutler continued her work into her 70s, and in 1892, retired to her daughter’s home in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, where she passed away after four years. During the course of her long and celebrated social reform career, interviewers questioned her about her passion for women’s suffrage. She made a statement then that continues to resonate. “Many of us have grown old in this [reform] 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.”
Masthead of The Una, the first feminist periodical.
Frontispiece of Phillipia, published in 1886.
