page_title: Anna Elizabeth Dickinson
section_title: Lecturer
hierarchical_section_title: Anna Elizabeth Dickinson / Career / Lecturer
caption_attribution_description: English: "Interior View of the Music Hall, Boston"
context_page_description: Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was an American orator and lecturer. An advocate for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights, Dickinson was the first woman to give a political address before the United States Congress. A gifted speaker at a very young age, she aided the Republican Party in the hard-fought 1863 elections and significantly influenced the distribution of political power in the Union just prior to the Civil War. Dickinson was the first white woman on record to summit Colorado's Gray's Peak, Lincoln Peak, and Elbert Peak, and she was the second to summit Pike's Peak.
context_section_description: She had gradually become widely known as an eloquent and persuasive public speaker, one of the first of her sex to mount the platform to discuss the burning questions of the hour. Unlike other Americans, Quakers encouraged women to speak in public. She toured the country on behalf of the Sanitary Commission. Encouraged to speak by Lucretia Mott and Dr. Hannah Longshore, she gave impassioned speeches on abolition, reconstruction, women's rights, and temperance. Her success led the way for future women speakers.
  She spoke publicly first in 1857 when she addressed a man who derided women at a Progressive Friends meeting. After that, she spoke regularly about temperance and abolition. In 1860, she spoke in Philadelphia at the Friends of Progress meeting at Clarkson Hall about The Rights and Wrongs of Women and then she addressed the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in the fall of that year. She gave her first major speech, a two-hour discussion of The Rights and Wrongs of Women, on February 27, 1861 in Philadelphia. Lucretia Mott, who delivered abolitionist speeches for decades in Quaker meetinghouses, provided leadership to sell 800 tickets for the Concert Hall event. Mott arranged for a lecture tour, sponsored by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, for the 19-year-old, who quickly became a popular speaker. The series of speeches helped lead the Emancipation movement.
  Having heard her speak, Garrison arranged for her to speak in 1862 in the Palmer Fraternity Course of lectures at the Boston Music Hall. Named "The Girl Orator" by Garrison, she spoke about The National Crisis. She visited hospitals and camps during the war to speak to the soldiers. In 1862, she visited soldiers wounded in the war, and then gave a lecture about "Hospital Life" in New England.
  During the 1863 United States Senate elections, with the deepening of the Civil War, Dickinson campaigned for several pro-Union Republican candidates in New York, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Connecticut to audiences that included people who did not support the war. She spoke eloquently and powerfully in support of the Radical Republican's anti-slavery platform and for the preservation of the Union. She spoke to coal miners in Pennsylvania soon after draft riots in the area and converted men who had not previously supported abolition.  Dickinson was named the "Civil War's Joan of Arc" for her promotion of the Union. She was ardent in her condemnation of the Copperheads and other Democrats. She was interviewed in 1863 by Whitelaw Reid, who was a supporter and often wrote about her speaking engagements in the New York Tribune.
  When she spoke at Cooper Institute in New York City, more that 5,000 people attended the event. It was reported that she "could hold her audience spellbound for as much as two hours.  She gave the impression of being under some magical control." She earned a standing ovation in 1864 for an impassioned speech on the floor of the United States House of Representatives. In attendance were President Abraham Lincoln and civic and military leaders. Invited by Republican leaders, she was the first woman to speak to Congress.
  After the Civil War, she remained one of the nation's most celebrated lyceum speakers for nearly a decade. She made as much as $20,000 (equivalent to $415,297 in 2019) a year, making a speech every other day on average, and gave most of her earnings away to charity, friends, and relatives. She also maintained a townhouse in Philadelphia, with expensive personal possessions, for her mother and sister.
  She spoke about reconstruction, African-American's rights, women's right and other issues, like venereal disease in Between Us Be Truth, and polygamy in her speech "Whited Sepulchers" in Utah. Although she called for women's rights, she was not a speaker for the suffrage movement. Some of her well-received post-war lectures include For Yourself and Platform and Stage and she frequently spoke about Joan of Arc.
  She talks fast, uses no notes what ever, never hesitates for a word, always gets the right word in the right place, and has 
caption: The Boston Music Hall, Winter Street, 1852[11]
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