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Anna E. Dickinson was born in 1842 to John and Mary Dickinson. Her father was a Philadelphia merchant and her mother was from an aristocratic family and very refined. Both were devout Quakers and of noble character. When Anna was an infant, the family lost their property and were reduced to poverty. Furthermore, the family suffered a greater loss when her father, who was a staunch abolitionist, died from a heart attack after giving a agitating anti-slavery speech in 1844, when Anna was only two years old.
Anna grew into a restless, willful, yet imaginative child, who cause her family much anxiety. Her childhood was not an easy one. Her more wealthy schoolmates made fun of her poor clothes and this caused her to strive to better herself. She read everything within her reach. Anna’s ambition and stubbornness were traits that fueled her determination. She had a passion for rhetoric and on one occasion scrubbed sidewalks for twenty-five cents so she could hear Wendell Phillips lecture on “The Lost Arts”.
In 1860, Anna made her first speech on “Woman’s rights and Wrongs” before the Association of Progressive Friends. After this she turned to the lecture circuit and made lecturing her profession. She spoke on such topics as abolition, woman’s rights, and war-time issues. One of her most notable lectures, delivered after the close of the war, was “Woman’s Work and Wages”. On this topic she spoke with great passion.
Probably the greatest honor of her life was an invitation to speak in the Hall of Representatives. Assembled to hear her were one of the most notable audiences that ever met in Washington. Many senators, representatives, foreign diplomats, the chief justice, the president, and much of Washington society in general came out to hear her. The proceeds of this lecture were over one thousand dollars and were devoted to the National Freedmen’s Relief Society.
While Anna Dickinson worked unceasing for social reform during her lifetime, before her death in 1932, her impact on abolition, the woman’s rights movement, and the North’s success in the Civil War were all but forgotten.
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