After the war, Martha was instrumental in the formation of the American Equal Rights Association, which attempted to merge the issues of black suffrage and woman suffrage. However, controversy arose over the Fifteenth Amendment, which provided only black male suffrage. This issue split the postwar women's movement into two camps, one led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the other by Lucy Stone. Martha sided with her friends Stanton and Anthony, and in 1874 was elected President of their National Woman Suffrage Association.
Martha's youngest daughter Ellen had married William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., son and namesake of the abolitionist leader. In December 1874, Martha traveled to Boston to assist the Garrisons at the birth of her fourteenth grandchild, William Lloyd Garrison, 3rd. Martha took ill there with typhoid pneumonia, and died in Boston on January 4, 1875, at the age of sixty-eight. Susan B. Anthony was shocked at the news, and wrote in her diary, "I could not believe it; clear-sighted, true and steadfast almost beyond all other women!" Much of Martha's correspondence, full of wit, wisdom, and erudition surprising for someone whose formal education ended at the age of fifteen, has been preserved in the archives of Smith College and Syracuse University, and used by historians studying reform movements and middle-class family life in nineteenth-century America.
A more complete treatment of Martha Wright's life appears in an article by Sherry H. Penney and James D. Livingston, "Expectant at Seneca Falls," in the Winter 2003 issue of New York History. A full-length biography by the same authors, with the tentative title, "A Very Dangerous Woman," will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2004.
James D. Livingston (jdliv @ mit.edu)
