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One such snub precipitated a collective reaction. On the occasion of Charles Dickens’s second visit to the metropolis, the New York Press Club decided to pay him homage with a fancy Delmonico’s dinner. Women, including journalist Croly, were barred. Croly, along with Willis, proposed forming a woman’s club, in counterpoint to the male havens lining Fifth Avenue, in which women could support one another’s initiatives and careers. Several of the best-known professional women had already begun meeting periodically at Sunday evening receptions held in the oak-paneled library of Alice and Phoebe Cary, two poet sisters. The core group quickly incorporated Sorosis—the first such organization in the country—and by April 1868 its members were meeting regularly in a second-floor room at Delmonico’s. The idea of a woman’s club triggered widespread derision, but the lampooning soon died down, in part because many members’ husbands were powerful men. By 1870 Sorosis included thirty-eight writers, six editors, twelve poets, six musicians, two artists, ten lecturers, four professors, nine teachers, two physicians, and one historian.

Many in the group were feminists and freethinkers, including Jacobi, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Paulina Wright Davis, and in 1869 Sorosis leaders helped organize a Woman’s Parliament in New York City. The body established committees to deal with education, household reform, health reform, and newspaper work for women, among others. It lasted only a year but was resurrected, in 1873, as the Association for the Advancement of Women, again at the initiative of Sorosis. The association sponsored the first Woman’s Congress, to which it invited all who “have conquered an honorable place in any of the professions or leading reforms of the day.” Over four hundred women from eighteen states came to New York, all from upper- or middle-class backgrounds, and they concentrated on problems specific to professional women, like having “two careers.” They applauded the ongoing expansion opportunities in women’s education—that same year the Normal College of the City of New York (1869), the teachers’ training institution presided over by Thomas Hunter, moved into a neo-

Anatomy Lesson at the New York College for Women, 1870, from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 16, 1870. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

Gothic building at 68th and Lexington—but delegates also demanded the opportunity to be educated for all professions and businesses.

Professional women in New York City also provided a powerful constituency for the broader feminist movement now revitalized by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Both had been based in New York since Henry Stanton won appointment as deputy collector of the Custom House in 1862. The Stantons had settled into a brownstone on West 45th Street, a block from the Colored Orphan Asylum, and Anthony boarded with them. Like many other women, the duo had subordinated feminist concerns for the duration of the war—even when the state legislature took advantage of the temporary abeyance of feminist pressure to gut several provisions of the Married Women’s Property Act. After Appomattox and the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery, they decided to press on for the emancipation of women, and in particular the right to vote.

In 1866 Stanton became the first woman to run for Congress—having noted that though females were disfranchised, nothing in the Constitution forbade them from holding office. A symbolic breakthrough, her campaign in New York City’s Eighth District was an electoral flop, garnering but two score votes.

In 1867 Stanton and Anthony organized a lobbying and petition campaign to pressure the state constitutional convention—then considering black male suffrage—into extending the privilege to women too. Granted a hearing by Horace Greeley’s Committee on Suffrage, they parried a barrage of jibes and objections, including Greeley’s jocular query whether the women—given that “bullet and ballot go together