● ● ● rights in the civil sphere. Under the leadership of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 launched a Declaration of Sentiments which was in effect a Declaration of Independence for women.
There is no evidence that Mrs. Glover was aware of this development, nor did she ever become a militant member of the crusade to which it led. In her chapter on “Marriage” in Science and Health she would later write:
Our laws are not impartial, to say the least, in their discrimination as to the person, property, and parental status of the two sexes. If the elective franchise for women will remedy the evil without encouraging difficulties of greater magnitude, let us hope it will be granted. A feasible as well as rational means of improvement at present is the elevation of society in general and the achievement of a nobler race for legislation,—a race having higher aims and motives.40
Even more basic than her concern with women’s lot was her concern with the human lot. Legislation might help to correct social inequities and implement women’s natural rights, but a “nobler race” would demand a new concept of both man and woman.
During the years of her widowhood in Sanbornton Bridge, Mrs. Glover’s concern with her own immediate predicament outweighed any interest she may have had in questions of abstract social justice. At least on the surface, she appeared to be a talented but untrained young mother seeking some means of supporting herself and her son. The occasional teaching and writing she did was far from adequate for the purpose. She may have looked forward to a distant future when young George Glover would climb to eminence in the world of men and champion the right, but meanwhile she had a life to live, a purpose of her own to find.
40 Eddy, Science and Health, p. 63. She also wrote a poem “Woman’s Rights” which was published in 1853 and is found in changed form in her Poems (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1938), p. 21.