by Jane Sciacca
Susanna Grout and her daughter Susan, who lived in today’s Grout-Heard House Museum, were two signers of a women’s petition to the US House of Representatives in 1837 decrying the “sinfulness of slavery.” They joined with 47 other Wayland women associated with the Evangelical Trinitarian Church (today’s Trinitarian Congregational Church) to protest the continuance of slavery in the District of Columbia, which came under the jurisdiction of Congress. Susanna Grout, at age 77, was given the honor of being the lead petitioner. Widow to a Revolutionary soldier, Silas Grout, Susanna herself had lived through the war and the passage of the Bill of Rights to the US Constitution. which gave women their only avenue to reach out to the Government- the right to petition. While there was almost universal male suffrage by the 1830s, no woman could vote. When the existence of slavery and especially its expansion into new territories became a pressing issue, women in vast numbers joined petition drives to urge Congress to take action against the slave trade and the spread of slavery. While the immediate effect of the petition drive was unsuccessful, it united women into a “sisterhood” that would ultimately lead to the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
