Читать книгу Victory for the Vote - Doris Weatherford - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIn the Beginning, 1637 to 1840
It was a tiny ad placed in an obscure newspaper. The Seneca County Courier, a weekly paper delivered to farms in the cold country of upstate New York, ran just three sentences in its edition for July 14, 1848. The simple announcement invited women to a discussion of “the social, civil, and religious rights of women.”
This little news release shook the earth. From the tiny town of Seneca Falls in 1848, a mighty flood of disruptive ideas reached around the world and into the twenty-first century. The global expansion of human rights for women—the notion that women are full human beings and that women’s rights are human rights—began here, in a little country church that we, the recipients of hard-fought victories, thoughtlessly have allowed to be destroyed. Ideas live on after buildings go, however, and the voices of these women still echo with words we need to hear.
Why Seneca Falls, New York? Why July 1848? The answer, of course, is that ideas find their time and place in people. The unpretentious circumstances of many women’s lives, however, often obscure the power of their minds. We may find it difficult to believe that culture-changing concepts can emerge from a tea table in a country kitchen, but the humble truth is that it was Seneca Falls because Lucretia Mott visited Elizabeth Cady Stanton there. It was 1848 because it was the first time that these busy mothers could manage to get together after their vow to do so in 1840. And the other truth is that both of these women were not only brilliant, but also possessed extraordinary courage.
It is altogether typical of the history of American women that it was their moral sense, their mutual effort to do good for others, that drew Mott and Stanton together. For them and for many other women, the cause of women’s rights long would be subordinated to other moral crusades, especially that of abolishing slavery. The Seneca Falls meeting was, in fact, directly rooted in other meetings, especially the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
There were other moral and intellectual roots. More than 200 years before Seneca Falls, a woman named Anne Hutchinson defied the dominant leadership and exercised her right to free speech. In 1637, the theocrats who ran the newly founded colony of Massachusetts tried and convicted Hutchinson of sedition because her religious ideas did not agree with theirs. Her brand of feminine spirituality was proving more popular than their harsh theology, and, when prominent young men exhibited their respect for this female leadership, Hutchinson was banished. At age 46, heavily pregnant for the twelfth time, she accepted exile rather than surrender her independent ideas. It literally cost her life; a few years later, Hutchinson and most of her children were killed by Algonquins in the Long Island Sound area where she had settled after banishment from the safety of Boston.
Anne Hutchinson preaching in her house in Boston. (Library of Congress)
Although shamefully few Americans know it, an even more powerful case for female participation in the exchange of ideas was made by Hutchinson’s friend Mary Dyer. The only person courageous enough to protest when Hutchinson was excommunicated from their Boston church, Dyer returned to England in 1652; there, she converted to the newly founded Society of Friends, more commonly called Quakers. While she was abroad, Massachusetts and Connecticut passed laws banning Quakers, and Dyer was exiled from both colonies upon her 1657 return. Although she could have remained safely in more liberal Long Island, she defied convention—and the pleading of her husband and sons—to repeatedly return to Boston to preach her vision of a loving, egalitarian God. On June 1,1660, the theocracy of Massachusetts, which was both church and state, hanged Mary Dyer.
The Quaker beliefs that she professed soon became America’s most important intellectual root of female freedom. Founded in England by George Fox, the Society of Friends quickly established itself in America. Women were important participants in the Quaker movement from the beginning: the group consistently committed itself to the idea of human equality. From the beginning, Quaker women were considered to have an inner light from God just as men did, and they were equally entitled to express moral and spiritual ideas. Nor were their views limited to the quiet of Quaker meeting houses; women were ordained and engaged in street preaching just as men were.
As Quaker culture evolved, especially in Pennsylvania, female leaders developed schools, hospitals, and other charitable organizations, and they controlled financial decisions on these enterprises. Older women also exercised strong powers over younger women, including resolving such personal issues as whether or not a young woman should accept a particular marriage proposal. Obviously, voting of a sort was inherent to such decision making, but because Quakers in general did not participate in secular government, their internal egalitarianism did not necessarily translate into a movement for political equality.
Quakers also were exceptional in seeing American Indians as full human beings—although even Quakers assumed their own religion to be the correct one. They sent missionaries to convert the natives, and, like virtually all other newcomers, took little heed of the political models offered by native societies. In some of those societies, especially the tribes of the northeastern Iroquois Confederacy, women were powerful. In many tribes that practiced farming, the culture was matrilineal. This was a crucial distinction from Europeans, for it meant that children took their mothers’ names and traced their families through the maternal, not the paternal, lineage. Thus, it was impossible to be a bastard, and the European shame of illegitimacy was unknown. Beyond that, matrilineal societies rejected the newcomers’ patriarchal view of women as the property of their fathers and husbands. In the Iroquois tribes that northeastern settlers encountered, for instance, a newly married man went to live with his wife’s family, and his children belonged to that clan, not to his. Personal possessions were relatively rare, but those that did exist were passed on through the mother’s line, not the father’s. If a marriage did not work out, couples easily separated, and the man went home to his mother.
Moreover, in many tribes, women held genuine political and military power. Women in the Iroquois Confederation, for example, traditionally controlled the fate of captives: they decided if a prisoner of war was to be killed, tortured, held for ransom, or adopted into the tribe. Although Pocahontas lived farther south, her famous intercession on behalf of John Smith thus can be seen as the native rule, not the exception. In the southeast, Cherokee women sometimes participated in actual combat and earned the title of “War Woman.” During Massachusetts warfare in 1676, the Pocasset band of Wamponoag was led by a woman named Wetamoo, whose head was displayed on the Taunton town square when only 26 of her 300 men survived the battle.
Indian women held their own councils and participated in treaty-making with whites—much to the annoyance of a number of white writers. Indeed, in the same year of 1848 that whites held their first women’s rights convention, the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Confederation adopted a new constitution. Under its provisions, both men and women elected judges and legislators, and all major decisions had to be ratified by three-fourths of the voters and by three-fourths of the clan mothers. Despite this, historians deem this period to mark a decline in the status of Seneca women: after their men interacted with European men, Seneca and other native women would continually lose traditional rights as their cultures adopted the white example.
Few Americans, however, were aware of these alternative societal structures, and almost none were willing to emulate the “savages”—or even the egalitarian ideas of their Quaker missionaries. Nevertheless, there were other female political leaders in mainstream colonial America, many of whom have been forgotten and remain unrecognized even by modern feminists. Lady Deborah Moody, for example, led the first English settlement of what is now Brooklyn when she took followers of her religious ideas there in 1643. They left Massachusetts because of disagreements with Governor John Winthrop, who called Lady Deborah “a dangerous woeman [sic].” Like Anne Hutchinson, her home was attacked by Native Americans. But Moody not only survived, she stayed there, holding steadfast to political and religious liberty. She also paid the natives for their land and went on to build an enlightened community.
Other charismatic religious women led similar settlements, making themselves, in effect, political leaders. Jemima Wilkinson, who called herself the “Publick Universal Friend,” took some 300 men and women into the wilderness of western New York in 1788, where her commune established peaceful relationships with its Seneca neighbors. “Mother” Ann Lee was even more successful. She immigrated from England just before the outbreak of the American Revolution, and, distrusted by both sides, was imprisoned for the pacifism she preached. Within a decade, her original eight disciples expanded to several thousand; eventually, the Shaker movement that she founded developed economically successful colonies in 18 states.
It was not coincidental that rebellious women—Hutchinson, Dyer, Moody, Wilkinson, Lee, and others—took refuge in New Netherland and its later version, New York. The Dutch who settled there in 1626 not only were religiously tolerant, they also were exceptionally egalitarian in their treatment of women. Colonial Dutch women retained their maiden names, which were recreated each generation with a father’s first name used as a girl’s surname. Married women not only had property rights, but also, commonly, prenuptial agreements. Most significantly, Dutch women engaged in a great deal of commercial enterprise, even after marriage.
Margaret Hardenbroeck, for example, owned a shipping line, exporting furs and importing merchandise from Holland; despite two marriages and five children, she frequently sailed across the Atlantic on business. Polly Provoost also was an importer; she attracted customers by laying America’s first sidewalk outside of her business. Annejte Loockermans Van Cortlandt paved the first street in America; her daughter, Maria Van Rensselaer, eventually controlled a 24-square-mile Albany fiefdom. Among the first public expenditures in New Amsterdam was the construction of a house for the colony’s midwife, Tryntje Jonas; her daughter, pioneer settler Annetje Jans, farmed 62 acres of land along Broadway, and her granddaughter, Sara Roeloef, was employed as an interpreter among English, Dutch, and Algonquin speakers. Although none of these women voted or held office, a historian of early Manhattan described Van Cortlandt’s home as “one of the centres of the petticoat government that so often controlled the affairs of the Colony.”
The least covert, most undeniable political power exercised by a colonial woman was that of Catholic Maryland’s Margaret Brent. Although from a noble family, she emigrated when Lord Baltimore granted her a tract of land as an inducement. Presumably he saw her as more talented than two of her brothers, for she led them, a sister, and servants to Maryland in 1638. Remaining determinedly single, she owned thousands of acres of land. When the governor, Lord Baltimore’s younger brother, lay dying, he granted his power of attorney to her, and she ran the colony after his death. After Lord Baltimore, comfortable back in England, complained about one of her decisions, Maryland’s legislative assembly backed her judgment call, not his: without Mistress Brent, they averred, “All would have gone to ruin.”
English-speaking colonial women, of course, benefited from the examples of seventeenth-century Queen Mary and especially the highly successful Elizabeth I, followed in the next century by Mary II and Anne. The English idea that a woman was capable of being the supreme monarch was rarely replicated on the European continent, Spain’s Isabella notwithstanding, and the status of women in French and Spanish colonies reflected this lesser place. Nor did the Catholic Church of France and Spain offer women roles analogous to those of Protestant women, especially Quakers. Although Spain’s Catholic colonies were North America’s first and priests held significant roles in them, more than two centuries would pass before the first Spanish sisterhoods arrived.
Spanish colonial women did enjoy some social freedoms that Anglo women lacked—dancing, drinking, smoking, gambling, wearing more comfortable clothing—but any aspirations to educational and political equality were more difficult. As late as the nineteenth century, for example, Catholic women in California were actively discouraged from even reading.
In contrast, reading was fundamental to Protestantism. Especially in the Puritan colonies of New England, girls were taught to read so that they could properly inculcate religious principles in their children. It is therefore wholly appropriate that the nation’s first written feminist theory came from its original Puritan settlement, Salem. It was the work of a intellectual giant whose name should be well known, but again, few Americans are familiar with Judith Sargent Stevens Murray.
A childless sea captain’s wife, Murray had time to think. In 1784—almost a decade before English Mary Wollstonecraft published the much more famous Vindication of the Rights of Women—she wrote on the need for improved female self-esteem, “Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms.” The thoughts she expressed are still being rediscovered by women today:
Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years old is more sage than that of a female of the same age? I believe the reverse is generally observed to be true. But from that period what partiality! How is the one exalted and the other depressed…. The one is taught to aspire, and the other is early confined and limited.
Murray eventually collected her essays into three books, the sales of which were promoted by George Washington, and at least one critic has compared her work with that of Noah Webster. Yet after her 1820 death in the wilderness of Mississippi, where she had gone to live with a daughter she bore by her second husband, Judith Sargent Murray’s brilliant mind was soon forgotten.
A better-known writer of the same era is Mercy Otis Warren. Perhaps her work is remembered both because it was less feminist and because she was well-connected to male leadership. The wife and the sister of governmental officials, Warren had a political insider’s view of the tumultuous days of the American Revolution; indeed, she played her own significant role in bringing on the rebellion by anonymously publishing satires of the British. While her chief purpose in writing was political in the usual sense of the word, Warren also included asides that made feminist points. “Hateall,” for example, a character in one of her plays, not only represented British brutality toward colonists, but also was a blatant misogynist. In a tavern scene, he boasted that he married only to win his wife’s dowry and then “broke her skirts.” His recommendation for a “rebellious dame” was “the green Hick’ry or the willow twig.”
Although both Warren and Murray called for greater respect for women, they nevertheless published much of their work under pseudonyms, and neither ever suggested the vote for women or even demanded clearly defined rights to property, custody, or other legal empowerments. Abigail Adams, who never published, was more assertive about political inclusion of women in her voluminous correspondence with the era’s important men.
Future president John Adams acknowledged that it was his wife’s property management ability that allowed him to spend his life in politics, and their records make it evident that she was the business executive of the family. And yet, although John had great respect for Abigail and their marriage was ideally companionate, he laughed off her most famous call for female freedom. When he met with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, she wrote from their farm near Boston in March 1776—well before July’s Declaration of Independence. “I long to hear you have declared an independency,” she said, “and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make,”
Abigail Adams (Library of Congress)
I desire you would remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.
Her husband’s reply was amused; rolling eyes and a quizzical grin seem to suffuse his words. Not only did he treat her demand for respect as cute, he could not even grant that these creative thoughts were her own:
As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere—that children and apprentices were disobedient, that schools and colleges were grown turbulent…. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented…. Depend on it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems…. I begin to think the British as deep as they are wicked at stirring up Tories, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Irish, Roman Catholics, and, at last, they have stimulated the women to demand new privileges and threaten to rebel.
Abigail Adams’s and Mercy Otis Warren’s feminist arguments were clearly subordinate to their mainstream political ideas, for it was the success of the new nation that motivated the majority of the words they wrote. Yet the rhetoric of freedom—as John Adams reluctantly acknowledged—inevitably encouraged rebellion among the less privileged. It was simply impossible to proclaim a Declaration of Independence that spoke of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” and of “the consent of the governed” without inspiring hopes that those words might mean what they say.
Perhaps these women of the Revolutionary Age influenced the political climate more than is easily traced, for the same era did produce the first actual voting rights for women. In 1776, the first official year of the Revolution, New Jersey implicitly granted the vote to its women when it adopted a constitution that enfranchised “all free inhabitants.” English-speaking women, however, had long experience with gender-neutral language that did not actually mean to include them. In Virginia, too, similar gender-neutral language implied an enfranchisement of which women remained unaware. When Hannah Lee Corbin wrote her brother, General Richard Henry Lee, in 1778 to protest the taxation of women without representation, he replied that Virginia “women were already possessed of that right”—something that seems to have been news to her.
Not surprisingly, such ambiguous and unpublicized enfranchisement meant that few women actually cast ballots. Surprisingly, almost a decade after the Revolution’s end, its spirit still prevailed: in 1790, the New Jersey legislature confirmed that it indeed had meant what it said by adding the words “he or she” to its election codes. The amendment’s sponsor was Joseph Cooper, a Quaker accustomed to voting women. More remarkable is the fact that only three of his male colleagues voted against this precedent-setting legislation.
New Jersey women voting, late eighteenth century. (Library of Congress)
The act was little publicized, though, and few women knew of this fundamental change in their status. Especially because many Quaker women refused to participate in secular government at all, the legalism made little difference for nearly a decade. In 1797, however, women in Elizabethtown marched together to vote against a legislative candidate who was backed by the male power structure. They nearly defeated him, and politicians began talking about repealing women’s franchise. Newspaper editors backed the ruling cabal, ridiculing the female voters in print and intimidating them from casting ballots in the future. Like John Adams’s view that the British had planted rebellious thoughts in his wife’s mind, editorials portrayed the Elizabethtown women as the opposition’s dupes—either ignorantly misled or forced to the polls by scheming, domineering husbands. That women were capable of both forming their own political views and organizing a coalition was a thought that these newspaper men simply could not entertain.
A decade later, in 1807, New Jersey women lost their vote, with the repeal sponsored by the Elizabethtown man they had nearly defeated. A recent campaign over whether a new courthouse would be located in Elizabethtown or Newark became his excuse for the repeal. The race was hotly contested, and there were newspaper allegations that women were so ignorant, corrupt, or obtuse that they “voted again and again.” The guilty party, however, was likely to have been men and boys disguised as women who cast multiple ballots. That women were disenfranchised for reasons of corruption and fraud is greatly ironic, because one of the strongest arguments against suffrage in the following decades was that women were naturally pure and should not engage in anything so dirty as politics.
As the new republic developed, ideologies of individual liberty expanded. This was, after all, the first nation in the Western world without a divine-right personage at its head, the first in which citizens openly averred their intention to govern themselves, and the vote continually expanded as state governments grew from colonial ones. Disenfranchised males, including non-property holders, Catholics, Jews, and free blacks, were granted suffrage. Especially after frontiersman Andrew Jackson won the popular vote in the presidential elections of 1824 and 1828, the “common man” ideals of Jacksonian populism were assured.
This rise of democracy, however, would continue to exclude the female half of the population. The only actual enfranchisement of women during the Jacksonian era was in Kentucky in 1838, when widows were allowed to cast ballots in school elections—but only if they had no children currently in school. The exclusionary provisions made it clear that Kentucky’s men did not believe that their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters were able to make informed judgments: even when a woman was allowed to vote because there was no man to cast a ballot in her stead, she apparently could not be trusted to vote reasonably if an issue actually might touch her personal life.
Yet it was, of course, for their own lives that women—like men—wanted the vote. They wanted to improve educational opportunities, especially for girls; they wanted to protect property that they earned or inherited; they wanted custody of their children when a man was abusive. And some of them wanted grander, less personally necessary political change; many women did think of themselves as their brothers’ keepers, as the most likely embodiment of purity and morality.
This moral realm was the one in which they felt most comfortable, and indeed, one of the things that kept them out of politics for so long was the difficulty of convincing both women and men that moral imperatives often are best implemented through government. In the case of ending slavery, for example, only government could achieve their goal. The same was true of the temperance movement, because laws regulating the sale of alcohol and other addictive substances could only be enacted by political bodies.
Emma Willard (Library of Congress)
Although women long would be severely constrained even in their traditional realms of moral and educational improvement, the era again showed signs of slow progress. In 1817, in the same rural New York area where Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson had led religious movements, Deborah Pierce published A Scriptural Vindication of Female Preaching, Prophesying, or Exhortation. The following year, Bostonian Hannah Mather Crocker published another innovative piece, Observations on the Real Rights of Women. With this work, Crocker redeemed some of the harm done to women by her grandfather, Reverend Cotton Mather, whose writing on witchcraft helped produce the hysteria that had led to 19 executions and more than 140 arrests in the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692. Far more thoughtful and less mystic than he, Crocker was the mother of ten—and yet she found time to read the work of English feminists, especially Hannah More, and to follow up on the theories of Judith Sargent Murray, especially concerning the negative effects of educating boys and girls differently.
Although it is unlikely that they knew of each other, Emma Willard was thinking the same thoughts. In 1818, the same year Crocker’s work was published, Willard presented to the New York legislature An Address…Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education. The lawmakers were shocked by her intention to teach math and science—especially anatomy—to girls, but the working-class town of Troy, New York, saw the good sense behind Willard’s innovative curriculum and raised taxes to build the school. An amazingly quick success, it demonstrated a great public desire for serious female education. Willard’s model was soon adopted elsewhere, and the Emma Willard School continues today.
Willard’s most significant early emulator was Mary Lyon, who built a work/study institution of higher education for women, Mt. Holyoke Seminary, in western Massachusetts in 1834. Those who knew Lyon said that they recognized immediately that they were in the presence of a genius, and her words certainly indicate an innate grasp of the subtlety of politics. “The plan,” she wrote to a friend of her ideas for this school, “should not seem to originate with us, but with benevolent gentlemen.” Lyon literally went from farm to farm, raising $15,000 for her school in two years. When criticized for this unladylike method of implementing her dream, she confidently replied, “I am doing a great work; I cannot come down.”
But Lyon spoke to people one-on-one; except for Quakers and others willing to be seen as on the radical fringe, women did not speak in public. Even Emma Willard’s famous “address” was written, not spoken. It was considered scandalous for a woman to speak to a “promiscuous audience”—an audience composed of men and women. Nor was this simply a societal taboo, but, in the view of almost everyone at the time, it was a commandment from God. St. Paul’s words in First Corinthians are unequivocal: “Women should keep silent in the churches…. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church” (1 Cor. 14:34–35). Because virtually all of the era’s cultural activity was church-related, very few women ever learned to speak in public. The subliminal message from Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer doubtless rang across the decades as a warning that speech could mean death.
Stage fright could not have been more real for the pioneers who broke this taboo. Clarina Howard Nichols, a Vermont newspaper editor of sufficient political power that, in 1852, she was invited to speak to the state’s senate on married women’s property rights, was nonetheless so frightened that she showed the symptoms of a heart attack. Nichols later wrote that she only barely managed to calm the “violent throbbing” in her chest to finish her speech, and her “voice was tremulous throughout.” She was supported by a local judge, who, with incredible kindness, had gone door-to-door the previous day, encouraging women to sit in the gallery. When the speech was over, they ran down the gallery stairs and said, “We did not know before what Woman’s Rights were, Mrs. Nichols, but we are for Woman’s Rights.” Another showed her vicarious anxiety: “I broke out in cold perspiration when…you leaned your head on your hand. I thought you were going to fail.”
The public-speaking taboo reflected more than a little class bias: working women in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, headed by labor leader Sarah Bagley, had addressed a legislative committee in 1845 with little public criticism. These working-class women were less concerned about accusations of unladylike behavior, and it is important to remember that their testimony focused on their legal needs as workers, not on their needs as women. Presumably because men in the mills also would benefit from labor reforms, public speaking by these women appeared acceptable.
Frances Wright (Library of Congress)
One woman stands out above all others of this era for insisting on her right to free speech. Frances Wright, a wealthy Scot who spent much of her life in the United States, violated the taboo with complete abandon. She made her first trip to the U.S. in 1818, and the travelogue she published was Europe’s first widely read book on the new nation. She returned again in 1824 and sailed around the Gulf of Mexico and up the Mississippi, where she established a colony for freed slaves near modern Memphis. Not surprisingly, the economy of this remote place could not support them, so Wright financed and personally escorted some 30 blacks to a new home in Haiti.
As early as 1829—decades prior to other feminists—Wright traveled the country on a paid lecture tour. Especially in the Cincinnati area where she eventually settled, she attracted large and generally respectful crowds, with men actually more likely to support her radical ideas than women. Not only an abolitionist and a utopian, Wright also unhesitatingly attacked organized religion for the secondary place it assigned women; most shockingly, she advocated the empowerment of women through divorce and the use of birth control. She married in France in 1831 after bearing her lover’s child. A true internationalist, she crossed the Atlantic five times in the 1840s alone. In 1851, a fatal accident deprived feminists of Frances Wright’s leadership, but decades later, they paid tribute to her by placing her picture first in the first volume of their History of Woman Suffrage.
A second well-known feminist did not engage in public speaking but did charge money for “conversations” in her home. New Englander Margaret Fuller’s writing was at least as influential as Wright’s; she was a close friend of the era’s most famous literati, including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and others. They chose her to edit the group’s innovative journal, The Dial, and she went from there to the New York Tribune, where she carved out a position as the nation’s first professional book reviewer. Like Frances Wright, Margaret Fuller bore a child abroad before she married her lover, an Italian revolutionary; also like Wright, an early death cut short the contribution she could have made to the women’s rights movement. The young family drowned in a shipwreck while returning to America.
Margaret Fuller (Library of Congress)
Fuller’s most important feminist work was Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. Her national reputation brought readership to the book, and it was a factor in creating the ferment of ideas that led to the Seneca Falls Convention three years later. Like Frances Wright, however, Fuller was at least a century ahead of her time, especially in her advocacy of “free love,” the era’s term for sexual liberation.
In the nineteenth century, more people lived unconventionally than is generally recognized today. By the time of the Seneca Falls meeting, the United States had at least 40 functioning utopian communities—what we might call “cults” today—with alternate lifestyles that usually included communal property, vegetarianism, and other health reforms, as well as sexual behavior that ranged from abstinence to communal sex. The Oneida community of rural New York probably was the most radical; its men were required to use birth control, and, even today, some of their “complex marriage” practices would be deemed not only scandalous, but criminal.
The era’s morally driven women, of course, were more than a little ambivalent about Wright and Fuller and the harm that this radicalism did to their shared cause of abolishing slavery. Those who hoped to influence a public that still believed in slavery as both economically necessary and divinely sanctioned could not afford the distraction and credibility loss that would result if they associated themselves with advocates of “free love.” Some abolitionists, however, were prescient enough to understand that, whatever the intentions of reformers, the public inevitably would link the agitation for women’s civil rights with that of blacks. Already at this embryonic stage of the movements, they understood that the best approach was to work for justice for both women and blacks, without forcing the two into a false competition.
Lydia Maria Child (Library of Congress)
Lydia Maria Child was one who had both causes on her mind: in 1833, she published an anti-slavery classic, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Just two years later, she wrote The History of the Condition of Women. These books were so controversial that Child went bankrupt. Subscription cancellations for her previously successful children’s magazine arrived in droves; it was America’s first, in which Child wrote classics such as the lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The image that she had built as the author of bestselling The Frugal Housewife (1829) was destroyed, and she was ostracized by former Massachusetts friends.
For a while, Child maintained the household income by adopting an early commuter-marriage lifestyle; she edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard from New York, while her husband worked as a journalist in Washington.
The tie between racial and gender liberation also was spelled out by Sarah Grimké. In 1838, just one year after becoming an active abolitionist and a decade prior to the Seneca Falls meeting, she published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. At the time, she and her sister Angelina were becoming famous (or notorious, depending on one’s point of view) for their courageous stand against slavery. Born into a wealthy slaveholding South Carolina family, the sisters moved north, converted to Quakerism, and began writing and speaking against slavery. The only white Southerners ever to be leaders in the cause, their Massachusetts speaking tour was the first by female abolitionist agents. During the summer of 1837, the Grimkés attracted hundreds of listeners, both men and women, every day. In Lowell alone, 1,500 came; in smaller towns, people stood on ladders peering into overcrowded churches.
Once again, it was speech, more than the written word, that made the Grimkés objects of scorn. Even the Society of Friends rebuked Sarah, not for speaking as such, but for raising the controversial subject of slavery at the society’s 1836 national convention. The next year, Massachusetts ministers of the Congregationalist denomination (the intellectual heirs of Puritanism) issued a pastoral letter denouncing the sisters’ speaking tour. “We invite your attention to the dangers that at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury,” the clerics read from their pulpits. “The appropriate duties and influence of woman are clearly stated in the New Testament.”
Mary S. Parker of Boston was one of the women who would ignore the Massachusetts ministers’ admonitions; in May 1837, she went to New York to preside over the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Arguably the first national organization of women, this initial meeting attracted 200 delegates from nine states, some of them free blacks including, among others, Julia Williams, a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. A permanent organization grew out of it, but, when the women assembled in Philadelphia the next year, the City of Brotherly Love greeted them with immense hostility. After a howling mob made it impossible for them to continue their business, presiding officer Maria Weston Chapman led the women out of the hall with a white woman holding the hand of each black woman, something that she had done three years earlier when similar men threatened the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. So frequently attacked for her views that she said she was afraid to walk alone because of the “odious” comments Bostonians made to her, Chapman nonetheless displayed singular courage and leadership as did the black activists who marched with her. After the women’s dramatic exit, the mob set fire to the building.
It was from these female anti-slavery societies that women went to the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in June 1840. The previous month, a serious split had developed in the American Anti-Slavery Society when its founder, William Lloyd Garrison, appointed Abby Kelly to the society’s business committee. Garrison was impressed by Kelly’s commitment to the cause; she had given up her teaching job to endure the most hostile of conditions while lecturing against slavery. During a tour the previous year, she was slandered, physically attacked, and refused hotel rooms. Despite this demonstration of commitment, many male abolitionists objected to a woman in a leadership position. At the May convention, “clergymen went through the audience urging every woman…to vote against the motion.” The contradiction of asking women to vote in this case but not in others did not escape ironic comment from feminists, and Garrison’s appointment of Kelly prevailed. Some of the losers, however, could not accept majority rule, and they vented their frustrations in London the next month.
Also sailing across the sea were the female delegates: Lucretia Mott led five Philadelphia women “in modest Quaker costume”; the three from Boston were “women of refinement and education” and they were joined by “several still in their twenties.” Among them was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry, who went to the abolitionist meeting on their honeymoon. Much later, in the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, she would recall:
The American clergymen, who had landed a few days before, had been busily engaged in fanning the English prejudice into active hostility against the admission of these women into the Convention…. The excitement and vehemence of protest and denunciation could not have been greater.
While the women watched in silence, some of the male American delegates made strong arguments for their inclusion. George Bradburn, a Massachusetts legislator, orated for a half-hour: “What a misnomer to call this a World’s Convention of Abolitionists when some of the oldest and most thorough-going Abolitionists in the World are denied the right to be represented!” Toward the end of the day’s debate, he sprang to his feet exasperated and used words that are almost incredible for a politician of any era:
“Prove to me, gentlemen, that your Bible sanctions the slavery of women—the complete subjugation of one-half the race to the other—and I should feel that the best work I could do for humanity would be to make a grand bonfire of every Bible in the Universe.”
Along with others, Bostonian Wendell Phillips zealously advocated the women’s cause. He pointed out that the American men could not “take upon themselves the responsibility of withdrawing the delegates…[whom] their constituents…sanctioned as their fit representatives.” In response to the most frequently offered argument for excluding women—that a mixed group would be offensive to the host country—Phillips retorted:
In America we listen to no such arguments. If we had done so we would never had been here as Abolitionists. It is the custom there not to admit colored men into respectable society, and we have been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have submitted to brick-bats, and the tar tub and feathers in America, rather than yield to the custom…shall we yield to the parallel custom or prejudice against women in Old England? We can not yield this question if we would; for it is a matter of conscience. But we would not yield it on the ground of expediency. In doing so we should feel that we are striking off the right arm of our enterprise. We could not go back and ask for any aid from the women…if we had deserted them.
Wendell Phillips (The Free Library of Philadelphia)
The feminist arguments were of no avail. The vote to refuse to accept the credentials of the female delegates passed by an overwhelming majority. The women were fenced off behind a curtain, where they could hear but could not be heard or seen. None of the men cared enough about the principle to surrender his credentials—except for William Lloyd Garrison, who arrived too late for the debate. “Brave, noble Garrison” sat “a silent spectator in the gallery” during the ten-day convention. “What a sacrifice,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “for a principle so dimly seen by the few, and so ignorantly ridiculed by the many!” Wendell Phillips, in contrast, assured the other men that he had “no unpleasant feelings.” Stanton concluded bitterly:
Would there have been no unpleasant feelings in Wendell Phillips’ mind had African American Frederick Douglass and Robert Purvis been refused their seats? And had they listened one entire day to debate on their…fitness for plantation life, and unfitness for the forum and public assemblies, and been rejected as delegates on the grounds of color.
The sadness of her conclusion still echoes. Although she commended Phillips’s leadership, his easy acquiescence to the status quo upset the young Stanton greatly, and it changed forever her view of even good men. Although much in love with her groom of exactly one month, she was forced to acknowledge: “it is almost impossible for the most liberal of men to understand what liberty means for woman.”
