Seventy-two years after Abigail Adams asked her husband to "remember
the ladies," a group composed of two-hundred women and forty men met in the
Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the rights of women in
America. (i) Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the Seneca
Falls Convention helped lay the foundation for the nineteenth-century
women’s rights struggle. In their “Declaration of Sentiments,” the
activists called upon the rhetoric of the Revolution, declaring that “all
men and women are created equal,” and listing eleven resolutions. (ii) The
most heavily debated resolution asserted that women had a “sacred right to
the elective franchise.” (iii)
Throughout the 1850’s, women continued to meet in conventions and less
formal gatherings to discuss their economic, educational, political, legal,
and familial rights. The women, who were mostly white and middle class,
participated in a broad spectrum of protest movements, fighting against
alcohol and slavery, and for the rights of immigrants and the poor. All of
these movements gave women the opportunity to develop and sharpen
organizational and ideological skills. However, women were often
discouraged or even barred from holding positions of power equal to those of
their male counterparts. Thus, women began to focus more and more on their
own status in America.
When the women’s movement emerged, it, and one of its main goals,
proved quite controversial. The possibility of women’s suffrage stirred
fear in Victorian society. According to the rules of Victorian America, men
and women were supposed to remain in separate spheres – women in the private
sphere of home and domesticity, and men in the public sphere of work and
politics. Women taking an interest in the rights of other groups – slaves,
poor immigrants, and families of alcoholics – fit with Victorian ideology
because the women protested on behalf of others. In other words, the women
protestors could be seen as simply extending their nurturing, mothering
instincts to the public. Voting, however, was a right claimed for women in
order to aid women. Such self-serving sentiments shocked a society in which
women were valued most for quiet self-sacrifice and humble endurance.
Indeed, protests against women’s suffrage often came from women. These
women believed that God had entrusted them with certain duties, and that
enfranchisement would lead to the destruction of their sacred role as mother
and housewife. They also felt that the proper way to exercise influence over
the public sphere was through raising patriotic sons. (iv) Women’s
suffrage was so radical a concept that women themselves feared it as a
threat to the foundation of American society, the family.
Ironically, the anti-suffrage women who based their feminine ideals on
morality and piety found allies with the liquor interests, who associated
the temperance movement with the suffrage movement. However, they allied
also with the Catholic Church and other similarly conservative groups that
clung to traditions of inequality.
Even within the suffrage movement, divisions emerged. Though the women
had a common goal, they did not share identical notions of how to achieve
that goal. One of the major splits came over the Fourteenth Amendment,
which used the word “male” to refer to a citizen’s voting rights. A number
of suffragists, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,
protested the amendment and widened a rift between women’s suffrage
supporters and African American suffrage supporters. Frederick Douglass was
one of the African American men alienated from the movement, declaring that
it was “the Negro’s hour,” and that women, of all races, would have to wait.
(v)
African American women, such as Sojournor Truth, found themselves
caught between their race and their sex. This conflict and others led to a
split in the women’s suffrage movement in 1869. While Anthony and Stanton
led a faction still fighting for a national amendment, others focused on
winning enfranchisement state-by-state. (vi)
By 1890, the suffrage movement was united again. More moderate,
younger women gradually replaced the radical leadership of Stanton and
Anthony, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association. White,
middle-class women still dominated the movement, and even based their claim
for suffrage on the assumption that their votes were needed to counteract
the votes of ‘ignorant’ immigrant men in urban slums. (vii) It was under
the leadership of these women that the movement finally achieved its goal –
in 1920, an amendment to the Constitution guaranteed American women the
right to vote.
Though earning the vote marks a landmark in the struggle for women’s
rights, the suffragists found that their fight certainly did not end with
the nineteenth amendment. Economic, familial, and legal inequalities
abounded. Slowly, however, women won struggles in courts, in legislation,
and in their homes. What the suffragists discovered, and what we are all
bound to discover, is that while each struggle may be an exhausting battle,
each victory brings us closer to winning the war.
Endnotes:
i. Sara M. Evans Born for Liberty, A History of Women in America. (New
York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997) pp.94-95.
ii. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, eds. Major Problems in American
Women’s History. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996). p.167.
iii. Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, eds. Major Problems in
American Women’s History. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996).
p.167.
iv. Jane Camhi Women Against Women. (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing Inc.,
1994) pp.4-7.
v. Gary B. Nash and Julie Roy Jeffrey The American People. (New York:
Harper & Row Publishers, 1986) p.544.
vi. ibid. pp.544-545.
vii. ibid. p.644.
Sources
1. Camhi, Jane Women Against Women. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing Inc.,
1994.
2. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty, A History of Women in America. New
York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997.
3. Nash, Gary B. and Julie Roy Jeffrey The American People. New York:
Harper & Row Publishers, 1986.
4. Norton, Mary Beth and Ruth M. Alexander, eds. Major Problems in American
Women’s History. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1996.
Questions about this column? Please e-mail me at
jcollett@wam.umd.edu.
