Between 1798 and 1820, the ideas dropped out of public discussion. The Vindication was a fugitive text, circling in eddies of radical dissent and private grievances, artifact of an abandoned project. Sometime in the early 1800s, for instance, Anna Wheeler, a young wife trapped on her alcoholic husband’s estate in Ireland, read the book and thereby started to assemble the mental resources that eventually helped her escape.55 In America, copies were scarcer but the old editions had long lives, passed around and pondered over. From Maine in 1801, Eliza Southgate, an astute teenage reader, fired off mettlesome letters to a supercilious male cousin about women’s proper role. Anticipating mockery when she mentioned Wollstonecraft, she was careful not to associate herself too closely. Yet even as she wobbled back and forth in her allegiances, she insisted there was more to Wollstonecraft than people granted. “Though I allow her to have said many things which I cannot but approve, yet the very foundation on which she builds her work will be apt to prejudice us so against her that we will not allow her the merit she really deserves.”56 Democratic-radical workingmen, eager young women such as Southgate, and enlightened gentlemen in Britain and the United States fastened onto the ideas of the Vindication.57 Over several generations, the life and the book, the love affairs and the ideas would inspire gratitude and fellow feeling.
Margaret Fuller, the New England Transcendentalist who herself knew what it was to work and love on terms far in advance of her times, was the first to rise to the defense. In 1845, Fuller used a Romantic vocabulary of the inner life to cast Wollstonecraft as a gifted being “rich in genius, of most tender sympathies, capable of high virtue and a chastened harmony.” Such women should be allowed space, Fuller insisted, “room in the world,” “light and air.” They “ought not to find themselves, by birth, in a place so narrow, that, in breaking bonds, they become outlaws.” Much later, Virginia Woolf, reflecting on Wollstonecraft from the vantage point of the 1920s and her own literary marriage, found her still a living presence, wonderfully “high-handed and hot-blooded,” above all in the marriage to Godwin: “She is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”58
Today, Wollstonecraft’s life and work still bear scrutiny and admiration. She lived and wrote at the far edge of what was possible and tangled with all the confusions which that position confers upon the brave and foolhardy. Yet while she has been held up as First Feminist for some two centuries, Wollstonecraft has always been an unsuitable founding mother. Her untidy life, her naked need for love, her failures and vagaries, militated against her reliability as symbol of rectitude and fidelity to her sex. “Nervous and commanding” was how Eliza Southgate described her: Nervous and commanding she still stands.59 Wollstonecraft never did bear idealization, nor did she seek it out. Barbara Taylor points out that while she held herself above other women, she was also leery of heroines. Regardless of boasting about being special, she drew back from romanticizing the singular woman, because she believed the great majority of women were so oppressed that simple right-minded behavior was beyond them: the ability to act as “reasonable creatures.”60
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman laid the intellectual basis for modern feminism. For all the hostilities to actual women embedded in its pages, the achievement was to announce, in a hundred different ways and from many different angles, that power, not nature, determined the relations of women and men. Expectations about how women should think and act were in truth born of a system of male privilege and tyranny as corrupt as any monarchy.
A pattern emerged that held for the next century, at the least. Women’s rights could be sidelined and rebuked by the very democratic forces that gave rise to the ideas. The fact was that those democratic forces were in the hands of men, who continued to have difficulty remembering the ladies. Liberal democracy as it emerged was fragile, incomplete, and halting; feminism was all the more fractured. The tradition that Wollstonecraft announced would drop out of sight, reappear, branch, divide, and recombine many times over. The understanding of the Woman to be vindicated and her “rights” was never straightforward. The relationship to liberal and radical politics was always tense and often hostile.
Feminist theorists, looking back on this opening chapter of democracy, have stressed that liberalism was always premised on women’s subjection; that the female sex was the exception to equality that made equality imaginable. Liberal democracy’s abstract promises were—and remain—resistant to extending their benefits across the sex line. Whether this limitation is inherent in liberalism, as they maintain, the liberal rights-bearing citizen remained paradigmatically male for more than a century.
At the same time, it was only democratic movements that offered sanctuary to the aspirations of women. Far into the future, the converse would also be true: Feminism would harbor battered democratic hopes. Democracy and feminism: It was an asymmetrical relationship, with the brothers always claiming the ground of genderless humanity, the sisters forever asserting their importance yet finding themselves pushed into the corner where exceptions to the universal belonged. But in fact, we will see that one did not proceed long without the other.
CHAPTER TWO
BROTHERS AND SISTERS
Women’s Rights and the Abolition of Slavery
IN 1840, British and American leaders of the movement to abolish slavery met together for the first time at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The occasion called for unity, but a conflict broke out before the meeting even began when the British hosts refused to seat eight American female delegates. Worse, they put all the women—bystanders plus rejected delegates—in a section behind a curtain in order to avoid exposing them to a public that included strange men. The episode was the culmination of ten years of women’s participation and conflict in the American branch of abolitionism. “Am I not a man and a brother?” the kneeling slave on the abolitionist emblem hauntingly cried. The question buried in the fraternal ideal rose to the surface: What about the sisters?
The movement to abolish slavery originated with Quakers in the late eighteenth century. It gained the devotion of free American blacks after the American Revolution, and emerged as a force in the United States in the 1830s. In Britain and the United States, women were drawn to abolition; and in America the logic of natural rights and abolition’s abhorrence of human subjugation led them to see their own situation as akin to the slaves’. “Since I engaged in the investigation of the rights of the slave, I have necessarily been led to a better understanding of my own,” avowed Angelina Grimké, whose public speaking on the subject in 1837 would set off a crisis.1 With their fervor and iconoclasm, female abolitionists emblazoned the claims of Woman with the brilliant radicalism of the era.
Despite their identical goals and their many ties, the British and American movements were very different. In Britain, abolition was a broad-based movement aligned with moderate public opinion. British abolitionists succeeded in ending slavery in the British West Indies in 1833. In the United States, it was a radical cause carried on by an unpopular minority, representing what many saw as an intolerable affront to political culture. Slavery in the United States was not a remote fact of faraway colonies, as it was in Britain, nor were people of African descent a neglible presence as they were there. Slavery and racial prejudice were ingrained in the country’s economy, society, politics, and Constitution. In 1830, there were more than two million enslaved people in the United States, some three hundred thousand free blacks, and a booming internal slave trade between the upper and lower South. The stakes were much higher than in England, and the questions of citizenship and rights for free blacks unavoidable. American abolition, with its mix of black and white advocates, was besieged by virulent hostility.
Antislavery activity among whites in the earlier nineteenth century took the form of the influential American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, which advocated manumitting (partially freeing) slaves and sending them to Liberia in West Afric
a. In the early 1830s, a handful of white reformers repudiated colonization and embraced the black demand for immediate abolition and civil rights. Led by William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer and reformer of unflagging zeal, a cadre of antislavery Quakers, Unitarians, and evangelicals joined with free African-Americans in Boston to form the group that became the nucleus of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). British West Indian emancipation in 1833 gave inspiration and hope. By 1837, the high point of the AASS, there were tens of thousands of supporters in New England, the Middle Atlantic, Pennsylvania, and Ohio and some two thousand chapters. The organization flooded Congress with petitions calling for measures such as the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the abolition of the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, which gave extra representation to the South in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College.2
On both continents, women formed their own abolitionist societies. But in the United States, female participation was much more daring. Black women founded the first all-female society in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1833. The associations were concentrated in Massachusetts, New York state, and the Philadelphia area, and stretched out through northern Ohio and Indiana. While white middle-class women dominated the membership, with a sprinkling of the wealthy, the societies also included women of modest means, white and black. Female abolition was strong in the Massachusetts industrial towns, for instance: Lynn, Lowell, and Fall River. Women from the tiny black urban middle class were present throughout, comprising about 10 percent of the membership in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), one of the strongest chapters.3
Abolitionist women believed that salvation, their own and the nation’s, required that they no less than men answer God’s call. Many had been born again in God’s grace in the Second Great Awakening, the Protestant revivals that swept through America in the 1820s and ’30s. In emphasizing the believer’s unmediated relationship to God and the urgency of carrying the message of salvation to others, the revivals authorized new forms of female action and speech in, for example, crusades to ban alcohol, observe the Sabbath more strictly, and organize Sunday schools. Evangelicalism enhanced their ability to speak and act with authority in the churches, testifying to their experiences of grace, in Christian associations, and in their families, leading prayers and struggling with the souls of loved ones. Ministers tried to contain them, devoting sermons and making rules to delineate their proper role. But their zeal forced church authorities to be flexible in interpreting the passages of scripture used for centuries to sideline them—above all Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians, echoed in the epistle to Timothy: “Let your women keep silence in the churches.”
Women’s enhanced role in the revivals spurred energetic discussion. From the pulpits and press in the 1820s and 1830s, ideas about Christian domesticity refashioned republican motherhood into an explicitly Protestant and implicitly middle-class understanding. The home was no longer an adjunct to public life where women reared educated sons; it was a sphere of its own, a separate source of national values and morality, flourishing under the authority of women and, by its very distance from worldly matters, close to God.
Female abolitionists worked the tenets of domesticity into a justification of unconventional outspokenness and unpopular views. Theirs was a defense that combined the older view of the genderless soul—in Christ there is no male or female—with new assertions about the distinct moral understanding conferred on their sex. They believed they brought an intensified understanding to the cause by virtue of their piety and identification with female slaves, as they reached out in their imaginations—some spoke of the transmigration of souls—to women who were in chains. They spoke elliptically of masters’ sexual degradation of slave women and bluntly described the desecration of mothers’ souls when owners tore them from their children. “By day and by night, their woes and wrongs rise up before us, throwing shades of mournful contrast over the joys of domestic life.”4
Domestic ideology could thus serve antithetical ends. It was a conservative understanding compatible with longstanding patriarchal beliefs and an ideology of extreme sexual difference, but it also undercut some of the most toxic eighteenth-century assumptions about women’s weak characters and dignified their advance into quasi-political space. Rather than slated simply to be mothers of future citizens, they became paramount moral actors with some limited authority beyond the home.
But how limited? British abolitionist women did not press the matter but hewed to a conception of their work as charity, much like ministering to distressed sailors or poor widows. They deferred to male authority and did not angle for a role in the men’s organization (which was really the main organization).5 American abolitionist women found them irritatingly timid and conventional when they met one another in London: “They had little to tell us,” complained the Philadelphian Sarah Pugh, “and had but little desire to hear anything we had to say … fearing they might get ‘out of their sphere’ should they speak aloud even in a social circle.”6 But in the more democratic political culture of the United States, abolitionism opened up the contradiction between women’s influence and the power of men and the churches to limit their compass. Was it enough for female societies to exist as an outgrowth of the domestic sphere, or did God ask them to do more?
The AASS struggled with these questions, seeking to calibrate social convention with God’s will. At first, men in the organization did not admit women as full members; then women could be members but could not speak. Later, they could speak but not in mixed meetings; then they could speak in the meetings but not serve on committees. Then they could serve on some committees but not on others. And so it went through the 1830s.
In each controversy, women and their male supporters pressed to make room for the sexes to work together. Christianity provided the language for a coequal relationship: “Your brother in Christ.” “Your sister in Christ.” So they signed their constant letters to each other. The sibling metaphor sanctioned relationships between the sexes outside marriage and family ties. It made possible working partnerships between the sexes and put friendship between a man and a woman, that most anomalous of relationships, onto an elevated basis.
The achievement may seem modest. A small group of high-minded people infused a scriptural phrase with new meaning. Yet the idea that people could hold loyalties that transcended kin and country had appalled conservatives since Wollstonecraft’s day, when detractors accused her of urging women to desert their children to pledge their energies to their sex instead.7 Now it seems counterintuitive, but feminism in its first American phase came out of a sensibility that bestowed meaning and purpose on ties between the sexes. Sisterhood was indeed powerful for early feminism, but sisters had brothers as well.
One of the first women to profit from the sibling relations of abolitionism was Maria Stewart, a young African-American living in Boston who briefly came to prominence in the early 1830s with the help of William Lloyd Garrison. Stewart was the first American woman to speak out publicly on the woman question (although the fact is little known). She began her brief but astounding public career as an exhorter and a prophet, and her protests on women’s behalf always returned to abolitionist and racial themes: the wrongs of prejudice and slavery, and the moral lapses of the free black community. But her attention to the plight of the race did not subsume her care for women.
Born in Connecticut in 1803, possibly to free parents, Stewart was orphaned as a small child and grew up in the most miserable of circumstances, an indentured servant—which is really to say a drudge—from the age of five. She only had six weeks of formal schooling; like many poor children, she learned the rudiments of reading in Sunday school but apparently little of writing, for when she wrote her first essay she dictated it to an amanuensis, a ten-year-old girl. In 1826, she married a ship’s chandler in Boston who was a navy veteran of the war of 1812 and a man of property. Stewart thereby lucked momentarily into fortune, joining the city�
�s minuscule black middle class. She almost certainly would have known David Walker, another shopkeeper on the wharves, whose 1829 Appeal … to the Coloured Citizens of the World stirred African-Americans in the North and horrified whites with a militant call for black insurrection, if necessary, to end slavery. But prosperity, even solvency, eluded her: Her husband died and white executors defrauded her of the estate. In 1831, when she approached Garrison, she was impoverished and despondent.8
Regardless of her troubles, some confluence of events—a conversion experience, the tumult around David Walker’s pamphlet and then, the next year, his mysterious death (many blacks believed he was poisoned), and Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia—inspired her to write. With a manuscript in hand on religion, morality, and black freedom, she sought out Garrison at the cluttered offices of his print shop and anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. Garrison and Stewart were almost the same age, in their late twenties, both deeply religious, and both “all on fire,” as Garrison once described himself, with the urgency of ending the sin of slavery. Although they lived on opposite sides of the color line, she must have found something congenial in his hardscrabble Baptist background and the egalitarian spirit he brought to all his dealings, a trait that earned him respect and trust from Boston’s black people. He in turn would have recognized a promising writer and a Christian sister. She was lovely, he recalled in paying tribute to her decades later: flush in “a ripening womanhood, with a graceful form and a pleasing countenance.” Others too remembered “one of the most beautiful and loveliest of women.” Having just arrived in Boston himself, Garrison extended fellowship to an impoverished, bereft woman by publishing her essay.9
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