The conflict erupted in 1838–40, with members splitting over the issue of whether women could participate in AASS conventions and whether or not to seat Abby Kelley on the society’s business committee. Kelley was a young Quaker of incorruptible conscience who, in the wake of the violence in Philadelphia, continued to lecture by herself in New England and New York state, enduring accusations of being a prostitute and a Jezebel. When the Garrisonians prevailed in the Kelley matter, the other faction walked out to form a rival organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the nucleus of what became the Liberty Party.45 Theodore Weld sided with the dissenters. He, Angelina, and Sarah retreated to Red Bank, New Jersey; Weld and Angelina began a family, and they all worked together on Weld’s compendious exposé Slavery as It Is. All three lived until after the Civil War; Weld, until 1895. But neither sister ever revived her public career.
In 1840, the Garrisonians included eight women in their delegation to the World Antislavery Convention in London. They had no reason to expect the British would seat the women, but the female delegates were seasoned veterans, and they considered the contacts they would make abroad and the debate they would provoke as worth the journey. The newlywed Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a novice to antislavery work, accompanied them to London; she was not a delegate but her husband, Henry Stanton, was. On the voyage over, Elizabeth Stanton, always drawn to intelligence and power, took especially to the much older Lucretia Mott, who was as close to powerful as a woman could get in 1840. At the convention from behind a curtain, the women followed the debate about seating them; and to the end of her very long life, Stanton remembered who of the American men sided with them and who lined up with the British position.
Stanton’s retrospective account of what happened next has her and Lucretia Mott thick as thieves, fuming and fulminating and making plans. Mott’s diary from the trip, however, sketches a different picture of passing contact with Stanton, who was an outsider to a tightly knit political clan. Mott was preoccupied with consultations with longtime colleagues and behind-the-scenes machinations. But however self-dramatizing Stanton’s story was, one thing is likely: In London, someone—and maybe it was Stanton—had the idea to hold a convention about women’s rights, and women’s rights alone, when they returned to America.46
Thus abolitionism opened a line of development for women’s rights, even as it also hindered. Events of the 1830s provided the basis for an understanding of Woman as morally sovereign person whose highest duties lay outside the family jurisdiction. Originating in domestic ideology, these ideas went beyond domesticity’s acceptance of the male citizen as the gold standard of civic virtue. Tyranny could lodge in men, too, the Grimkés argued—and fascinated hundreds with the proposition. Women-as-they-were, not women-as-they-might-be, were judged quite able to take up rights and duties in a Christian republic.
CHAPTER THREE
NEW MORAL WORLDS
“OH NO DON’T let us get married,” Antoinette Brown, a twenty-two-year-old abolitionist, urged her best friend, Lucy Stone, in 1847. The pair were about to graduate from Oberlin College in one of the early classes of women. They were preparing to go out into the world as teachers, advancing the cause of the slaves, of course, but also the cause of women. Reviewing their guiding precepts, Brown thought their single state would serve notice of great things to unnamed doubters. “Let them see that woman can take care of herself & act independently without the encouragement & sympathy of her ‘lord & master,’ ” she boasted. Women were taking the stage of world history, the two agreed: crusaders in particular reforms but also leaders in a quest for the general good, the “great reform which is about to revolutionize society.”1 And indeed, the next year, participants at a meeting on women’s rights at Seneca Falls, New York, did rally to a great reform, a new Declaration of Independence for the sex.
The principle of the moral equality of the sexes inscribed a clear line of development from the Grimké sisters, through antislavery women such as these two, to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention on women’s rights and the movement that came after it. But in Europe, where, after all, women’s rights began, the situation was very different because there were so few channels for popular politics of any sort. There, feminist thinking also stirred with life in the 1830s and 1840s, but several degrees off the main lines of political development. Where the subject flared up in political discourse, it was stoked by radical republicans, utopians, and socialists, especially in France and Britain: working-class people and middle-class dissenters. Heirs to the aspirations of the French Revolution, they struggled to resurrect dreams of equality and the rights of man in the face of political repression and the brutal exploitation of early industrial capitalism.
A continuing fascination with utopias was part of this European generation’s quest to change the world through peaceful means outside traditional politics, to chart a course that repudiated blood in the streets and also circumvented intransigent regimes. Nourished by literary Romanticism and the rudiments of early socialist economic thought, reformers of many tints discovered the inner life—subjectivity, imagination, and emotion—as one resource for birthing a new, moral world. As repression eased after 1820 in France and Britain, the democratic-radical project of vindicating women revived, with the aim of changing marriage and family structure and thereby transforming mass psychology. Women’s equality emerged as a precondition of, not an option for, social improvement, thereby turning women into leaders, not followers, in the coming revolution. At least in theory.
On the face of it, European utopian socialism was an ocean and a world away from little Oberlin College out in the Ohio fields. But echoes of treatises emanating from London and Paris can be heard in the convictions of the two students. Unconventional, independent, and committed to the greater good, their kind of women, they thought, were inaugurating a new era in history.
The major utopian prophets of the early nineteenth century were the French writer Charles Fourier and the British thinker Robert Owen. The two were very different in their personalities and preoccupations. Fourier was a solitary adept of strange and far-fetched schemes, including plans for “phalansteries,” cooperative communities that abolished private property and marriage and raised children communally. Fourier’s writings traveled around Europe from 1808, when he published his first work, until his death in 1837, inspiring in the course of these decades—and even more after his death—a farflung assortment of followers.
Owen was a moral and economic thinker, well connected to the liberal British elite and, in the 1830s, the leader of a populous movement of working people. A Welsh-born factory owner turned socialist, he came to believe in the early days of his intellectual and political journey that human happiness necessitated not only the end of private property and the death of capitalism, but also a profound alteration in family arrangements and the relations of men and women. Owen’s utopia would reorganize society into networks of cooperative communities, run by working people for working people, where members shared labor and reinvested profits for the common good. At the heart of the twisted impulses that drove the capitalist system of greed and acquisitiveness, Owen believed, was the tyranny of marriage and the subjugation of women within it.
Both Fourier and Owen drew on an Enlightenment faith that reasoning human beings could infinitely improve, even perfect themselves. Both spun their plans from a hatred of industrial capitalism and a belief in people’s ability to live in harmony, not competition; in abundance, not want; and for the social good, not selfish acquisition. Both saw private property, marriage, and the church as pillars of despotism. Both sought to organize people in ways that would swiftly transform a poverty-ridden, corrupt, violent society, where a few prospered and many suffered, into one of peace, productivity, and equality. Finally, both believed that humankind could attain perfect well-being and enduring happiness. It now seems a faith of dizzy naïveté, but in the early nineteenth century others, too, held to it. Felicity on such a scale required deep
changes in the psyche, which meant re-creating the families in which the human psyche is formed. Changes could only come from altering the ways children were raised and sex and marriage were organized. To women’s rights, then, Fourierism and Owenism proved obliquely hospitable.
Fourier predicated his plan on synchronizing social relations with what he posited as the laws of the universe. He proposed that “passionate attraction”—by which he meant sexual attraction, but also friendship and family feeling—was the true basis for human affinities, the glue of all relationships. Yet society repressed the passionate attractions. Marriage stamped out sexual feeling for others and, in an age before the advent of contraception, inflicted continual pregnancies on women. Both sexes suffered, but women bore the brunt of the burdens of loneliness, monotony, and the injuries of men’s sexual infidelity.
Fourier devised a plan to utilize and sustain passionate attractions, entwining a theory of labor with a theory of sexual love. A network of cooperative communities of work and love—“phalanxes”—would replace all forms of government. Phalanxes abolished private property and profit along with nuclear families and marriage: In order to put labor and wealth on a cooperative basis, intimate relations had to be communal. Residents were to share domestic labor and child rearing along with productive work, with everyone pitching in: men, women, and children. Couplings would be transitory and end voluntarily—a kind of serial monogamy. Women, set free from economic dependency on men, would pursue their own passionate attractions. And it was on women’s freedom that the fortunes not only of the phalanxes but of humanity rose or fell: “Social progress and change,” wrote Fourier, “are brought about by virtue of the progress of women towards liberty, and social retrogression occurs as a result of a diminution in the liberty of women.”2
The critique of marriage dated back to Wollstonecraft and, before her, to Mary Astell in the 1600s. But Fourier went those writers one better by inventing a form of heterosexual attachment beyond marriage. Unlike his feminist predecessors, he gave these concerns a basis in an entire science of society, an all-encompassing plan to put society on a rational basis, in part by enshrining men’s customary sexual wandering as a rule of community service. In the 1830s, disciples (mostly male) preached Fourierism in France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Not all emphasized sexual reorganization, but in France, followers of the liberal aristocrat Claude Saint-Simon replicated elements of Fourier’s system in their scandalous practices. The Saint-Simonians lived in communes and encouraged women to break loose from abusive marriages and sleep with men in the group.3
Owen embarked on his road to socialist thought through attempts to remedy the poverty of the workers in a textile factory he managed and partly owned in the Scottish industrial center of New Lanark. There he experimented with humane labor practices, with the aim of creating a model other industrialists could follow. In an 1816 speech in New Lanark, he mentioned the “Millenium,” indicating that his thinking had already shifted from a model factory town to something much larger: “What ideas individuals may attach to the term ‘Millenium’ I know not; but I know that society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.” In the 1820s, having left New Lanark to move to London (where he moved in the circle of liberal thinkers around Jeremy Bentham), he worked out specifications for what he termed a New Moral World, where laborers took production away from capitalists to manage it themselves on a cooperative basis, sharing profits equitably.
The New Moral World would require profound changes in private life, although Owen only briefly advocated abolishing marriage (he later backpedaled). Like Fourier, he believed that marriage was analogous to private property, an institution that implanted selfishness in everyone and practically guaranteed male selfishness. “It is my house, my wife, my children, or my husband, our estate, and our children.… No arrangement could be better calculated to produce division and disunion in society,” he asserted.4 Love, whether platonic or erotic, was a natural impulse, but it could not flourish when relations were based on ownership and women were subject to men’s arbitrary will. The end of Mammon and materialism could only come when love ran freely through human connections.
Until 1829, small groups of disciples sustained Owenism, but as militant labor sentiment spread, the British working-class movement became its home. Enthusiasm for cooperative stores and labor exchanges tied to trade unions spread in Britain, especially in London and the industrial north, growing into a mass movement in the 1830s that overlapped with Chartism. Owenism appealed to active and thoughtful people of the middling sort, artisans and shopkeepers who were the shock troops of dissent everywhere in Europe, their ranks augmented by middle-class sympathizers and a few renegades from the gentry.5
In the Owenite movement itself, women were numerous and vocal, attracted by these perceptions of injustice in the family. They were tailoresses, seamstresses, bonnet makers, weavers, domestic servants, shopkeepers, ladies of small means, and runaways from the upper classes. In London, for example, Anna Wheeler, that Irish reader of Wollstonecraft, had by this time fled her husband, children in tow, and ended up in London, a devotee of Owen’s, after passing through a Saint-Simonian community in Normandy (in France she met Fourier and tried to arrange a meeting between the two great men). Frances Wright was another Owenite; her theatrical deportment spoke to her self-presentation as a heroine of a new epoch.6
In the 1830s, Owenite women interjected their own voices into the movement, lecturing and writing about the desolation of unwanted pregnancies and the perennial issue of domestic abuse. They tackled economic problems, trying to make men care about women workers’ particular debilities. Owenite women were the first wage earners to write about the ruthless underpayment of women, when even skilled seamstresses might earn half of unskilled men’s pay. Applying the principle of cooperation to domestic work, they chided workingmen for exempting themselves from housework. Remarkable extrapolations from Owen’s theories about marriage sailed forth. In 1831, Robert Dale Owen, his son, advocated contraception on the grounds that women’s happiness, which was necessary to everyone’s well-being, could only be ensured when they could choose when to have children and how many to have.7 Owenites discussed making marriage a civil contract, dissoluble like any other, thus making divorce a civil matter (rather than ecclesiastical, as it was in Britain, which effectively made marriage a life sentence).
Men were the public face of this early European feminism, the prominent speakers, writers, journalists, and (eventually) legislators and members of Parliament. Their relationship to those women who were also thinking about these matters was asymmetrical, but it was fruitful. We can see the gravity and force of these half-hidden collaborations in the first written defense of women’s rights since the Vindication, authored by William Thompson in partnership with Anna Wheeler. An eccentric and genial Irish landholder, William Thompson was another wealthy gentleman who had come to be tormented by the miseries of the people—his tenant farmers—whose labors enriched him. He too went to London to sit at Bentham’s feet, but he ended up an Owenite champion instead. In 1825, Thompson published his grandly titled Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery. The co-author whom Thompson acknowledged in his preface was his friend and fellow reformer Anna Wheeler.8
The book was primarily an attack on the preeminent philosopher James Mill, Bentham’s heir, who in a famous 1819 treatise on government denied that women had any claim to political rights. Mill’s essay was a locus classicus of liberal British reform, which sought to fight a corrupt oligarchy by extending the franchise to responsible men of property and denying it to everyone else. Mill dismissed female suffrage with hauteur: Li
ke children and workingmen, women could be “struck off from political rights without inconvenience,” he professed with cold candor. This was virtual representation updated for an age of the widened franchise.
Thompson’s Appeal is a closely deduced, flat-footed treatise swept along by fiery indignation. He pulled together Fourierist and Owenite ideas about women into an argument that was by no means easy or obvious to make at the time. He was much harder on men than Wollstonecraft had been. Male power, far from being the benevolent force that James Mill supposed, was really despotic; it was a “monstrous fiction” that men could legislate for wives and daughters when in fact they could easily abuse and exploit them. Like Wollstonecraft, he believed that women were victimized by bad education and narrow lives, but he saw the problem really coming back to men, who appeared to him not as avatars of republican virtue but as tyrants, their power girded by the law of marriage, which put women in a state worse than West Indian slaves. Woman’s destiny was determined by “the never-closing eye of a domestic tyrant, jealous and brutal, because having power with impunity to be so, hemming round not only her actions but her words and thoughts at his pleasure, and invested by law with all the uncontrolled power requisite to keep life in such a constant state of torment, that the morning sun that calls her to a renewal of existence may be cursed for its summons to a renewal of misery.” The clauses and metaphors tumble over each other, a grammatical hodgepodge that testifies to the white-hot outrage that drove the prose.9
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