The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  But they did not strike a sympathetic chord among the men. Vitriol and misogyny congealed in newspaper cartoons by the city’s best-known illustrators—the most famous was Honoré Daumier—who turned revolutionary women into old maids, viragoes, man haters, delinquent mothers, unfaithful wives, and armed maniacs. Lampooning feminists’ ideas, the cartoons were the talk of the town and acted as a “brake on the revolutionary imagination,” an art historian observes. The message was that revolution was a man’s business, and women who dared participate were only evading their duties. “It makes no sense to leave me here with three kids to watch,” protests a henpecked husband, loaded down with infants, to his termagant wife in one Daumier cartoon. “Oh! So you’re my husband!… Well! It’s my right to throw you out the door of your own house.… Jeanne Deroin proved it to me last night!” an enraged woman informs her man as she shoves him out the door.26 Socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon voiced a common sentiment when he sneered at Deroin’s campaign for a legislative seat: Women could no more govern than men could be wet nurses. Margaret Fuller, who followed events in Paris from her new home in Rome, resigned herself to the plain fact that “woman’s day has not come yet.”27

  Leaving Paris, Fuller traveled on to Rome to take in the sights, like any American on the Grand Tour. But she also acted surreptitiously as an emissary for Guiseppe Mazzini, whom she had met in London. Mazzini was the leader of Young Italy, preparing to return to lead the revolution in Rome. In winter 1849, with the revolutionary tide elsewhere receding, Mazzini made his triumphal return to establish the short-lived republic. Fuller plunged in to help. In a city electric with expectation, she stepped out of Mickiewicz’s utopian mythology and her own airy-mystical prose into living history, the “springtime of the peoples.” Seized by the justice of the Roman cause, Fuller fired off a volley of passionate reports to the Tribune that tried to counter antirevolutionary sentiment in the States and fire up Americans’ sympathies for a struggle that paralleled their own. Indeed, she believed that at the moment, Europe was leading the battle for democracy, since Europe was free from slavery. She fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, a minor noble and dedicated republican, an officer in the Civic Guard defending the city. With Ossoli, she conceived a child almost certainly out of wedlock, a daring affirmation of free love. She gave birth to a son, whom they took to the countryside for safety. Fuller and Ossoli, now secretly married, returned to a city under siege by the French army, dispatched by Louis-Napoleon—the counterrevolutionary victor in France—in response to the pope’s call to Catholic Europe to crush the republic.

  Ossoli was no intellectual, but the two forged a marriage based on shared devotion to a noble cause, a partnership of the kind that Fuller had extolled in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. He fought courageously on the barricades and Fuller ran a hospital for the wounded, risking her life under constant bombardment: “May God help us,” the letter giving her the commission is signed. But regardless of the danger the nurses faced, the very existence of the corps of female volunteers irritated some officials, who grumbled and carped about the women’s authority. Mazzini upheld their standing, and the nurses retained their positions, officially honored as women of “high democratic ideals.”

  Musing on the spirit of 1848, Fuller imagined an even greater role for herself—“I might ask to be made an Ambassador”—though she knew that such a possibility would have to wait “another century.” She had remade her life as a sexually emancipated woman; and now she took a place in the revolution as a woman and citizen. The only American to remain in the city during the siege, she and Ossoli stayed until the end, when the French marched through the city gates on one side and the revolutionaries poured out the other. If we look back to the symbolic sibling relationship she sketched in her book, it’s as if Mazzini and the other republican brothers had assured her, “ ‘you can do it, if you only think so.’ ” 28

  In the ten months of revolution and counterrevolution between spring 1848 and the fall of the Roman republic, American reactions ran from excitement to condemnation. Antislavery supporters took the revolutions as a spur to their own labors to rid their country of the ultimate form of tyranny. In New York state, antislavery men precipitated their own rebellion within the Democratic Party, the Barnburners insurgency that led to the formation of the Free Soil Party, which ran former president Martin Van Buren for president on a third-party ticket that fall.

  In the thick of the antislavery turmoil, Lucretia Mott paid a visit to her sister Martha Coffin Wright in Auburn, New York, and took the occasion to renew her friendship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had moved from Boston to nearby Seneca Falls. Based in Seneca Falls, Henry Stanton was close to the antislavery uprising and deeply involved.29 But while the Barnburners occupied Henry, Elizabeth chafed under the constraints of small-town life and three small children. Sitting around a table drinking tea with Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, and two other women, Stanton jumped at the chance to call a women’s rights meeting.

  Stanton was convinced that there, in the middle of rural New York in 1848, they were on the edge of another revolt of historic significance. She knew exactly the place in history she wanted to stake out: “The first women’s rights convention that has ever assembled,” she stressed to a neighbor.30 It was easy enough to put something together. Many years later, wanting to stress their heroism, Stanton told the story as if the idea were a bolt from the blue and the organizers scarcely knew how to proceed, so naïve and untutored were they in public life. The fact was that they were all reformers involved in organizing temperance, antislavery, and church meetings, renting halls, composing resolutions, and putting out notices for years.31 They worried that attendance would be small: It was high summer, busy on the farms, hot and slow in town. Yet throngs of people gathered on the first day, about three hundred, mostly women but with a large contingent of men.32

  From the European news, many in attendance would have had manifesto making on their minds. The organizers issued their own, a “Declaration of Sentiments,” which inserted women into the formulations of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”33 Compared to Sarah Grimké’s account of women’s wrongs ten years earlier, the Declaration’s tally of grievances was much more extensive and systematic: taxation without representation, the civil death women suffered under common law, the lack of maternal custody rights in cases of separation or divorce, and their exclusion from the ministry, law, and medicine. The document pointed out that freeborn American women were still the subjects of husbands and fathers; that divorce was a social and economic disaster for them; that a “double standard of morals” banished women from respectable society for actions that were deemed unimportant in men; and that no decently paid work was open to them. The culprit was man: “He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for [woman] a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”

  By using the language of 1776, the authors of the Seneca Falls resolutions drew authority from natural rights theory rather than Christian doctrine. The proposed remedies cohered as specific demands: to attend university, hold political office, have access to male employments, and end the worst features of coverture. All were premised on the proposition “that woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.” The most concrete resolution was for women’s suffrage, a proposal Elizabeth Stanton put forward. It was the only one that was controversial.

  It was not that the issue was unknown. The Owenites had raised it sporadically and to no avail in Britain. In Paris a few months earlier, a Committee for the Rights of Women petitioned the provisional government for the franchise (voted down 899–1).34 In the United States, women’s suffrage was far-fetched but still a logical extension of a system that had already undone the tight
fit of virtual representation for men. With universal white manhood suffrage in place, it was not the lack of property but sex and race that stripped adults of political rights. And even race was debatable. Although effectively disenfranchised in most of the country, free black men voted in some states in the North. During the conventions in the 1840s held by most states to revise their constitutions, measures for black disenfranchisement occasioned lengthy debate. In New York state, the constitutional convention of 1846–47 received several groups of petitions for women’s suffrage, although it ignored them. Commenting on the response, Unitarian minister Samuel May, a Garrisonian and a Liberty Party man, preached from his pulpit in Syracuse that one would never know that “there were any women in the body politic.”35

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, well connected to leading men and wellversed in the day’s political developments, had just seen the Married Women’s Property Act pass the New York legislature. Now she seized the chance to introduce the subject of suffrage into debate. She encountered resistance on strategic grounds: “Those who took part in the debate feared a demand for the right to vote would defeat others they deemed more rational, and make the whole movement ridiculous.” Lori Ginzberg suggests that the other organizers knew that the preponderance of Quakers and Garrisonians who were bound to be at the meeting saw voting as participation in a corrupt political system and would reject the resolution out of hand. But Stanton prevailed, probably with the help of the Free Soilers at the meeting, who would have been alert to the importance of voting. The balance tipped when Frederick Douglass threw his weight behind the resolution. Douglass, who was editing his North Star in nearby Rochester, was “a disfanchised man,” as he wrote six months earlier when the state convention took away the vote from black men. Now he kindled to the principle of universal suffrage articulated from another direction.36 Forty years later, at an anniversary celebration of Seneca Falls, he spoke with unmistakable pride of his action that day. “When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”37

  Seneca Falls launched a fleet of women into public life. The impulse toward organization led to continuous activity, and the republican language provided the ideological basis to sustain an ongoing enterprise. Through the 1850s, women in the Northeast and Midwest held women’s rights conventions with regularity. All told there were more than thirty held up to the outbreak of the Civil War, with interest running along channels of abolitionist sympathy.38

  Like abolitionism, women’s rights was a Northern phenomenon. The ideas were anathema in the South, where the power that upheld human bondage pervaded all human relations—slaves, slaveholders, and nonslaveholders alike. Men’s customary power over women’s labor, persons, and bodies derived from the same ancient sources as did slavery, a fact that did not escape feminists, beginning with Mary Astell, and that was of course a central insight of abolitionist-feminists.

  But the analogy dwindled in power the closer one got to the slave system, because slave-owning women were nothing like slaves. Mastery was a status that also incorporated mistresses, who could dispose of the persons and labor of the women and children under their control as they would, especially in their own domain of the household. There they held the power of life and death and they did not shirk from using violence to enforce it. Regardless of their own subordination to men, Southern planter women were loyal to a ruthless social order antithetical to the principles of universal rights and moral equality on which feminism depended.39

  Women’s rights featured in Southern thought as a demonstration of all that was wrong with Northern society. Famously, George Fitzhugh maintained in Cannibals All! (1857) his defense of slavery as a positive good, that the kindly paternal care that enveloped childlike Africans also enfolded women, who were similarly weak and vulnerable. Planter women were aware of Northern arguments; the terms of women’s rights thought flicker in Mary Boykin Chesnut’s caustic observations in her diary of the 1850s about Southern men: their sexual liaisons with slave women, their bullying ways about money. But such private allusions to their sufferings functioned as tokens of planter women’s stoic allegiance to the system. Nowhere in the South did women’s complaints about men amount to more than the carping of a loyal opposition: loyal, that is, to the class of which they were paid-up members. No Southern women except for the Grimkés spoke out against slavery. As a result, affiliations with women’s rights were missing in the South until well after the Civil War.

  In the North, though, the fight against slavery gave cover to feminist organizing, giving women space to gather in the interstices of antislavery clamor, away from withering scrutiny. The call for suffrage, a daring departure at Seneca Falls, became a standard demand. In Salem, Ohio, an abolitionist hotbed near Youngstown, participants in an 1851 convention were unequivocal about the universal right to vote, which they merged with black enfranchisement, concurrently being debated in the state constitutional convention: “ ‘White male’ must be stricken out of our State Constitution … and person substituted in its place.”40 Legal reform of married women’s position was a leading concern, routed through the call for married women’s property acts.

  Discussions ranged over the general debilities of wives, although they stopped short of contemplating the Owenite idea of marriage as a civil contract. Rather, the plight of the “drunkard’s wife,” a figure lifted from the temperance movement, was a more palatable way to talk about the gross inequities of marriage without coming uncomfortably close to the institution itself or the taboo subject of divorce. In passing, and in stately Victorian language that floated high above the gritty realities of workingwomen’s lives, participants also considered paid labor: pervasive discrimination and women’s drastically limited opportunities. “The number of her industrial avocations is unnecessarily restricted … and, when she is engaged in the same occupations with men, her remuneration is greatly below what is awarded to her stronger associates.”41

  This flourishing field in America stands in sharp contrast to the situation in Europe. After the defeats of 1848, feminism there persisted as threads of thought and aspiration rather than streams of energy; strands woven through cultural elites and working-class movements as they regrouped. Radicals scattered. Only the Germans immigrated to the United States in significant numbers. Mathilde Anneke fled Bavaria with her husband and started a German-language newspaper in Newark, New Jersey. Anneke was one of the few ’48ers who became prominent in the American suffrage movement; a colleague of Stanton and Anthony, she proselytized after the war to German immigrants.

  In Paris in the aftermath, Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland spent six months in prison. From their cells, they comforted themselves by thinking about events abroad. How they got the news is not clear, but they somehow knew about the 1850 women’s rights convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, and a Chartist women’s petition for suffrage to the House of Lords.42 The two prisoners believed something of great historic import was abroad in the world. In a long letter dispatched to each group of “sisters,” they rehearsed the whole sad tale in Paris, including the rebuffs of the brothers, but ended on the upswing with a salute to those elsewhere who were taking up the great endeavor. Calling up Wollstonecraft’s language, they promised that “your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of the right of Woman to civil and political equality.” Carry on! they entreated. “Faith, Love, Hope” and “Sisterly salutations.”43

  Colloquies across borders were evanescent but important, because they gave the conversants a sense that women together were operating in world politics, making the cause of liberal democracy their own. The transatlantic connections, however, remained thin. This was in part because of the death of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, who, returning to America in 1850, drowned with her husband and son off Fire Island, New York, on the last leg of their journey.

  Unquest
ionably, Fuller’s death was a loss to the nascent American movement. Only Elizabeth Cady Stanton would come close to Fuller’s intellectual stature, her ability to hold her own with male luminaries, and her vision of a greater scope for women—and it would take Stanton years to get her footing. But even Stanton, brilliant as she was, lacked Fuller’s intellectual breadth and cosmopolitan politics. We can only speculate about what might have happened had Fuller returned and taken her place again at the center of her culture. With her grasp of international politics, her fluency in French, German, and Italian, and her experience in combining the most advanced female liberties with the cause of democracy, she might have served as an intermediary between the American women and Europe. She might have opened the American movement to labor causes; or she could have returned to her writing on women’s subjectivity. She might have revived the democratic themes of sibling relationships that, in Rome, she had lived out.

  In 1850, America was at once the only functioning democracy left standing in the North Atlantic world and the one nation to harbor slavery. In the space that the contradiction wrenched open, American women mounted a small but energetic political initiative. These were the singularities of the American situation. Europe, the defeated hopes of 1848, and socialist castles in the air were very far away.

  While there were men at the edges—friends, fathers, brothers, and sons—the American movement increasingly defined itself as a female affair. We are now in a time of women friends. The relative ease of travel in the North meant that women formed political friendships across distances. Letters spun homely intimacies across miles and between women’s rights conventions: worries about children, stories of sickness and aging parents, preoccupations with servants and anxieties about money, along with tales of meetings organized and speeches given, fulminations on the Fugitive Slave Act, and plans for temperance campaigns.