It was a solidly middle-class group, with virtually no working-class women and few rich women, either, although middle-class was a fragile status. Lucy Stone, for example, the Oberlin graduate and in the 1850s an abolitionist lecturer, would land solidly in the middle class when she married Henry Blackwell, from a well-to-do Anglo-American reform family. But Stone, like many of these middle-class women, came from a modest farm family, and had she not married, she would have been a hard-pressed teacher scrabbling out a living.44 Regardless of the liminal class identities, though, the milieu was overwhelmingly white. By 1840, black and white women had separated, a fact that should surprise no one; what is remarkable is the extent to which they had once overlapped.
This is not to say African-Americans were closed to women’s rights, and any full account of feminist history must include the rising generation of black women abolitionists who operated from independent positions outside marriage, supporting themselves by lecturing and writing: the indomitable Sojourner Truth (once a slave); Frances Ellen Watkins (an Oberlin graduate); Sarah Parker Remond (daughter of a leading abolitionist family); and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (also a child of abolition). All these women brushed against women’s rights ideas and organizations. While their public presence was tenuous, they established a foothold for feminist principles in African-American life to which Northern black women after the Civil War returned.45
At the center of the women’s rights movement were Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Anthony/Stanton partnership inaugurated a female political collaboration previously unimaginable. A demon organizer, Anthony, from a farm family in upstate New York, had not been at Seneca Falls, but she met Stanton shortly after, in 1850. They became political partners and friends, although the abiding desire they shared was not for intimacy but for women’s power. Stanton’s mobility and time were constrained by a growing family: She had three more children in the 1850s, bringing the total to six. If it had not been for their partnership, Stanton might well have fallen into the role of brilliant, bitter small-town housewife, firing off idiosyncratic letters to the editor; and Anthony could have slipped into the position of peripatetic spinster, a figure like Miss Birdseye, the aging reformer in Henry James’s novel The Bostonians, immensely admirable and vaguely pitiable. The work of Anthony, who did not marry, often consisted of helping with Stanton’s children so that their mother could write a speech. But between them they gave unfailing, steady, strong direction to what might otherwise have been a momentary upswelling of sentiment. As it was, their busy, productive fifty-year partnership was packed with events, travel, ideas, high aims, and political wrangling.
British feminists also came together as a distinct circle in the 1850s, but theirs was an elite, metropolitan affair, coalescing around Barbara Leigh Smith and Bessie Rayner Parkes, both from radical Unitarian families. The loosely knit group of fellow spirits met at a house in London that provided space for a newspaper office, meeting rooms, a library, and classrooms, “everything that could be desired by a new reform or lobby group.” While the principals were genteel, the group continued the Owenite stress on women’s labor, transposing it into a middle-class register in calling for professions for women. Barbara Leigh Smith’s lengthy “Women and Work” decried the equation of feminine propriety with idleness and put the need for decent, fairly paid labor at the center of women’s equality; the group held classes to train young women as accountants, bookkeepers, and printers. Smith and Parkes were prescient in their goals and ideas. But theirs was a select circle, with few connections to the wider world of women and no means to attract a mass constituency.46
Gone were the male/female partnerships so important to earlier feminism. Except for John Stuart Mill, whose The Subjection of Women (1869) was heavily indebted to Harriet Taylor (now his wife), the germinative relationships would be between women. Although the democratic brothers remained important presences in all feminists’ lives and provided critical aid, they were not known as writing partners, collaborators, co-conspirators, or enthusiasts. The compelling problem of sisters and brothers receded, to be replaced for long stretches of time by a different aspect of feminism’s family romance, negotiations between generations and factions imagined as mothers and daughters.
In Europe, feminist assertions were attached to popular insurgency. After 1848, the lifeline was gone. Women’s rights retreated to small enclaves, such as the Langham Place circle, or lodged in literary sensibility, as in the work of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and (more ambiguously) George Eliot. When women’s rights movements emerged in the 1860s and 1870s in Britain, the Netherlands, and France, it was among middle-class women, connected to republican ideas that were purged of socialism and any hints of sexual impropriety.
In the United States, in contrast, antislavery politics gave women’s rights a line of support and a raison d’être. For a time the fact that the women’s cause was subsidiary did not raise troubling contradictions. The American feminist movement was small but pragmatic, with ideas about how to respond to pressing needs, hold men accountable, and seize a measure of self-representation in politics. The connection to antislavery propelled the subject into national conversation. Going down the Mississippi River on her wedding trip in 1857, Barbara Leigh Smith (now Bodichon) found that Southerners were ready to denounce women’s rights at the drop of a hat.47
At the same time, however, the more public, Protestant, middle-class character of the American movement meant that avant-garde thinking about sexuality, marriage, and labor was more truncated than in Europe. Aside from Stanton and a few of her intimates, the movement absorbed only mild elements of the European marriage critique and spurned the rest as licentious free love.
The American women had no ties to Congress and few hopes of immediate changes they might effect. They were not adjuncts to a political elite. Yet neither were they on the fringe. They made themselves political actors, even though they were only playing bit roles. The diffuseness of their activity and aims generated the dynamics of future expansion. A freewheeling conversation began about the causes of women’s difficulties. Amelia Bloomer, for instance, a supporter in Ohio, developed a theory about the role that clothes played in women’s oppression. The long skirts and multiple petticoats of Victorian fashion literally dragged women down. Hems collected dust and mud, and the dirt made travel difficult. Workingwomen were turned away from skilled mechanized trades because their skirts might catch in the machinery. The most serious feminists flirted with wearing blousy pants underneath their dresses, “bloomers,” named after their inventor. Bloomers never gained many converts; the mockery that greeted them was too harsh. But the thinking was typical of the American movement: an attempt to redress very large injustices with small measures.
The emphasis on the emancipation of the body, running alongside the call to the vote, owed something to European dreams, now subsided. With some ability to withstand the periods of lassitude and indifference that were (and remain) feminism’s worst enemy, the American movement entered the second half of the nineteenth century able to articulate intense aspirations and imagine how they might come to pass.
CHAPTER FOUR
LOYALTY’S LIMITS
The Civil War, Emancipation,
and Women’s Bids for Power
THE ASSOCIATION OF women’s rights with antislavery was keenly felt. No antislavery activist could help but think that one good cause fed another. When war came, veterans of the women’s conventions threw themselves into the battle for a republic whose preservation, they believed, depended on the efforts of all: mothers and sisters no less than the fathers and brothers who enlisted. And when the war ended, the emancipation of the slaves augured to them a huge expansion of democracy. The hopeful believed that loyal women would enter the Union as enfranchised citizens right alongside the freedpeople, recognized for the part they had played for thirty years in the battle that determined the republic’s fate. They met with bitter disappointment.
“Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room,” Walt Whitman observed with dry understatement about his months nursing wounded and dying men.1 Like most who wrote about the war, Whitman construed the experience as male. But the Civil War was no quadrille for women, either. Northern women did all in their power to join their efforts to the troops’. Since the battleground was almost entirely in the South, they were far from the fighting, and since it was a modern war, with the government supplying the wants and needs of the Union Army, they were distant from the actual operations (as women were not during the American Revolution). But the massive mobilization and soaring casualties meant that no one was untouched.
When Lincoln was elected, leaders agreed to put aside women’s rights for the duration to attend to the crisis at hand. “I have felt that it would be very unwise, at this time,” reasoned a sensible Martha Wright about not holding a convention in 1861, “when the nation’s whole heart & soul are engrossed with this momentous crisis.” She described what must have been the daily life of most households: “Every body now is absorbed in watching the course of our politicians, calculating the effect of every action on the future of the nation, reading with anxiety the account of battles, in which so many of us have a personal interest—How then is it possible to think of a Convention.”2
Once the war began, the women who had thrown themselves into anti-slavery agitation were assigned to the sidelines along with the rest of their sex, knitting and rolling bandages. They found their political feet in the difficult spring of 1863, when the prospects for Union victory were dim. After a string of defeats and two months before the New York City draft riots and Gettysburg, Anthony and Stanton found a way to take action by issuing a call to the “Loyal Women of the Nation” in the New York Tribune. The call urged women to insert themselves as partisans into the issues of the war:
Thus far there has been no united public expression from the women of the North as to the policy of the war. Here and there one has spoken and written nobly. Many have vied with each other in acts of generosity and self-sacrifice for the sick and wounded in camp and hospital. But we have, as yet, no means of judging how and where the majority of Northern women stand.
The organization they formed, the Women’s National Loyal League, was their bid to join the Republican effort to shore up flagging Northern support and stave off the growing power of the Peace Democrats. Five months after the partial freedom of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Loyal League was a parallel to the influential Union Leagues for men, formed a year earlier to rally support for the government and amplify the demand for emancipation.3
The Loyal League did not tell anyone to stop making bandages and knitting. But its point was to encourage women to address the politics of the war directly. The message went against the grain: By this time, anti-slavery was a moral position tolerable for women to adopt, but party politics was thought to be men’s business. The whole idea of women as women advocating war and defending the Republican Party flew in the face of assumptions about their peace-loving nature: They were supposed to be too busy with household concerns and too frail to take part in the rough-and-tumble affray of party debate. The premise reworked the principle of virtual representation for a more democratic age: Women should leave these fractious matters to husbands or their congressmen. Caroline Dall, an opinionated, high-handed women’s rights leader in Boston, expressed the views of even open-minded people when she chided Stanton about the Loyal League. Women should confine themselves to moral influence and stay away from the down-and-dirty business of base partisanship, she scolded.4
Partisanship was exactly what the Loyal League called for. Speaking passionately at the first meeting, Stanton denounced the call for peace with slaveholders and vehemently affirmed the war aim of immediate and unconditional abolition. “For if there is a God in heaven, if there is a law of justice in the earth, if there is a law of cause and effect in the universe, this war can never be suppressed, this nation can never know peace, until slavery—the cause of the war—is wholly and for ever removed.” Stanton spoke as a citizen, not a moral subject, and she sought to rally women on that basis. She declared the League to be “the first and only organization of women for the declared purpose of influencing politics,” thus differentiating it from the aspirational, resolution-passing women’s conventions of the 1850s.
Carried along by the momentum of crisis, Stanton and Anthony seem to have thought they could vault over obstacles by dint of sheer determination, willing themselves into political equality. In a war fought very far away, they meant to extend the home front by making women into influential citizens at the leading edge of public opinion, using what was still the only political right available to them after all these years, the right of petition. In the summer following Gettsyburg, the League set itself the task of getting a million signatures on a petition to Congress for immediate emancipation.5
It sounds simple, but it required complicated, hectic organization—important people contacted and urged into action, envelopes and paper purchased, free mailing privileges obtained from Massachusetts abolitionist senator Charles Sumner. The goal of a million signatures was unrealizable (it would have represented more than 10 percent of the adult population of the North). But they were phenomenally successful, collecting 100,000 names: Sumner brought the first group to the Senate floor in February 1864, laying the groundwork for the Thirteenth Amendment, which passed the Senate two months later. More rolled in: Sumner introduced them in lots to keep up pressure on the House, which passed the amendment in December. The final tally is an impressive 400,000 signatures, one for every twenty-four adults in the Northern states.6
The Thirteenth Amendment petition drive inspired among women leaders conviction about their own efficacy. It seemed that they could take on political weight by virtue of hard work and determination. Looking back, we could call the approach willed equality: a faith that has often come to activist women working in the throes of a political crisis and convinced that their efforts cannot help but win recognition. Women had petitioned before, in the abolitionist campaigns of the 1830s. This time, however, they were working with the party in power. They helped shore up the Union at a dire moment and contributed to the passage of a constitutional amendment. “Women will undoubtedly be a power in the coming presidential campaign,” Stanton happily predicted in 1864. They were “already speaking on all phases of the question, hence the importance that we know whereof we speak.”7
In sum, “loyalist” was a position they imagined as inside, not outside formal politics, and bound to bring them political rewards.8 For Stanton, the war was a hinge between a before of women’s political quiescence and an after of robust engagement. Northern women had shown a “want of vigilance,” but now, called to duty, they proved they were capable of taking up the obligations of citizens—the corollary of holding political rights. Stanton and Anthony’s correspondence from 1864 shows them scheming avidly with friends male and female about the Republican presidential nomination, for all the world as if they were backroom wheeler-dealers.
It is impossible to overstate the immensity of the task the country faced at the war’s end, or the severity of divisions about how to proceed. Six hundred thousand dead, four million slaves freed, the president murdered, and the rebellious states to be reintegrated into the Union. What was to be done with Confederate officeholders, leaders of a treasonous government? What was the civil and political status of the freedpeople? An armed South raised the stakes as white vigilantes went on the offensive against the former slaves, using terror to reimpose white rule. Skirmishes boiled over into full-scale attacks on freedpeople in New Orleans and Memphis in 1866. With the border state president Andrew Johnson, who favored leniency so extreme it would mean readmission of the former Confederate states with the same senators and congressmen who seceded in 1861, consternation in the North spread. The vote for blacks was an absolute necessity to change the structure of power in the Southern states, but black suffrage on wh
at terms?
Once a Republican Congress took control of Reconstruction in 1866, women’s rights proponents were among those calling for black manhood suffrage. Only biracial democracy, shored up by the freedpeople’s votes, could fend off the nightmare scenario of the former potentates of the slave power reinstalled in statehouses and Congress. In May, women’s rights leaders combined with the Garrisonians to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), dedicated to universal suffrage. “As women we can no longer seem to claim for ourselves what we do not for others—nor can we work in two separate movements to get the ballot for the two disfranchised classes—the negro and woman—since to do so must be at double cost of time, energy and money.” It was a clarion call for “the true basis of the reconstruction of our government, not the rights of woman, or the negro, but the rights of all men and women.” The “citizen” whose outlines had appeared during the war seemed to them big enough to encompass both the freedman and the white woman, with the freedwoman presumably trailing along. Specifically, they saw Northern women loyalists as counterparts to the black soldiers, the humbled and excluded who had done their part, and whom a grateful nation would now welcome to full citizenship.9
Political exigency pulled the issue away from them. For Republicans, Congressional Reconstruction hinged on whether the political rights of the republic would be extended to black men, not whether those rights could be reinterpreted to belong to women. Assumptions that the new black citizens were male had already entered debate over the Thirteenth Amendment. So deeply inscribed in antislavery politics was the notion that freedom would redeem black manhood—a manhood crushed by slavery—that congressmen praised emancipation in just those terms: The former slaves could govern their women and children as white men did in their family jurisdictions.10
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