The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  While the suffrage cause made no headway in Congress or the states, the women’s rights movement could still claim solid achievements in the forty years since Seneca Falls. Most important, higher education opened up. Wealthy men and women endowed the first women’s colleges: Mount Holyoke, established by Mary Lyon in western Massachusetts in 1837 as a higher order girls’ school, paved the way (although it was not a real college until 1893). Matthew Vassar, a brewer in Poughkeepsie, New York, founded Vassar College in 1861; Sophia Smith endowed Smith College in 1871 near Mount Holyoke; and the Durants, Henry Fowle and his wife, Paulina, gave the money for Wellesley College in 1875. More modest institutions with religious affiliations dotted the Midwest: Jane Addams, a yearning, idealistic girl in Cedarville, Illinois, went to one nearby in 1877, high-minded Rockford Female Seminary. Federally funded land-grant colleges in the Midwest and West were coeducational from the start, opening prospects for girls of lesser means.

  In the South, the freedpeople’s hunger for education led to the establishment of schools at all levels, including colleges and seminaries funded by denominations: for instance, Spelman Seminary (eventually Spelman College), founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary; the Methodist school in Greensboro, North Carolina, founded in 1873 by Albion Tourgee, which became Bennett College. Serious higher education for Southern white women was scarce, but among blacks, determination to give girls an education equipped a generation of African-American girls to take up service to the race. The trajectory of Mary McLeod (later Bethune) illustrates the dramatic consequences for the lucky. Fifteenth of seventeen children from a family of former slaves in South Carolina, McLeod would have ended up a tenant farmer were it not for her iron-willed Christian mother and her education, first at a local mission school and then at a Presbyterian female seminary. She became a leading educator, college president, and, in 1924, president of the National Association of Colored Women.74

  Most white college graduates married and took up the life of middle-class matrons. But the skills learned in college and the momentary independence gained living away from home led them to look at public life as rightfully theirs. In the next two decades, these were the women whose efforts helped carry forward the Progressive movement, as well as innumerable literary and music clubs, self-improvement societies, art museums, symphony halls, parks, and public health campaigns. Cracks in the professions slightly widened. Increasing numbers of women graduated from law schools: Belva Lockwood was one and Phoebe Couzins another. Couzins, the first woman to be admitted to law school at Washington University, was a co-strategizer with the Minors on the New Departure. For black women, race prejudice narrowed the openings into the professions even more than the straitened access Northern white women had, but nonetheless a tiny cohort of African-American lawyers and doctors won professional accreditation. Charlotte Ray, for instance, was admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar a year before Lockwood; the former abolitionist Mary Ann Shadd Cary was at Howard University Law School along with Ray; Rebecca Lee graduated from a women’s medical college in Boston in 1864 and practiced in the city; Rebecca Cole was a doctor who worked in Elizabeth Blackwell’s infirmary in New York.

  By 1887, there were enough female attorneys nationwide—about 250 in the 1890 census—to form a correspondence club for mutual support. In letters, members debated issues such as whether a woman should wear a hat in court. It was a problem, since propriety required it (only prostitutes left their heads uncovered in public), but on the other hand, attorneys had to remove their hats before judges. So seldom did women attorneys appear in court, though, that the point was still unresolved in 1961, when Raya Dreben worried about whether to wear a hat when she argued before the Supreme Court in Hoyt v. Florida. More to the point, there was disagreement about whether women should go into court at all, but instead limit themselves to working in law offices (courtrooms being another rough-and-tumble masculine venue that women entered at their peril). Charlotte Ray, for example, practiced real estate law, a common tack for those unwilling to face the open derision and prejudice they would assuredly encounter in courtrooms.75

  The faith in willed equality that wells up in volatile periods also comes to women who gather at a threshold, waiting and waiting for a door that has cracked open to swing all the way. In the correspondence club, the attorneys’ tone was jolly and strenuously confident that hard work and merit would banish the intransigent opposition that was everywhere evident. “My experience thus far is but limited,” conceded a new member recently admitted to the D.C. bar. But things were going well. “One, by one, the doors are thrown open, very wide to woman; and, I am fully convinced, that the time is at hand, when woman’s ability to fill the chair, of professor of Law, in our colleges, sit beside her brother … and even grace the ‘White House’ in our city, as the nation’s choice and its Chief Executive,” she wrote with determined optimism in 1887, three years after Belva Lockwood ran for president.76

  Women entered medical school in better circumstances than had Elizabeth Blackwell, the first to try in 1847, who could not study anatomy at Geneva College in upstate New York because it was thought immoral for her to look at a cadaver. Interest in women’s health spread through the women’s movement, leading several wealthy women to endow a half-dozen women’s medical colleges, which in turn made medical education that much more plausible. When Jane Addams graduated from college in 1882, trying a career in medicine was respectable enough that even her highly conventional stepmother tolerated her enrolling in the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. In 1881, 115 women were members of state medical societies; the number climbed over the next twenty years to more than 7,000 in 1900, 5.6 percent of the total.77

  Educated women—purposeful, hardworking, and ethically committed—could begin to conceive of themselves as inhabiting a story their sex was only beginning to write, in which the female protagonist made a life of meaning and purpose that did not depend on having a husband and children.

  These were accomplishments in which feminists could take pleasure, solid gains from forty years of activity. Yet at the same time, the deepening conservatism of the times shot through the women’s movement. For Stanton and Anthony, the work could be drab. They both lectured and traveled incessantly: thousands of miles of train trips around the Midwest and far West, out to the Pacific coast, hundreds of miles in wagons and carriages over (as they described their journeys) awful roads, dreadful roads, long, terrifying, and horrible roads. Separately and together, they worked the circuit, sometimes speaking to crowds, more often to knots of the faithful, and sleeping in supporters’ houses, fleabag hotels, and on trains. In the 1880s, they pulled back from lecturing and embarked on more gratifying trips: Stanton on jaunts to visit the two children who had settled in Europe, Anthony following her, to converse with reformers and women’s rights leaders in Britain and France.

  But while they traveled to new places and attracted converts, the work was tiresomely similar from year to year: lectures, more lectures, meetings and conferences, more meetings, pointless machinations to move the women’s suffrage amendment along in Congress. Stanton, who saw herself as a reader and writer, not an organizer, complained about boredom as early as 1873. She was so weary of conventions, she wrote Martha Wright, the old friend who had been with her since Seneca Falls, that “I feel as if I would rather go to Heaven this spring than attend another.… Two days full of speaking & resolving & dreading lest some one should make a fool of us all, rehearsing the same old arguments in the same old way, must this be endured to the end of our slavery?” That was 1873; by 1889, writing to another friend, she really meant it. She was “sick of all organizations.… Once out of my present post in the suffrage movement I am a free lance to do and say what I choose and shock people as much as I please.”78

  One wonders if this woman, who spent heady years in the middle of the movement that both invented women’s rights in America and ended slavery, was fretting at the limits of not only the issue but the co-wor
kers. Although her long friendship with Susan B. Anthony, a restrained woman who put a premium on the steady virtues, was essential to her life’s work, she had always thrived on rubbing up against other powerful political personalities: her husband, Henry, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, George Train, Wendell Phillips, Victoria Woodhull. These were high-stakes schemers, bold strategists, and fascinating outsiders. The suffrage movement lacked such people, precisely because it was so far from the institutions where powerful people—men—operated.

  The Northern movement’s estrangement from Reconstruction politics, coupled with the collapse of the New Departure and the rise of disenfranchisement measures, rendered militant suffragism politically insignificant by 1880. Although the two postwar suffrage organizations continued, they were eclipsed by the women’s temperance movement, the most important sponsor of votes for women in the Gilded Age. The political landscape was so barren that in large parts of the country, temperance was the main vehicle for women’s rights; in some places it was the only one. Promoting an ideology of maternalism and female moral superiority, temperance won great numbers to the cause even as it laid down a conservative basis for the vote.

  The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), formed in 1874, quickly became the premier women’s organization in the United States, assuming a place at the center of unenfranchised women’s civil society that it did not lose until after World War I. In league with its sister organization, the British Women’s Temperance Association, the WCTU had an international impact as well. It spread its message of abstinence from alcohol and “social purity”—reformed sexual behavior—through Protestant missions and British colonists. By 1891, when a World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union formed, Americans were in touch with reformers in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Japan, and India.79

  The WCTU usually drops out of histories of feminism, since few writers like to remember feminism as a movement of teetotalers and prudes. Temperance as ideology, however, was more than a passing chapter in feminism, and it’s impossible to understand subsequent developments in feminist history without it. In the United States, the temperance crusade dominated the suffrage movement for a good twenty years, driving it into a period of political paralysis. More important, temperance injected a strain of conservatism into the tradition that, while latent for most of the twentieth century, episodically resurfaced, sometimes in the most unlikely radical settings. When we come upon images of lustful male predators, hapless women who are unable to escape their clutches, and wise, powerful women who by dint of their superior understanding can rescue them, there is the historic legacy of temperance.

  The temperance movement dates back to the 1820s. It always had an affinity for women’s rights, since the campaign against alcohol addressed by its very nature a prevalent form of male irresponsibility and violence. Susan B. Anthony started out her career in the 1850s in the New York state temperance association, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton pulled off some of her earliest maneuvers there. After the Civil War, temperance gained ground with white and black women in the South; and in the West, it followed Anglo settlers to sparsely settled states where male drinking was endemic. Frances Willard took over the WCTU presidency in 1879 and transformed what had been a federation of shrill bands, breaking into saloons and smashing bars, into a well-behaved, streamlined mass organization.

  Willard was an organizational genius with a catholic view of women’s politics. A happily unmarried woman herself (she lived most of her adult life with first one woman friend in a “Boston marriage” and then another), she developed a strategy for power that depended on marriage and motherhood. For her, the crusade against alcohol was an instrument to protect women and children from unrestrained male power. The WCTU tapped an evangelical faith in women’s moral suasion and amplified it into a brief for their superiority. The emotional lure was the hope of converting unregenerate men, and the instrument of salvation was Christian marriage. Ushered in by a helpful woman, Jesus would enter the heart of the drinking man and take the family into “the next wider circle” of grace.80

  At its height, the WCTU put forth an ambitious agenda, striving for a Christian feminism that was socially efficacious. A “Do Everything” policy stretched female benevolent ambitions as far as they could go. The WCTU woman was a doer as well as a gentle exemplar. The program of reform incorporated several score “departments.” In 1889 in Chicago, the national headquarters, the WCTU sponsored two day nurseries, two Sunday schools, a vocational training school, a shelter for homeless women, a free medical clinic, a cheap lodging house for men, and a low-cost restaurant. Membership increased fivefold under Willard; in 1890 there were 150,000 dues-paying members, with an additional 28,000 young women signed on to a youth auxiliary and 135,000 children in the children’s club. In 1886, six full-time, paid WCTU organizers traveled the country and there were chapters in more than half the nation’s counties.81 Neither the NWSA or the AWSA came close to these numbers.

  The WCTU was the first—and for many years, the only—organization outside the two suffrage associations to endorse votes for women. Willard pushed through the first resolution in 1880, against great opposition, and over the years brought her membership along with sweet reasonableness and her message that the ballot would ensure “home protection.” With a dense network that incorporated small Midwestern towns, the Western backcountry, and the rural South, the WCTU in the 1880s and ’90s provided troops on the ground for state suffrage campaigns (although on the downside, it also linked votes for women to the prospect of prohibition, so that every year the brewers and saloon owners came out in force to defeat them). In the South, temperance was one of the few public forums open to black women as white supremacy strengthened its grip. Long popular among Northern blacks, temperance work was a means for community uplift, a showcase for middle-class black womanhood, and the sole model of biracial Christian cooperation, albeit cooperation as determined by white women’s racism. As for Southern white women, temperance was the one entrée into a political culture that held that female political involvement was a Yankee monstrosity.82

  In a conservative era, temperance softened and domesticated women’s suffrage by ladening the issue with religiosity and maternal moralism. It was not because of women’s natural rights but because of their motherly virtues that they deserved political rights. The pitch was in the short run persuasive. Temperance platforms in third-party campaigns and state referenda on prohibition drew home-abiding women into activity they would otherwise have shrunk from as a masculine domain, and made voting seem like it could be a Christian duty. The WCTU made suffrage safe. Vivian Gornick captures the change: “An intelligent, good-looking woman of the middle classes who worked for the vote no longer had to fear the stigma of caricature. She could now be experienced as lovely even if strong-minded, her work in the movement posing no real threat to her primary duties in society.”83

  To improve women’s situation, the WCTU turned away from goals like coeducation, integrating the professions, and undoing coverture. Instead it concentrated on changing men, the source of women’s problems, by bringing them to Christ—which meant bringing them around to respect and honor women. As things stood, men were free to wreak havoc on family finances and female bodies, and a licentious culture grotesquely enhanced their ability to damage women and children. Shutting down the liquor trade was the first step, but the vision of a world purified of male vice was more comprehensive. The WCTU aimed to end prostitution, which went hand in glove with saloons; to rescue and reform the degraded women who were its victims; to abolish the “white slave trade”—later generations would call it trafficking in women—which ensnared innocent girls; to eradicate venereal disease by inspiring men to pledge themselves to “social purity,” that is, celibacy before marriage and sexual fidelity in marriage; and to abolish the male vices of tobacco and gambling.84

  Yet despite all this, the WCTU refrained from directly challenging male authority, in the family or anywhere else. “W
illard did not condemn the sexual contract; she aimed to salvage it,” writes Suzanne Marilley, the WCTU’s most astute historian. Temperance was “not an organized protest against the married relation,” Clara Parrish, a WCTU organizer in Japan in 1896–98, assured her home audience. “Instead of being organized to make women dissatisfied with the home, it is calculated to make them far better mothers.” Wives would improve men by virtue of their shining example and the gospel truth, thereby leading them to a more equitable partnership. On family finances, for instance, the WCTU preached that a woman was due a fair share of the male wage: “It is her income as well as yours,” the organization instructed husbands straight-out. “To dole out money grudgingly to your wife is more than ungenerous, it is unjust.” But the leadership did not address the question of women’s miserable wages, or what happened in cases of divorce or separation.85