The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The contradiction lay in the simultaneous commitment to conventional marriage and scorn for male depravity. The WCTU managed to reconcile the incompatible views by projecting the loathsome qualities it attributed to the male sex onto working-class, black, and immigrant men, as well as men of the dark-skinned races of Asia and Africa. Middle-class men were more likely to be seen as “brother-hearted” allies, partners in a middle-class Christian elite that would rescue vulnerable women from the depraved tyrants who held them in thrall. In other words, mothers and fathers were to collaborate in a Christian enterprise that was also a class and imperial mission.86

  Frances Willard understood how potent were women’s fears of men’s power. She calculated correctly that political mobilization could flip that fear into anger, self-righteousness, and Christian bellicosity, a conviction of moral superiority that would shore up an otherwise timid public persona. Despite their own powerlessness, women could imagine themselves through temperance ideology as powerful mothers saving working-class daughters and younger sisters—ignorant, gullible, and frightened—from drunken, dangerous, dirty, diseased men: brutes in lumber camps, Negro pimps, Chinese procurers in red-light districts.

  The problem with this politics of redeemed women and unredeemed men was that it could be adapted so easily to antidemocratic uses. In the American South, the contradictions of temperance were extreme. Even as black women gravitated to the WCTU, white temperance workers were among those who whipped up fears of a supposed legion of black rapists roaming the countryside threatening to rape and murder (white) women on the farms. The temperance watchword of “home protection” thus helped to legitimate a reign of terror against African-Americans in the 1890s, when lynchings reached an all-time high. Mob violence, too, could be an instrument of home protection.87

  The politics of female protection and rescue proved to be hardy and adaptable. Surveying the globe, temperance activists depicted girls and women as victims of male despotism and savage custom. WCTU chapters cropped up among British women in outposts of the empire (especially India and South Africa) and American women in the Pacific islands and (after the Spanish-American War) the Philippines. Temperance women stressed the power and respect that Christian nations supposedly gave them, contrasting it to the oppressions of their sisters in foreign lands, itemizing atrocities that colonized men inflicted on hapless women: the harem, daughter selling, female infanticide, and bound feet. Women thus conceived of themselves as soldiers in the battle for civilization, especially trained to spot the female victims of barbarism.

  By 1890, Gilded Age conservatism saturated women’s politics. Christian redemption replaced the Constitution as the centerpiece of the suffrage campaign.88 The suffrage movement did, unquestionably, incorporate a broader spectrum of opinion than it did before the Civil War. Such is the definition of coalition, but such is also the stuff of frustration for intellectuals. Elizabeth Cady Stanton never tangled with Frances Willard, but she was allergic to the sentimentality and idealizations of femininity that emanated from the WCTU.

  The adoption of motherhood as the central value of the women’s movement also precluded the discussion of marriage and divorce Stanton had carried on in The Revolution. Temperance ideology promised women power through shaming men, disciplining them within marriage rather than changing marriage itself. The difference in emphasis marks the distance between, on the one hand, a conservative stance that quietly maligned men even as it preserved the legal and economic bases of their privilege, and, on the other, a viewpoint that retained the hope for a better future that the sexes could share. No one was more aggressive than Stanton in attacking men for the injuries they inflicted, but her hatred was of male domination as it congealed in institutions, not of male character. Women were no better than men, she insisted at her most forthright and honest: “The talk about women being so much above men, celestial, ethereal, and all that, is sentimental nonsense.” While she fulminated against “white males” and men in general, her touchstone remained faith in a common life. Men and women enriched one another, she believed. “The real woman is not up in the clouds nor among the stars, but down here upon earth by the side of man. She is on the same material plane with man, striving and working to support herself.” One feels in these passages the presence of Stanton the mother of sons as well as daughters, Stanton the friend of men as well as women—and even, perhaps, Stanton the disaffected, distant but still-affectionate spouse, after thirty-five years of marriage.89

  Stymied on the political front, Stanton turned to the deeper sources of resistance to women’s freedom, engaging criticisms of organized religion that had compelled her decades earlier when the Garrisonians had attacked the churches for their equivocation on slavery. The free thought movement, a loose intellectual network of agnostics and atheists, intensified her interest in organized religion as a font of tyranny. At NWSA conventions, she ruffled feathers by introducing resolutions condemning the church as an institution that taught that woman was an afterthought in creation, marriage was a condition of subordination, maternity was a curse, and that to be Christians, women must remain silent before male ecclesiastical authority.90 The movement she had helped to found, however, had little use for her probing thoughts.

  The politics of the mothers tapped middle-class desires for more egalitarian families and drew middle-of-the-road women into the once-fearsome issue of suffrage. Political motherliness promised an accommodation with marriage and the prospect that still-covered but enfranchised citizens could nonetheless improve their marriages, thereby protecting their social interests. The problem was that the approach shunted women back into a structure of male governance that remained intact. An awareness of women’s real vulnerabilities and the importance of exposing men’s power in its most dangerous and secretive manifestations were legacies of this strain. But so was a sensibility of women’s power that was soaked in self-righteousness, race and class superiority, and fantasies of rescuing other women.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE POLITICS OF THE MOTHERS

  CRISES RACKED America in the 1890s: labor battles, the Panic of 1893, massive unemployment, racial violence in the South, the Spanish-American War. Yet to read through reports from women’s organizations is to paddle in the mental backwaters. The America that was represented in their pages was a fundamentally calm place, steadily advancing into a better future by virtue of the wives and mothers who were busily improving their communities and gently prodding the recalcitrant toward the path of right living, even as they pressed politely for the vote. The approach to power is cautious and accommodating, advertising an acceptance of women’s dependent position in the family.1

  The ideology of separate spheres and female virtue allowed suffragism to survive in a conservative time. But it was also a liability. By 1900, opponents were turning it against them, charging that their ladylike incursions into the public sphere were in truth unwomanly. If suffragists took stock, they saw a political impasse. But few took stock.2

  In 1890, the two rival American suffrage organizations (Stanton and Anthony’s NWSA and the Boston-based AWSA) merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Unification augured well for the combined forces, but it turned out instead to mean a softened tone and diminished goals. Elizabeth Stanton was elected president—although she was titular head, put forward because of Susan B. Anthony’s insistence, having already alienated conservative women with her combative ideas. Two years later Anthony, much more popular and assimilable, took over; she headed the association until 1900. Meanwhile, the democratic meanings of the vote steadily contracted.

  NAWSA did profit sporadically from the old sterling currency of genderless natural rights. That view was identified with Stanton, who articulated the principles with lofty certainty in a magnificent final speech when she left the presidency in 1892. “The Solitude of Self” distilled Stanton’s lifetime of work trying to pry women loose from family encumbrances so they could stand as liberal individuals. The
intimate relations of the family, avowed Stanton (who was now seventy-seven), were precious but nonetheless incidental to the real business of life. Women’s purpose was, like men’s, to do the largest work of which they were capable.

  The speech is both a majestic summation of nineteenth-century liberal feminism and a charter that heralds the modern era. Beginning with a classic liberal trope of autonomy, Stanton posed her exemplary woman as Robinson Crusoe, responsible for her own fate. The stoic tone evoked the lonely soul, not the social contract. Stanton contended that individual integrity of purpose was the most important requisite to give meaning to any individual’s life, since God, if present at all, was distant from the turmoil of any one human being.

  The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear—is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.

  Women no less than men endured tragic losses; the solitude of old age; the terrors of mortality. They must be equipped with sources of enduring meaning in order to bear these vicissitudes.3

  The speech is all the more moving if we think of Stanton as a person who became an adult in a culture that pictured her sex as tendrils twining around the sturdy oak of male authority. Now, at the end of the century, she depicted them as erect and commanding. “No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so,” avowed Stanton, “they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.” With metaphors of masculine hardihood and action—captain, pilot, engineer, soldier—she recurred to the need to chart one’s course. “It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman.” Both must be equipped for the journey. And that equipment must include citizenship, for in the endeavor of self-realization humans, however lonely, require one another and can work together for the common good. It is the fullest statement of American feminism in the nineteenth century as well as a profound description of the psychological responsibility that democracy entails. With Stanton making women the captains of their ships, it is good to remember that long before, Margaret Fuller had urged, “let them be sea-captains.” Perhaps Stanton remembered, too.

  Stanton was not alone; like-minded suffragists clustered around her: NWSA co-worker Matilda Joslyn Gage, newspaper editor Clara Bewick Colby, novelist Helen Gardener, and others. But they fought a losing battle in NAWSA. Stanton’s 1895 publication of The Woman’s Bible, an astringent critique that came out of her freethinking investigations, appalled members with its castigation of Christianity for its mistreatment of women. They rose en masse at the 1896 convention to pass a resolution tantamount to censure over Anthony’s pained objections.

  Living in conservative times for which she was ill-fitted, Stanton “swung like a pendulum through the decade,” historian Ann Gordon concludes, “hopeful and infuriated, expansive about rights and narrowly class centered.” The road ahead was not to open in her lifetime, yet melancholy was not a state she entertained. She was doing the planting, she reasoned; others would bring in the harvest. Of that she was sure. After 1895, she returned to her family and writing, publishing in national magazines and producing her memoir Eighty Years and More (1898) and the second installment of The Woman’s Bible (1898), just as much a “hornet’s nest” as the first. She died in her sleep in 1902, having just written President Theodore Roosevelt urging him to support suffrage.4 Susan Anthony died four years later.

  By 1900, suffragists trucked almost exclusively in women’s special traits as the basis for the claim to voting. Women were so different from men—superior, really—that they had a special role to play in politics. “It is because a woman loves her home that she wants her country to be pure and holy, so that she may not lose her children when they go out from her protection. We want to be women, womanly women, stamping the womanliness of our nature upon the country,” declared Reverend Ida C. Hultin at the 1897 convention. Disenfranchisement was thus not a denial of rights but rather an insult to maternal authority.5

  Ideas of mothers’ preeminence gained strength from the pseudoscientific theories of human evolution developed in tandem with Darwin’s science by Herbert Spencer and his American followers. Suffragists turned Spencer’s thought to their purposes, giving the virtues of Protestant domesticity a pseudoscientific gloss. Social Darwinism adapted domestic womanhood to an aggressive racial ideology, a cluster of ideas and assumptions that purported to explain away human conflict and inequality as inevitable results of the triumph of the fittest. Humans were first and foremost members of separate races—Africans, Slavs, Orientals, Celts, Caucasians, and so on—each with distinct moral, intellectual, and physical traits. These differences placed groups on respective rungs of an evolutionary ladder: lower, higher, more primitive, or more civilized, with Anglo-Saxons at the top.6

  There were different schools of thought about where women stood on the evolutionary scale. Hard-line Spencerians assumed that men’s dominance in education, politics, war, and intellectual life showed their superiority, and that women’s childbearing was an animal function that mired them in the primitive depths of humanity. But women’s advocates squeezed out an optimistic reading that put women at the top of their respective races. Traits were mutable. Highly evolved Christian women transmitting their desirable traits to their offspring hauled everyone a rung or two up the ladder. Women from all the races—the lowly Africans, the weird Chinese, the vulgar Italians, the suspicious Jews—thus helped the civilizing mission.

  In the 1890s, a generation of black suffragists came to national prominence, ushered in by uplift ideology and a pragmatic attitude toward white women reformers. They saw themselves as race women but at the same time they posited black women’s separate position in African-American life, at a distance from men. With very sparse resources to work with, they found political traction in the maternal enterprise of uplift, refitted from evolutionist premises.

  Although the voting rights of African-American men had been under attack since Reconstruction, black men voted and exercised limited political power in many Southern locales through the 1880s. In 1890, Mississippi set out to rectify the situation with a sweeping program to push blacks out of politics altogether, using poll taxes and residency and literacy requirements. The other states of the former Confederacy followed. There was initial anxiety among Southern elites about whether Jim Crow laws would stand up in federal courts, but the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) gave constitutional legitimacy to segregation. The 1890s came to be known as the “nadir” of African-American history.

  At that moment, a book heralded the women’s advent in national affairs. In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper, a Washington, D.C., educator and classics scholar educated at Oberlin, published A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, a searching meditation on race relations, women’s power, and black America. In a period when hard-pressed African-Americans put a high premium on race solidarity and male leadership, Cooper’s suggestion that women bore a double burden of race and sex broke new ground. Cooper was the first to sound the theme of black women’s unique position in America. “To be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the ages.” Written at a bleak time for blacks and composed in a segregated city, Cooper’s book is suffused with a striking sense of promise. “The race is young and full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth. All its achievements are before it.”7

  Pitched as prophecy and program, A Voice from the South revived the antebellum idea of women’s epochal importance. “We are living in what may be called, a woman’s age,” declared Fannie Barrier Williams, a Chicag
o leader who echoed Cooper in a landmark speech on black women at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. “The old notion that woman was intended by the Almighty to do only those things that men thought they ought to do, is fast passing away.” Williams’s words had a lyrical turn, picking up on Cooper’s view that the very neglect of black women, their exclusion from sentimental idealizations and codes of chivalry, made them the newest of New Women. “The Negro woman is really the new woman of the times, and in possibilities the most interesting woman in America,” Williams maintained with élan. “She is the only woman whose career lies wholly in front of her.” The affirmation at once looked back to Maria Stewart and forward, to Toni Morrison’s reflections many years later about the existential solitude that was the ordinary black woman’s lot: “And she had nothing to fall back on; not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she may very well have invented herself,” Morrison wrote in 1971. The black woman would be the new century’s heroine, making herself up as she went along.8

  Cooper’s emphasis on the singular character of a rising generation of women was related to a fascination with modern life and the changes it wrought in human character—an interest that rose among Americans in the 1890s, with the year 1900 anticipated as a historical caesura. Cooper’s “new woman of the times” played off of the iconic “New Woman” who cropped up in Anglo-American popular culture in the decade. Ubiquitous in journalism, theater, novels, and magazine illustrations, New Woman imagery both absorbed changes in female education, work, and consciousness and heightened their meaning to individuals who embraced them. The New Woman type was single and uninterested in marrying; she was civically engaged, college educated, idealistic, and often professionally trained. Female physicians and lawyers were deemed New, as were artists, actresses, journalists, and settlement house workers—or any woman, for that matter, trying to make a go of it in service to the higher truths of Art, or Revolution, or Service to the Poor. The New Woman gestured toward a different life course—detractors said she was foolish, enthusiasts thought her marvelous. She saw herself as the heroine of a story (the details were vague) that would break with the paradigmatic marriage plot—inscribed in culture and art in a million ways—in which the woman’s destiny unfolded through the twists and turns of courtship and romance and ended either happily-ever-after in marriage or tragically in death, despair, or shame.