The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  CHAPTER ONE: WILD WISHES

  1. “The Waggoner’s Lad” (trad.), as performed on Debra Cowan, Acie Cargill, Susan Brown, with Kristina Olsen and Ellen and John Wright, The Songs and Ballads of Hattie Mae Tyler Cargill (Folk-Legacy Records, 2001); Anna Bijns, “Unyoked Is Best! Happy the Woman Without a Man,” in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, Ga., 1987), p. 382.

  2. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975), p. 145.

  3. Ibid., pp. 124–51.

  4. Blackstone’s commentaries on marriage can be found at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch15.asp.

  5. On Poullain de la Barre, see Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, Calif., 2000), p. 34; Astell, Reflections upon Marriage (1706), reprinted in The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell, ed. Bridget Hill (New York, 1986), p. 76; Offen, “How and Why the Analogy of Marriage with Slavery Provided the Springboard for Women’s Rights Demands in France, 1640–1848,” in Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Stewart (New Haven, Conn. 2007), pp. 57–81.

  6. This is the argument of Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), chapter 1.

  7. Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philip (New York, 1995), pp. 29, 194. The argument about parricide was made by Winthrop D. Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History 60 (September 1973), pp. 294–308; see also Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972), pp. 167–308; Hunt, The Family Romance, p. xiv.

  8. Linda Kerber, “ ‘I Have Don … Much to Carrey on the Warr’: Women and the Shaping of Republican Ideology After the Revolution,” in Women and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution, ed. Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993), pp. 250–51.

  9. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), passim; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980; New York, 1986), p. 28 and chapter 1 in general.

  10. Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York, 2004); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980).

  11. Rachel Wells’s petition is reprinted in full in Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart, Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 4th ed. (New York, 1995), p. 89. Kerber discusses the petition in Women of the Republic, p. 87.

  12. On women’s speech and writing in France, see Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, N.J., 2001), chapter 1. For contrast, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 74; also Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution,” in Women and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution, ed. Applewhite and Levy, pp. 181–226.

  13. In a speech opposing the Stamp Act, Otis momentarily wandered into the far reaches of radical republican logic as he worked out who, exactly, had to consent in order for a government to be legitimate. Otis queried—one gets a sense that he got carried away by his hypotheticals—why it was that apple women and orange girls, i.e., poor street sellers, had not “a natural and equitable right to be consulted in the choice of a new King or in the formation of a new original compact or government.” Otis, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved” (1764), reprinted in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–66, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 420–21.

  14. Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, p. 11.

  15. Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776, Papers of John Adams, vol. 4., ed. Robert J. Taylor (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 210.

  16. Abigail Adams to Isaac Smith Jr., April 20, 1771, The Adams Papers, Series II: Adams Family Correspondence, vol. l, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 76.

  17. Abigail to John Adams, March 31, 1776, ibid., p. 370.

  18. Reva Siegel, “ ‘The Rule of Love’: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy,” Yale Law Journal 105 (June 1996), pp. 2121–24.

  19. For a brisk summary on the relations of the common law to familial authority, see Siegel, “She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family,” Harvard Law Review 115 (February 2002), pp. 980–81.

  20. John to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776, Adams Papers, ser. 2, vol. 1, p. 382.

  21. Adams to Sullivan, May 26, 1776, Papers of John Adams, pp. 208–9.

  22. Ibid., p. 211.

  23. Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, April 27, 1776, Adams Papers, ser. 2, vol. 1, pp. 397–98. Warren’s father was James Otis, he who asked ten years earlier why poor women street sellers could not vote; by this time he was confined to a lunatic asylum.

  24. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York, 1998), p. 8.

  25. Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), p. 23; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 48–49.

  26. Ibid., pp. 16–17.

  27. The exception was New Jersey, where women with the same qualifications as enfranchised men voted (that is, single women and widows with property, since married women could by definition own none). But this ended in 1807. See Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York, 1991), pp. 98–103; Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 33.

  28. Adams to Sullivan, Adams Papers, p. 210.

  29. Kerber, Women of the Republic, chapter 7.

  30. “Introduction,” Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880, ed. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (Stanford, Calif., 1983), pp. 13–19.

  31. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), pp. 16–38, 58 (on the salons and Journal des Dames); Kerber, Women of the Republic, pp. 18–39 (on Enlightenment writers and the differences between the French and the British). On women and the French Revolution, see also Bonnie G. Smith’s interpretation in Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (Lexington, Mass., 1989); Karen Offen’s in European Feminisms; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795, ed. Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson (Urbana, Ill., 1980) is a collection of documents.

  32. Dominique Godineau, “Daughters of Liberty and Revolutionary Citizens,” in A History of Women in the West, volume 4, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, ed. Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), p. 24; Gary Kates, “ ‘The Powers of Husband and Wife Must Be Equal and Separate’: The Cercle Social and the Rights of Women,” in Women and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution, ed. Applewhite and Levy, p. 167.

  33. Condorcet, “Sur l’Admission des femmes au droit de cité,” reprinted in translation in Women, the Family, and Freedom, ed. Bell and Offen, p. 97.

  34. Gouges, “The Rights of Woman,” reprinted in Women in Revolutionary Paris, ed. Levy, Applewhite, and Johnson, pp. 89–96.

  35. Scott, Only Paradoxes, p. 42.

  36. Louis-Marie Prudhomme, in Offen, European Feminisms, p. 63; Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, pp. 116–17.

  37. Among passive citizens were women, men under twenty-five years, domestic servants, convicted felons, bankrupts, and those men who did not pay direct taxes equivalent to three days’ local wages. Effectively this meant that about one third of adult males were excluded from active citizenship. Literacy was not a qualifi
cation. Eventually Jewish men were admitted to full citizenship, provided they met the other qualifications. Free blacks of color in the colonies were also relegated to passive citizenship, although there was back-and-forth on the issue until the abolition of slavery in 1794.

  38. Smith, Changing Lives, p. 110.

  39. Arianne Jessica Chernock, “Champions of the Fair Sex: Men and the Creation of Modern British Feminism, 1788–1800” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2004), pp. 31, 34–35.

  40. Wollstonecraft, in Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York, 2000), pp. 35, 124.

  41. Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York, 2005), pp. 130–32, 144.

  42. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, chapter 2, p. 86.

  43. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (1792; New York, 1988), pp. 19, 34.

  44. Ibid., p. 34.

  45. Ibid., p. 175.

  46. Ibid., p. 41.

  47. See Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 15–21, for more analysis of Wollstonecraft’s misogyny; Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 19, 192.

  48. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 150, 35; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 17.

  49. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 77.

  50. Ibid., p. 57.

  51. Imagining a young woman writer starting out, Woolf envisions “the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues going at her shouting their warnings and advice. ‘You can’t do this and you shan’t do that!’… So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or left. If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh. Hesitate or fumble and you are done for. Think only of the jump, I implored her.…” Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929; New York, 1957), p. 97.

  52. Wollstonecraft, in Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 332.

  53. Godwin and Wollstonecraft, in ibid., pp. 438–39.

  54. Burke, Walpole, in Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1983), pp. 11, 14.

  55. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 59–60; Margaret McFadden, “Anna Doyle Wheeler (1785–1848): Philosopher, Socialist, Feminist,” Hypatia 4 (Spring 1989), pp. 91–101.

  56. Clarence Cook, A Girl’s Life Eighty Years Ago: Letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne (New York, 1882), pp. 61–62. Southgate’s letter is reprinted in Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott et al. (1972; Boston, 1996), pp. 101–2.

  57. Excerpts from the Vindication were widely reprinted in the United States, along with two American editions; the ideas circulated widely. Clare A. Lyons makes the case for Philadelphia and summarizes the scholarship in Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), pp. 242–43.

  58. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Other Writings, ed. Donna Dickenson (New York, 1994), p. 46; Woolf, The Common Reader, 2nd ser., “Mary Wollstonecraft” (1925; New York, 1932), p. 163. See also Elaine Showalter, Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (New York, 2001). Showalter traces the thread of Wollstonecraft as exemplar and inspiration.

  59. In Cook, A Girl’s Life, pp. 61–62.

  60. Barbara Taylor, “Mother-Haters and Other Rebels,” London Review of Books, January 3, 2002, p. 3.

  CHAPTER TWO: BROTHERS AND SISTERS

  1. Grimké, “Letters to Catharine Beecher,” The Liberator (Boston), October 13, 1837.

  2. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), p. 495.

  3. Signatories to Constitution of the PFASS, December 14, 1833, Minute Books, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. For information on the female societies see Blanche Glassman Hersh, Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in America (Urbana, Ill., 1978); Shirley Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1992); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), chapters 13–14; Deborah Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst, Mass., 1993); Nancy A. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984); Carolyn Williams, “The Female Anti-Slavery Movement: Fighting Against Color Prejudice and Promoting Women’s Rights in Antebellum America,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 2000). On the Massachusetts industrial towns, see Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (New York, 2005), chapter 1.

  4. American Anti Slavery Society, “Petition Form for Women” (1834), Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké 1822–1844, vol. 1, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (New York, 1970), pp. 175–76.

  5. See Elizabeth Heyrick on abolitionist women’s sympathies, in Claire Midgeley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London, 1992), p. 94 and passim for the trajectory of the British women in relation to the male-dominated movement.

  6. Pugh, in ibid., p. 161.

  7. Chandos Michael Brown, “Mary Wollstonecraft, or, the Female Illuminati: The Campaign Against Women and ‘Modern Philosophy’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Fall 1995), pp. 389–424.

  8. What is known about Stewart comes primarily from the prefatory letters and her own introduction to her last publication, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (Widow of the Late James W. Stewart) (Washington, D.C., 1879). The reference to the girl is in Alexander Crummell, prefatory letter, Meditations, p. 11. For a biographical sketch see Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), pp. xiii–xvii, 3–27.

  9. On Garrison and Stewart, see Garrison, prefatory letter, Meditations, p. 6, and Henry Mayer, All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998), pp. 119–20. “Loveliest of women” is from Louise C. Hatton, prefatory letter, Meditations, p. 8. The pamphlet is Stewart [Maria W. Steward], Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality: The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build (Boston, 1831), published by Garrison & Knapp.

  10. Maria W. Stewart, ed. Richardson, p. 38, refers to the African Meeting House. The First African Baptist Church is named in Stewart’s pamphlets published by Garrison & Knapp. “Pots and kettles” is in Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, p. 16.

  11. Catherine Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998), pp. 183–211; Louis Billington, “ ‘Female Laborers in the Church’: Women Preachers in the Northeastern United States, 1790–1840,” Journal of American Studies 19 (December 1985), pp. 369–94.

  12. Celia Morris Eckhardt, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 171, 186–87; “Mrs. Stewart’s Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston Delivered September 21, 1833,” Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart Presented to the First African Baptist Church & Society of the City of Boston (Boston, 1835), p. 82.

  13. Stewart, “Farewell Address,” Productions, p. 75; Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996), chapters 14, 18. Painter shows that it was Frances Dana Gage, an abolitionist, who invented from memory and attributed the phrase to Truth in 1863.

  14. Stewart, “Farewell Address,” Productions, p. 76.

  15. John Adams, Woman, Sketches of the History, Genius, Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs and Importance of the Fair Sex in All Parts of the World Interspersed with Many Singular and Entertaining Anecdotes by a Friend of the Sex (1790; Boston, 1807); Stewart, “Farewell Address,” Productions, pp. 75–78.
On Stewart’s use of the book, see Jennifer Rycenga, “A Greater Awakening: Women’s Intellect as a Factor in Early Abolitionist Movements, 1824–1834,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21 (Fall 2005), pp. 47–50.

  16. Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 1, The Private Years (New York, 1992), p. 106. Stewart did not publish again until after the Civil War. She left Boston for New York and joined the African-American female literary society there. She worked as a teacher in New York and Baltimore, and in 1863 moved to Washington, D.C., where she also taught school. She was an active Episcopalian in Washington, often tangling with a conservative pro-Southern white ministry. She led prayer meetings, by her account attracting many followers. In 1879 she was matron of the Freedman’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. This was when she reissued the Boston book with an autobiographical preface. See Crummell’s prefatory letter on the New York years and Stewart’s account of her post-Boston life, Meditations, pp. 13–23.

  17. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communication (New York, 2004), pp. 47–82.

  18. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London, 1986), pp. 64–66, 176–77, 263. See Joan Judge’s moving account of Chinese women reformers’ use of national motherhood in “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review (June 2001), pp. 765–803. The history of female education in France is an especially clear illustration of the fit with republicanism and the complications it engendered. See Karen Offen, “The Second Sex and the Baccalaureat in Republican France, 1880–1924,” French Historical Studies 13 (Fall 1983), pp. 252–86.