The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  19. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844; Oxford, U.K., 1994), p. 61; Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 2, The Public Years (New York, 2007), pp. 34, 116.

  20. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago, 1985), chapter 4; David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (Brighton, Sussex, U.K., 1986), chapter 11; Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth Century Europe (New York, 2005), p. 97.

  21. The remarks of President Lawrence Summers ignited a firestorm of controversy that eventually led to his resignation. See Robin Wilson, Paul Fain, and Piper Fogg, “The Power of Professors,” in Chronicle of Higher Education, March 3, 2006, pp. A10–A13; “Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women,” New York Times, January 18, 2005.

  22. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), chapter 5; pp. 69, 119.

  23. Angelina Grimké, Slavery and the Boston Riot [A Letter to Wm. L. Garrison] (Philadelphia, 1835). On the Grimkés, see Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (1967; New York, 1998); Mark Perry, Lift Up Thy Voice: The Grimké Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders (New York, 2001).

  24. Ryan P. Jordan, “Slavery and the Meetinghouse: Quakers, Abolitionists, and the Dilemma Between Liberty and Union, 1820–65” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2004), chapter 1.

  25. The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings 1835–1839, ed. Larry Ceplair (New York, 1989), p. 31.

  26. Grimkés to Sarah Douglass, February 22, 1837; to Weld, May 18, Letters, vol. 1, ed. Barnes and Dumond, pp. 363, 387. The proceedings of the meeting are reprinted in Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women … in New York City, May 9–12, 1837, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New York, 1987), p. 19.

  27. AG to Weld, Letters, vol. 1, ed. Barnes and Dumond, August 12, 1837, p. 414.

  28. AG, “Letters to Catharine Beecher,” Liberator, October 13, 1837; Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duties of American Females (Boston, 1837), pp. 101–2.

  29. AG to Jane Smith, July 25, 1837, The Public Years, ed. Ceplair, p. 117. The movement of abolitionist women into women’s rights sentiment has been well studied. See Hersh, Slavery of Sex; Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002); Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven, Conn., 2007), ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart; Yee, Black Women Abolitionists; Hansen, Strained Sisterhood; Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1989); The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagin Yellin and John Van Horne (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).

  There is a rich biographical and memoir literature, as well as republished materials, e.g., Linda L. Geary, Balanced in the Wind: A Biography of Betsey Mix Cowles (Lewisburg, Penn., 1989); Ira V. Brown, Mary Grew: Abolitionist and Feminist (Selinsgrove, Penn., 1991); Two Quaker Sisters … From the Original Diaries, ed. Elizabeth Buffum and Lucy Buffum Lovell (New York, 1937); Elizabeth Buffum Chace, ed. Lillie B. Wyman and Arthur Wyman (New York, 1914); Otelia Cromwell, Lucretia Mott (New York, 1958); Selected Letters of Lucretia Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Urbana, Ill., 2002); Sarah H. Southwick, Reminiscences of Old Slavery Days (privately printed, 1893). Laurie, Beyond Garrison, opens up new ways to look at women’s activities on the race question.

  Information on African-American female abolitionists is harder to come by. See Anne Bustill Smith, “The Bustill Family,” Journal of Negro History 10 (1925), pp. 638–44; Janice Sumler-Lewis, “The Forten-Purvis Women,” Journal of Negro History 66 (1981–82), pp. 282–88; Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite (Philadelphia, 1988) and A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (New York, 2002); Speak Out in Thunder Tones: Letters and Other Writings by Black Northerners, 1787–1865, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New York, 1973).

  30. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995), pp. 220–25. See also Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860, ed. and intro. by Drew Gilpin Faust (Baton Rouge, La., 1981), p. 119; Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), pp. 5–6.

  31. “Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Massachusetts (Orthodox) to the Churches Under Their Care,” reprinted in The Liberator, August 11, 1837, and more accessibly in Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism, ed. Aileen S. Kraditor (Chicago, 1968), pp. 50–52.

  32. His friends and intimates were all men, beginning with the cherished patron and friend Charles Stuart, who in 1832 paid for him to train for the ministry, and extending through the cadre of abolitionist brothers he worked with at Lane Seminary and then in the AASS. Barnes and Dumond summarize Weld’s biography and his relationship to Charles Stuart and the Lane rebels in their Introduction to Letters, pp. xix–xxiv.

  33. Weld to SG and AG, Aug. 26, 1837, Letters, vol. 1, ed. Barnes and Dumond, p. 433; SG and AG to Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, ibid., August 20, 1837, pp. 429–30.

  34. AG to Weld, in Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement, pp. 125–26.

  35. Ibid.

  36. AG to Jane Smith, August 10, 1837, in The Public Years, ed. Ceplair, pp. 133–34.

  37. An 1833 edition was published by A. J. Matsell in New York. Matsell was possibly a freethinker associated with Frances Wright’s earlier visit and the Workingmen’s Party. On Wright in New York City, see Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984; New York, 2004), pp. 176–83. On Mott’s copy see Cromwell, Lucretia Mott, pp. 28–29; the strike is recounted in Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York, 1982), p. 134.

  38. Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, ed. Elizabeth Ann Bartlett (1837; New Haven, Conn., 1988), p. 100.

  39. Ibid., p. 98.

  40. Ibid., p. 35.

  41. Biblical commentary is scattered throughout the text. For extended passages see ibid., Letters I and II (on the Fall), and Letters XIII–XV, which consider the problem of Paul, in The Feminist Thought of Sarah Grimké, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York, 1998).

  42. Right and Wrong in Boston: Report of the Boston Female Anti Slavery Society; with a Concise Statement of Events, Previous and Subsequent to the Annual Meeting of 1835 (Boston, 1836), p. 6.

  43. Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges, p. 40.

  44. In Colored American (New York) see “Ladies Beware,” May 18, 1839; “Thoughts on Miss S. M. Grimke’s ‘Duties of Woman,’ ” September 22, 1838; “Colored Females,” November 17, 1838; “Whisper to a Wife,” March 18, 1837; “Counsel for Ladies,” September 8, 1838; “Daughters,” September 25, 1841.

  The shift away from women’s rights in the female leadership—and in the next generation—is a question that has not been studied.

  45. Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York, 1969), chapter 3; Laurie, Beyond Garrison, pp. 35–40.

  46. The London meeting is famously described by Stanton in her autobiography, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; Boston, 1993), pp. 78–84; see also History of Woman Suffrage (hereafter HWS), vol. 1, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York, 1881), pp. 53–62. My revision of Stanton’s account, which is the accepted account, comes from Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York, 2009), pp. 34–41.

  Dramatic on-the-ground evidence of women’s
difficulties in the movement after the onset of violence in Philadelphia and growing animus in the AASS is in the Abby Kelley Foster Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Dorothy Sterling captures the tenor of the late 1830s and early 1840s in Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York, 1991).

  CHAPTER THREE: NEW MORAL WORLDS

  1. Brown to Stone, September 22, 1847, Friends and Sisters: Letters Between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846–93, ed. Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill (Urbana, Ill., 1987), p. 31. Another classmate was Sally Holley, who would never marry: See A Life for Liberty: Anti-Slavery and Other Letters of Sallie Holley, ed. John White (Chadwick, N.Y., 1899). Holley’s life is a particularly interesting example of one track of female abolitionism before and after the Civil War. More Stone-Blackwell correspondence is in Soul Mates: The Oberlin Correspondence of Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown 1846–1850, ed. Lasser and Merrill (Oberlin, Ohio, 1983). Both went on to marry; Stone left a stirring protest against coverture in the marriage agreement she drew up with her husband, Henry Blackwell. She did not take his name, a defiance of coverture that was almost unheard of. The agreement is reprinted in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York, 1972), pp. 103–5.

  2. Fourier, quoted in Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p. 29. For a recent treatment of Fourier, see D. Graham Burnett, “Contra Naturam,” Lapham’s Quarterly (Summer 2008), available at www.laphamsquarterly.org/magazine/book-of-nature.php. The standard intellectual biography is Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).

  3. Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century (Albany, N.Y., 1984), pp. 41–59, 61–87, 47–48. Bonnie Anderson sees Saint-Simonianism as influencing radicals outside France through the vogue for Fourier. Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830–1860 (New York, 2000), pp. 73–74.

  4. Owen, The Life of Robert Owen, Written by Himself (London, 1857), p. 349; in Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 39–40.

  5. J.F.C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York, 1969), “Anatomy of a Movement,” pp. 195–232.

  6. On Anna Wheeler, see Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 59–65 and passim; McFadden, “Anna Doyle Wheeler,” pp. 91–101; Anderson, Joyous Greetings, p. 74.

  7. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, chapter 4; Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (1974; Urbana, Ill., 2007), pp. 45–46.

  8. Dolores Dooley examines their relationship in Equality in Community: Sexual Equality in the Writings of William Thompson and Anna Doyle Wheeler (Cork, Ireland, 1996). Thompson is an extraordinary figure, understudied as a major feminist thinker because he is a man. The best biographical information is Richard K. P. Pankhurst, William Thompson (1775–1833): Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-Operator (London, 1954).

  9. Mill’s essay on government is reprinted in James Mill: Political Writings, ed. Terence Ball (New York, 1992), p. 27. Thompson, Appeal of One Half the Human Race (1983; London, 1825), p. 86.

  10. Carlyle, in Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarianism and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York, 1995), p. 35. The radical Unitarians also had international connections. The exiled Italian leader Giuseppe Mazzini stayed with them when he lived in London in exile in the 1830s, and may have absorbed something of their hospitality to women’s emancipation. Later in 1849–50 Mazzini and Margaret Fuller were drawn to each other and worked together during the Roman revolution: Fuller stayed with the Unitarians on her European trip. Ram Mohun Roy, a pioneering Bengali thinker and reformer, encountered the Unitarians on a trip to London; he would have found resonances among them with his own condemnations of the treatment of women in Hindu society. Writing in the 1820s, Roy denounced child marriage and polygamy and waged a campaign against sati, the sacrifice of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. On Roy, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), pp. 48, 197, 222; Susobhan Sarker, Bengal Renaissance and Other Essays (New Delhi, India, 1970), p. 9; Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 56, 74–75; Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Colonial Rule (New York, 1995), p. 71. On Mazzini, see Gleadle, The Early Feminists, p. 41; Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. 2, pp. 302–3.

  11. Gleadle, The Early Feminists, chapter 4.

  12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848; New York, 1967), “Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism,” pp. 46–47.

  13. Ibid. Trembling, chains, and the world to win come in the conclusion, p. 52. For an analysis of how Marx’s and Engels’s views developed vis-à-vis the followers of Fourier and Owen on the margins of working-class politics, see Harold Benenson, “Victorian Sexual Ideology and Marx’s Theory of the Working Class,” International Labor and Working Class History 25 (Spring 1984), pp. 1–23.

  14. For Fourierist communities, see Emily Bingham, The Mordecais: An Early American Family (New York, 2003), pp. 210–12; Free Love in America: A Documentary History, ed. Taylor Stoehr (New York, 1979), pp. 485–548. Charles Capper notes that social (not sexual) Fourierism was so much the vogue among the Boston intelligentsia in the 1840s that Fuller and Emerson used the phalanx as a metaphor for the intermeshed relationships of life: Margaret Fuller, vol. 2, p. 602. Bronson Alcott tried to stamp out the implications of Fourier for the reformed family and preserve the authority of the male head in a Boston debate in 1848; see F. B. Sanborn and William T. Harris, A. Bronson Alcott, vol. 2 (Boston, 1893), pp. 412–13. Lydia Maria Child’s ruminations on Fourier and phalanxes are another perspective from Boston: Child was taken with the idea of passionate attraction and worked to domesticate it for native uses: “I think Fourier means that society ought to be so constructed that every passion will be excited to healthy action on suitable objects.” Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817–1880, ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (Amherst, Mass., 1982), pp. 165–66. On the American free-love tradition more generally see John C. Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (New York, 1988); Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana, Ill., 2003); Jean L. Silver-Isenstadt, Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols (Baltimore, 2002).

  15. Thomas Hertell first introduced a resolution to appoint a committee to produce a bill in 1836. Hertell was a follower of Frances Wright, and his effort conjoined with those of Ernestine Rose. The bill was voted down in 1840 and reintroduced later. See Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (Urbana, Ill., 2004), pp. 145–53.

  16. Ellen Carol DuBois, “The Pivot of the Marriage Relation: Stanton’s Analysis of Women’s Subordination in Marriage,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Feminist as Thinker, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard Cándida Smith (New York, 2007), pp. 83–84; Stanton tells her story of the law office in Eighty Years and More, pp. 31–32.

  17. “Margaret Fuller,” HWS, vol. 1, p. 801. Stanton wrote the bulk of the material for the first volume, and the stirring stentorian voice sounds like hers. Stanton does not mention having heard Fuller lecture, although her residence in Boston overlapped with Fuller’s last years there. See Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. 2, pp. 37–39, on Fuller’s criticisms of the Garrisonians and theirs of her.

  18. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 81, 49. On the Barmbys see Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 172–82.

  19. Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 79.

  20. Ibid., pp. 75, 3.

  21. She imagined a ponderous male critic accusing her of taking his wife away from the kitchen to vote at the polls and preach from the pulpit. Ibid., pp. 11, 14.

  22. Ibid., pp. 20, 22, 24–25, 78.

&nb
sp; 23. It is unclear how much women’s rights were openly discussed, however. When Flora Tristan, once a Saint-Simonian, visited London in 1840, women recoiled at any mention of Wollstonecraft. The London Journal of Flora Tristan, trans. Jean Hawkes (1840; London, 1982), p. 253.

  24. Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. 2, chapter 8.

  25. On Germany and Anneke, see Henriette M. Heinzen, in collaboration with Hertha Anneke Sanne, “Biographical Notes in Commemoration of Fritz Anneke and Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke,” Typescript, 1940, Wisconsin State Historical Society; Sanne and Heinzen, “Mathilda Franziska Anneke,” Written for the National League of Women Voters Honor Roll, Typescript, ibid. For the Vésuvienne declaration, see Laura S. Strumingher, “The Vésuviennes: Images of Women Warriors in 1848 and Their Significance for French History,” History of European Ideas 8, no. 4/5 (Winter 1987), pp. 454–55.

  26. Strumingher, “Vésuviennes,” p. 457; Honoré Daumier, Liberated Women: Bluestockings and Socialists, cat. and ed. Jacqueline Armingeat (London, 1990).

  27. Fuller, in Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. 2, p. 419. On Deroin and Roland, including Proudhon’s gibe, see Anderson, Joyous Greetings, pp. 7, 9; chapter 1, passim; pp. 157–63.

  28. Documents from the hospital controversy are reprinted in Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Era, ed. Charles Capper and Cristina Giorcelli (Madison, Wis., 2007), Appendix, pp. 241–50. On being an ambassador, see Capper, Margaret Fuller, vol. 2, p. 419. Fuller’s dispatches from Rome are reprinted in The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings, ed. Bell Gale Chevigny (Old Westbury, N.Y., 1976).

  29. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, pp. 610–11, 620–21.

  30. Stanton to Elizabeth W. McClintock, July 14, 1848, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1, In the School of Anti-Slavery 1840 to 1866, ed. Anne D. Gordon (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997), p. 69 (hereafter Selected Papers).