The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  31. Stanton was invested by this time in describing Seneca Falls as if it emerged full-blown from the mind of Zeus (or Athena). See HWS, vol. 1, pp. 67–75.

  32. The number of attendees is unknown, but the organizers were surprised by the crowd. See Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, pp. 194–97, 201. The “Declaration of Sentiments” at the end was signed by one hundred people, a third of them men. “Appendix,” HWS, vol. l, pp. 809–10.

  33. An accessible reprinting is in The Feminist Papers: From Adams to De Beauvoir, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Boston, 1973), pp. 413–21. The original is in HWS, vol. l, pp. 70–73.

  34. Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, p. 142.

  35. Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005). Earlier that year, in the jockeying that preceded the formation of the Free Soil Party, Stanton’s cousin Gerrit Smith had called for women’s suffrage at the convention of a splinter group of the Liberty Party. See Wellman, Road to Seneca Falls, pp. 150–53, 175–76. For a general discussion of the intellectual vectors of the moment, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998).

  36. HWS, vol. l, p. 73; “Letter to Henry Clay,” North Star (Rochester, N.Y.), December 3, 1847. Douglass published a glowing report about Seneca Falls, followed by a long, enthusiastic account of the Rochester women’s rights convention held the next month. Ibid., July 28, August 11, 1848. Ginzberg discusses the impact of the state constitutional convention in Untidy Origins. See Ginzberg also on the suffrage resolution at Seneca Falls in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, pp. 61–62.

  37. Douglass, March 31, 1888, The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, Conn., 1992), vol. 5, p. 53. I draw the quote and the interpretation of Douglass from Ann D. Gordon, “Difficult Friendships: Frederick Douglass and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” unpublished paper in my possession.

  38. A surge came in 1850, when leading Garrisonian men joined by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott added their names to the call for a convention in Worcester, Massachusetts. With the provisions of the Compromise of 1850 fresh in the public mind and looming conflict over the Fugitive Slave Act, more than a thousand people, three times the number at Seneca Falls, showed up in Worcester. The Call and Proceedings are reprinted at www.assumption.edu/whw/old/On-line%20Archive.html.

  Elizabeth Stanton, among others, called attention to the horrors of the Fugitive Slave Act, whose implications were dramatized shortly thereafter in Boston, on October 25, when two slave catchers, sent by an owner emboldened by the federal act, showed up to repossess antislavery celebrities William and Ellen Craft, who had escaped slavery in Georgia two years earlier. See Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, pp. 645–46.

  39. See the strong case for the similarities, from the point of view of the slaves, between masters and mistresses in Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York, 2008).

  40. The Salem, Ohio 1850 Women’s Rights Proceedings, ed. Robert W. Audretsch. Typescript on deposit at Public Library, Salem, Ohio.

  41. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins, p. 66; Call to Worcester Convention, online at www.assumption.edu/whw/old/On-line%20Archive.html.

  42. The Sheffield Female Reform Society authored the petition. Anne Knight, an abolitionist who was more feminist than many in the British movement, was involved. Knight corresponded regularly with American women. See Anderson, Joyous Greetings, p. 8; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (New York, 1991), pp. 248–55.

  43. Anderson, Joyous Greetings, pp. 8–9, 69, 180. The letter is reprinted in HWS, vol. 1, pp. 234–37, although without the excited punctuation, Anderson points out.

  44. Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick, N.J., 1992).

  45. Ruth Bogin, “Sarah Parker Remond,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 110 (April 1974), pp. 120–50; Dorothy Porter, “Sarah Parker Remond, Abolitionist and Physician,” Journal of Negro History (1935), pp. 287–93; Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North 1830–1880 (New York, 1995); Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Frances Watkins Harper: Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer 1825–1911,” in African-American Women and the Vote 1837–1965, ed. Ann Gordon et al. (Amherst, Mass., 1997).

  46. Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (New York, 1997), pp. 94–98; “Women and Work” (1857), in Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, ed. Candida Ann Lacey (New York, 1986), pp. 36–72; Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven, Conn., 1985); Jane Rendall, “Langham Place Group,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., Oxford University Press, May 2007, www.oxforddnb.com/view/theme/93708.

  47. Bodichon, An American Diary 1857–58, ed. Joseph W. Reed (London, 1972), p. 61.

  CHAPTER FOUR: LOYALTY’S LIMITS

  1. Whitman, Specimen Days, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York, 1982), p. 779.

  2. Anthony to Stanton, December 23, 1860, pp. 451–52, to Martha Coffin Wright, January 7, 1861, p. 453; Henry B. Stanton to Stanton, January 12, 1861, pp. 454–55; Martha Coffin Wright to Anthony, March 31, 1862, p. 474, in Selected Papers, vol. 1.

  3. “To the Women of the Republic,” ibid., p. 483; Editorial Note, ibid., p. 480.

  4. Dall’s objections can be inferred from Stanton’s replies, April 22, May 7, 1864, ibid., pp. 514–15, 518–22.

  5. Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic, May 14, 1863, ibid., p. 490; Women’s National Loyal League statement, May 14, 1863, ibid., p. 499.

  6. Wendy Hammond Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville, Va., 1991), chapters 5–6; Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, pp. 168–72; Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), pp. 150–61.

  7. Correspondence with Sumner is in Selected Papers, vol. 1, passim; Stanton to Dall, ibid., April 22, 1864, p. 514.

  8. Ibid., May 7, 1864, p. 519. Just as in the South, “soldier’s wife” was a new self-designation that for yeoman women emblematized their political salience. See Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass., 2010).

  9. Resolution, Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, Selected Papers, vol. 1, p. 585; James Mott, ibid., p. 587; Stanton, “ ‘This is the Negro’s Hour,’ ” National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 26, 1865, Selected Papers, vol. 1, p. 564. DuBois details the tensions surrounding the new organization. See Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), pp. 63–64.

  10. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York, 1998), p. 111.

  11. Stanton, in DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, p. 61.

  12. Stanton to Truth, March 24, 1867, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 47; Truth, in proceedings, American Equal Rights Association (AERA), May 9, 1867, HWS, vol. 2, p. 193; Martha Wright, Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, May 10, 1866, Selected Papers, vol. 1, p. 588.

  13. New York State Equal Rights Convention, November 20, 1866, Selected Papers, vol. 1, p. 601.

  14. Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 9 n2, p. 113 n15. It was apparently an AERA petition.

  15. For example, in the Senate, an amendment to remove “male” from the franchise bill for the District of Columbia in December 1866 was introduced by a Democrat and supporter of Andrew Johnson. The nine affirmative votes came from five Democrats and four Republicans. Ibid., notes on pp. 7–9.

  16. Truth, AERA meeting, May 9, 1867, HWS, vol. 2, pp. 193–94.

  17. The classic account of the Kansas campaign is DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, chapter 3. For documents see HWS, vol. 2, chapter 19.

  18. On the fracas after Sumner’s speech, see William Lloyd Garrison to Helen Garrison, Octob
er 9, 1862, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 5, Let the Oppressed Go Free: 1861–1867, ed. Walter M. Merrill (Boston, 1979), p. 120; Boston Daily Journal, October 6, 7, 10, 15, 1862. On Train’s politics, see Ann Gordon’s cogent editorial note in Selected Papers, vol. 2, pp. 94–95 n11, which characterizes him as occupying “a space somewhere between brilliance and insanity.”

  19. Twain, “Letters from Washington, Number VII,” Territorial Enterprise (Virginia City, Nev.), February 27, 1868. He also lampoons Train in “Information Wanted,” New York Tribune, January 22, 1868, and the Chicago Republican, March 1, 1868.

  20. Entry on Train in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 9 (New York, 1964), pp. 626–27. The DAB gets some points wrong; more accurate and illuminating is Patricia G. Holland, “George Francis Train and the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1867–70,” Books at Iowa 46 (April 1987), pp. 8–29.

  21. Train published a kind of scrapbook of the campaign speeches, put together from his own memories, notes, stenographic transcriptions, and newspaper accounts. One ditty is: “In the age of Shoddy / A busy little body, / Kept dancing a legislative gig; / But while riding his hobby, / He kicked and threw poor Snoddy, / And elected Sebastopol, the nig.” The Great Epigram Campaign of Kansas … Thirty Speeches in Two Weeks in All Parts of Kansas (Leavenworth, Kan., 1867).

  22. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, p. 97; Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 104 n5; Appendix B (tabulation of votes cast by county), pp. 643-44.

  23. Stanton to Ellen Eaton, December 17, 1867, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 117; quoted in Holland, “George Francis Train,” p. 5.

  24. Stanton to Eaton, December 17, 1867, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 118; Anthony to Olympia Brown, ibid., January 1, 1868, p. 122.

  25. Garrison to Anthony, January 4, 1868, ibid., p. 124; Douglass, meeting of the AERA, May 14, 1868, ibid., p. 138; New York World account of meeting, ibid., p. 137.

  26. Douglass, AERA meeting, May 1869, HWS, vol. 2, p. 382.

  27. Douglass and respondents, ibid.; Benjamin Quarles, “Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,” Journal of Negro History 25 (January 1940), pp. 39–41. For a private expression of the same sentiments, see Douglass’s letter to Josephine Griffing, September 27, 1868, in Joseph Borome, “Two Letters of Frederick Douglass,” Journal of Negro History 33 (October 1948), pp. 469–70.

  28. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), pp. 52–54. Frances Dana Gage and Sojourner Truth were the exceptions. Gage worked in freedpeople’s camps on the Sea Islands during the war, and Truth worked in a refugee camp in Washington, D.C. Both complained that freedmen tried to dominate and “master” the women. AERA meeting, May 9, 1867, HWS, vol. 2, pp. 193, 197.

  29. Harper, AERA meeting, May, 1869, HWS, vol. 2, p. 391.

  30. Stanton’s gibe was at Caroline Dall. See ibid., p. 187 n5.

  31. “The Sixteenth Amendment,” April 29, 1869, ibid., pp. 236–38.

  32. For an old instance that came out of the conventional wisdom of the 1960s left, see Warren Hinckle and Marianne Hinckle, “A History of the Unusual Movement for Women Power in the United States 1961–1968,” Ramparts, February 1968, pp. 22–43.

  33. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Nineteenth-Century Black Women and Woman Suffrage,” Potomac Review 7 (Spring–Summer 1977), pp. 16–17; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, Ind., 1998), pp. 34–35; Painter, Sojourner Truth, pp. 232–33. Charlotte Ray, to name a less-known black woman, attended the NWSA convention in 1876, possibly because the organization’s activities in Washington, D.C., where she practiced, attracted black women. Entry in Black Women in America: An Historical Encylopedia, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), p. 965 (hereafter BWA). See Selected Papers, vol. 2, Appendix C for listings of biracial activity for suffrage in Washington, D.C.

  34. Blackwell’s pamphlet was “What the South Can Do. How the Southern States Can Make Themselves Masters of the Situation.” See Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 51 n10. On Blackwell’s statistical argument, see Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York, 1993), pp. 113–14.

  35. Anthony to the Editor, New York Times, June 4, 1869, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 247; Emil Hoeber’s criticism at an NWSA meeting was reported in The New York Times, ibid., p. 248 n3. A typical Stanton speech using caricatures is “Manhood Suffrage,” December 24, 1868, ibid., pp. 194–99.

  36. See my “Missed Connections: Abolitionist Feminism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed. DuBois and Smith, pp. 41–47, on this point.

  37. Stanton to Martha Coffin Wright, March 21, 1871, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 426. Davis was also Wright’s relative, because he was married to her niece.

  38. Quarles, “Frederick Douglass and the Woman’s Rights Movement,” p. 42; Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote: On Account of Race or Sex,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed. DuBois and Smith, pp. 122, 127. In 1888, at the founding convention of the International Council of Women, organized by Stanton and Anthony, Douglass gave an opening address and again elegiacally recalled his involvement at Seneca Falls: “There are few facts in my humble life to which I look back with more satisfaction than to the one, recorded in the History of Woman Suffrage, that I was sufficiently enlightened at that early day, and when only a few years from slavery, to support Mrs. Stanton’s resolution for woman suffrage.” Report of the International Council of Women … 1888 (Washington, D.C., 1888), p. 329. “All good causes are mutually helpful,” he concluded. Ibid., p. 330.

  39. Arguments that universal suffrage might have come to fruition are DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, chapter 3, and Ann D. Gordon, “Difficult Friendships.”

  40. Remarks, “Western Woman Suffrage Association,” September 10, 1869, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 266.

  41. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, pp. 103–4 and passim; Twain, “Letters from Washington,” Territorial Enterprise.

  42. Proceedings of Tenth National Woman’s Rights Convention, May 10–11, 1860, HWS, vol. 1, pp. 723–29. On the newspapers see editorial notes in Selected Papers, vol. 1, p. 431. Ernestine Rose defended her friend. DuBois attributes Stanton’s newfound assertiveness on the subject to her friendship with Rose, a former Owenite. “ ‘The Pivot of the Marriage Relation’: Stanton’s Analysis of Women’s Subordination in Marriage,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed. DuBois and Smith, pp. 83–84.

  43. Hendrik Hartog rescues the case from the terms in which it’s usually discussed—which are inherited from Stanton’s account in The Revolution—to restore the fascinating detail, including the fact that Abby had established a modest career as an actress and “public reader.” Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 221–23 and passim. See also Stanton’s speech reprinted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois (Boston, 1981), pp. 125–30.

  44. Stanton, Speech on the Richardson-McFarland case, May 17, 1870, Selected Papers, vol. 2, pp. 336–56; “true union” is on p. 349.

  45. Hartog, Man and Wife, p. 169.

  46. Stanton, speech on Richardson-McFarland case, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 342; Stanton to Josephine White Griffing, December 1, 1870, ibid., p. 382.

  47. Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997), chapter 2; Melanie Susan Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 1854–1924 (Urbana, Ill., 2001).

  48. Jill Norgren, Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (New York, 2007).

  49. Anthony’s initiatives were clumsy and ill timed. See DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, chapter 5.

  50. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982), chapters 5–6; for Europe, see Smith, Changing Liv
es, chapter 7.

  51. Arnell, in Norgren, Belva Lockwood, pp. 38–39.

  52. Norgren, Belva Lockwood, p. 63.

  53. On their need for “new men,” see Olympia Brown to Anthony, January 3, 1868, Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 123. Capsule biographies of women’s rights marriages and professional partnerships can be found throughout the editorial notes of ibid., vols. 2 and 3. For John Hooker see Stanton to Isabella Beecher Hooker, July 5, 1876, Selected Papers, vol. 3, pp. 242–43; on the Olneys, Anthony to the Editor, Ballot Box, ibid., September 21, 1877, p. 322.

  54. Robert C. Post and Reva B. Siegel, “Legislative Constitutionalism and Section Five Power: Policentric Interpretation of the Family and Medical Leave Act,” Yale Law Journal 112 (June 2003), pp. 1982–83.

  55. DuBois, “Outgrowing the Compact of the Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” Journal of American History 74 (December 1987), p. 844; Belle Squire, The Woman Movement in America: A Short Account of the Struggle for Equal Rights (Chicago, 1911), pp. 123–25.

  56. On the Minors, see Monia Cook Morris, “The History of Woman Suffrage in Missouri, 1867–1901,” Missouri Historical Review 25 (October 1930–July 1931), pp. 67–82; Kerber, No Constitutional Right, pp. 103–4; HWS, vol. 2, pp. 407–11. The origins of the name are unclear. It anticipated the Democratic Party’s “New Departure” policy of 1872, which announced acceptance of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, conceding that postwar constitutional change and black suffrage were irreversible. See David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967), p. 354. For Stanton’s shift to the Fourteenth Amendment strategy, see Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 413 n3.

  57. Kerber, No Constitutional Right, pp. 88–90. Protests in six Connecticut towns occurred in 1871. The information is in Selected Papers, vol. 2, Appendix C, pp. 645–54. The best analysis is Ellen Carol DuBois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana, Ill., 1993), pp. 19–40; see also Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, pp. 44–47.