The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  58. Siegel, “She the People,” pp. 972–73; Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York, 1998), pp. 211–12, 248–51.

  59. The Republican campaign even offered Stanton and Anthony money to travel on Grant’s behalf. Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, p. 51; DuBois, “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands,” pp. 19–40. The plank in the Republican platform is the fourteenth, on the party’s obligations to the “loyal women of America.” www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index/php?pid=29623.

  60. Selected Papers, vol. 3, p. 21 n4; Gordon, “Difficult Friendships”; Norgren, Belva Lockwood, pp. 57–63. Most famously, Susan B. Anthony presented herself at her polling place in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and was arrested. She wanted to be tried and found guilty so she could appeal the case to the Supreme Court. She was short-circuited by a technicality that prevented her from appealing beyond federal district court. Selected Papers, vol. 2, p. 590 n1.

  61. James Bradwell served one term in the Illinois House of Representatives. He sponsored successful bills making women eligible to be elected to school boards and appointed notary publics. See “James Bradwell,” American National Biography Online, www.anb.org/articles; Selected Papers, vol. 2, pp. 220 n3, 309 n2; Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice, pp. 163–64.

  62. He noted that single women could make contracts, but that the Court could not make law on the basis of exceptions. Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873).

  63. Amicus curiae brief of American Civil Liberties Union, Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 67 (1973).

  64. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875); Selected Papers, vol. 3, p. xix; Norma Basch, “Reconstructing Female Citizenship: Minor v. Happersett,” in The Constitution, Law, and American Life: Critical Aspects of the Nineteenth-Century Experience, ed. Donald Nieman (Athens, Ga., 1992), pp. 52–66; DuBois, “Taking the Law into Their Own Hands,” p. 33.

  65. Adams, in Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), p. 122.

  66. Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed. DuBois and Smith, p. 112; Stanton, “National Protection for National Citizens,” January 11, 1878, Selected Papers, vol. 3, pp. 346–67.

  67. Stanton, Speech to the Women Taxpayers’ Association of Rochester, New York, October 31, 1873, Selected Papers, vol. 3, pp. 7–8; Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote,” in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, ed. DuBois and Smith, p. 113.

  68. Elsa Barkley Brown, “ ‘To Catch the Vision of Freedom’: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865–1880,” in African-American Women and the Vote 1837–1965, ed. Ann Gordon et al. (Amherst, Mass., 1997), pp. 66–99; see also Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 185; Terborg-Penn, African-American Women and the Struggle for the Vote, pp. 44–45. In South Carolina, Charlotte Rollin advocated suffrage on the floor of the state legislature in 1869; Rollin was from a wealthy free black family in Charleston and her two sisters, Frances and Louisa, were active in Reconstruction politics in the 1870s. Frances Rollin married William J. Whipper, who advocated for women’s suffrage as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. In 1870 Lottie Rollin was secretary of the South Carolina Women’s Rights Association, and she represented her state to the AWSA in 1872.

  69. Brown, “ ‘To Catch the Vision of Freedom,’ ” pp. 84–85.

  70. Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, p. 166. Nancy Bercaw points out that it is more accurate to speak of reconstructed households rather than families, since domestic living groups were flexible, including blood relationships (mothers/children), heterosexual pairs (marriages, “taking up,” “sweethearts”), fictive kin (uncles, aunts, grandparents), and orphans, single people, and the elderly. See Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875 (Gainesville, Fla., 2003), chapter 4.

  71. Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, Ill., 1997), chapter 1; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, chapter 5.

  72. Hannah Rosen, “The Rhetoric of Miscegenation and the Reconstruction of Race: Debating Marriage, Sex, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Arkansas,” in Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World, ed. Pamela Scully and Diana Paton (Durham, N.C., 2005), pp. 289–309.

  73. National Woman Suffrage Association, “Memorials,” January 15, 1874, Selected Papers, vol. 3, p. 34.

  74. Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York, 1974), p. 31; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), pp. 37, 33; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984), pp. 76–77; entry on Bethune in BWA, pp. 113–26.

  75. Virginia Drachman, Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern American History (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 30, and Women Lawyers and the Origins of Professional Identity in America: The Letters of the Equity Club, 1887–1890 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993); Kerber, No Constitutional Right, p. 172. On African-American physicians, see BWA, vol. 2, pp. 488–91; on attorneys, BWA, vol. 2, p. 245.

  76. Quoted in Drachman, Sisters in Law, p. 48.

  77. Joyce Antler, “The Educated Woman and Professionalization: The Struggle for a New Feminine Identity, 1890–1920” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1977), p. 208; Mary Roth Walsh, “Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply” (New Haven, Conn., 1979), p. 186.

  78. Stanton to Martha Coffin Wright, March 8, 1873, Selected Papers, vol. 2, pp. 597–98; quoted in Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001), p. 133. For a revealing analysis of the transatlantic impact of the European visits, see Sandra Stanley Holton, “ ‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994), pp. 1112–37.

  79. Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991), p. 22; Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), p. 141; Elizabeth Battelle Clark, “The Politics of God and the Woman’s Vote: Religion in the American Suffrage Movement, 1848–1895” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1989), chapters 4–5. Clark’s dissertation is the most probing analysis of the conflict between liberal and maternalist feminism, never published as a book because of her untimely death.

  80. “By the revelation of her place in His kingdom, He lifted to an equal level with her husband the gentle companion.” Anna A. Gordon, The Beautiful Life of Frances E. Willard (Chicago, 1898), p. 132.

  81. Bordin, Women and Temperance, pp. 98, 89, 94.

  82. Ibid., pp. 56–63; Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), chapter 4; Faust, Mothers of Invention, pp. 248–54. Willard visited the South and encouraged African-American temperance. Willard’s own abolitionist roots—her father attended Oberlin—made her a sympathetic figure in the eyes of black women, a rare contact across the color line. Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow, pp. 47, 45–59; Gordon, Beautiful Life, p. 32.

  83. Vivian Gornick, The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York, 2005), p. 120.

  84. Brian Donovan, White Slave Crusades: Race, Gender, and Anti-Vice Activism, 1887–1917 (Urbana, Ill., 2006).

  85. Marilley, Woman Suffrage, p. 113; Clara Parrish, in Tyrrell, Woman’s World, p. 125; Rumi Yasutake, “Men, Women, and Temperance in Meiji Japan: Engendering WCTU Activism from a Transnational Perspective,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 17 (2006), passim; Bordin, Woman and Temperance, p. 114.

  86. Tyrrell, Woman’s World, pp. 133–35.

/>   87. Crystal Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, 1835–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); LeeAnn Whites, “Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Problem of ‘Protection,’ in the New South,” in Visible Women, pp. 41–61; Wheeler, New Women of the New South, pp. 89–103.

  88. Willard admonished French suffragists, presumably because socialist women were in their ranks, that “the emancipation of women if not based on religious principles and feelings is doomed to hell.” Tyrrell, Woman’s World, p. 68.

  89. Stanton, “Woman Suffrage,” May 30, 1874, Selected Papers, vol. 3, pp. 82–83. When her son Theodore married in 1881, she wrote him a touching letter of advice, tempered by her own experiences of how the institution of marriage could distort the best intentions. “Men and women can do a great deal to elevate and intensify each others lives and quite as much to enfeeble and degrade each other.” Stanton to Theodore W. Stanton, April 21, 1881, Selected Papers, vol. 4, p. 64.

  90. Restless with the constraints of the Americans, she and Anthony formed an International Council of Women (ICW), which met for the first time in Washington, D.C., in 1888, drawing together women they had met when they traveled in Europe and during Stanton’s long sojourns in England. They saw the ICW as having many unifying functions, but certainly Stanton hoped to use it to recruit women who were willing to join a “Woman’s Bible” committee that would employ liberal Bible commentary to make a female critique of scripture. See Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, p. 104; Report of the International Council of Women … 1888 (Washington, D.C., 1888).

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICS OF THE MOTHERS

  1. The stress on motherhood was not entirely a retreat from the fight for sexual equality. Demands for higher education and access to the professions continued, justified as the means to outfit women for their civilizing jobs. Nor did suffragists stop insisting that women could live full and important lives outside the family. They honored single women as leaders and cultural icons: Frances Willard and above all, Susan B. Anthony, known in NAWSA as “Aunt Susan,” who by 1900 was ascending to the status of a symbolic mother to the movement. NAWSA’s litany of female achievement included teachers and lawyers, writers, physicians, and ministers, along with honored wives and mothers: all worthy professions for cultivated women who, whether or not they were biological mothers, would diffuse the highest traits of the race and spread the virtues of the home. “A woman, all by herself, and without any man to help her, can, if she likes, transform a house into a home,” instructed Mary Livermore, a suffragist writer, in a staple speech she gave on the lyceum circuit. See Aileen Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965), p. 129; Livermore, “Homes Built by Women,” AM1 3484 in Livermore Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University.

  2. Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, pp. 83–85.

  3. Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” reprinted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony, ed. DuBois, pp. 246–54. Given before the House Judiciary Committee, January 18, 1892. See also DuBois’s discussion of the speech, ibid., and Gornick’s analysis in Solitude of Self, pp. 3–7.

  4. Gordon, “Difficult Friendships”; see Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible, pp. 217–22, on Stanton’s last years.

  5. Mary Putnam Jacobi, “Common Sense” Applied to Woman Suffrage (New York, 1894), pp. 201–2; Reverend Ida C. Hultin, 1897 NAWSA convention, HWS, vol. 4, p. 285; Isabella Beecher Hooker, 1892 NAWSA convention, ibid., p. 194. Jacobi’s book is an illustration of how suffragists routinely mixed the expediency and justice arguments that Aileen Kraditor argued were separate and opposed. Indeed, this had been the case since the demand for suffrage was first raised at Seneca Falls. See Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, passim.

  6. Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999), chapter 1.

  7. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; Oxford, U.K., 1998), p. 44.

  8. Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation,” in The World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright Sewall (Chicago, 1894); see also the responses from Cooper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Sarah J. Early, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frederick Douglass; Williams, “The Woman’s Part in a Man’s Business,” The Voice of the Negro 1 (November 1904), pp. 543–47; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, p. 96; Morrison, “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” New York Times, August 22, 1971.

  9. Paula Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York, 2008), chapter 9.

  10. Willard, in ibid., p. 266; see also Patricia A. Schecter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001).

  11. Anna Julia Cooper had also been pushing from within the WCTU for the organization to take a stand on lynching, but with no success. Wells used the leverage of moral arbiters who had influence with Willard, including British luminaries and Frederick Douglass. Willard reopened the “colored work” department she had shut down over Cooper’s objections. Willard, in Giddings, Ida, pp. 266–69, 301; Bettye Collier-Thomas, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Abolitionist and Feminist Reformer 1825–1911,” in African-American Women and the Vote, ed. Gordon et al., pp. 57–59. The account of the uproar comes from Giddings, Ida, pp. 256–68, 291–92. Ruffin, quoted in “Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin,” BWA, p. 995.

  12. Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, pp. 35–38; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pp. 93, 135–36; Collier-Thomas, “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” in African-American Women and the Vote, ed. Gordon et al., p. 59; Gilmore, Gender & Jim Crow, chapter 6.

  13. Williams, quoted in Terborg-Penn, “Discrimination Against Afro-American Women in the Woman’s Movement, 1830–1920,” in The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, ed. Sharon Harley and Terborg-Penn (Baltimore, 1997), p. 24. On Logan, see Giddings, When and Where I Enter, p. 121, and Adele Logan Alexander, “Adella Hunt Logan, the Tuskegee Woman’s Club, and African Americans in the Suffrage Movement,” in Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation, ed. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler (Knoxville, Tenn., 1995), p. 99; on Ruffin, see Flexner, Century of Struggle, pp. 191–92; Fannie Barrier Williams, “A Northern Negro’s Autobiography,” The Independent (July 14, 1904), pp. 91–96. See also entries on Ruffin, Logan, and Williams in BWA.

  14. On the General Federation of Women’s Clubs endorsement, see Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, Conn., 1996), p. 67; on the NACW see Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, ed. Gordon et al., p. 88.

  15. Burroughs, “Not Color but Character,” The Voice of the Negro (July 1904); Williams, “The Colored Girl,” ibid. (June 1905); Terborg-Penn, African-American Women and the Struggle for the Vote, pp. 66–68.

  16. Ellen Carol DuBois, “Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review 69 (November 2000), pp. 539–51; Raewyn Dalziel, “Presenting the Enfranchisement of New Zealand Women Abroad,” in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (New York, 1994), pp. 42–64.

  17. Marilley, Women’s Suffrage, chapter 5.

  18. See for example James S. Clarkson, Benjamin Harrison’s campaign manager, in Edwards, Angels in the Machinery, p. 83.

  19. Ibid., pp. 133–49.

  20. Gordon, in Wheeler, New Women of the New South, p. 118; on Blackwell’s statistical argument see ibid., pp. 115–16, and Marilley, Woman Suffrage, pp. 162–64.

  21. Mildred Rutherford, J. B. Evans, in Wheeler, New Women of the New South, pp. 25–26. Hostility to women’s rights was strongest in the Black Belt, where white supremacist rule was strongest. See Elna Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), p. 45.

  22. Wheeler, New Women of the New South, chapter 3.

  23. Woman’s Journal, March 28, April 4, April 11, 1903; Anthony to
Douglass, June 25, 1893, Stanton-Anthony Papers, Rutgers University.

  24. Woman’s Journal, March 28, April 4, April 11, 1903. Williams’s letter is discussed in Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, pp. 91–92.

  25. Keyssar, The Right to Vote, passim; DuBois, “1869 Redux: Gender and Race Politics in the Democratic Race,” Dissent, online archive (Winter 2008).

  26. Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, pp. 66–68. Terborg-Penn notes that women made distinctions in who was to blame. Terrell, for example, pointed out that it was white men who drove the corrupt political system. For a range of views, see Cooper, Voice from the South, pp. 139–40; Burroughs, “Black Women and Reform,” The Crisis 10 (August 1915), p. 1871; Giddings, When and Where I Enter, pp. 122–23; Barbara Savage, Your Spirit Walks Beside Us (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), p. 169; Terrell, The Progress of Colored Women (Washington, D.C., 1898), p. 15.

  27. Shaw, in Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, p. 126; Catt, in Wheeler, New Women of the New South, p. 115; for a general view of women’s suffrage’s relationship to disenfranchisement, see Keyssar, The Right to Vote, chapter 6.

  28. Wheeler, New Women of the New South, p. 27.

  29. Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign Against Woman Suffrage (Madison, Wis., 1997), pp. 64, 88–89; Rep. James Thomas Heflin (D-Alabama), Congressional Record, 63rd Congress, 3rd Session 1914/1915, Jan. 12, 1915, p. 1465; Rep. Frank Clark (D-Florida), p. 1412.

  30. Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy, pp. 18–21; Eileen L. McDonagh and H. Douglas Price, “Woman Suffrage in the Progressive Era: Patterns of Opposition and Support in Referenda Voting, 1910–1918,” American Political Science Review 79 (June 1985), pp. 415–35.