Collective Interests
Unlike the Beecher sisters Stanton and Anthony did not want such burdens to be assigned to women alone. Rather, they envisioned a world in which both men and women would share responsibility for others, a new ‘‘equilibrium of the masculine and feminine elements.”30 Unfortunately, they pointed, out, men would not relinquish their privilege without a fight.
Early feminists articulated an analysis of collective economic interests based on gender that paralleled the concept of class interests articulated by David Ricardo and the early socialists. In 1838 Sarah Grimke published a set of letters on the quality of the sexes that described men as analogous to slave owners: ‘‘All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill.”31 She denounced male control over female sexuality, and argued that equal rights to person and property would release women from the ‘‘horrors of forced mater- nity.’’32 She went on complain that women's jobs were always paid less than men’s.33The Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls began with an emphasis on individual rights, but moved rather quickly to a militant emphasis on collective action, as indicated in the epigraph of this chapter. The list of more specific observations that followed protested women’s subordination in the family, in the church, and in the economy. Occupational segregation, as well as lack of property rights, was deplored: ‘‘He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments... He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself.’’34
This rhetoric drew heavily on the tropes of classical political economy as well as liberal political theory.
Male power was often described as analogous to that of feudal lords, slaveholders, or capitalists. Like the landlords that fascinated Ricardo, men inherited their access to wealth and power, rather than earning it. Stanton’s term ‘‘aristocracy of sex’’ treated women as an unrepresented class or caste, an approach later fleshed out in some detail by the twentieth-century feminist economist, Barbara Bergmann.35Yet Stanton also situated her analysis of male collective power in a larger context: ‘‘As I read history old and new the subjection of women may be clearly traced to the same cause that subjugated different races and nations to one another, the law of force, that made might right, and the weak the slaves of the strong.”36 Like John Stuart Mill, she believed that the purpose of the democratic state was to curb such subjugation, to impose limits on efforts at collective aggrandizement. In her essay on ‘‘The Subjection of Women”, adopting the title of Mill's famous tract, she argued that all those who struggled for equality would advance the cause of woman's rights.
Like Friedrich Engels, whose Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State was first published in 1884, Stanton drew on the work of early anthropologists like Johann Bachofen and Henry Louis Morgan, who provided some evidence that early human civilizations venerated women and mothers, and were possibly even ruled by them. She believed that anthropology and history provided a powerful alternative to the religious account of Eve's original Garden of Eden transgression. In her ‘‘Matriarchate or Mother-Age,'' published in 1891, she emphasized that men had used physical force and military power to wrest control of society away from women. These arguments foreshadowed those of twentieth-century feminist historian Gerda Lerner and others seeking to understand the emergence of patriarchal systems.37
An odd grammatical detail of nineteenth century feminism was its use of the singular ‘‘woman's rights'' rather than the plural ‘‘women's rights''. At first glance, this might seem to represent its individualism. In practice, however, the singular invoked a symbolic unity. Emphasis on men's collective action obviously helped justify the need for collective action on women's part. If women wanted individual rights, they would need to work in concert. Even in its most liberal form, feminism appealed to female solidarity. The most serious weakness of this argument, then as now, was its failure to articulate a vision of competing collective interests, or any clear model of systemic inequality—other than slavery itself.