Equality and Difference

Nineteenth-century feminists often alternated between efforts to improve gender equality and efforts to improve men’s appreciation of women’s distinctive contributions. Historians like Nancy Cott emphasize that the dialectic between “equality” and “difference” contributed to feminism’s intellectual and political vitality.¹⁷ The same dialectic linked feminism to the tensions among concepts of selfishness, altruism, and moral obligation in political economy.

Feminists like Stanton shared John Stuart Mill’s conviction that institu­tional change could establish a better balance between individual and collective interests. This did not always bring them into direct opposition to those who believed in women’s moral superiority. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s popular novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, explained most social ills as the result of inadequate maternal love. The generic slave trader was a man who would ‘‘sell his own mother at a good percentage—not wishing the old woman any harm, either.’’¹⁸ If slaves behaved badly, it was because they had been torn from their mothers—or had their children torn from them. Still, Stowe’s morality tale led many of its readers to agree that slavery itself was the source of the problem. Abraham Lincoln referred to her as the little lady who helped start the Civil War.1⁹

On the other hand, the moralists feared that women might be tainted by too much participation in a men’s world. Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy, published in 1841, foreshadowed arguments that were laid out in the even more successful The American Woman’s Home, coau­thored with her sister Harriet and published in 1869.

Stanton and other woman’s rights advocates countered with the argument that such self-sacrifice made women vulnerable and tempted men to misbe­havior. But they never went to the opposite extreme of arguing that women should imitate men.²² Even Lois Banner, who describes Stanton as a staunch individualist, immediately notes her great appreciation of maternal virtues.²³ More recent scholarship challenges the notion that Stanton can simply be characterized as an individualist.²⁴

Stanton's engagement with political economy reveals similar complexities. Sometimes she adopted a liberal tone, emphasizing the merits of competition relative to the dangers of monopoly. In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt cam­paigned for president on a platform denouncing evil giants such as Standard Oil and preaching the virtues of a marketplace that allowed small farmers and small businesses to thrive. Stanton praised his efforts, but went on to plead, ‘‘Surely there is no greater monopoly than that of all men in denying to all women a voice in the laws they are compelled to obey.''²⁵

Sometimes Stanton adopted socialist rhetoric, arguing that capitalism was exploitative: men were to women as capitalists were to workers, extractors of labor.²⁶ Her essays in The Revolution advocated fair wages and an eight- hour workday. In her view, political power would allow women to use their maternal gifts to guarantee ‘‘equal distribution among all.''²⁷ When she identified women with the ‘‘unselfish, the moral, the diffusive'' she was paraphrasing the French sociologist August Comte who had served as secretary to de Saint-Simon.²⁸

The Revolution sometimes looked down on women who were only housewives.

We women have been taught that the object of a woman's life is to help a man. No one seems to have suspected that any man was ever born for any purpose except his own happiness and self-development. Now, after forty years of agitation, the idea is beginning to prevail that women were created for themselves, for their own happiness, and for the welfare of the world.²⁹

The argument inverts a proverb: what's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. If men should be self-interested, women should be too. Ironically, Anthony herself could not resist adding ‘‘the welfare of the world'' to women's burdens.