Feminism and Abolition
Likewise, married white women were instructed to be grateful for their privileges. The comparison between their position and that of their Negro or Native American counterparts was particularly telling in the South, where women dissatisfied with their place in the patriarchal order tended more toward individual than public strategies of resistance.42 The dissidents who spoke of women's rights almost always linked these with the rights of other unempowered groups.
Frances Wright, a Scottish heiress influenced by the writings of Robert Owen, was scornful of inequalities based on class and race as well as gender. She established a utopian community in Nashoba, Tennessee in 1825, purchasing slaves in order to show that they could produce enough to buy themselves to freedom. The scandalized neighbors were less than cooperative. The utopians seemed to know more about social theory than growing food, and never became self-supporting. The emancipation of their slaves was not emulated.43Sterner if hardly more effective emphasis on similarities between patriarchy and slavery came from the Quaker direction. Sarah Grimke, a Massachusetts member of the Society of Friends, was a fan of the French utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon.44 In 1838 she published a set of letters on the equality 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.’’45 She denounced male control over female sexuality, and argued that equal rights to person and property would release women from the ‘‘horrors of forced maternity’’.46 She went on to complain that women’s jobs were always paid less than men’s.47
Slavery and patriarchal marriage did share some common features.
Both slaves and wives were denied any legal rights over the products of their own labor. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century married women lacked legal rights over their own earnings or over their own children in the event of separation, abandonment or divorce. Runaway wives could be punished and forced to return home. The sexual double standard was advertised by the growing visibility of prostitution in urban areas. By law, slave owners and patriarchs were required only to meet the subsistence needs of their dependents, and could administer physical punishment without the close supervision of the law.Within most white families it was likely that the force of patriarchal power was softened by personal affections. The same was said, of course, of slavery. Southerners insisted that plantation owners not only had a stake in the physical well-being of their chattel, but generally loved and cared for them. Altruistic behavior toward the powerless always has a contingent, variable quality. The slave owner, home from church, might offer his slaves an extra Sabbath ration. Faced with the prospect of a harvest shortfall, he might use a whip to stripe their backs. A suitor, overwhelmed with passion, might offer his heart. A husband, peeved with a disobedient wife, might slap her senseless. The mere threat of violence was often sufficient to enforce authority.
Altruistic behavior from the powerless, whether real or feigned, is a more predictable response. Affection is often coded as subservience, and pretending helplessness an effective way of blunting anger. The obligation to put others first requires either some repression of self-interest or a definition of the self that encompasses the well-being of the other.48 Women were not— as Frederick Douglass pointed out—lynched on lampposts. What slaves and wives shared was the expectation of subservience—the repression of their own self-interest.
With a synergy that would be repeated more than a century later during the Civil Rights Movement, the movement to abolish slavery dislodged resistance to consideration of women's rights.
Similarities in the lack of legal personhood and exclusion from the franchise were too obvious to ignore. Perhaps a willingness to offend public opinion on one count made it easier to be outspoken on another. Many other moral causes beckoned. In 1834 the New York Female Moral Reform society moved beyond parlor meetings to brothel visits, in efforts to embarrass patrons.49 Most men were, however, reluctant to embrace the cause of sexual purity or of women's rights. Abolitionists feared distraction from their primary, overriding goal. The Conference on World Slavery held in London in 1840 voted to exclude women from official participation, despite the important role that they had played. Among the women who vowed redress was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wife of a prominent anti-slavery activist. Eight years later she masterminded the convention in Seneca Falls, New York that inaugurated the campaign for women's suffrage.