Peculiar Institutions

The home-grown political economy of mid-nineteenth-century U.S. had a conservative slant. Most recognized authorities dismissed the notion that women or slaves had distinct collective interests or were vulnerable, as groups, to economic exploitation.

Early advocates of women’s rights drew from a dissident anti-slavery Quaker tradition. With a synergy that would be repeated more than a century later during the Civil Rights Movement, efforts to redress racial exploitation were both inspired and strengthened by consideration of women’s rights. Similarities in the lack of legal personhood and exclusion from the franchise were too obvious to ignore. A willingness to offend public opinion on one count sometimes made it easier to be outspoken on another. Utopian and communitarian ideals tinged both movements. Frances Wright, an Owenite, founded a community in Tennessee based on the principle of emancipation for women and for slaves.⁴ Sarah Grimke, an abolitionist activist and stalwart of the Massachusetts Society of Friends was a fan of Henri de Saint-Simon.⁵

As the abolitionist cause gained momentum, its supporters 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.

The convention’s manifesto begin with a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence that added two small words—‘‘and women.’’

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.⁶

The document drew a clear analogy between the Revolutionary War slogan ‘‘no taxation without representation” and demands for the political repre­sentation of women. Public response to the Seneca Falls convention was hardly enthusiastic. One newspaper described the women as ‘‘erratic, addle- pated comeouters.’’⁷ But emphasis on the goal of woman's suffrage—not achieved until 1920—understates their success. Concerted efforts to publi­cize the cause of women’s rights contributed to major improvements in married women’s property rights over the course of the nineteenth century, which in turn strengthened the suffrage effort.⁸ The connections were personal as well as political. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s inheritance from her father increased her bargaining power within marriage and enabled her to advance the cause of women’s rights while also tending to responsi­bilities as a wife and mother.⁹

In the wake of the Civil War, women’s rights advocates suffered serious setbacks. Progressive political energies focused on the fifteenth Amend­ment to the Constitution giving black men the right to vote. Horace Greeley, prominent newspaper editor and Fourierist sympathizer opposed woman suffrage as an innovation ‘‘openly at war with a distribution of duties and functions between the sexes as venerable and pervading as government itself.’’¹⁰ When Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.

11

newspaper again.

Angered by public willingness to give black men, but not women, the vote, Stanton and Anthony became more willing to emphasize gender interests. In the process they resorted to racist rhetoric, complaining that men of the ‘‘lower orders’’ should not take precedence over native-born white women.1² With the financial assistance of a notorious opponent of black male suffrage, they inaugurated a new women’s rights journal called The Revolution in 1868. It became the voice of militant feminism, publishing the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill and entertaining its readers with articles about bread and babies and the ballot. It lionized women who took on non-traditional jobs, including female farmers, inventors, sailors, and thieves.

True to its name, The Revolution quickly generated a backlash, and not just among opponents of women's rights. Many reform-minded activists felt that Stanton and Anthony were going too far too fast, alienating potential supporters. Disagreements over votes for black men (and over policies towards Reconstruction in the South) were exacerbated by debates over the issue of divorce. The movement split. In 1869, the National Woman Suffrage Association, formed under the leadership of Stanton and Anthony, remained open to all women believers in woman suffrage. The more cautious American Woman Suffrage Association led by Henry Ward Beecher and Lucy Stone was organized on a delegate basis, inviting only representatives from recognized organizations.¹³ Not until 1890 did the two organizations reconcile and rejoin.

The split reflected temperamental differences—the contentious versus the compromising. But theoretical tensions were also evident. Stanton and Anthony leaned more toward the discourse of political economy than the discourse of morality.

A quasi-religious approach to women’s rights found vivid expression in the temperance movement, which included ax-wielding attacks against saloons selling demon rum. Temperance leader Frances Willard called on women to listen to their ‘‘mother-hearts’’ and serve as a conscience for the world. In her view, gaining the franchise was less a political right than a moral duty for women who wanted to better fulfill their responsibilities for the care of others. 15 By the 1890s, the organization she commanded, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, enjoyed a membership one hun­dred times larger than the National Woman Suffrage Association.¹⁶ But the smaller group under the leadership of Stanton and Anthony ultimately proved more influential, perhaps because its embrace of political economy contributed to the development of new ideas.