Victory for the Vote. Doris Weatherford
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Margaret Fuller (Library of Congress)
Fuller’s most important feminist work was Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. Her national reputation brought readership to the book, and it was a factor in creating the ferment of ideas that led to the Seneca Falls Convention three years later. Like Frances Wright, however, Fuller was at least a century ahead of her time, especially in her advocacy of “free love,” the era’s term for sexual liberation.
In the nineteenth century, more people lived unconventionally than is generally recognized today. By the time of the Seneca Falls meeting, the United States had at least 40 functioning utopian communities—what we might call “cults” today—with alternate lifestyles that usually included communal property, vegetarianism, and other health reforms, as well as sexual behavior that ranged from abstinence to communal sex. The Oneida community of rural New York probably was the most radical; its men were required to use birth control, and, even today, some of their “complex marriage” practices would be deemed not only scandalous, but criminal.
The era’s morally driven women, of course, were more than a little ambivalent about Wright and Fuller and the harm that this radicalism did to their shared cause of abolishing slavery. Those who hoped to influence a public that still believed in slavery as both economically necessary and divinely sanctioned could not afford the distraction and credibility loss that would result if they associated themselves with advocates of “free love.” Some abolitionists, however, were prescient enough to understand that, whatever the intentions of reformers, the public inevitably would link the agitation for women’s civil rights with that of blacks. Already at this embryonic stage of the movements, they understood that the best approach was to work for justice for both women and blacks, without forcing the two into a false competition.
Lydia Maria Child (Library of Congress)
Lydia Maria Child was one who had both causes on her mind: in 1833, she published an anti-slavery classic, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Just two years later, she wrote The History of the Condition of Women. These books were so controversial that Child went bankrupt. Subscription cancellations for her previously successful children’s magazine arrived in droves; it was America’s first, in which Child wrote classics such as the lyrics to “Over the River and Through the Woods.” The image that she had built as the author of bestselling The Frugal Housewife (1829) was destroyed, and she was ostracized by former Massachusetts friends.
For a while, Child maintained the household income by adopting an early commuter-marriage lifestyle; she edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard from New York, while her husband worked as a journalist in Washington.
The tie between racial and gender liberation also was spelled out by Sarah Grimké. In 1838, just one year after becoming an active abolitionist and a decade prior to the Seneca Falls meeting, she published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. At the time, she and her sister Angelina were becoming famous (or notorious, depending on one’s point of view) for their courageous stand against slavery. Born into a wealthy slaveholding South Carolina family, the sisters moved north, converted to Quakerism, and began writing and speaking against slavery. The only white Southerners ever to be leaders in the cause, their Massachusetts speaking tour was the first by female abolitionist agents. During the summer of 1837, the Grimkés attracted hundreds of listeners, both men and women, every day. In Lowell alone, 1,500 came; in smaller towns, people stood on ladders peering into overcrowded churches.
Once again, it was speech, more than the written word, that made the Grimkés objects of scorn. Even the Society of Friends rebuked Sarah, not for speaking as such, but for raising the controversial subject of slavery at the society’s 1836 national convention. The next year, Massachusetts ministers of the Congregationalist denomination (the intellectual heirs of Puritanism) issued a pastoral letter denouncing the sisters’ speaking tour. “We invite your attention to the dangers that at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury,” the clerics read from their pulpits. “The appropriate duties and influence of woman are clearly stated in the New Testament.”
Mary S. Parker of Boston was one of the women who would ignore the Massachusetts ministers’ admonitions; in May 1837, she went to New York to preside over the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Arguably the first national organization of women, this initial meeting attracted 200 delegates from nine states, some of them free blacks including, among others, Julia Williams, a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. A permanent organization grew out of it, but, when the women assembled in Philadelphia the next year, the City of Brotherly Love greeted them with immense hostility. After a howling mob made it impossible for them to continue their business, presiding officer Maria Weston Chapman led the women out of the hall with a white woman holding the hand of each black woman, something that she had done three years earlier when similar men threatened the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. So frequently attacked for her views that she said she was afraid to walk alone because of the “odious” comments Bostonians made to her, Chapman nonetheless displayed singular courage and leadership as did the black activists who marched with her. After the women’s dramatic exit, the mob set fire to the building.
It was from these female anti-slavery societies that women went to the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in June 1840. The previous month, a serious split had developed in the American Anti-Slavery Society when its founder, William Lloyd Garrison, appointed Abby Kelly to the society’s business committee. Garrison was impressed by Kelly’s commitment to the cause; she had given up her teaching job to endure the most hostile of conditions while lecturing against slavery. During a tour the previous year, she was slandered, physically attacked, and refused hotel rooms. Despite this demonstration of commitment, many male abolitionists objected to a woman in a leadership position. At the May convention, “clergymen went through the audience urging every woman…to vote against the motion.” The contradiction of asking women to vote in this case but not in others did not escape ironic comment from feminists, and Garrison’s appointment of Kelly prevailed. Some of the losers, however, could not accept majority rule, and they vented their frustrations in London the next month.
Also sailing across the sea were the female delegates: Lucretia Mott led five Philadelphia women “in modest Quaker costume”; the three from Boston were “women of refinement and education” and they were joined by “several still in their twenties.” Among them was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband Henry, who went to the abolitionist meeting on their honeymoon. Much later, in the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, she would recall:
The American clergymen, who had landed a few days before, had been busily engaged in fanning the English prejudice into active hostility against the admission of these women into the Convention…. The excitement and vehemence of protest and denunciation could not have been greater.
While the women watched in silence, some of the male American delegates made strong arguments for their inclusion. George Bradburn, a Massachusetts legislator, orated for a half-hour: “What a misnomer to call this a World’s Convention of Abolitionists when some of the oldest and most thorough-going Abolitionists in the World are denied the right to be represented!” Toward the end of the day’s debate, he sprang to his feet exasperated and used words that are almost incredible for a politician of any era:
“Prove to me, gentlemen, that your Bible sanctions the slavery of women—the complete subjugation of one-half the race to the other—and I should feel that the best work I could do for humanity would be to make a grand bonfire of every Bible in the Universe.”
Along with others, Bostonian Wendell Phillips zealously advocated the women’s cause. He pointed out that the American men could not “take upon themselves the responsibility of withdrawing the delegates…[whom] their constituents…sanctioned as their fit representatives.” In response to the most frequently offered argument for excluding women—that a mixed group would be offensive to the host country—Phillips retorted:
In America we listen to no such arguments. If we had done so