Pick any woman who argued for woman’s suffrage in the 19th or early 20th century. What other social movement causes outside of woman’s suffrage was that individual involved in promoting? How did that cause also help (or not help) promote woman’s suffrage itself?
Woman: Majorie Spruill Wheeler
Use the article below for help
The fact of their silence deeply grieved us, but
the philosophy of their indifference we thor-
oughly comprehended for the first time and saw
as never before, that only from woman’s stand-
point could the battle be successfully fought, and
victory secured. “It is wonderful,” says Swift, “with
what patience some folks can endure the suffer-
ings of others.” Our liberal men counseled us to
silence during the war, and we were silent on our
own wrongs; they counseled us again to silence in
Kansas and New
Y
ork, lest we should defeat “ne-
gro suffrage,” and threatened if we were not, we
might fight the battle alone. We chose the latter,
and were defeated. But standing alone we learned
our power; we repudiated man’s counsels forever-
more; and solemnly vowed that there should
never be another season of silence until woman
had the same rights everywhere on this green
earth, as man.
While we hold in loving reverence the names
of such men as Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley,
William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Wendell
Phillips and Frederick Douglass, and would urge
the rising generation of young men to emulate
their virtues, we would warn the young women of
the coming generation against man’s advice as to
their best interests, their highest development. We
would point for them the moral of our experi-
ences: that woman must lead the way to her own
enfranchisement, and work out her own salvation
with a hopeful courage and determination that
knows no fear nor trembling. She must not put
her trust in man in this transition period, since,
while regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave,
their interests must be antagonistic.
But when at last woman stands on an even
platform with man, his acknowledged equal
everywhere, with the same freedom to express
herself in the religion and government of the
country, then, and not till then, can she safely
take counsel with him in regard to her most sacred
rights, privileges, and immunities; for not till then
will he be able to legislate as wisely and gener-
ously for her as for himself.
THE NATIONAL WOMAN
SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION
(DOCUMENT DATE 1883)
SOURCE: The National Woman Suffrage Association.
Library of Congress. Gift of the National American
Woman Association (1 November 1938).
In the following document, originally created in 1883,
the members of the National Woman Suffrage Associa-
tion detail the mission and structure of the organization.
The National Woman Suffrage
Association
ARTICLE 1.—This organization shall be called
the NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIA-
TION.
ARTICLE 2.—The object of this Association
shall be to secure NATIONAL protection for
women citizens in the exercise of their right to
vote.
ARTICLE 3.—All citizens of the United States
subscribing to this Constitution, and contributing
not less than one dollar annually, shall be consid-
ered members of the Association, with the right to
participate in its deliberations.
ARTICLE 4.—The officers of this Association
shall be a President, a Vice-President from each of
the States and Territories, Corresponding and
Recording Secretaries, a Treasurer and an Execu-
tive Committee of not less than five.
ARTICLE 5.—A quorum of the Executive Com-
mittee shall consist of nine, and all the Officers of
this Association shall be ex-officio members of such
Committee, with power to vote.
ARTICLE 6.—All Women Suffrage Societies
throughout the country shall be welcomed as
auxiliaries; and their accredited officers or duly
appointed representatives shall be recognized as
members of the National Association.
Those desiring to join can do so by sending
one dollar with name and address to MRS. JANE
H. SPOFFARD, Treasurer, RIGGS HOUSE, Washing-
ton, D.C.
OVERVIEWS
ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS (ESSAY
DATE 1978)
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MARJORIE SPRUILL WHEELER
(ESSAY DATE 1995)
SOURCE: Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. “Introduction: A
Short History of the Woman Suffrage Movement in
America.” In One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the
Woman Suffrage Movement, edited by Marjorie Spruill
Wheeler, pp. 9-20. Troutdale, Oreg.: New Sage Press,
1995.
In the following excerpt, Wheeler traces the origins,
strategies, divisions, and state victories of the woman’s
suffrage movement from 1848 to the end of the nineteenth
century.
Origins: 1848-1869
The woman suffrage movement, which began
in the northeastern United States, developed in
the context of antebellum reform. Many women
including Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Abby
Kelley Foster, Lucretia Mott, Maria Stewart, Anto-
ON THE SUBJECT OF�
LUCRETIA COFFIN MOTT (1793-1880)
Lucretia Coffin Mott was a pioneer feminist
leader and radical abolitionist. She was born
on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts;
her family became Quakers and in 1804
moved to the mainland. She was educated in
Boston and New York, and after working
briefly as a schoolteacher, married James
Mott in 1811. At the age of twenty-eight,
Mott became a Quaker minister, and when
the denomination divided over matters of
doctrine she supported the liberal, or Hick-
site, faction. The Motts were abolitionists,
and their home became a station on the
Underground Railroad, by which Southern
slaves escaped to the North. Mott helped
found the first antislavery society for women
in 1837, and later, with other militant aboli-
tionist women, helped William Lloyd Garrison
take over the American Antislavery Society.
In 1840 Mott was one of a group of
women who accompanied Garrison to Lon-
don for a world antislavery convention; Gar-
rison sat with Mott and other women in the
gallery when they were refused seating in the
main area, and denied official recognition as
delegates from the United States. At the
convention Mott met the young Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. Their friendship developed,
and Mott inspired Stanton, who in time grew
more radical than her mentor. The two
eventually organized the first Woman’s Rights
Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in
1848. During the Civil War, Mott was a vocal
supporter of the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution. She was deeply distressed by
the split in the women’s rights movement
that developed in the late 1860s, and worked
to heal it until her death in 1880.
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inette Brown Blackwell, Lucy Stone, Susan B.
Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, began
speaking out for woman’s rights when their ef-
forts to participate fully in the great reform move-
ments of the day—including antislavery and
temperance—were rebuffed. These early feminists
demanded a wide range of changes in woman’s
social, moral, legal, educational, and economic
status; the right to vote was not their initial focus.
Indeed, those present at the Seneca Falls Conven-
tion in upstate New York regarded the resolution
demanding the vote as the most extreme of all
their demands, and adopted it by a narrow margin
at the insistence of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Frederick Douglass.
After the Civil War, women’s rights leaders
saw enfranchisement as one of the most impor-
tant, perhaps the most important of their goals.
Enfranchisement, they believed, was essential
both as a symbol of women’s equality and indi-
viduality and a means of improving women’s legal
and social condition. They were extremely disap-
pointed when the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments did not provide universal suffrage
for all Americans, but extended the franchise only
to black men. In fact, women’s rights advocates
divided acrimoniously in 1869 largely over the is-
sue of whether or not to support ratification of
the Fifteenth Amendment.
Suffrage Strategies During “The
Schism”: 1869-1890
Two woman suffrage organizations were
founded in 1869, with different positions on the
Fifteenth Amendment and different ideas about
how best to promote woman suffrage. The Na-
tional Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA)
headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, but
called for a Sixteenth Amendment that would
enfranchise women. Led exclusively by women,
the New York-based NWSA focused upon the
enfranchisement of women through federal ac-
tion, and adopted a more radical tone in promot-
ing a wide variety of feminist reforms in its short-
lived journal, The Revolution.
The other organization, the American Woman
Suffrage Association (AWSA) with headquarters in
Boston, was led by Lucy Stone with the aid of her
husband Henry Blackwell, Mary Livermore, Julia
Ward Howe, Henry Ward Beecher, Antoinette
Brown Blackwell, Thomas Wentworth Higginson
and others. It supported ratification of the Fif-
teenth Amendment while working for woman suf-
frage as well. While endorsing a federal amend-
ment for female enfranchisement, this
organization concentrated on developing grass-
roots support for woman suffrage. Employing
agents who traveled all over the nation, establish-
ing local and state suffrage organizations, speak-
ing and circulating literature, and working
through its newspaper, The Woman’s Journal, the
AWSA engaged in a massive educational campaign
designed to make woman suffrage and other
feminist reforms seem less radical and consistent
with widely shared American values. AWSA mem-
bers promoted state suffrage amendments and
various forms of “partial suffrage” legislation,
including bills giving women the right to vote on
school or municipal issues or in presidential elec-
tions; they believed that these measures were
desirable in themselves and a means to the even-
tual end—full suffrage for all American women.
Meanwhile, suffragists associated with the
NWSA, disheartened by the response to the
proposed federal amendment, and disdaining the
state-by-state approach, tried to win their rights
by other approaches, known collectively as the
“New Departure.” These suffragists challenged
their exclusion from voting on the grounds that,
as citizens, they could not be deprived of their
rights as protected by the Constitution. Victoria
Woodhull, a radical, iconoclastic, and beautiful
figure who briefly gained the support of Stanton
and Anthony in the 1870s (before her scandalous
personal life and advocacy of free love were
revealed at great cost to the movement), made
this argument before Congress in 1871.
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony attempted to vote,
hoping to be arrested and to have the opportunity
to test this strategy in the courts; she was arrested
and indicted for “knowingly, wrongfully and
unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the
Congress of the United States.” Found guilty and
fined, she insisted she would never pay a dollar of
it. Virginia Minor, a suffrage leader in St. Louis,
succeeded in getting the issue before the United
States Supreme Court, but in 1875 the court ruled
unanimously that citizenship did not automati-
cally confer the right to vote and that the issue of
female enfranchisement should be decided within
the states.
The West Pioneers in Woman Suffrage
Even as the NWSA and the AWSA competed
for support and tried several strategies for winning
female enfranchisement to no avail, woman suf-
frage was making headway in the West. While
most eastern politicians were dead set against
woman suffrage, politicians and voters in several
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western states enfranchised women and, at times,
battled Congress for the right to do so. In 1869
Wyoming led the nation in the adoption of
woman suffrage while still a territory; in 1890,
when it appeared that Congress would not ap-
prove its application for statehood as long as
Wyoming allowed woman suffrage, the legislature
declared “we will remain out of the Union a
hundred years rather than come in without the
women.” Even the Mormon stronghold of Utah
enacted woman suffrage as a territory in 1870 and
came into the Union with woman suffrage in
1896. Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896) were the
other “pioneering” suffrage states.
Historians differ as to the reason why the West
was so precocious in its adoption of woman suf-
frage. One theory was that frontier conditions
undermined traditional gender roles and that
women, having proven their ability to conquer
difficult conditions and do “men’s work,” were
rewarded with the vote. Another theory was that
the politicians hoped that women voters would
help to “civilize” the West. Most historians stress
practical politics as opposed to advanced ideology
as the explanation, arguing that western politi-
cians found it expedient to enfranchise women
for a variety of reasons. In Utah, for example,
Mormons were confident that the votes of women
would help preserve Mormon traditions—includ-
ing polygamy—and that enfranchising women
would help to dispel the idea widely accepted in
the East that Mormon women were an oppressed
lot.
For whatever reasons, these four western states
were the only states to adopt woman suffrage in
the nineteenth century. The next round of state
victories did not come until 1910, and these were
also in the West (Washington, 1910; California,
1911; Oregon, 1912; Kansas, 1912; and Arizona,
1912).
Woman Suffrage and Temperance
Meanwhile, the suffrage movement won a
valuable ally when Frances Willard, as president
of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
(WCTU), led thousands of otherwise quite tradi-
tional women to “convert” to the cause of woman
suffrage as a way of protecting the home, women,
and children. Following its official endorsement
in 1880, the WCTU created a Department of
Franchise under Zerelda Wallace and Dr. Anna
Howard Shaw (later president of the NAWSA),
Illustration of members of the National Women’s Suffrage Association speaking at a political convention in Chicago,
Illinois, in 1880.
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which encouraged state WCTU chapters to en-
dorse suffrage and distributed suffrage literature.
Though Willard was a member of the AWSA and
invited Susan B. Anthony to speak before the
WCTU, the temperance organization’s work for
woman suffrage was particularly valuable in creat-
ing support for suffrage among women who might
have considered the existing suffrage organiza-
tions and their leaders eccentric or radical.
The WCTU endorsement, however, gained for
the suffrage movement a powerful opponent
when the liquor industry concluded that woman
suffrage was a threat to be stopped at all costs.
Indeed, NAWSA President Carrie Chapman Catt
later referred to the liquor industry as “the Invis-
ible Enemy” and believed that its corrupt manipu-
lation of American politics long delayed the com-
ing of woman suffrage.
Unity Restored Through the NAWSA:
1890
One of the most important turning points in
the history of the woman suffrage movement
came in 1890 as the two national suffrage organi-
zations reunited in one major organization. At the
instigation of younger suffragists, the movement’s
aging pioneers put aside their differences suf-
ficiently to merge their rival organizations into
the National American Woman Suffrage Associa-
tion (NAWSA). Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected
president; Lucy Stone, head of the executive com-
mittee; and Susan B. Anthony, vice president; but
it was Anthony who actually took command of
the new organization. (She became president of-
ficially in 1892 and remained in office until 1900.)
While continuing to demand a federal amend-
ment, NAWSA leaders concluded that they must
first build support within the states, winning
enough state suffrage amendments that Congress
would approve a federal amendment and three-
fourths of the states would be sure to ratify.
Though Stanton continued to address a wide
range of feminist issues, many of them quite radi-
cal (including an indictment of Christianity in
her 1895 The Woman’s Bible), most NAWSA lead-
ers including Anthony thought it imperative that
the movement focus almost exclusively on win-
ning the vote. In keeping with this new approach
and influenced by the conservatism of new re-
cruits, the suffragists went to great lengths to
avoid association with radical causes.
Woman Suffrage and the Race Issue
This new approach included shedding the
traditional association of women’s rights with the
rights of blacks. Although the NAWSA never
stopped using natural rights arguments for woman
suffrage, white suffragists—still indignant that
black men were enfranchised ahead of them and
angry at the ease with which immigrant men were
enfranchised—drifted away from insistence upon
universal suffrage and increasingly employed rac-
ist and nativist rhetoric and tactics.
The new NAWSA strategy included building
support in the South. There the historic connec-
tion between the woman’s movement and antisla-
very made suffrage anathema to the white conser-
vatives who once again controlled the region and
made advocacy of woman suffrage quite difficult
for the influential white women the NAWSA
wished to recruit. In the 1890s, however, with
Laura Clay of Kentucky as intermediary, NAWSA
leaders went to great lengths to, in Clay’s words,
“bring in the South.”
Using a strategy first suggested by Henry
Blackwell, northern and southern leaders began to
argue that woman suffrage—far from endangering
white supremacy in the South—could be a means
of restoring it. In fact, they suggested that the
adoption of woman suffrage with educational or
property qualifications that would disqualify most
black women, would allow the South to restore
white supremacy in politics without “having to”
disfranchise black men and risk Congressional
repercussions.
The NAWSA spent considerable time and
resources developing this “southern strategy,”
sending Catt and Anthony on speaking tours
through the region, and holding the 1895 NAWSA
convention in Atlanta. Eager to avoid offending
their southern hosts they even asked their aging
hero Frederick Douglass—who was an honored
participant in women’s rights conventions else-
where in the nation—to stay away from the
Atlanta meeting. By 1903, however, it was becom-
ing clear that this southern strategy had failed;
the region’s politicians refused (in the words of
one Mississippi politician) to “cower behind pet-
ticoats” and “use lovely women” to maintain
white supremacy. Instead, they found other means
to do so that did not involve the “destruction” of
woman’s traditional role.
White suffragists largely turned their backs on
African American women in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and, in the South,
excluded them totally from white suffrage organi-
zations. Nevertheless, a growing number of African
American women actively supported woman suf-
frage during this period. Following a path blazed
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by former slave Sojourner Truth and free blacks
Harriet Forten Purvis and Margaretta Forten who
spoke at antebellum women’s rights conventions,
and Massachusetts reformers Caroline Remond
Putman and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin who were
active in the AWSA in the 1870s, black women
persevered in their advocacy of woman suffrage
even in these difficult times. Prominent African
American suffragists included Ida B. Wells-Barnett
of Chicago, famous as a leading crusader against
lynching; Mary Church Terrell, educator and first
president of the National Association of Colored
Women (NACW); and Adella Hunt Logan, Tuske-
gee faculty member, who, in articles in The Crisis,
insisted that if white women needed the vote to
protect their rights, then black women—victims
of racism as well as sexism—needed the ballot
even more.
Still, white suffrage leaders, who either shared
the nativism or racism endemic to turn-of-the
century America or were convinced they must
cater to it in order to succeed, continued in their
attempts to shed the movement’s radical image
and enlarge their constituency.
ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS (ESSAY
DATE 1998)
SOURCE: DuBois, Ellen Carol. “What Made Seneca
Falls Possible?” In Remembering Seneca Falls: Honoring
the Women Who Paved the Way: An Essay, pp. 4-16.:
Boston: The Schlesinger Library for the History of
Women, Radcliffe College, 1998.
In the following excerpt, DuBois compares and contrasts
the revolutionary nature of the 1848 Seneca Falls conven-
tion calling for women’s rights with popular democratic
revolutions in Europe that same year.
For both the champions and the denigrators
of women’s rights, the Seneca Falls Woman’s
Rights Convention of 1848 was of a piece with
the revolutionary upheavals of the age. The year
1848 was of wide historical significance, with
revolutions in Europe and major social changes,
or demands for change, in the United States, not
only by women.
In 1848 Elizabeth Blackwell became the first
American woman to earn a regular medical degree,
and the organized working women of Lowell
petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a ten-
hour day; in 1847 Lucy Stone had been the first
woman in American history to earn a Bachelor of
Arts degree. In such an atmosphere, the an-
nouncement of a public convention dedicated
solely to the rights of women, a development for
which there was no precedent in this country or
any other, was less startling than it might have
been in a year in which history was moving at a
less breakneck speed.
The Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention
can be situated in this broader historical context
at three levels. First, the international: 1848 was a
year of democratic revolution, particularly in
Europe. Second, the national: in 1848, the United
States defeated Mexico in a controversial war that
would accelerate the struggle over slavery and
inaugurate a new era of aggressive American
nationalism. The third context is that of New York
State, which, earlier in 1848, had passed one of
the most advanced married women’s property acts
of any state. Each of these levels helps us to
understand the forces behind and the significance
of the Seneca Falls convention.
When historians speak of “the revolutions of
1848,” they are referring to popular democratic
movements in Germany, France, Italy and Austria.
In Germany the revolutions of 1848 led Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels to write the Communist Mani-
festo. The revolutionary movements of 1848 were
intent on establishing modern constitutional
governments, based on a broad popular franchise
that would ensure genuine democracy. The Com-
munist Manifesto captures for us the degree to
which these universal democratic hopes were
identified with the political ambitions of a particu-
lar class, the wage-earning “proletariat.” But it was
not only workers whose activism fueled the era’s
grand political dreams.
Women too saw themselves as a revolutionary
class, an oppressed group whose political empow-
erment would lead to social transformation of the
most profound sort. In Germany and France
especially, groups of women joined the revolution-
ary ferment and called simultaneously for national
democratic revolution and women’s rights. In-
deed, in the eyes of female revolutionaries, the
two were identical: women’s rights were not a
single issue, a special interest, counterpoised to
“men’s” revolution. Lucretia Mott, the senior
feminist at the Seneca Falls convention, reflecting
on the links among the European revolutions, the
demand for women’s rights, and democratic
rumblings among the upstate New York Seneca
Indians whom she visited that summer, said
All these subjects of reform are kindred in their
nature; and giving to each its proper consideration
will tend to strengthen and serve the mind for
all. . . . [The abolitionist] will not love the slave
less in loving universal humanity more.1
Americans in general, and women’s rights
pioneers in particular, were perfectly aware of the
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revolutionary winds stirring in Europe, and saw
their own efforts as a part. “This is the age of
revolutions,” began the New York Herald’s cover-
age of the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca
Falls. “To whatever part of the world the attention
is directed, the political and social fabric is crum-
bling to pieces; and changes which far exceed the
wildest dreams of the enthusiastic Utopians of the
last generation, are now pursued with ardor and
perseverance.”2
In taking their historic initiative, American
women’s rights pioneers appealed to “the upward
tending spirit of the age, busy in an hundred
forms of effort for the world’s redemption.” This
was the language used at the first national wom-
en’s rights convention, held two years after Seneca
Falls in Worcester, Massachusetts.3 There, Paulina
Wright Davis invoked the unity of women’s rights
and the era’s revolutionary spirit. “The reforma-
tion we propose in its utmost scope is radical and
universal . . . ,” she declared. “It is an epochal
movement—the emancipation of a class, the
redemption of half the world, and a conforming
reorganization of all social, political, and industrial
interests and institutions.”4
At the Seneca Falls convention, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton expressed this same historic sensibil-
ity.
A new era is dawning upon the world, . . . when
the millions now under the iron heel of the tyrant
will assert their manhood, when woman yielding
to the voice of the spirit within her will demand
the recognition of her humanity, when her soul,
grown too large for her chains, will burst the
bands around her set and stand redeemed, regen-
erated and disenthralled.5
In this challenge to women to burst their
chains we hear distinct echoes of Karl Marx’s 1848
call to the workers of the world to unite and rise,
as they have “nothing to lose but [their] chains.”
The Communist Manifesto was not available in the
United States until 1871, but the similarity is there
and reflects the more general influences at work,
the spirit of the age and the widespread revolu-
tionary metaphors used in different places by dif-
ferent sorts of visionaries to express it.
In her Seneca Falls speech, Stanton virtually
soars on the wings of revolutionary optimism,
determined as she is that her sex not only be part
of, but indeed help realize, the world historic
transformation she feels coming.
While the globe resounds with the tramping of
legions who roused from their lethargy are re-
solved to be free or perish, while old earth reels
under the crashing of thrones and the destruction
of despotisms, . . . while the flashing sunlight
that breaks over us makes dark so much that men
have before revered and shows that to be good
that had scarcely been dreamed of . . . ,
she proclaims, and goes on to ask: “shall we
the women of this age be content to remain inac-
tive and to move in but a narrow and circum-
scribed sphere, a sphere which man shall assign
us?”6 Not until the abolition of slavery in 1865,
when at least one “scarcely dreamed of” aspira-
tion was realized, did Stanton again take to such
revolutionary rhetoric.
For all the similarity, there was also a funda-
mental difference between what began at Seneca
Falls and these other revolutions of 1848: steady
growth and development for American women,
but reaction and repression in Europe, with
particularly brutal consequences for women. In
France the Provisional Legislature, elected in 1848
without the votes of women, turned in a radically
reactionary direction; one of its first acts (passed
just two weeks after the Seneca Falls convention)
was a law prohibiting women from participating
in any political clubs. Pauline Roland and Jeanne
Deroin, two of the leading women of the revolu-
tion, were soon imprisoned under this law’s provi-
sions. In 1851 they wrote from their jail cells in
Paris to the Woman’s Rights Convention in
Worcester that their American sisters’
courageous declaration of Woman’s Rights has
resounded even to our prison, and has filled our
souls with inexpressible joy.7
Undoubtedly American women were favored
in their feminist ambitions by the fact that our
national democratic upheaval was safely in the
past. Indeed, Stanton and her Seneca Falls compa-
triots were able to rely on the structure and
authority of the American Declaration of Indepen-
dence as the framework for their feminist mani-
festo, and thus to confer legitimacy on the radical
new direction they were taking. Like the thirteen
colonies in revolt against the British throne, their
declaration proclaimed, women aspired to over-
throw another, domestic tyranny, that of their
husbands, fathers and brothers. As radical a
framework as this was for American feminism, the
spirit of revolutionary nationalism that the Seneca
Falls women shared with other ’48 radicals did
not draw upon them, as it did upon their Euro-
pean sisters, the wrath of existing power structures,
threatened in their very existence.
Instead of resulting in outright government
repression, the Woman’s Rights Convention at
Seneca Falls inaugurated an orderly and deter-
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mined process of movement building, limited
only by the limits of women’s own aspirations
and energy. Seneca Falls was followed two weeks
later by a second Woman’s Rights Convention in
Rochester, New York, where the links among
democracy, women’s rights and the revolutionary
labor movement were even clearer; and then by
an accelerating flow of local and national conven-
tions, of traveling women’s rights agitators and
ambitious women’s rights newspapers throughout
the 1850s. Indeed, the repressions in Europe even
benefited the American women’s rights move-
ment. European ’48ers escaped to the United
States, bringing with them their revolutionary
élan, their political experience, and such feminists
as the German Mathilde Anneke, who spoke on
women’s rights around the United States through-
out the 1850s.
All of this is not to say that American politics
were peaceful and harmonious in 1848; they were
not, and the tumultuous national political context
is fundamental for understanding the when, why
and what of the Seneca Falls convention. Five
months earlier, in February 1848, the United
States won its year-and-a-half long war against
Mexico, fought to acquire Mexico’s northern ter-
ritories. The Mexican war was the first American
war in which popular passions were aroused on
both sides. Pro-war sentiments in the south and
west were strong enough to elect Democrat James
Polk to the presidency in 1844, and after him a
series of soldier/politicians, all sporting their
military credentials.
In the northeast, however, sentiment ran
against the war. Most memorably, Henry David
Thoreau refused to pay his taxes and wrote the es-
say “Civil Disobedience” to explain his antiwar
stance. The women of Seneca Falls, most of them
Quakers, were undoubtedly in the same camp. In
their article published in the Seneca County Courier
soon after the convention, Stanton and her friend
Elizabeth McClintock referred several times to
“the unjust and cruel war” against Mexico as an
example of the unchristian, sinful conduct into
which slavery was leading the nation and which
the entry of women into politics might help to
reverse.8
The consequences of the Mexican war for
American politics cannot be overstated. The lands
brought into the nation by the war, equal to
roughly seventy percent of the territory of the
United States at that point, carried with them the
inescapable question of the status of slavery there
and of the role of the national government in
controlling its growth or containment in federally
administered lands. In turn, the question of
slavery in the territories spurred on efforts to form
an effective national antislavery party that could
stop the expansion of the “peculiar institution.”
The first of these aspiring antislavery parties
had been formed in 1840, when abolitionists in
the Whig Party withdrew to form the Liberty
Party. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was part and parcel
of this development. Her cousin Gerrit Smith, the
man most influential in turning her into a re-
former, was one of the Liberty Party’s founders.
Henry Stanton was deeply involved in the schism
of the antislavery movement from which the
Liberty Party emerged. Indeed, he and Elizabeth
made the snap decision to marry in May 1840,
immediately after the new party was formed. Sail-
ing to London for their impromptu honeymoon,
a fellow passenger was James Birney, who had just
been chosen to run for president on the Liberty
Party ticket that November.
“I like him very much,” Elizabeth wrote Gerrit
Smith from England, “though he lectures me oc-
casionally through Henry for my want of discre-
tion.”9
Four years later, a second antislavery party was
formed, this one split from the Democratic Party.
The Free Soil Party was much more powerful than
the Liberty Party, garnering ten percent of the
popular vote in 1848 and draining enough sup-
port from the Democrats to elect a Whig president,
Zachary Taylor. Here Stanton’s link was even more
intimate: her husband Henry was one of the
founders of the Free Soil Party and indeed was off
speaking on its behalf in late July. The town of
Seneca Falls was a Free Soil hotbed, and through-
out the spring and summer of 1848 Free Soil
conventions were held in upstate New York from
Utica to Buffalo, involving some of the same
people who attended the Woman’s Rights Con-
vention. One historian of Seneca Falls calculates
that, of the twenty-six local families with members
attending the Woman’s Rights Convention, eigh-
teen were actively involved in the Free Soil move-
ment.1 0
What is the significance of all this political
activity for the women of Seneca Falls, who after
all could not vote? But of course their disfranchise-
ment was becoming exactly the point. Through-
out the 1830s, the abolitionist movement had
steered clear of party politics, resting all its faith
on “moral suasion.” Deeply religious and un-
tainted by male politics, abolitionism in this
period was very inviting to women. Foremost
among these women were the passionate Chris-
tian abolitionist feminists Sarah and Angelina
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Grimké. Sexual equality as the Grimkés perceived
and preached it in the 1830s was fundamentally a
matter of morality: as they put it,
Whatsoever is right for a man to do, it right for a
woman to do.
The authors of History of Woman Suffrage wrote
that “above all other causes of the ‘Woman Suf-
frage Movement,’ was the Anti-Slavery struggle in
this country . . . so clearly taught, that the
women who crowded to listen, readily learned the
lesson of freedom for themselves” and so “the
double battle to fight against the tyranny of sex
and color” was launched.1 1
When the abolitionists began to turn from
moral suasion to political action, however,
women’s participation was thrown into crisis.
Party politics was a male environment, where
women were not welcome and few wished to go,
and where the franchise was fiercely guarded as
the ultimate symbol of American manhood. If
women were to continue to play a major battle
against slavery, they would have to take an even
more dramatic step out of their foreordained
sphere than the Grimkés had in 1838 when they
became public lecturers “to promiscuous as-
semblies”1 2 and spoke on subjects “about which
ladies should not know.” Women would have to
demand “the sacred right of the elective fran-
chise,” the cornerstone of American democratic
claims. Few women were willing to enter this
particular territory.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, student and protégé
of female abolitionists Lucretia Mott and the
Grimkés, wife of one political abolitionist, Henry
Stanton, and kinswoman of another, Gerrit Smith,
took this step of extending the vision of sexual
equality to the political realm.
So long as we are to be governed by human laws,
I should be unwilling to have the making and
administering of those laws left entirely to the
selfish and unprincipled part of the community,
she had written in 1842.1 3 The Woman’s
Rights Convention of 1848 and the Declaration of
Sentiments that it passed, including the much
debated ninth resolution in favor of woman suf-
frage, were the result of her conviction that social
change must ultimately be won through politics
and that women committed to making social
change need political equality.
Notes
1. A word for the poor Indians. The few hundreds left of the
Seneca Nation at the Cataraugus reservation are improving
in their mode of living, cultivating their land, and educat-
ing their children. They, too, are learning somewhat from
the political agitations abroad: and, as man is wont, are
imitating the movements of France and all Europe in seek-
ing larger liberty—more independence. Their Chieftainship
is therefore a subject of discussion in their councils, and
important changes are demanded and expected, as to the
election of their chief, many being prepared for a yearly ap-
pointment. “Letter from Lucretia Mott,” Liberator, 6
October 1848.
2. Quoted in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and
Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage,
vol. 1 (Rochester, N.Y.: Susan B. Anthony, 1881), 805.
3. Ibid., 221.
4. Ibid., 222.
5. Address by ECS on woman’s rights [September 1848], The
Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan
B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1997), 115
6. Ibid., 116.
7. HWS [History of Woman Suffrage], vol. 1, 234
8. ECS and Elizabeth W. McClintock to the editors, Seneca
County Courier, [after 23 July 1848], The Selected
Papers . . . , 88-94.
9. ECS to Gerrit Smith, 3 August [1840], The Selected
Papers . . . , 16.
10. Judith Wellman, “The Seneca Falls Women’s Rights
Convention: A Study of Social Network,” Journal of
Women’s History 3, no. 1 (1991):23.
11. HWS, vol. 1, 52 and 53.
12. Ibid., 52 and 53.
13. ECS to Elizabeth Pease, The Selected Papers . . . , 30.
(Elizabeth Cady Stanton)
THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS
EFFECT ON SUFFRAGE
ELLEN CAROL DUBOIS (ESSAY
DATE 1995)
SOURCE: DuBois, Ellen Carol. “Taking the Law Into
Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor and Suffrage Mili-
tance in the 1870s.” In One Woman, One Vote: Rediscov-
ering the Woman Suffrage Movement, edited by Marjorie
Spruill Wheeler, pp. 81-98. Troutdale, Oreg.: NewSage
Press, 1995.
In the following excerpt, DuBois describes the increas-
ingly militant strategies pursued by women in courts of
law during the 1870s in reaction to their exclusion from
enfranchisement in both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments.
Introduction to the New Departure
. . . Most histories of women’s rights—my
own included—have emphasized the initial rage
of women’s rights leaders at the Radical Republi-
can authors of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
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