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 involv

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 York, 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 b

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