The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXIII: “The Fundamental Privilege of Citizenship”

    On the surface, at least in terms of their goals, the American Woman Suffrage Association – as led by Lucy Stone – and the National Woman Suffrage Association – as led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – did tend to be quite similar. Both of them, fundamentally, sought the enfranchisement of American women. But their methods, as they developed over the course of the 1870s and 1880s, showed a marked difference in execution. The AWSA included men and women among its members, drew upon the resources of the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party, employed a decentralized structure that focused on the individual states, and was generally conservative in its character, making use of petitions and public speeches, for example, and evincing orthodox attitudes towards marriage and religion. Broadly incrementalist in its character, it was, in many ways, a reflection of Lucy Stone’s expressed concerns about funding, logistics, and public perception. The NWSA, meanwhile, was staffed almost exclusively by women, prioritized its own organization and financial independence, adopted a centralized structure, and tended towards militancy and explicit confrontation, specifically by favoring litigation and openly questioning aspects of social institutions which its leaders felt were detrimental to women’s independence. More urgent in nature than its rival, the organization founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was aimed at overturning what the former described in an article in the The Revolution in the spring of 1869 as the “aristocracy of sex” that had descended upon the United States with the ratification of the 15^th Amendment and the establishment of universal manhood suffrage.

    Over the course of the two decades that followed their establishment, the NWSA and the AWSA set about executing their respective programs. The former tended to be the flashier of the pair, risking big and losing big while pushing for wholesale change on the federal level. Initially, this took the form of the so-called “New Departure” strategy, the brainchild of a Missouri activist named Virginia Louisa Minor (1824-1894). Her thesis, which she and her lawyer husband devised between them, was essentially that the Constitution already guaranteed women the right to vote by way of the recently ratified 14^th Amendment. Said amendment, recall, stated plainly that, 

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States [.]

Arguing that citizenship necessarily entailed the right to vote, Minor accordingly asserted that American women came into possession of the franchise with the ratification the amendment in question on July 9^th, 1868. Bearing this in mind, all women need to have done in order to affirm said right was attempt to vote in a state or federal election and then allow the resulting legal process to play itself out to completion. Ideally, in a number of years, the Supreme Court itself would affirm Minor’s premise and women’s suffrage would be secured without the need to further amend the Constitution.

    No doubt because it seemed at once to be both dramatic and cunning – a strategy which sought to overturn established assumptions while also promising to terminate in a dramatic showdown – the NWSA embraced the New Departure with undisguised enthusiasm. Beginning in 1871, hundreds of women began attempting to vote in jurisdictions across the country, with the organization footing their legal bills when they were denied the franchise and opted to sue. The results, as predicted, were at once frustrating and encouraging. On the one hand, not a single woman was permitted to successfully cast a ballot. And as the resulting suits were filed and the relevant judicial authorities began to weigh in, it very soon became clear the extent to which the NWSA was fighting an uphill battle. The Supreme Court of the District of Columbia – now the United States District Court for the District of Columbia – provided a particularly memorable ruling in October of the aforementioned year. After discoursing, at length, as to the applicability of “natural law” to the political and social realities of the late-19^th century United States – the result of which was an extended digression on the supposed chaos which would result from granting an absolute right to vote to the citizen inhabitants of major American urban centers – the majority ruled summarily that, “The right to vote ought not to be, and is not, an absolute right. The fact that the practical working of the assumed right would be destructive of civilization is decisive that the right does not exist.” Disheartening though such a ruling may have been, however, it was also exactly according to the plan. The New Departure required the lower courts to reject the NWSA’s cases, thus allowing the organization to make appeals to the next tier in the American judicial hierarchy. So long as the Supreme Court saw the light of day when the climactic moment finally came, all the frustrations and reversals would have proven to be worthwhile.

    Anthony, of course, did her part for the cause as well. On November 1^st, 1872, she and her sisters entered a voter registration office located in a barber shop in the city of Rochester, New York and convinced the attending inspectors – thanks to the timely aid of local attorney John Van Voorhis (1926-1905) – to allow her to place her name on the local electoral roll. Four days later, on November 5^th, Anthony accordingly cast her ballot in the ward where she resided after once again successfully arguing in her own favor with the attending poll watchers. The officials, it seemed, found themselves in something of a bind. While on the one hand, under pain of imprisonment, it was a crime to allow an ineligible voter to cast a ballot, it was also a crime to refuse to allow an eligible voter to do the same. And since Anthony willingly took the prescribed oath of affirmation, the poll watchers were not in a position to claim that she was, in fact, ineligible. Doubtless eager to avoid accusations that they had refused anyone the right to the franchise – in the event that Anthony did have the right to vote – the officials allowed her to carry on and she successfully cast her ballot. Nine days later, on November 14^th, warrants were issued for the arrest of Anthony, the various women she had convinced to vote alongside her, and all of the poll watchers who had allowed their votes to be cast. On November 18^th, Anthony was arrested at her home by a deputy U.S. Marshal. Fifteen women were arrested in all, only one of which, Anthony, refused to post bail. In lieu of holding her in the Albany County jail, she was permitted to go free before her trial the following summer.

    Over the course of the next several months, Anthony proceeded to go on a well-publicized speaking tour throughout Monroe County, New York, where her trial was to be held and from which the relevant jurors would be drawn. And in the standard speech she gave during her various appearances, she drew particular attention to two logical inconsistences which she observed in the behavior of the United States government and its various institutions and representatives. First, she questioned the extent to which the American government paid heed to the specifics of legal language. According to the cited ruling of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, something like the right to vote could not possibly be inferred by reference to such a nebulous concept as “natural law.” On the contrary, the presiding judge stated, either such a right was expressly affirmed in terms of “positive law” or it could not be said to exist. At the same time, however, most law in a state like New York was written in expressly gendered language. Tax laws, for example, exclusively used the pronouns “he” and “him,” as did the federal Enforcement Act (1870) which Anthony was accused of violating. If affirmative language was so essential to the functioning of government in the American republic as to deny, by its absence, female citizens the right to vote, then why was it that a similar lack of specific language failed to stop female citizens from being taxed, or tried, or executed? Anthony’s response was very simple: such a contradiction should not be permitted. “I insist [,]” she said, “If government officials may thus manipulate the pronouns to tax, fine, imprison and hang women, women may take the same liberty with them to secure to themselves their right to a voice in the government.”

    Anthony’s other central thesis was a fair bit more fundamental. Referring, as had Virginia Minor, to the text of the 14^th Amendment, she asked her audience to consider the broader implications of what the United States government was attempting. “The only question left to be settled now, is: Are women persons?” she said. “And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no State has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities.” It was a bold argument, to be sure, but far from an unreasonable one. If all persons born in the United States were indeed citizens of the same, and if the 14^th Amendment did indeed ensure that no state was able to “Make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” then what other conclusion might a sensible person draw from official efforts to prevent female citizens from voting other than that they must not be citizens – and following on that, persons – at all? As her trial date neared, Anthony sought to ensure that her own views and the arguments of her defensive team were as widely distributed as possible. To that end, she had the pretrial arguments of her lawyer, Henry Selden (1805-1885), printed and distributed and requested the assistance of local and out-of-state newspaper editors in spreading her message. Her intention, as she stated to the publisher of the Rochester Evening Express, was really a very simple one. “We must get the men of Rochester so enlightened [,]” she said, “That no jury of twelve can be found to convict us.”

    These intrigues on the part of Anthony unfortunately did not go unnoticed. At an arraignment on May 22^nd, 1873, the prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Richard Crowley (1836-1908), successfully requested the case be transferred from the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York to the concurrent United States Circuit Court for the Second Circuit. As the latter was set to meet in June in Ontario County, New York, this would serve to remove Anthony’s trial from Rochester, where she’d endeavored to prepare the ground, to the comparatively ambivalent city of Canandaigua, where she’d have to make her case all over again. It was also a significant development because of who was now set to preside. Circa 1873, all Justices of the United States Supreme Court were required, along with assigned District Court judges, to hear cases in the federal Circuit Courts to which they were formally attached. This meant, upon his arrival in June, that Anthony’s case would be heard by Associate Justice Ward Hunt (1810-1886), a Grant appointee who had previously been a member of the New York Republican political machine and who had no experience as a trial judge whatsoever. The resulting proceedings, unsurprisingly, were something of a farce.

    For one thing, Justice Hunt had apparently determined in advance to hear Anthony’s case while presiding alone. This went against the standard practice of the time for the Circuit Courts, wherein federal criminal cases were customarily heard by two judges, the relevant Supreme Court Justice and one of the assigned District Court judges. The reason for this was almost certainly because Hunt wished to cut off the possibility of an appeal to a higher court. Such an appeal could only be made if the presiding judges disagreed on the final verdict. By removing the possibility of disagreement, Hunt thus removed the possibility of an appeal. The presiding justice also repeatedly refused to allow Anthony to testify on her own behalf and denied her, by his conduct of the case, the right to a legitimate trial by jury. Having listened, over the course of two days, to the arguments of Selden – that the 14^th Amendment granted citizenship to all person born in the United States, that citizenship was meaningless without the franchise, and that Anthony had accordingly sought to exercise a right which she legitimately believed she possessed – and Crowley – that the “privileges and immunities” protected by the 14^th Amendment did not include the right to vote, that children were an example of citizens who did not possess this particular privilege, and that a number of federal court decisions left it to the states to define the parameters of the franchise – Hunt then proceeded to deliver a ruling which he freely admitted had been written in advance.

    As if this was not already a fairly stunning admission, the substance of Hunt’s finding was doubly so, and then some. “The right of voting,” he declared,

Or the privilege of voting, is a right or privilege arising under the constitution of the state, and not under the constitution of the United States […] If the state of New York should provide that no person should vote until he had reached the age of thirty years, or after he had reached the age of fifty, or that no person having gray hair, or who had not the use of all his limbs, should be entitled to vote, I do not see how it could be held to be a violation of any right derived or held under the constitution of the United States […] If the fifteenth amendment had contained the word ‘sex,’ the argument of the defendant would have been potent […] The amendment, however, does not contain that word. It is limited to race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Putting aside his contention that a state like New York would have been within its rights to restrict the franchise based on something as frivolous as hair color – a claim so ludicrous in its implications it almost beggars’ belief – Hunt’s assertion that there effectively existed no federal right to vote amounted to a fairly breathtaking interpretation of contemporary law and precedent. None of this is to say, mind you, that the Justice’s claims weren’t factually accurate. Indeed, it is that fact that they were accurate that makes them to difficult to fathom. By the explicit terms of the Constitution, the various states were responsible for determining who could and could not vote in all federal elections held within their respective jurisdictions. It was accordingly also the case that a state like New York, if its elected legislators so desired, could restrict the franchise to all but those possessed of blue eyes and straight teeth. Such was the state of federal law and jurisprudence that the 15^th Amendment was then the sole federal determinant of whether a person could vote or not. That is, of course, unless one starts to reflect upon certain passages of that selfsame 14^th Amendment to which Anthony had clung so resolutely up to this point.

    “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States [,]” it says, “Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law [.]” Granting, circa 1873, that the right to vote was not widely considered to be a fundamental privilege or immunity of citizenship – thus seemingly opening the door for state legislatures to restrict the franchise based on any criteria other than “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” – the dual concepts of “liberty” and “due process of law” would nonetheless seem to carry a good deal of weight between them. What is liberty, after all, if one lacks the ability to vote? How can one be at liberty when they are actively denied a voice in shaping the laws to which they are bound? Justice Hunt, no doubt, as well as those of his ilk, would doubtless have answered that refusing certain people the franchise was quite simply a necessity. As the U.S. Attorney, Richard Crowley, pointed out, denying the franchise to children was nothing more than common sense; they couldn’t be trusted with it, wouldn’t know what to do with it. So, then, seemed to be Hunt’s attitude toward women. Barring some explicit guarantee of their enfranchisement, he was inclined to determine that granting the franchise to female citizens was not conducive to the public good.

    But where, in this determination of his, was the “due process of law” which the 14^th Amendment guaranteed? Surely, if the state of New York did as Justice Hunt suggested was their right and restricted the franchise to those fifty years of age or older, legal proceedings would follow requiring the government of that state to justify the law in question. Such a fundamental denial of one of the basic rights of citizenship could not be taken on account, after all. Rather, it would need to be demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why people under the age of fifty were not adequately qualified to cast a ballot. It would be hard to believe that a man like Ward Hunt – an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States – could deny the necessity of just such a requirement. All the same, this is exactly what he was doing in the ruling cited above. If push came to shove – notwithstanding his own conjecture – he almost certainly would have agreed that people denied the right to vote on account of some immutable physical characteristic were entitled to the due process of law before said denial was permitted to be carried out. Except, of course, if those people happened to be women. If they were women, to Hunt’s thinking, then no explanation was necessary.

    Amazingly enough, Justice Hunt’s narrow-minded ruling on the nature of the federal franchise was not even the most astonishing thing he delivered at the conclusion of Susan B. Anthony’s trial. Having thus determined, to his own satisfaction, that women could not vote under the terms of the United States Constitution, and that the fact of their ineligibility was an entirely settled thing, he accordingly declared that Anthony knowingly broke the law when she cast a ballot in the Election of 1872. In consequence, as Anthony did not dispute having thus broken a federal law, there was no need to poll the jury as to whether she was guilty or innocent. Hunt thus directed the assembled jury to deliver a verdict of guilty. Overriding Selden’s objections, and in preparation to move immediately to sentencing, the presiding justice then asked of Anthony if she had anything to add to the record. But while this was intended as little more than a routine courtesy on Hunt’s part, Anthony seized on the opportunity to speak by delivering one of the most searing speeches in the history of the American movement for women’s rights. “In your ordered verdict of guilty,” she began,

You have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

But while Justice Hunt at this pointed attempted to silence the condemned, asserting that, “The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting [.]” Anthony was not to be so easily dissuaded.

“All of my prosecutors,” she continued,

From the 8th ward corner grocery politician, who entered the complaint, to the United States Marshal, Commissioner, District Attorney, District Judge, your honor on the bench, not one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, even then I should have had just cause of protest for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, awake or asleep, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men. Even my counsel, the Hon. Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before your honor, is my political sovereign. Precisely as no disfranchised person is entitled to sit upon a jury, and no woman is entitled to the franchise, so, none but a regularly admitted lawyer is allowed to practice in the courts, and no woman can gain admission to the bar—hence, jury, judge, counsel, must all be of the superior class.

This constituted, inarguably, a fairly stunning indictment of the very concept of equality under the American system of government and the legal principles upon which it was supposedly grounded. By the terms of the 6^th Amendment, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed [.]” And in accordance with the essential significance of jury trials as lodged within the English Common law tradition – from which the American tradition draws most of its fundamental principles – the only means by which a person might be convicted of a crime is by the “lawful judgement of their peers.” Bearing these basic facts in mind, Anthony’s assertion would seem to be next to impossible to refute. How could it be said that she had been tried by an impartial jury if in truth she had been tried by no jury at all? In what sense were any of the people involved in her trial and conviction her peers if, under the laws and customs of the contemporary United States, every one of them possessed rights and privileges which she was forbidden from ever attaining? Indeed, under these circumstances, what was the purpose of even holding a trial? Why bother pretending Anthony was entitled, by her citizenship, to a fair and impartial trial if no presiding authority could be found who was capable of delivering just that?

    Susan B. Anthony, in short, had been railroaded. And while she had little in the way of legal recourse at her disposal – Justice Hunt, as aforementioned, had earlier ensured that an appeal to the Supreme Court would be impossible – she could at the very least refuse to cooperate with the efforts of her persecutors to reinforce their understanding of her legal inferiority. When, at long last, given the chance to speak, she figuratively spat in the eye of those who claimed to uphold such vaunted principles as liberty, equality, and justice. And when Justice Hunt ordered, by way of punishment, that Anthony pay, “A fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution [,]” she likewise made plain her categorical refusal to oblige. “May it please your honor,” she said,

I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper—Th e Revolution—four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall go to this unjust claim.

Anthony, history would prove, was as good as her word. To her dying day in 1906, she did not, in fact, pay a single cent of the fine laid upon her in 1873. And while this arguably amounted to a victory on its own merits – for she was never punished for her refusal – it also stood as something of a failure. To be sure, Anthony was being sincere when he asserted her refusal to pay the assigned penalty on the grounds that it was fundamentally unjust. At the same time, however, she was almost certainly attempting to maneuver around the legal blockade that Justice Hunt had sought to erect. In refusing to pay the damages, Anthony doubtless hoped that Hunt would order her imprisonment, at which point she could have filed for a habeas corpus writ with the Supreme Court of the United States. By declining to have Anthony imprisoned, the presiding justice thus closed off her last opportunity to appeal her sentence and have her right to the franchise potentially confirmed.  

    None of this is to say that Anthony’s attempt to enact the New Departure strategy in 1872 was of no effect or significance whatsoever. The details of her trial garnered widespread media attention the likes of which no event connected to the movement for women’s rights had ever before been able to achieve. No small amount of this coverage was negative, of course, with editors and pundits from across the country actively denigrating the very notion of women’s suffrage and drawing particular attention to Anthony herself as some kind of ridiculous, unbalanced, self-proclaimed revolutionary. And while Justice Hunt also received his fair share of public excoriation – the New York Sun called for his impeachment; the Trenton State Sentinel and Capital asked, “Why have juries at all if Judges can find verdicts [?]” – the resulting outrage had little, if anything, to do with his recorded treatment of Anthony. The contemporary American public may have been disturbed by the deeds of a particularly imperious and overreaching judge, but the plight of his female victim was apparently cause for little more than ridicule. All that being said, the mere fact of the coverage itself might have been worth its generally mocking tone. For the first time, people living all throughout the United States were being made aware of the existence of a movement for women’s rights and being exposed to the moral suasions of one of the most prominent figures therein. Anthony’s closing speech was widely reprinted – and at no cost to the NWSA – allowing American women and American men to decide for themselves whether the continued refusal of female suffrage was truly necessary or unjust.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXII: “An Element of Restoration and Harmony”

    The first of a dozen national women’s rights conventions was organized and summoned in 1850 at the behest of the aforementioned Lucy Stone – who had since become a fervent anti-slavery activist – and Pauline Kellogg Wright Davis (1813-1876), an educator and abolitionist from Western New York. Held in Worcester, Massachusetts, this inaugural gathering counted as many as one thousand attendees representing almost a dozen different states, at least one of whom came from as far away as California. The first resolution which the gathered delegates considered was that which would become the principal objective of the women’s rights movement as a whole – i.e., “To secure for [woman] political, legal, and social equality with man until her proper sphere is determined by what alone should determine it, her powers and capacities, strengthened and refined by an education in accordance with her nature” – while subsequent discussions sought to address such topics as women’s property rights, education, and employment. On the final evening, Stone rose to give a brief speech in which she summed up the intentions of herself and her closest supporters. “We want to be something more than the appendages of Society [,]” she said,

We want that Woman should be the coequal and help-meet of Man in all the interest and perils and enjoyments of human life. We want that she should attain to the development of her nature and womanhood; we want that when she dies, it may not be written on her gravestone that she was the "relict" of somebody.

The aforementioned Susan B. Anthony – who did not attend this first convention but was kept abreast of the accomplishments of the burgeoning women’s rights movement by her activist parents – was later heard to remark that this declaration by Lucy Stone was what finally convinced her to join the movement herself.

    Subsequent conventions were held in 1851 (also in Worcester), 1852 (in Syracuse, NY), 1853 (in Cleveland, OH), 1854 (in Philadelphia, PA), 1855 (in Cincinnati, OH), and 1856, 1858, 1859, 1860, and 1866 (all in New York City, NY). The twelfth and last of their number was convened in 1869 in Washington, D.C., over twenty years after the first such meeting in Seneca Falls. Lucretia Mott – now in her 70s – and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – approaching that same decade herself – were once more in attendance, as was Susan B. Anthony, Congressmen-Elect John Menard (1838-1893), Kansas Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy (1816-1891), and pioneering surgeon – and the one and only female Medal of Honor recipient – Mary Edward Walker (1832-1919). During that gathering, reflecting back upon the experience of the recent war – and no doubt with her own efforts to secure the ratification of the 13^th Amendment at the front of her mind – Stanton memorably commented upon what then must have seemed to be the self-evident relationship between socio-political inequality and intractable civil strife. “If serfdom, peasantry, and slavery have shattered kingdoms, deluged continents with blood, scattered republics like dust before the wind, and rent our own Union asunder,” Cady asked of her audience, “What kind of a government, think you, American statesmen, you can build, with the mothers of the race crouching at your feet [?]” 

    The Civil War, as it happened, was something of a chaotic time for the women’s rights movement in America. On the one hand, because so many of the most prominent activists and organizers were also deeply enmeshed in the contemporary anti-slavery movement, many of them were inclined to shift their attention away from the goal of attaining the enfranchisement of American women and towards the cause of the final eradication of slavery. Stanton and Anthony in particular threw their combined energies wholeheartedly into forming the Women’s Loyal National League, an organization whose sole and stated purpose was to aid the passage of an amendment which would ban slavery in the United States. And while the result was an undeniable – indeed, one might say astounding – success, with the League securing some four hundred thousand signatures in favor of just such an amendment – which anti-slavery advocates in Congress then used to great effect in persuading certain of their wavering colleagues – the resulting shift in focus arguably deprived the women’s rights movement of much of the momentum it had been building over the course of the 1850s. No national women’s rights conventions were held at all between 1860 and 1866, recall, and only one more would be held thereafter.

    At the same time, however, the success of the Women’s Loyal National League arguably fed back into and inspired subsequent successes on the part of later women’s rights organizations. Though the 1850s had been a fairly momentous decade for the cause of women’s rights, there yet remained no permanent, national coordinating body whose sole purpose was advocating for female social and political emancipation. The aforementioned conventions had been organized on a largely ad-hoc basis by a fairly small number of women whose connections and resources were largely personal. The WLNL helped to change this by introducing its members to the manifest utility of formal organizing methods, helped create professional relationships between women across multiple states and regions, and readied the next generation of young activists for the more politically engaged endeavors that were to follow in the decades ahead. Indeed, it was in many ways the experience and the success of the WLNL that shifted the women’s rights movement in America from one which sought to appeal to the moral sensibilities of its target audience to one which made increasingly canny use of a variety of political techniques and resources. Before this shift could definitively take place, however, a little more chaos was yet in the offing.

    Formed in May of 1866, the American Equal Rights Association was born out of the eleventh Women’s Rights Convention for the purpose of effectively combining the efforts and resources of the contemporary anti-slavery and women’s rights movements. The desire of its leadership – which included Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglas – was essentially to push for the enfranchisement of women and formerly-enslaved peoples as a single reform package with particular attention paid to the momentous political events then unfolding at both the state and federal levels. At that time, recall, the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress were in the process of redefining the nature of the relationship between citizenship and race in America. A constitutional amendment banning slavery had already been approved and ratified while another establishing universal citizenship was very much in the offing. Meanwhile, the various states of the so-called “Confederacy” were in the process of negotiating their reentry into the federal fold, the result of which was a tremendous opportunity for those who wished to advocate for further change. As long as Congress was prepared to actively redefine what it meant to be a citizen, and as long as some portion of the states would have no choice but to accede to Congress’s wishes, a well-organized campaign of lobbying might conceivably achieve a great deal. Such was the goal of the AERA: to capitalize on a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attain universal citizenship and universal suffrage in America.

    But while the AERA was the product of canny strategic thinking and possessed abundant material and political resources, it was unfortunately also immediately stricken by fairly serious internal divisions. At its first annual meeting in New York in May of 1867, for example, the discussion very quickly broke down into a kind of ranking of priorities. The likes of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressed a certain amount of trepidation at the idea that Black men in American might gain the right to vote before women. “Woman,” said Mott, “Had a right to be a little jealous of the addition of so large a number of men to the voting class, for the colored men would naturally throw all their strength upon the side of those opposed to woman's enfranchisement.” Stanton, meanwhile, when asked by Black abolitionist George T. Downing (1819-1903) if she would be willing to allow Black men to gain the franchise before women, answered, “I would say, no; I would not trust him with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are. I desire that we go into the kingdom together.” As callously racialized as this answer was, it did not stop other Black attendees from agreeing with Stanton. Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), a former slave herself who had become a renowned public speaker and activist in the 1840s and 1850s, notably remarked during this same discussion that, “If colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before [,]” while Frederick Douglass went so far as to admit that, “The race to which I belong have not generally taken the right ground on this question.”

    Not every woman agreed with Stanton and Mott, of course, and many white attendees also favored pursuing Black suffrage in preference to female suffrage. Massachusetts abolitionist Abby Kelly Foster, for one, argued that the need to secure the electoral franchise for Black men in America was significantly more urgent than the corresponding effort on behalf of white women. And Congregationalist preacher Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) – brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) – opined that while universal suffrage should remain the AERA’s ultimate goal, its members should also refrain from turning aside the opportunity to secure Black suffrage alone, if possible. Very little, it seemed, was likely to be settled in the immediate, both because of these disagreements and because of the attention demanded by a certain event that was fast approaching. The following month, in June of 1867, a convention was to be summoned in New York for the purpose of revising that state’s constitution. And so, just as the leadership of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention had attempted in 1850, the AERA set in motion a plan based on the WLNL’s lobbying work in 1865 to secure the franchise in the Empire State for both its Black and female citizens. But while the members of the AERA, operating in dozens of different communities across the state, succeeded in gathering some twenty thousand signatures in favor of their proposal to grant women the right to vote and remove property qualifications on the franchise, the effort ultimately fizzled out in the midst of significant personal and ideological rancor.

    Horace Greeley (1811-1872), former Congressman and longtime publisher and editor of the New-York Tribune, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the movement for women’s rights and an ardent ally of the AERA leading into the New York Constitutional Convention of 1867. Being dominated by Republican delegates – and Greeley being a staple of New York Republican Party politics – he was also made chairman of the influential committee on suffrage, thus placing him in an ideal position to sway his fellow convention-goers from inside the proceedings while AERA activists circulated petitions among the general populace. The man was widely known as a champion of social reform, and so it doubtless seemed to those who considered him a friend and ally that his energy and his enthusiasm would be key to securing the victory that the AERA desired. Unfortunately, like many of his reformist contemporaries, Greeley had his own particular sense of what was most important in that historical moment. “This is a critical period for the Republican Party and the life of our Nation [,]” he reportedly declared to the doubtless nonplussed Stanton and Anthony, “I conjure you to remember that this is ‘the negro's hour,’ and your first duty now is to go through the State and plead his claims.” True to this sentiment, Greeley’s committee ultimately approved the removal of property qualifications on the franchise – the purpose of which had historically been to disqualify potential Black voters – and rejected any measures which would have allowed for women’s suffrage. When Stanton and Anthony responded poorly to this turn of events, Greeley first threatened and then proceeded to use his control over the Tribune to attack the women’s rights movement and its supporters, claiming that the “best women” he knew did not want to vote. When Stanton and Anthony countered by having the name of Greeley’s wife read aloud at the convention as having signed one of the AERA pro-suffrage petitions, the relationship between the organization and the Tribune’s publisher was effectively severed.

    The AERA’s next major campaign in Kansas would prove no more successful than the first. The citizens of the Sunflower State, as of the late spring and early summer of 1867, were about to cast their votes in two separate referenda, one of which, if approved, would grant the vote to Black men, and the other of which, if approved, would grant the vote to women. Naturally, the AERA leadership sought to promote the approval of both measures in an effort to make Kansas the first beachhead in their national struggle for universal suffrage. And in order to do so, they sought to make use of what was known as the Hovey Fund, a bequest of $50,000 made by a Boston merchant named Charles Fox Hovey (1807-1859) for the purpose of supporting both abolitionist causes and the American movement for women’s rights. The AERA had tapped the Hovey Fund during its ill-fated operation in New York, and naturally sought to do so once again in Kansas. As stipulated in Hovey’s will, what remained of the bequest was to be directed towards securing equal citizenship for American women once slavery was legally abolished in the United States. Since the ratification of the 13^th Amendment had accomplished exactly that in 1865, the likes of Stanton, Mott, and Anthony accordingly concluded that the remains of the Hovey Fund were theirs to do with as they say fit. Unfortunately, the fund’s administrator had other ideas. Though an early advocate of women’s rights and a longtime ally of Lucy Stone, Wendall Phillips (1811-1884) was even more devoted to the cause of Black civil rights, to the point that he did not consider the ratification of the 13^th Amendment to represent the final end of American slavery. On the contrary, he said, so long as the franchise was not applied equally regardless of race, no one could rightly claim that slavery had finally been abolished. In consequence of this uncompromising stance, Phillips opted not to allow any of the resources of the Hovey Fund to be channeled to the AERA during its organizing push in Kansas.

    The result, in the short term, was a dearth of necessary resources. Unable to raise adequate money themselves – in no small part because few jobs were then open to women – the AERA’s female organizers were unable to mobilize the same kind of field operation in Kansas that characterized their earlier effort in New York. In consequence, they were unable to exercise adequate influence over the local political scene and accordingly lost the initiative to a faction of the Kansas Republican Party whose stated position was to support the Black enfranchisement referendum while actively campaigning against suffrage for women. As the summer wore on and the AERA’s efforts began to collapse, hostility on the part of local Republicans accordingly began to mount. Writing to Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone rather bitterly observed at the time that, “The negroes are all against us. There has just now left us an ignorant black preacher named Twine, who is very confident that women ought not to vote. These men ought not to be allowed to vote before we do, because they will be just so much more dead weight to lift.” When Anthony and Stanton finally arrived in Kansas in September, with less than a month to go before the relevant measures went to a vote, the situation looked truly desperate. In consequence – and likely against their better judgment – the two of them made a decision out of purest desperation.

    Having made his fortune in the railway industry in Australia, Britain, and the United States, the aptly named George Francis Train (1829-1904) was as eccentric as he was wealthy and had a particular dislike for the Republican Party. By no means a Confederate sympathizer – indeed, he campaigned enthusiastically for Abraham Lincoln in the leadup to the Election of 1864 – Train was nevertheless an ardent Democrat and an unapologetic racist who desired nothing more in the late 1860s than to make the avowedly-progressive Republicans eat their own words. When it became known to him that the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were somewhat desperate for funding in consequence of the AERA’s flailing campaign in Kansas in the summer of 1867, he accordingly seized the opportunity to do exactly that. Though, as noted, Train had not the slightest regard for the intelligence or trustworthiness of America’s newly emancipated Black population, he was very much in favor of both temperance and women’s rights, and accordingly was willing to donate both his money and his time to what remained of the AERA’s efforts to see the women of Kansas gain the franchise. While Anthony spoke at rallies arguing that Black suffrage and female suffrage ought to have gone hand in hand as a matter of right, Train often followed her by advocating female suffrage as a means of allowing the white community to keep Black voters in check. Given the prior affiliations and expressed values of many of the AERA’s members, this kind of rhetoric on part Train’s did not land particularly well.

    Lucy Stone, for one, thought Train, “A lunatic, wild and ranting [,]” and deeply resented Stanton and Anthony’s decision to include her name in a letter publicly praising his efforts. Stone’s response, in the moment, was to lash out in anger, first accusing Anthony of misappropriating AERA funds and then moving to block payment of expenses for the work she had done in Kansas. As the campaign came to a close, however, and the dust began to settle on what had turned out to be a near-total debacle for the movement – with neither referendum having achieved success – the cleavages which had been exposed in the heat of desperation began to appear increasingly intractable. Whereas Stanton and Anthony believed that political and organizational independence were essential if the women’s movement was going to survive long enough to achieve its core objective – that being the establishment of female suffrage as soon as possible – Lucy Stone and her allies favored a continued alliance with both the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party. Forced by the disruptive presence of Train – who, as aforementioned, desired little else but to make the otherwise progressive Republicans look foolish by encouraging them to work at cross purposes with the women’s movement – to take accounting of their priorities, this latter faction within the AERA ultimately placed greater value on the material resources which the abolitionists and Republicans could provide. And in exchange for access to the same, Stone and her followers were willing to support such measures as would enfranchise Black men in advance of American women.

    This division, of course, would take some time to shake out completely. In the immediate, Anthony and Stanton chose to stand by George F. Train. His wealth and his enthusiasm had an undeniable appeal, with the former being of particular importance if the campaign for women’s rights was to finally part ways with the abolitionists. One of the first fruits of this renewed alliance was the founding of a women’s rights newspaper in 1868 under the provocative title The Revolution, paid for by Train and run by Anthony and Stanton. Intended to act as something of a clearinghouse for all news and information having to do with the cause of women’s rights, The Revolution featured articles and editorials by prominent female activists, reporting on employment discrimination and advancements in divorce law, transcriptions of speeches, and convention announcements, all couched in a tone of cultivated insouciance designed to shake its readers out of any sense of complacency. In practice, this desire to be forceful and provocative led the editors of The Revolution into more than a few testy exchanges with their contemporaries. When an article in the New York World expressed disdain for the forcefulness of the paper’s tone, for example, Stanton replied with characteristic causticness. “The World innocently asks us the question, why, like the Englishwomen, we do not sit still in our conventions, and get "first class men" to do the speaking?” she wrote. “We might, with equal propriety, ask the World's editorial staff why they do not lay down their pens and get first class men to edit their journal?” The purpose of such repartee, of course, was to demonstrate to any who yet doubted the faculties of American women that they were perfectly capable of standing toe-to-toe with their male counterparts. The Revolution was not the frivolous ladies’ supplement to a more serious publication, but rather a hard-hitting paper whose sharp-minded editors were the equal of any in the business.

    While this penchant for plain-spokenness generally served the editors of The Revolution well – inasmuch as it made clear to all and sundry that cause of women’s rights was a serious matter being fought for by serious and capable people – it did not necessarily mix all that harmoniously with the continued influence of George F. Train. Stanton and Anthony, as editors, were assuredly free to direct the paper in whatever manner they wished. Train contributed funding, as well as the occasional editorial on whatever subject had caught his interest, but for most of the existence of The Revolution, he was out of the country on business or indulging in one or another of his passions. But when one takes account of Train’s avowed opinions on race – and when one considers the sense of gratitude which Stanton and Anthony had cause to feel towards him – certain opinions published in The Revolution take on a particularly ugly aspect. During the debate over the 15^th Amendment, for example, as the measure was being debated and voted upon in the various states, Stanton penned an article in support of additional reforms which would grant the national franchise to women. But while her object was certainly a laudable one, her language was anything but. “American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement,” she wrote in April of 1869, “If you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters [...] demand that women too shall be represented in government.” Reprehensible though such a declaration most certainly was, it was in fact a significantly softened version of something Stanton had written months prior on the same subject. In the last week of December in 1868, she wrote that, “There is only one safe, sure way to build a government, and that is on the equality of all its citizens, male and female, black and white,” and that she accordingly rejected women being subject to the whims of, “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic.”

    Unsurprisingly, when the AERA met for the final time in May of 1869, many of its members were not on the best of terms. Not only had Stanton and Anthony alienated many of their compatriots by associating with the like of George F. Train and adopting deeply racialized language when discussing the pending ratification of the 15^th Amendment, but the pair had also made a point of publicly antagonizing the contemporary leadership of the otherwise sympathetic Republican Party and to associating with Democrats in an attempt to lobby their support for women’s suffrage. To that end, during the events of the 1868 Democratic National Convention, Anthony wrote a letter addressed to the convention-goers in which she sought to arouse fears of Black enfranchisement as a means of garnering support for women’s rights. “While the dominant party has with one hand lifted up two million black men and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship,” she thus declared, “With the other it has dethroned fifteen million white women—their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters—and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood.” Within the context of the AERA, this kind of language was not received particularly well. Abolitionist Stephen Symonds Foster (1809-1881), for one, thought the association with Train unforgivable, and accused Stanton and Anthony of supporting only “educated suffrage” rather than the organization’s stated goal of universal suffrage. Lucy Stone’s husband, Henry Blackwell (1825-1909), then attempted to calm the waters by insisting that the editors of The Revolution continued to be as dedicated to Black suffrage as anyone else then present, but too much damage had already been done.

    Frederick Douglass, for his part, was understandably moved to first voice his disappointment with Stanton’s aforementioned use of the epithet “Sambo,” and then to express his opposition to the pair’s continued insistence that Black and female suffrage be achieved together or not at all. “I do not see how anyone can pretend that there is the same urgency in giving the ballot to woman as to the negro [,]” he was reported to have said. “With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least in fifteen States of the Union.” Anthony’s response mirrored the combative tone of The Revolution. “Mr. Douglass talks about the wrongs of the negro [,]” she said, “But with all the outrages that he to-day suffers, he would not exchange his sex and take the place of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.” This exchange then promoted Lucy Stone to give voice to her own concerns. Though her previous disagreements with Anthony and Stanton were well-known and well-founded – and the ill will that resulted was not soon to be forgotten – in this instance she found herself agreeing with the pair. Addressing Douglass, she declared that, “Woman suffrage is more imperative than his own.” True, “There are no KuKlux Clans seeking the lives of women [,]” but children were still being taken from their mothers by, “Ku-Kluxers here in the North in the shape of men.” None of this was to say that Stone opposed the ratification of the 15^th Amendment in practice. On the contrary, she said, “I thank God for that XV. Amendment, and hope that it will be adopted in every State. I will be thankful in my soul if any body can get out of the terrible pit.” But all the same, she continued, “I believe that the safety of the government would be more promoted by the admission of woman as an element of restoration and harmony than the negro.”

    Thus divided along lines of gender and race – with Stanton and Anthony on one side, the abolitionists on another, and Lucy Stone on a third – the AERA could quite simply no longer function. The aftermath of this final annual meeting accordingly gave rise to several distinct successor organizations intended to carry on in its stead at the behest of certain factions thereof. Not but two days thereafter, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Women Suffrage Association, the early membership of which was drawn in large part from the earlier Women’s Loyal National League and the Working Women’s Association, the latter of which had been formed in 1868 in the offices of The Revolution for the purpose of combining and mobilizing the resources of middle-class female wage workers. Several months later, in December of 1869, Lucy Stone then responded by establishing the American Woman Suffrage Association, effectively an enlargement of the New England Woman Suffrage Association which Stone had helped form in November of 1868. By February of 1870, of course, the ostensible cause of the split had been more or less laid to rest. With the ratification of the 15^th Amendment and the enshrining of Black political rights in the text of the Constitution, there no longer seemed to have been any cause for disagreement. Notwithstanding the efforts of Stanton and Anthony, Black men had indeed gained the vote before the nation’s female population. But while there now appeared to be no reason why abolitionists, reformist Republicans, and women’s rights activists should not pool their resources and form a united front for the cause of women’s suffrage, in reality the breach which the 15^th Amendment debate had opened was not to mended so quickly. Indeed, it would not be formally sealed for another twenty years.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXI: “The Great Work Before Us”

    One of the most significant results of the earliest stirrings of the women’s rights movement in America was inarguably the Seneca Falls Convention, held in the Western New York in the summer of 1848. Organized by local Quaker women and the aforementioned Elizabeth Cady Stanton, this gathering of notables – which included, among others, Lucretia Mott, temperance advocate and social reformer Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), scientist Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), and anti-slavery activists Amy Post (1802-1889) and Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) – was in many ways a direct response to two countervailing trends then playing out in contemporary American society. On the one hand, as noted above, temperance organizations, abolitionist societies, and the emerging transcendentalist movement – among others – had all begun to provide American women in the 1830s and 1840s with some means of taking part in contemporary public life. And naturally, as women began to develop a sense of agency within these reform-minded spaces, they began to push against the boundaries that remained in place to limit the nature and latitude of their personal freedoms. To a large extent, the gathering at Seneca Falls was one of the most prominent early achievements in this particular line of action. Having asserted themselves within and through various reformist organizations and movements whose end goals were otherwise unconnected to the explicit cause of women’s rights, the women in question quite understandably sought to proceed to the next logical step in their quest for wider socio-political recognition by organizing specifically for the purpose of expanding and forwarding those selfsame rights.

    Another reason that a number of contemporary America’s most prominent female activists felt the need to publicly assert themselves entirely apart from the organizations and movements which had first allowed them some degree of political and social agency, of course, was that male chauvinism remained a stubbornly common feature of political pressure groups which were otherwise reform-minded and liberal. Certain abolitionists, like William Llyod Garrison (1805-1879), did make a point of encouraging female participation in the anti-slavery movement – to the point that, in December of 1837, he declared in his anti-slavery weekly The Liberator that he backed, “The rights of woman to their utmost extent” – but others were far more circumspect. Brothers Arthur (1786-1865) and Lewis Tappan (1788-1873), for example, split from Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 and formed their own American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in large part because they were uncomfortable with Garrison’s unflinching support of women’s rights and his insistence on unfettered female participation in the anti-slavery movement’s various efforts. The aforementioned World Anti-Slavery Convention, held in this same year, likewise made clear to the women in attendance that while their support for the cause of abolitionism was appreciated, the male-dominated leadership of most of the anti-slavery societies in the contemporary Anglo-American world were simply not willing to allow their female contemporaries to speak in public forums or generally participate as the equals of men. The Seneca Falls Convention was absolutely a direct response to the assertion of exactly this kind of double standard. Women like Stanton and Mott, having been led to believe that they were entitled to contribute as fully as they were able to the socio-political reform movements which aligned with their personal convictions, were not about to step back and stay quiet when it became clear that most of their male colleagues expected them to submit unquestioningly to male leadership. On the contrary, these kinds of reverses only encouraged them to seek new forums in which to make their voices heard.

    The gathering in Seneca Falls was exactly that kind of forum, and one which is made all the more remarkable by how quickly it came together and the comprehensiveness of its declared aims. Conceived in response to an informal conversation between Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Hunt (1812-1889), and several other women while Mott was in the area visiting a Haudenosaunee reservation in Cattaraugus County, the first session was convened slightly over one week following its announcement in local newspapers on July 11^th, 1848. Only women were invited to attend and to speak during the first day’s proceedings (July 19^th) and a list of grievances and resolution was prepared for the approbation of the assembled participants on the second and final day (July 20^th). Charged with drafting the bulk of this document, Stanton took inspiration from the text of the Declaration of Independence and – with the assistance of her lawyer husband, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805-1887) – included extracts from a number of contemporary laws which explicitly sought to curtail the social and economic rights of American women. But while the resulting Declaration of Sentiments was, for the most part, a fairly moderate document concerned primarily with the social and economic disabilities under which American women were then forced to labor, one resolution in particular proved to be something of a sticking point even for some of the men and women in attendance. Addressed, as were all of the resolutions, to “mankind” whose history was said to be one of, “Repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her [,]” the first of their number simply stated, as one of injuries in question, “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.”

    As Stanton was adding this particular accusation to the original draft of the Declaration, her husband, the aforementioned Henry Stanton, reportedly attempted to warn her off. Not only was her personally opposed to American women being granted the right to vote – a sentiment which, in fairness, put him in line with the vast majority of contemporary American men – but his own ambitions made him disinclined to be personally associated with such a radical position. Having been interested in seeking political office for a number of years, Mr. Stanton accordingly concluded – after failing to persuade his wife to excise the cited passage – that the best course of action would be for him to be some distance away from Seneca Falls when the conference actually took place. Not everyone who became aware of the extent of Stanton’s ambition reacted quite so cravenly, to be sure, but her husband’s read on the radical nature of the statement in question was nevertheless far from inaccurate. The most common critique was that any insistence on something as politically significant as the franchise would inevitably overshadow the more moderate resolutions which the document in question contained. The nation’s cohort of male legislators were not about to grant women the right to vote simply because they were asked to, and any attempt to push the issue was bound to create more problems than it would solve. Mott was of this opinion, though she undoubtedly agreed with Stanton in principle. “Why Lizzie,” she said in her characteristic Quaker speech, “Thee will make us ridiculous.” As the debate went on, however, one voice in particular rose in support of Stanton’s decision. Frederick Douglass, the only non-white person in attendance, stated in no uncertain terms that he could not possibly fight for the right of Black people in America to vote without also affirming the right of American women to do the same. “This denial of the right to participate in government,” he said, involved, “Not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice […] but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”

    This declaration on the part of Douglass, along with Stanton’s refusal to back down from her stated position, ultimately allowed the cited resolution to pass by a significant majority vote. And this was just as well, for the concluding statement which Stanton had also written was similarly radical in its character. “In view of [the] entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country,” it began,

Their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States. In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.

Let it be marked, before the present discussion proceeds any further, just how revolutionary this statement was and what it represents within the context of the women’s rights movement in the United States of America. In 1848, at a time when property qualifications on the electoral franchise had only ceased to be the norm over the course of the preceding decade, only about three million people out of a population of twenty million could vote, and neither women nor non-whites could cast ballots regardless of their citizenship status, the attendees of the Seneca Falls Convention were actively demanding that the governments of the United States grant women, “Immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens [.]” Not only was this a stunningly ambitious – one might also call it stunningly brave – act of political self-assertion, but its place on the timeline of the American movement for women’s rights further serves to drive home the manifest importance of the act itself. Only eight years prior, in 1840, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been denied the right to speak at an anti-slavery convention in London. Now, in 1848, at a convention in many ways organized in direct response to that earlier incident, these same women were demanding that they and their contemporaries be immediately granted the right to vote. Seventy-two years later, their demand would finally be met.

    Long before that great achievement, of course, would come decade upon decade of stubborn, patient work. First, in the mold of Seneca Falls, would follow a whole series of women’s rights conventions. The earliest among these was held at nearby Rochester less than one month later, organized by many of the same people and chaired by local anti-slavery activist Abigail Norton Bush (1810-1898). Though the Rochester convention covered many of the same issues as its predecessor had done at Seneca Falls – to the point of taking up and approving the same Declaration of Sentiments – it was nonetheless remarkable for both pointedly addressing the plight of local working women and for the attendance of a local couple, Massachusetts transplants Daniel and Lucy Anthony. Reformist Quakers, abolitionists, and close associates of Frederick Douglas, the Anthony’s second child, Susan, would soon become deeply involved in the women’s rights movement through her parent’s associations. Two years later, in Salem, Ohio, the first women’s rights convention to be organized on a statewide basis was then held under the leadership of Betsy Mix Cowles (1810-1876). With a remarkable attendance of fully five hundred people, the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention was the first in history to be simultaneously led and staffed exclusively by women, as well as the first to allow only women to vote and to speak. The gathering’s final act was also exceptionally noteworthy. In an attempt to take advantage of the fact a state convention was about to meet for the purpose of revising the Constitution of Ohio, the attendees drafted a memorial advising the delegates to codify women’s right to vote. “Believing that woman does not suffer alone,” the petition concluded,

When subject to oppressive and unequal laws, but that whatever affects injuriously her interests, is subversive of the highest good of the race, we earnestly request that in the New Constitution you are about to form for the state of Ohio, women should be secured, not only the right of suffrage, but all the political and legal rights that are guaranteed to men.

While the document ultimately produced by the constitutional convention and subsequently approved by the people of the Buckeye State did not heed this appeal to reason, the fact that the application was made at all is nonetheless worthy of note. Within two years of having organized the first gathering of its kind, and upon the first instance of women having complete control of the relevant agenda, the presiding officers of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention had attempted to make canny use of their local political calendar to achieve their desired goals. This would prove to be an extremely important model going forward.

The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXX: “Those Talents with Which Her Heavenly Father Has Entrusted Her”

     To those who are familiar with the history of social activism in the United States, the notion that the story of the 19^th Amendment very much mirrors that of the 18^th will come as no great surprise. The 19^th Amendment, of course, is that which prohibits denying the vote to American citizens on the basis of their gender. In full, it states that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and furthermore that, “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” The constituency which this measure was intended to target was the segment of the American population which then identified as female. By the time of the amendment’s passage through Congress in June of 1919 – and its subsequent ratification by the states in August of 1920 – American women had been denied the federal vote since the first national elections in 1789. Certain individual colonies had recognized their right to vote in local elections before the declaration of American independence, and the state of New Jersey would continue to do so until it’s first constitution was duly amended in 1807. But between 1807 and the wanning decades of the 19th century, no women who were citizens of the United States of America could legally cast a vote in any official, civic capacity.

    The result, as with prohibition, was a decades-long campaign of political activism principally organized and led by American women. These woman – of different social classes, education levels, ethnic communities, and professions – formed pressure groups and held conferences, published literature and took part in marches, pursued legal remedies and faced arrest, all in the name of securing recognition of one of the fundamental rights which they knew to be theirs as American citizens. It was a long fight, taking place – as it did – over the course of almost a century. And while the movement for women’s suffrage certainly experienced its share of setbacks, its supporters also made tremendous headway at times, especially when one takes into account the essentialist nature of gender politics in the 19^th century United States. Piece by piece, state by state, the right of women to vote in local elections was recognized and enforced. And alliances were formed between women’s rights crusaders and abolitionists and between women’s rights crusaders and temperance activists, the result of which was a kind of grand coalition of socio-political reformers whose influence over domestic politics in the second half of the 1800s was truly something to behold. And in the end, of course – if we consider 1920 to be the end of this particular story – these efforts were met with success. Momentum built upon momentum, victories were notched out one after the other, and an amendment was finally approved by Congress which set right a wrong for which there could be no possible justification.

    As aforementioned, the story of how this all happened is really rather a long one. But it started, more or less, sometime in the late 18^th century, arguably in response and in parallel to the works of British writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797). Not every woman in the contemporary English-speaking world responded favorably to what was printed in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), to be sure. In reply to Wollstonecraft’s assertion that historically deficient education rather than some innate intellectual incapacity was what held women back from being able to fully participate in public life, fellow writer and poet Hannah Moore (1745-1833) famously sought to reaffirm that, “To be unstable and capricious is but too characteristic of our sex.” Moore’s contemporaries, the classicist Elizabeth Clark (1717-1806) and the essayist and literary critic Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), had similar things to say on the subject, with Barbauld even going so far as to spar with Wollstonecraft through her poems for a period of several years. But while A Vindication would remain substantially controversial for the first half of the 19^th century for its relative social and cultural radicalism – a quality perhaps best embodied by its author’s contention that women should endeavor not to be controlled by their emotions or desires – Wollstonecraft nevertheless managed to positively influence the thinking of a number of women in the British literary scene. Novelist Maria Edgeworth (1768-1849), for example, while she made a point of distancing herself from Wollstonecraft on the surface – to the point of including an unflattering caricature in her most famous work, Belinda (1801) – nevertheless showed her agreement with Wollstonecraft’s ideals in the way that she wrote her various female characters. And Edgeworth’s fellow novelist, Jane Austen (1775-1817), likewise demonstrated a sense of accord with the ideas first rendered in A Vindication in her portrayal of her female protagonists as intelligent, sensible, and possessed of an agency all their own.

    The reception which Wollstonecraft received across the Atlantic in the United States of America was sadly much aligned with that which she suffered in her native Britain. Most male writers pilloried her, most female writers turned her into an object of ridicule, and those who agreed with her mostly kept quiet. The ideas expressed in A Vindication were so horrifying, it seemed, that even nodding in their direction was seen as a form of social suicide. Substantially stultifying as this reaction was to the cause which Wollstonecraft had endeavored to advance, however, some small numbers of American women were not to be intimidated so easily. Both Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), two of the 19^th century’s most prominent American campaigners for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, discovered upon their meeting at an anti-slavery conference in London in 1840 that they had both read Wollstonecraft and that her ideas formed the core of their respective reformist ambitions. Two years prior, Southern-socialite-turned-Quaker-abolitionist Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) began writing a series of letters for a Massachusetts newspaper called The Spectator in which, among other things, she radically avowed that

God created us equal;–he created us free agents;–he is our Lawgiver, our King, and our Judge, and to him alone is woman bound to be in subjection, and to him alone is she accountable for the use of those talents with which her Heavenly Father has entrusted her. 

The following year, in 1839, journalist and translator Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) began publishing her own series of essays in a transcendentalist magazine called The Dial which would later be collected and published under the title Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). The thrust of this work – also strongly echoing Wollstonecraft – was essentially that mankind’s tendency to hold back women was in fact holding mankind back from achieving its fullest potential. These women were relatively few, to be sure, and the positions which they staked out were often met with open hostility from men and other women alike. But their very existence was a portent of things to come. Notwithstanding the social forces with which it would be forced to contend – and the length of the journey which lay before it at this early juncture – the women’s rights movement in America was beginning to take shape.

    Of note at this formative moment, of course, is that early efforts to secure the rights of women in America most often coalesced within and alongside other campaigns for some manner of socio-political reform. Abolitionist societies, for example, were generally more welcoming of female participation than most other civil society groups in the contemporary United States, though their inclusion into such spaces was not always entirely frictionless. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as aforementioned, first met within the context of an anti-slavery conference in London, having been dispatched to the gathering as representatives of their local abolitionist societies. The pair were deeply insulted, however, when the majority of their male counterparts voted to bar women from speaking and then proceeded to instruct them to seat themselves apart from the rest of the assembled delegates. Similarly, Margaret Fuller’s ability to have her views on the need for equality among the sexes published in the late 1830s and early 1840s was facilitated by the fact that she had been made the editor of The Dial by its publisher, philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emmerson (1803-1882). Transcendentalism being a system of belief in which the individual is held up as a fundamental aspect of a divine concept known as the “Over-soul,” Emmerson and his supporters were accordingly far more likely to regard women like Fuller as being possessed of intellect and inspiration – and far more likely to give them opportunities to express themselves – than would most of their fellow Americans.

    The contemporary temperance movement also provided American women with a unique opportunity to make their voices heard. As discussed in the previous entry in this series, one of the most successful prohibitionist organizations of the 19^th century was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874 and led during the height of its influence in the 1880s and 1890s by a retired educator named Frances Willard (1839-1898). With Willard at the helm, the WCTU staked out a place for itself in the contemporary public discourse by describing its mission in explicitly pious and domestic language. Prohibition, these women said, was not about stopping anyone from exercising their rights, but rather sought to promote peaceful family life, childhood education, safe streets, and Christian forbearance. Naturally, since the furtherance of these goals would require the eradication of legal drink, Willard and the WCTU also sought to influence the domestic legislative process at the state and federal level, pushing for such laws as they felt would serve their ends and stand up to scrutiny. And naturally, since many men were bound to object to such efforts – on the unspoken but widely understood grounds that they liked to have a drink now and then and didn’t see why they should have to stop – Willard came to further support the enfranchisement of American women. Her goal, she wrote in 1879, was “To secure for all women above the age of twenty-one years the ballot as one means for the protection of their homes from the devastation caused by the legalized traffic in strong drink.” Willard’s personal feelings on the matter, as it happened, were somewhat broader in scope. Like Sarah Grimké, she held that men and women were fundamentally equal before God, social conventions to the contrary thus running counter to his divine will. As God had placed husbands and wives in a position of equal leadership within the context of the Christian family, she thus wrote in 1890, so too did God place, “Male and female side by side throughout his realm of law.”

    The net result of these various developments – the ridicule of prominent women’s rights literature, the creation of spaces for women in certain social and political reform organizations, and the emergence of a small number of prominent female speakers and writers on the margins of spaces otherwise dominant by men – was the gradual coalescence of the first generation of women’s rights organizations and activists in the United States of America. There were still many obstacles in the way of mass mobilization, of course. Public speaking, for example, would remain a space only tenuously open to women well into the 1850s. Lucy Stone (1818-1893), one of the founders of the American Woman Suffrage Association, famously challenged the customs upheld by the faculty at Oberlin College which denied selected female students the right to read aloud their graduation essays on the same basis as their male contemporaries. In spite of – or perhaps because of – having organized an unofficial women’s debating club and successfully petitioning her professors – at least for a time – to take part in debates during her coeducational rhetoric classes, Stone was refused the opportunity to take part in the aforementioned reading upon her own graduation in 1847. Though chosen to write an essay for the occasion, she turned down the honor on the basis that to do otherwise would signal support for the principle that women ought to have been denied, “The privilege of being co-laborers with men in any sphere to which their ability makes them adequate.”

    Women were also hampered in their ability to organize and to disseminate their ideas at this early juncture in their fight for political agency by contemporary laws which pointedly failed to recognize their possession of legal personhood. In many states, once a woman married, her legal identity became subsumed into that of her husband, making it next to impossible for married women to rent convention halls or contract printers to produce pamphlets without the permission of their spouses. Gradually, over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, these laws did begin to disappear, though the cause had little to do with granting women’s rights campaigners the freedom of action their deserved. The Panic of 1837 brought about any number of personal bankruptcies, particularly in the American South, and many state legislators responded to the resulting dissolution of family wealth – brought about, in many cases, by men who made poor use of the dowries granted to them by their in-laws – by passing such acts as would allow married women to own property. The result, while far from ideal – such laws rarely permitted women to dispose of their property without the written consent of their husband – did at least have useful side effects. Increasingly recognized as distinct individuals under the law, women were now able to begin taking the practical steps necessary to start creating local and national organizations for the purpose of advancing women’s rights in America.