To those who are familiar with the history of social activism in the United States, the notion that the story of the 19th Amendment very much mirrors that of the 18th will come as no great surprise. The 19th 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 19th
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 18th 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 19th 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 19th
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 19th 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.
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