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 13th
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 13th 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 13th 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 15th 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 15th 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 15th 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 15th 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 15th Amendment debate had opened was not to mended so quickly. Indeed, it would not be formally sealed for another twenty years.
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