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It is time to effect a revolution in female manners-
time to restore to them their lost dignity-
and make them, as a part of the human species,
labor by reforming themselves to reform the world.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of WomanI do not wish them to have power over men;
but over themselves.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of WomanWould men but generously snap our chains,
and be content with rational fellowship
instead of slavish obedience,
they would find us more observant daughters,
more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives,
more reasonable mothers-in a word, better citizens.
We should then love them with true affection,
because we should learn to respect ourselves;
and the peace of mind of a worthy man
would not be interrupted by the idle vanity of his wife.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of WomanWhatever it is morally right for man to do,
it is morally right for woman to do.
Angelina Grimké, Letters to Catherine BeecherResolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country
to secure to themselves
their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Seneca Falls Resolutions, 1848The only revolution that we would inaugurate
is to make woman a self-supporting, dignified, independent,
equal partner with man in the state, the church, and the home.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Revolution, May 19, 1870Robbed 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 republican form of government.
Susan B. Anthony at her trial for voting, 1873All over America the Suffragists declare
that they have gained hope and inspiration
from our own great British movement.
In the early days of our long struggle
it was we who drew our inspiration from them.
Our movements act and react on each other.
Sylvia Pankhurst, 1911We should take no denial,
but go in procession to interview him nevertheless.
I should accompany the deputation:
my license having expired, I should be re-arrested of course.
Then I should not only repeat
the usual hunger- and thirst-strike in prison,
but continue it after release
until the deputation should be received.
Sylvia Pankhurst, May 30, 1914To get the word male in effect out of the Constitution
cost the women of the country
fifty-two years of pauseless campaign thereafter.
During that time they were forced to conduct
fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters;
480 campaigns to urge Legislatures
to submit suffrage amendments to voters;
47 campaigns to induce State constitutional conventions
to write woman suffrage into State constitutions;
277 campaigns to persuade State party conventions
to include woman suffrage planks;
30 campaigns to urge presidential party conventions
to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms,
and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.
Cary Chapman Catt, Woman Suffrage and PoliticsAs a disenfranchised class we feel that
we are not subject to the jurisdiction of this court
and therefore refuse to take any part in its proceedings.
We also feel that we have done nothing
to justify our being brought before it.
Alice Paul, August 15, 1918
Reforms of the 19th century brought an end to human slavery,
the most outrageous violation in civilized nations.
What Victor
Hugo proclaimed the "Century of Woman" also began the
struggle
to liberate women from subjection to patriarchal traditions
that had existed
in most cultures since the beginning of recorded
history.
Successful achievement of the vote for women was not
attained by Great Britain
until 1918 and by the United States
in 1920.
Those heroic efforts, which were for the most part nonviolent,
are the subject of this chapter.
New Zealand allowed women to
vote in 1893, Australia in 1902,
Finland in 1906, Norway in 1913,
and Russia in 1917.
By 1939 another 26 nations had granted female
suffrage.
France, Italy, Romania, Yugoslavia, and China did not
allow
women to vote until shortly after World War II.
In 1952
the United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women
declared, "Women shall be entitled to vote in all elections
on equal terms with men, without any discrimination."
By
1965 women could vote in more than a hundred nations.
Before exploring the great pioneer of the women's rights movement
in the modern era,
Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the book that
made a powerful case for
women's rights, we may note that as early
as 1739 an author calling herself
Sophia in Woman Not Inferior
to Man proposed better education for
women for independence and so that they could become good teachers,
physicians, lawyers,
soldiers, and philosophers.
The following year in Woman's Superior
Excellence to Man Sophia responded
to criticism by acknowledging
the faults of women but suggested they resulted
from inadequate
education and male tyranny.
Wollstonecraft's contemporaries Condorcet
and Catharine Macaulay
also called for improved education of girls.
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on April 27, 1759.
Her
father had a drinking problem, and Mary had to take care of younger
sisters.
She began working as a companion when she was nineteen
and spent two years nursing her mother, who died in 1782.
Mary
helped her sister Eliza separate from her husband,
whose cruel
treatment she believed caused Eliza's breakdown.
Eliza, Mary,
and her best friend Fanny Blood started a school northeast
of
London that was guided by the Dissenting minister Richard Price.
Mary's sister Everina also joined them.
Mary was with Fanny Blood
when she died during childbirth in Lisbon,
and the school closed
three months later.
In 1786 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote Thoughts
on the Education of Daughters
in which she recommended mothers
suckle their babies to produce affection.
Whenever a child asks
a question, a reasonable answer should be given.
She noted that
love without esteem will probably degenerate,
but love for a worthy
person is an incentive for improvement.
Mary suggested that women
cultivate their minds so that
they may be content if comfortable
and consoled if not.
Mary Wollstonecraft took employment in Dublin but was dismissed
after arousing the jealousy of Lady Kingsborough.
After that,
she did not serve in another woman's household
but was able to
make her living as a writer.
Her autobiographical novel Mary,
a Fiction was published in 1788.
She wrote articles for the Analytical Review and
published The Female Reader
under a pseudonym.
She translated books from French and German
and published
Original Stories from Real Life for children.
After the conservative Edmund Burke attacked the rights of man
in his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France,
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men
anonymously in 1790 but added her name the next year.
She criticized
Burke for defending the property rights
of the wealthy more than
human rights.
She argued that the progress of civilization has
been delayed
by hereditary property and hereditary honors.
She
argued,
that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy
which can only be enjoyed by equals;
and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms,
but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits,
founded on respect for justice and humanity.1
The rights that humans inherit from birth derive
not from their
forefathers but from God.
She believed that submission to authority
should not be endless
but must stop, or they return to barbarism.
She was outraged that Burke defined English liberty as "security
of property,"
and every nobler liberty was sacrificed to
this selfish principle.
A thief is punished with death, but violence
or killing a person
is considered a less heinous offense.
Mary Wollstonecraft's great work A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman
was published in 1792 and revised the same year.
In her circle of friends she was intellectually stimulated by
Thomas Paine,
William Blake, Joseph Priestley, and Henry Fuselli,
for whom
she had a brief passion that did not work out because
he was married.
While at Paris during the reign of terror, she
became the lover of the American
Gilbert Imlay and gave birth
to his daughter Fanny
in 1794 even though they did not marry.
That year she published her 522-page Historical and Moral View
of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution.
Back
in London, Mary attempted suicide twice.
After publishing her
letters from Scandinavia, she became involved
with the radical
political thinker, William Godwin.
They were married on March
29, 1797, and Mary worked on
her second novel, The Wrongs of
Woman: or, Maria.
She died of an infection eleven days after
the birth of her daughter Mary Godwin,
who grew up to marry the
poet Shelley and to write the novel Frankenstein.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was dedicated to
the French diplomat Talleyrand with the request that he consider
including women in the rights of citizens to national education.
To exclude women from their New Constitution would leave them
open to charges of injustice and tyranny and would undermine morality.
In the introduction Mary Wollstonecraft noted charges against
"masculine women,"
but she argued that in terms of developing
rational qualities it is better
for women to become more masculine
and respectable rather than
being satisfied with limited beauty
and elegance.
She also encouraged men to become more modest and
chaste.
In discussing the rights and duties of humanity she argued
that reason and virtue separate humans from brutes.
Rousseau tried
to show that everything was all right originally;
many
authors argue that things are all right now;
but she aimed
to prove that things will be all right.
She based her belief
on the perfection of God.
She noted that kings often gained their
power by vile and unnatural crimes.
She held that standing armies
are incompatible with freedom,
because subordination depends on
despotism.
Mary Wollstonecraft discussed the prevailing opinions about
women,
and she asked why women should be kept in ignorance
under
the specious reason of innocence.
She observed that women have
been led astray by false refinement
but should be allowed to develop
their reason just as men are.
She compared the truncated education
of women to the opposite extreme
of military men; both acquire
manners but lack moral development
because they are expected to
submit blindly to authority.
Learning the art of pleasing is useful
only to a mistress;
but the chaste wife and serious mother must
develop virtues in order to be respectable.
For women to purify
their hearts they need to learn more
than developing their senses
for amusement.
The woman who strengthens her body and exercises
her mind
by managing her family and practicing virtues may become
the friend of her husband rather than a humble dependent.
She
objected to the idea that "they were made to be loved and must not
aim at respect, lest they should be hunted out of society
as masculine."2
Wollstonecraft argued that if morality has an eternal standard,
there can be only one rule of right for all.
Since liberty is
the mother of virtue, why should women by their constitution be
slaves
and "languish like exotics" as "beautiful
flaws in nature"
when they could "breathe the sharp
invigorating air of freedom."
Liberty will make women wiser
and more virtuous.
She acknowledged that a man has more bodily
strength than a woman,
and she insisted that the virtue and knowledge
of the two sexes should be the same.
Therefore women should have
the same opportunities to acquire both.
She suggested that in
their enlightened age the "divine right of husbands" could be
challenged just as the Americans and French challenged
the divine right of kings.
She complained that girls are taught
from infancy that beauty is their scepter
and that thus their
mind should be shaped by their body
so that it roams in a gilded
cage, adorning its prison.
She called for a revolution in manners
that
would restore the lost female dignity;
by working to reform
themselves they could reform the world.
Independence of character
is based on understanding;
women "must only bow to the authority
of reason,
instead of being the modest slaves of opinion."4
Next Wollstonecraft discussed the various causes
by which women are reduced to degradation.
Women were not created just to console
men.
Women have always been slaves except in rare cases
when they
were despots; yet both retard the progress of reason.
When men
do homage to women by exalting their inferiority,
they are tyrannizing
over the weakness they cherish.
She believed that women are degraded
by
receiving trivial attentions because of their sex.
The love
of pleasure makes a woman's circumstances trifling,
and without
duties her concerns are on secondary things or adventures.
When
the passions are pampered while the judgment is neglected,
what
else can result but madness and folly?
In Emile Rousseau
wrote that if women are educated like men,
they will become like
men and thus have less power over men;
yet Wollstonecraft did
not want women to have
power over men but over themselves.
She
was concerned that the power of female beauty
was fleeting because
it lasted only for a few years.
If female education develops only
the romantic side, it is vain and mean.
By educating nature and
reason, women can become more virtuous
and useful as they become
more respectable.
Wollstonecraft described how contemporary authors
have rendered
women objects of pity.
She complained that Rousseau wanted to
educate Sophia to be weak
and passive so that she will be "agreeable
to her master,"
as if that were the grand purpose of her
existence.
Much of girls' and women's attention is given to superficial
things like clothes.
She was concerned about the effects of early
impressions on character.
She hoped that through rational education
a woman would be contented
to love once and after marriage let
passion calmly subside into friendship
built on pure affections that would not disturb the sober duties of life.
She defined modesty
as not thinking more highly of oneself than one ought to think
and distinguished it from the self-abasement of humility.
She
believed true love makes the lover more modest in her presence.
A sober mind is attained by the exercise of duties and the pursuit
of knowledge;
the alternative for the dependent woman is to be
loved only as long as she is fair.
She observed that most people
are more concerned
with their reputation than their actual chastity.
She noted that the two sexes either mutually corrupted or improved
each other.
Morality will never improve until more equality is established
in society.
One cannot expect women to be more virtuous until
they are
independent of men, for women that are absolutely dependent
on men tend to be cunning, mean, and selfish.
Men "gratified
by the fawning fondness of spaniel-like affection"
have little
delicacy, because love cannot be bought.5
Wollstonecraft observed
that riches debased women even more than men
because the latter
could still engage their faculties as soldiers and statesmen.
She criticized the class structure that divided the world
between
voluptuous tyrants and envious dependents.
Benevolent legislators
encourage private virtue to promote public happiness.
Pleasures
weaken women by making them slaves to their persons to allure
men,
or they manipulate their tyrants with sinister tricks.
In
addition to discharging her civil duties, managing her family,
educating her children, and assisting her neighbors, a woman should
be
independent of her husband's bounty so that she can be generous
on her own.
She asked if morality is not wounded when
poverty
becomes even more disgraceful than vice.
Wollstonecraft believed that women could be physicians as well
as nurses,
study politics, and pursue business if they are educated
properly.
Many could be saved from common and legal prostitution,
because they would not have to marry for support.
Yet in her time
most of the jobs open to women were menial,
and even governesses
were not treated like tutors.
She argued that a woman who earns
her own bread is
much more respectable than the most accomplished
beauty.
She entreated men to emancipate their companions.
The
woman who is not allowed to govern her own conduct
will not have
sufficient sense to be a good mother.
She noted how girls are
kept down by their parents more than boys.
She often repeated
how rights and duties must go together.
Until esteem and love
are joined together, and reason becomes
the foundation of duty,
morality will stumble.
Criticizing the problems of current private and public schools,
Wollstonecraft recommended boys and girls be educated together
in day schools open to all classes funded by the government.
After
the age of nine, most boys and girls could go on to learn trades
while those with superior abilities could learn
languages, science,
history, politics, and literature.
Such would be schools for human
morality and happiness.
She objected to tyrannical punishments
and suggested that
students be tried by their peers to learn justice.
Humane treatment of animals should be taught.
Those made free
will quickly become wise and virtuous.
She warned against sentimental
education and suggested
ridiculing cheap novels to make students
more discriminating.
She concluded that women will correct their
vices and follies
when they are allowed to be free.
When women
share the rights of men, they will also share his virtues
and
will grow more perfect when emancipated.
In the late sixteenth century six Indian tribes were confederated
into the Iroquois League for the sake of peace.
Nevertheless the
warriors' desire for individual glory led to much fighting.
On
at least one occasion the women organized a noncooperation campaign
to stop a war in the same way that Aristophanes had dramatized
it in his play Lysistrata.
Many people came to America
for reasons of conscience and religious liberty,
such as Roger
Williams and later the pacifist Society of Friends.
Ann Hutchinson
spoke so persuasively in Boston about conscience and inner spiritual
guidance that she was brought to trial and banished from Massachusetts.
In 1657 this colony outlawed the Society of Friends.
Several Friends
disobeyed the law and taught about the "inner Light"
in Massachusetts.
Three of them were hanged for this "crime,"
including Mary Dyer.
In a March 1776 letter Abigail Adams reminded her husband John
that all men
would be tyrants if they could and warned that the
ladies would rebel
if they were bound by laws in which they had
no voice or representation.
That year tax-paying women in New
Jersey were given the right to vote
until it was taken away by
the legislature in 1807.
In Boston girls were allowed to attend
public schools
during the summer from 1789 to 1822.
In 1818 Hannah
Mather Crocker published the pamphlet
Observations on the Real
Rights of Women, suggesting that
if they received the same
education, they would improve equally.
Frances Wright was born in Scotland and read with excitement
about the republicanism of the American Revolution.
She visited
the United States in 1824 with Lafayette.
She bought 2,000 acres
near Memphis, Tennessee
and established the Nashoba
community,
where slaves could work to gain their freedom in five years;
but
the land was poor, and cooperation was difficult.
Wright and socialist
Robert Owen promoted birth control
in The Free Enquirer
in New York and lived together.
Frances Wright lectured from Boston
to New Orleans
in 1828 and 1829 for sexual equality.
She called
upon fathers and husbands to end the mental bondage
they imposed
on their daughters and wives, warning
"whenever we establish
our own pretensions upon the sacrificed rights of others,
we do
in fact impeach our own liberties."6
She was criticized severely
for believing in sexual freedom and miscegenation.
In 1830 the
34 slaves were taken from Nashoba to Haiti, where they were freed.
Emma Willard gave speeches to raise money and
founded the Troy
Female Seminary in 1821, and two years later
Catherine Beecher
began a seminary for girls in Hartford, Connecticut.
The first
public schools for girls were started in Worcester, Massachusetts
in 1824
and in New York in 1826, but there were not many others
until after the Civil War.
When Quaker Prudence Crandall advertised
to add Negroes to her girls school in 1833,
the school closed;
but she began teaching seventeen Negro girls and did so
for eighteen
months despite persecution and harassment.
Oberlin College in
Ohio began in 1833 by accepting males and females of any race.
Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke as a seminary in 1837,
and it
eventually became a college.
Beginning in 1838, Dorothea Dix did
much to expose
and improve conditions in prisons and insane asylums.
Women were active in the abolitionist movement.
When they were
not allowed to join the American Anti-Slavery Society
at its founding
in 1833, they formed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society
and in New York four years later the National Female Anti-Slavery
Society.
When a mob of several thousand abducted Garrison while
he was speaking
to their Boston meeting in 1835, Maria Weston
Chapman led the women
out walking in pairs holding the hand of
a colored sister.
That year Lydia Maria Child published in two
volumes a
multi-cultural examination of women entitled
History
of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations.
From
Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands to Europe and America,
she
showed how marriage laws treated women as drudges,
sexual objects, child-bearers and child-rearers, or property.
She discussed how
laws differed on virginity, adultery, polygamy, divorce,
concubinage, and prostitution, noting how women were treated differently than
men in these and in relation to education, political power, business,
and religion.
The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, who had left
their South Carolina home
and its slaves in 1828, joined the Quakers
in Philadelphia and worked
for the abolition of slavery and women's
rights.
In 1837 Sarah Grimké's Letters on the Equality
of the Sexes were published
in the New England Spectator
and were reprinted in The Liberator.
She speculated that
women were the first to suffer
from man's lust for dominion after
the fall.
All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will,
used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification,
to minister to his sensual pleasures,
to be instrumental in promoting his comfort;
but never has he desired to elevate her
to the rank she was created to fill.
He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind;
and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought,
and says the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.7
Sarah believed that men and women were created equal and argued
that
whatever it is morally right for a man to do is right for
a woman;
but she surrendered her rights and accepted the privileges
given her by men.
Sarah noted the disproportionate value set on
the time and labor
of men as compared to that of women.
Men have
exerted brutal power over women, such that in most countries
the
name husband means also tyrant.
Brute force is especially egregious
in the homes of the poor,
where the woman is made a drudge.
Sarah
Grimké signed her letters "Thine in the bonds of womanhood."
Angelina Grimké went on a speaking tour and drew
large
audiences of more than a thousand people.
While she was speaking
in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania Hall was torn down and set aflame.
She argued that men would find women as their equal
much more
valuable than women as their inferior.
She worked herself to exhaustion,
collapsed, and nearly died of typhoid fever.
In 1838 Angelina
was reported to have said,
I ask no favors for my sex.
I surrender not our claim to equality.
All I ask of our brethren is
that they will take their feet from off our necks,
and permit us to stand upright on the ground
which God has designed us to occupy.8
Women began getting petitions signed to stop the spread of
slavery,
to ban it in the District of Columbia and in interstate
trade
as well as for its complete abolition.
When their right
to petition was challenged, ex-President John Quincy Adams
presented
the petitions himself in the United States Congress.
The men's
and women's anti-slavery societies merged in 1839;
but the next
year when eight American women delegates were barred
from the
British Anti-Slavery Societies meeting in London,
Lucretia Mott
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton decided to organize a
convention in
the United States for the rights of women.
Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller wrote the essay "The
Great Lawsuit"
in the Dial in 1840 calling for complete
equality
for women in education, industry, and politics.
She expanded
these ideas into the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
which she completed in 1844.
Since women are in some ways weaker
than men,
they ought to have legal protection to make oppression
impossible.
She wanted every arbitrary barrier thrown down
that
would prevent women from being as free as men.
She believed that
such equality would allow a divine energy
to pervade nature previously
unknown in history.
Humanity will be ripe for this when the inward
and outward freedom
for women is recognized as a right,
not merely yielded as a concession.
Fuller saw male and female
as complementary in nature,
representing two sides of a "radical
dualism."
Male energy, power, and intellect are balanced
by female harmony, beauty, and love.
She believed that women excelled
in spiritual intuition.
She pioneered the modern psychological
concept that
men have feminine aspects while women have masculine
qualities.
If men would just remove the barriers,
women could
be independent and self-reliant.
The industrial revolution resulted in many women working
long
hours in factories with unhealthy conditions.
The first labor
strike involving only women workers
was at Dover, New Hampshire
in 1828.
In the 1840s several strikes led by Sarah Bagley of the
Lowell Female
Labor Reform Association were aimed at reducing
the work day to ten hours.
Other reforms in this period allowed
married women to own property in most states.
Magazine editor
Sarah Josepha Hale promoted professional and physical education
for women so that they could be physicians; she also exposed the
menace of corsets.
Many women liberated their bodies by wearing
more comfortable clothing and were called Bloomers.
For ten years
from 1843 Clarina Howard Nichols promoted women's rights
as the
editor of the Windham County Democrat in Vermont.
In 1851
Myrtilla Miner opened a school for Negro girls
in Washington D.
C. and soon had forty students.
Lucretia Mott was born in 1793, was the mother of six, and
had been
ordained as a minister by her Quaker meeting when she
was 28.
She criticized conservative attitudes in the Religious
Society of Friends
and advocated not using the products of slavery.
When William Lloyd Garrison organized the all-male
American Antislavery
Society in Philadelphia in 1833,
Lucretia organized the Philadelphia
Female Antislavery Society four days later.
Angelina and Sarah
Grimke joined; as they began to address
"mixed" audiences,
the "woman question" arose.
The controversy erupted at the First Annual Convention of Antislavery
Wome
on May 17, 1838 when a mob, angry that black and white - women
were meeting together before a "promiscuous" audience
of men and women,
burned the new Pennsylvania Hall to the ground
with the apparent approval of the mayor and the police.
From there
the mob went to attack the Motts' home,
but someone led them in
the wrong direction.
Lucretia Mott had led the evacuation of the
hall, suggesting that the women
link arms in pairs of one white
woman and one black woman.
She calmly awaited the mob at her home
with her husband and their guests.
The next day the women met
again and decided to increase their efforts.
At the following
year's convention Lucretia refused police protection
and ignored
advice to keep the races apart on the streets.
A few months later,
her bravery prevented an abolitionist friend
from being tarred
and feathered in Delaware.
She boldly pleaded with them to take
her as she was the chief offender,
saying, "I ask no courtesy
at your hands on account of my sex."9
In 1840 Lucretia Mott went to London for the World Antislavery
Convention;
even though she represented two organizations, she
was not admitted.
However, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and
in 1848 they organized
the Seneca Falls Convention for women's
rights.
Lucretia Mott spoke always for the equal and balanced
empowerment of women
and men harmoniously blended so that "there
would be less war, injustice,
and intolerance in the world than
now."
She remained an active Non-Resistant and pacifist even
during the Civil War,
supporting conscientious objectors and recommending
only moral force.
Abby Kelly had an equal partnership with her husband, Stephen
S. Foster;
they alternated going on speaking tours and taking
care of their child and the farm.
Once when they were both arrested
in Ohio for handing out antislavery literature
on the Sabbath,
Abby refused to cooperate and was carried to jail.
After the Civil
War they refused to pay taxes on their farm
because women were
not represented in government.
The origin of Mother's Day is an interesting story of women's
efforts for peace.
In 1858 Anna Reeves Jarvis organized Mothers'
Works Days in West Virgini
in order to improve sanitation in
Appalachian communities.
Julia Ward Howe and her husband Samuel
Gridley Howe worked with the
US Sanitary Commission during the
Civil War when more people died of disease
because of poor sanitation
than were killed in battle.
After meeting President Lincoln, Julia
Ward Howe wrote new words to the popular
song "John Brown's
Body" which became "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
After witnessing the devastation of this war,
in 1870 when another
Franco-Prussian war broke out,
she wrote the following declaration,
which became known
as the Mother's Day Proclamation:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them
of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God—
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Julia Ward Howe proposed June 2 as Mother's Day for Peace in
1872
and went on to work with Lucy Stone in the woman suffrage
movement.
In 1874 she published Sex and Education with
essays disputing theories
that woman were inferior to men and
thus should have separate education.
Howe co-founded the Association
for the Advancement of Women (AAW)
in 1873 and was its president
until 1881.
She wrote a biography of Margaret Fuller in 1883.
In 1890 the AAW was transformed into the General Federation of
Women's Clubs
and she directed its activities while founding
clubs on her lecture tours.
Julia Ward Howe continued to promote
June 2
as Mother's Day for Peace until she died in 1910.
Anna Jarvis, the daughter of Anna Reeves Jarvis, began a campaign
to celebrate Mother's Day by giving five hundred women carnations
at her St. Andrews church in Grafton, West Virginia in 1907
and
the following year that church honored mothers on May 10.
In 1909
Mother's Day services were held in 46 states.
In 1914 the US Congress
passed a Mother's Day resolution
that was signed by President
Wilson.
Anna Jarvis disliked the commercialization of the celebration
that made profits from selling flowers and cards,
which she considered
a lazy excuse for a good letter.
In 1923 she sued New York governor
Al Smith and was even arrested for protesting.
Lucretia Mott was born in 1793 and had been ordained
as a minister
by her Quaker meeting when she was 28.
Elizabeth Cady was born
in 1815, and her father was a judge.
She attended the Troy Female
Seminary and married
abolitionist speaker Henry B. Stanton in
1840.
Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Stanton, after meeting with three
other Quaker women,
placed a notice in the Seneca County Courier
announcing a
Woman's Rights Conference on July 19 and 20, 1848.
Using the "Declaration of Independence" as a model,
they added the keywords "and women" before "are
created equal."
The first two paragraphs were very similar,
but the rest of the "Declaration of Sentiments" outlined
the major grievances
of women against men instead of King George
III and read as follows:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries
and usurpations on the part of man toward woman,
having in direct object
the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise
her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws,
in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights
which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—
both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen,
the elective franchise,
thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation,
he has oppressed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all right in property,
even to the wages she earns.
He has made her, morally, as an irresponsible being,
as she can commit many crimes with impunity,
provided they be done in the presence of her husband.
In the covenant of marriage,
she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband,
he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—
the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty,
and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce,
as to what shall be the proper causes,
and in case of separation,
to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given,
as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—
the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition
of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman,
if single, and the owner of property,
he has taxed her to support a government
which recognizes her only
when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments,
and from those she is permitted to follow,
she receives but a scanty remuneration.
He closes against her all the avenues of wealth and distinction
which he considers most honorable to himself.
As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education,
all colleges being closed against her.
He allows her in Church, as well as State,
but a subordinate position,
claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry,
and, with some exceptions,
from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world
a different code of morals for men and women,
by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society,
are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.
He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself,
claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action,
when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.
He has endeavored, in every way that he could,
to destroy her confidence in her own powers,
to lessen her self-respect,
and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement
of one-half the people of this country,
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 the 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.10
At the Seneca Falls convention several resolutions were passed
unanimously.
The only one that was passed by a mere majority was
for the elective franchise,
and that was because some believed
it would make the whole movement
seem ridiculous and so harm the
other more rational objectives;
but Mrs. Stanton and Frederick
Douglass argued that the power to choose rulers
and make laws
to secure all the others depended on the right to vote.
The Declaration
of Principles was signed by 68 women and 32 men.
Another convention
was held at Rochester two weeks later, and conventions
were organized
in Ohio, Massachusetts, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.
The 1850 convention at Worcester, Massachusetts was supported
by
William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, William H. Channing,
Bronson Alcott,
Gerrit Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higgins, and Theodore
Parker.
The English woman Harriet Taylor wrote an article
for
the Westminster Review in 1851,
and her future husband
John Stuart Mill
would publish The Subjection of Women
in 1869.
In the 1851 convention at Akron, Ohio, few women were
willing to speak
against the men's views in the meeting as Frances
Dana Gage presided;
but the ex-slave Sojourner Truth took the
floor
and won over her audience with a speech that began,
Well, children, where there is so much racket
there must be something out of kilter.
I think that ‘twixt Negroes of the South
and the women of the North, all talking about rights,
the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.
But what’s all this here talking about?
That man over there says that women need to be
helped into carriages and lifted over ditches,
and to have the best place everywhere.
Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over mud-puddles,
or gives me the best place—and ain’t I a woman?11
National woman's rights conventions were held every year in
the 1850s except in 1857.
The new states California, Minnesota,
Oregon, and Kansas adopted liberal laws
for women, and all the
other states joining later followed them in that.
Susan B. Anthony was born into a Quaker family in 1820
and
had been a teacher and worked for the temperance cause,
but she
suffered discrimination because of her sex.
So in 1852 she and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
started the Woman's State Temperance Society.
Anthony worked in New York for women's control of their earnings,
guardianship of their children after divorce, and to vote.
She
found a woman to be captain in all sixty counties of New York,
and in ten weeks they collected six thousand signatures.
Elizabeth
Cady Stanton was the first woman to testify before a
Joint Judiciary
Committee of both legislatures in New York.
In 1855 Susan Anthony
traveled to 54 counties of New York.
In 1860 Mrs. Stanton spoke
before the New York legislature and noted that
the legal authority
Blackstone considered the husband and wife one,
but later commentators
decided that that one was the husband.
She argued that the prejudice
against sex was as strong as that against color.
Legislators resisted,
but in 1860 they passed laws that enabled women
not only to own
property but to collect their own wages, sue in court,
and have
similar property rights as men after the death of a spouse.
Polish
immigrant Ernestine Rose had worked for twelve years
to gain these
reforms, and she said,
Freedom, my friends,
does not come from the clouds, like a meteor;
it does not bloom in one night;
it does not come without great efforts and great sacrifices;
all who love liberty, have to labor for it.12
Lucy Stone attended Mount Holyoke Seminary, graduated from
Oberlin in 1847,
and became an outstanding orator against slavery
and for woman's rights.
When abolitionists complained, she ignored
their cause for the latter,
she agreed to speak against slavery
on weekends and for women during the week.
Her three main lectures
discussed women's disabilities -
social and industrial, legal and
political, and moral and religious.
At the national convention
held at Syracuse in 1852 she argued,
"It is the duty of woman
to resist taxation as long as she is not represented"
even
though "it may involve the loss of friends as it surely will
the loss of property."13
When she married Henry B. Blackwell
in 1855,
Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higgins approved and publicized
their protest statement
acknowledging their mutual independence
despite any laws to the contrary,
and Lucy Stone kept her name.
In 1858 she sent a letter to a New Jersey tax collector explaining
that
she was returning her tax bill without payment
because women
were denied the right of suffrage.
Her household goods were sold
to pay the taxes.
She believed that when men became aware that
this was contrary
to their theory of government, then they would
correct it.
Smith sisters in Connecticut and Abbey Kelly Foster
also
had their property seized for not paying taxes as a protest.
No woman's rights conventions were held in the United States
during the Civil War.
In May 1863 in New York the Loyal Women
of the Nation was formed
with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president
and Susan B. Anthony as secretary
to collect signatures for the
abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment.
On February 9, 1864
the first 100,000 were presented in the Senate
by Charles Sumner,
and eventually more than 300,000 were gathered.
The 13th Amendment
was ratified on December 18, 1865.
That year Vassar College opened
with a faculty of 22 women
and eight men for 300 female students.
The effort for the 14th Amendment brought a conflict between
the
opponents of racism and sexism when the word "male"
was included three times.
Anthony correctly realized that this
would make it necessary to pass
another constitutional amendment
to give women the vote in federal elections.
Efforts by women
to get their rights at this time were dismissed by many
who believed
that this was "the Negro's hour."
In 1867 Kansas held
two referenda on votes for Negroes and women;
but despite the
efforts of Lucy Stone, Mrs. Stanton,
and Susan Anthony, both were
defeated.
Influenced by the changed position of Horace Greeley,
the New York
constitutional convention chose not to allow voting
on a woman suffrage
amendment even though 28,000 signatures were
presented.
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified
in July 1868,
and the US Senate voted to deny women the vote
in
the District of Columbia by a vote of 37-9.
The 15th Amendment would guarantee that the voting could not
be denied
based on race or color but did not mention sex;
in March
1869 Senator Julian of Indiana introduced
a similar amendment
that did so, but it was largely ignored.
The wealthy Democrat
George Francis Train sponsored a newspaper called
The Revolution,
which called for women's rights and urged women to join unions
and demand equal pay for equal work; but in 1869 the equal rights
movement
split between the National Woman Suffrage Association
(NWSA) led by
Mrs. Stanton
and Susan Anthony and the American
Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA
and their Woman's Journal
edited by Lucy Stone, her husband, and Mary Livermore.
After Train
pulled out his financial support, The Revolution
could
not stand the competition and folded the next year.
Victoria Woodhull
and her sister Tennessee Claflin championed sexual freedom
and
denounced the double standard.
In Portland, Oregon women's rights
were pioneered by Abigail Scott Duniway
in her newspaper The
New Northwest, founded in 1871.
Not many women were in the
wild west,
yet the Utah and Wyoming territories granted them the
vote in 1870.
In 1868 on Election Day 172 women in New Jersey voted
although
their ballots were "courteously refused" by the men
electors.
In her speeches Susan Anthony pointed out that history
shows that
whenever there is a disenfranchised class, they are
a degraded class of labor.
She cited statistics that three million
women were
supporting themselves in the United States at that
time.
In an 1869 speech Elizabeth Cady Stanton described men as
destructive,
self-aggrandizing, loving war, conquest, and acquisition
and bringing about
discord, disorder, disease, and death.
Women
are needed to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion,
and
to lift men to a higher level of thought and action.
In 1871 the flamboyant Victoria Woodhull became the first woman
to address
the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, and she
argued that
use of the word "person" in the 14th and
15th Amendments implied
the right of suffrage for all persons
including women.
At the NWSA convention in New York, Woodhull
made a speech in which
she proposed treason, secession, and revolution;
then she sold 10,000 copies of her speech.
She and thirty women
tried to vote, and in a public speech to 3,000 people
she spoke
on free love, marriage, divorce, and prostitution.
Mrs. Stanton
declined to criticize her radical promiscuity;
but at the next
NWSA meeting in 1872
Susan Anthony would not allow Woodhull to
speak.
So Woodhull and her followers formed the Equal Rights Party
and nominated her for President of the United States.
Woodhull
accused Henry Ward Beecher of having an affair with the
wife of
Theodore Tilton, and Woodhull was arrested by the
vice crusader
Anthony Comstock on a charge of obscenity.
After a month in jail
her career precipitously declined.
Four cases testing whether the 14th Amendment allowed women
the right to vote
were made in 1872; the most significant was
the
effort led by Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York.
She
and fifteen other women risked a fine of $500 and a prison sentence
of up to three years; strict laws had been made
to keep former
secessionists from voting in the South.
Before her trial Anthony
spoke in all 29 post office districts in Monroe County
on "Is
It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?"
When
the prosecuting attorney got the trial transferred to Ontario
County,
she spoke in 21 districts there, and in the other sixteen Mathilda Joslyn Gage
lectured on "The United States on Trial,
not Susan B. Anthony."
Anthony's lawyer was the former Appeals Court Judge Henry R.
Selden,
but Justice Hunt of the US Supreme Court acting as a circuit
judge
would not even let Anthony testify, ordered the jury to
find her guilty
as a question of law, and then read his prepared
decision.
Selden's request to poll the jury was denied.
Anthony
complained that she had been tried "by forms of law all made
by men,
interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men
and against women."14
She was fined $100 and costs of the
prosecution; but she replied that all she had
was a $10,000 debt
from publishing The Revolution newspaper.
She ended her
brief statement by quoting the well known revolutionary maxim
favored by Thomas Jefferson, "Resistance to tyranny is obedience
to God."
Justice Hunt, by releasing her even though she did
not pay,
took away her right to appeal to the US Supreme Court.
In 1875 that Court ruled against woman suffrage
in the case of
Francis and Virginia Minor, who had sued Happersett
for not being
allowed to register to vote in St. Louis.
What became known as the "Anthony Amendment" was
introduced
into United States Congress by California Senator Sargent
in 1878;
but it would take hundreds of campaigns and millions
of signatures
before it would be ratified in 1920.
Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Frances Joslyn Gage
compiled a
detailed and extensive History of Woman Suffrage,
publishing
the first three volumes in 1881, 1882, and 1886.
Anthony also
helped Ida Husted Harper complete
and finance the fourth volume
by 1902.
Harper also wrote the last two volumes on 1900-1920
of
this comprehensive work that was published in 1922.
In 1882 both houses of Congress appointed Select Committees
on Woman Suffrage.
Chairman Lucy Stone of the American Woman Suffrage
Association announce
they supported it, but in the years ahead
the AWS
put most of their efforts into petitioning state legislatures.
Referenda were held in Michigan (1874), Colorado (1877), Nebraska
(1882),
Oregon (1884), Rhode Island (1887), Washington (1889),
and South Dakota (1890).
By 1889 American women could vote in
school elections in every state except twelve.
Intellectual women
developed their abilities by attending colleges
and joining women's
clubs, and more working women joined unions.
In 1888 Mrs. Stanton and Susan Anthony began efforts to heal
the breech
by reuniting the two woman suffrage organizations;
they formed the
International Council of Women, but the representatives
of the
women's organizations declined to support the suffrage
effort.
Frances Willard was converted to the suffrage cause, and
her
Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) by 1890
had 160,000
members, including many in the South.
However, this coalition
aroused the liquor industry that began opposing
woman suffrage
because they feared women would vote in Prohibition.
Lucy Stone's
daughter Alice Stone Blackwell was instrumental in bringing about
the merger in 1890 of the two organizations into the
National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)
with Elizabeth Cady
Stanton as president until 1892,
when she was succeeded by Susan
B. Anthony.
Mrs. Stanton devoted her efforts to the divorce rights
and to gain the franchise for educated women.
Before the House
Judiciary Committee she said,
The strongest reason why we ask for woman
a voice in the government under which she lives;
in the religion she is asked to believe;
equality in social life, where she is the chief factor;
a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread,
is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty;
because, as an individual, she must rely on her herself….
Nothing strengthens the judgment
and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
Nothing adds such dignity to character
as the recognition of one’s self-sovereignty;
the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded;
a place earned by personal merit,
not an artificial attainment by inheritance,
wealth, family, and position.
Seeing, then, that the responsibilities of life
rest equally on man and woman,
that their destiny is the same,
they need the same preparation for time and eternity.15
She published a critique of the way women were treated in the
Old Testament
in The Woman's Bible in 1895 with
a second volume published in 1898.
Mary Baker Eddy made the concept
of Father-Mother God
a basic precept of Christian Science.
Alice
Blackwell's motion to hold the annual convention in Washington
only in alternate years was opposed by Anthony in 1893;
but it
carried, and that was the last year either house in Congress
gave
the suffrage bill a favorable report for many years.
Wyoming had
entered the Union in 1890 with female suffrage intact,
and in
1896 Utah regained female suffrage
after losing it for nine years
because of Mormon polygamy.
Party politics and the liquor lobby
managed to defeat woman suffrage in most states,
but it slipped
through in Colorado in 1893 and Idaho in 1896.
Starting in 1894,
the NAWSA began demanding "equal pay for equal work."
In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her first book, Women
and Economics,
arguing that it is morally and economically
necessary for women to work as men do.
The next year Florence
Kelley organized the National Consumers' League.
The English Reform Bill of 1832 used the term "male person"
for the first time in English history, and women objected to the
word "male" in the Municipal Reform Act of 1835.
Richard
Cobden, the strongest advocate for peace in the Parliament,
publicly
spoke out for woman suffrage in 1845 and 1848.
Harriet Taylor in 1851 wrote the essay "Enfranchisement
of Women" in which
she reported that the Women's Rights Convention
at Worchester, Massachusetts
was attended by more than a thousand
people demanding equal rights
for women in education, employment,
voting, and holding offices.
She answered the maternity argument
by saying that
women can and should be more than mothers.
She
believed that working women could supplement
their husband's income
or earn their own living.
She noted that women may have needed
protection in a
previous age of violence, but now that is no longer
necessary.
She presented the real question as "whether it
is right and expedient that
one-half of the human race should
pass through life
in a state of forced subordination to the other
half."16
Because many women do not seek their emancipation
is not an argument against it
just as the vast numbers in Asia
who submit to being veiled and dominated by men
is not necessarily
a good thing that may not change in the future.
At the end of
her essay she noted that a petition for the franchise from the
women
of Sheffield was presented to the House of Lords in February
1851.
Harriet Taylor married her close friend of twenty years John
Stuart Mill (1806-73)
in 1851 and had a strong influence on him
before she died in 1858.
The Northern Reform Society was organized
that year
and made universal suffrage its objective.
Mill published Representative Government in 1861, arguing that women
need
the vote so that they may not be misgoverned by men,
and he discussed
the benefits that would result from women voting.
Mill had been
arrested when he was 17 for distributing information on birth
control.
When Mill presented in the House of Commons a petition
to give
women the franchise in 1866, it was greeted with laughter.
Disraeli suggested that women with property should have the vote.
During debates on the Tories' Reform Act of 1867 Mill made the
first plea
ever heard for women's suffrage in the British Parliament,
but his amendment to replace the word "man" with "person"
was defeated.
Attempts to test whether the generic term "man"
included women failed in the courts.
Mill wrote The Subjection
of Women in 1861 but did not publish it until 1869.
He began
with the basic premise
That the principle which regulates
the existing social relations between the two sexes—
the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself,
and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement;
and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality,
admitting no power or privilege on the one side,
nor disability on the other.17
The law should treat all people alike except for positive reasons
of justice or policy.
Mill suggested that the opinion which allowed
men to subordinate women is not
based on any deliberate thought
but was the result of the law of the strongest.
He noted that
even the powerful Church
has not been able to renounce violence
and force.
Women suffer from a chronic condition of bribery and
intimidation.
The subordination of women has been such a universal
custom
for so long that any departure from it seems unnatural.
He compared it to the slavery of barbarians by the Greeks
and
of Africans in his own century;
but men want more than just obedience
from women,
they want their sentiments and willing submission.
Thus moralities have been devised to make it the duty of women
to focus
all their affections on their husbands and the children
they have by them.
Yet Mill believed that the entire course of
history is away from systems of
unequal rights and toward human
improvement for all
and that the condition of women is approaching
equality with men.
He doubted that men had the knowledge that
would qualify them to lay down the law
for women as to their vocations;
but he believed it is better for women
to decide for themselves
by their own experience.
Mill reviewed how oppressive were current laws
of various countries
against women,
and he noted that often women are treated much
better than those hellish laws.
Loving liberty, Mill disliked
both sides of commanding and obeying,
and he believed that society
is progressing toward equal associations.
The virtue of humans
is that they can live together as equals,
claiming nothing that
they do not freely concede to others.
He acknowledged that the
family is a school of obedience for children
as parents learn
to command; but he saw also that it needed to be
"a school
of sympathy in equality, of living together in love,
without power
on one side or obedience on the other."18
He lamented that
the development of women had been hindered;
when that is corrected,
he expected there would be no difference
between the character
and capacities of the sexes.
He suggested that the complaint against
women is that
they fulfill the only duties they are taught too
faithfully.
In the last section Mill asked if mankind would be better off
if women are free.
First, it would be greatly advantageous if
human relations
were regulated by justice instead of injustice.
Second, giving women free choice of employment and opening more
occupations
to them would double the mental faculties available
to serve humanity.
Furthermore, the influence women already have
toward averting wars
and increasing charity would be greatly enhanced.
Mill found himself from his marriage to Harriet Taylor that a
loving
and equal relationship with reciprocal duties is the ideal.
He concluded,
The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence,
when the most fundamental of the social relations
is placed under the rule of equal justice,
and when human beings learn to cultivate
their strongest sympathy with an equal
in rights and in cultivation.19
In 1865 a society for women's suffrage had been formed in Manchester,
and they printed 10,000 copies of Lydia Becker's paper advocating
the franchise.
In 1869 English women gained municipal suffrage,
and Scotland adopted it in 1882.
The Woman's Disabilities Removal
Bill was drafted by Dr. Richard Pankhurst
and was introduced by
Jacob Bright in 1871 to give women the vote;
it was considered
favorably by Gladstone but was defeated.
Florence Nightingale
and Harriet Martineau led the drive that
submitted 18,000 signatures
from women on memorials.
Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy worked to get
the
Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 passed.
Married
mothers gained guardianship of their children
in the Custody of
Infants Act of 1886.
In Europe, Marie Goegg founded the Woman's
International Association
at Geneva in 1868, and the first International
Woman's Rights Congress
was held at Paris in 1878.
In 1889 Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst organized the Women's Franchise
League
to gain the vote and equality for women in
divorce, inheritance,
and the custody of children.
Dr. Pankhurst had stood up for the
Boer republics, and after his death
Mrs. Pankhurst resigned from
the Fabian Society in 1900
after it refused to oppose the Boer
War.
In October 1903 she joined with a few women
from the Independent
Labor Party (ILP)
to form the Women's Social and Political Union
(WSPU).
Worker Annie Kenney was elected to the committee
of the
card and blowing-room operatives.
When Edward Grey came to speak
in the Manchester Free Trade Hall
on October 13, 1905, Annie Kenny
put up a banner "Votes for Women."
Mrs. Pankhurst's
eldest daughter Christabel repeated her questioning
and fought
to keep from being ejected.
Both were thrown out and arrested;
Christabel was charged
with spitting at a police superintendent
and an inspector.
Refusing to pay fines, they went to prison,
Christabel for seven days and Annie for three.
Liberal candidate
Winston Churchill tried to pay their fines,
but the governor would
not accept his money.
Annie Kenney displayed another banner when
Prime Minister
Henry Campbell-Bannerman spoke at Albert Hall.
At another meeting Churchill refused to answer the questions
of
Christabel's sister, Sylvia Pankhurst.
Mrs. Pethick Lawrence became treasurer of the WSPU.
After Annie
Kenney and two others were arrested on Downing Street,
two hundred
Members of Parliament formed a Women's Suffrage Committee
and
petitioned Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman,
who refused to initiate
any such legislation.
Lloyd George told protesters he was a Suffragist
and suggested they go to
their enemy Asquith, at whose residence
thirty women were attacked by police.
Kenney and two others were
sent to prison for six weeks.
Dora B. Montefiore had refused to
pay income tax
because "taxation without representation is
tyranny."
Her house was besieged for six weeks before
one
piece of furniture could be taken in 1906.
By then Christabel
Pankhurst had earned a law degree from Victoria University.
On
October 23, 1906 Mrs. Pankhurst and nine women were arrested
for
sitting down in the Lobby of the Parliament and went to prison.
Sylvia Pankhurst also tried to speak and got fourteen days.
News
spread, and for the first time in France 150 women
demonstrated
for the vote in the Chamber of Deputies.
In February 1907 a "Women's Parliament" was held
in Caxton Hall,
and they marched to the House of Commons.
Fifty-four
women and two men were arrested
as mounted police cleared Parliament
Square.
That year Emmeline and Frederick Pethick Lawrence founded
the newspaper Votes for Women and gave it to the Union
in 1908.
Five thousand meetings for women's suffrage
were organized,
including one at Albert Hall.
Despite the efforts of Keir Hardie,
the Pankhursts
and WSPU members withdrew from the Labor Party.
Women heckled politicians at public meetings and at private functions.
After a Women's Parliament in February 1908 led to
another demonstration, 48 women were sentenced to two months.
Mrs. Pankhurst tried to
speak on a cart and was
arrested with eight women, getting six
weeks.
To prevent an announced public meeting in Parliamentary
Square
5,000 foot police and fifty mounted officers assembled
on June 30.
Yet women spoke from the steps of government buildings.
A few frustrated women went to Downing Street
and threw stones;
27 women went to prison.
Christabel Pankhurst, her mother, and Mrs. Drummond were ordered
arrested
for printing
handbills saying "HELP THE SUFFRAGETTES
RUSH THE HOUSE OF COMMONS."
On October 13, 1908 at Parliament
Square 24 women and 12 men
were arrested and went to prison for
three weeks to two months.
Christabel was sentenced to ten weeks,
and the two older women got three months.
Jennie Baines was sentenced
to six weeks
for throwing herself on the Prime Minister at Leeds.
Sylvia Pankhurst told Helen Ogston not to use a dog-whip; but
at Albert Hall
she used it against police after they burned her
wrist and struck her in the chest.
As a result many women were
beaten.
Twenty-six members of the Women's Freedom League were
arrested
trying to interview Cabinet Ministers at Downing Street
in January 1909.
At the sixth Women's Parliament the next month
police took leaders
into custody and violently man-handled the
others to push them back.
Twenty-one women were arrested at the
Women's Parliament on March 30
and got one to three months in
prison.
During the eighth Women's Parliament on June 29, 1909 Government
window panes
were broken for the first time because those that
broke a window were
quietly taken into custody instead of beaten;
108 were arrested, including Alice Paul of Pennsylvania.
All were
freed but fourteen, who were charged
for breaking windows or rescuing
others.
They demanded political status in prison, smashed windows
in their cells
because of stifling heat, and went on hunger strikes.
Twelve more were arrested and did the same,
and they were released
after four to six days of fasting.
Other small groups had a similar
experience.
Mrs. Pankhurst and Christabel defended the tactic
of throwing stones.
After 37 women had shortened their sentences
by fasting,
the Home Secretary ordered Birmingham prisoners
forcibly
fed by a rubber tube in September 1909.
Medical doctors complained
that this was brutal and dangerous,
116 physicians sending a memorial
to the Prime Minister.
In June 1910 the Conciliation Committee promoted
a bill to
give women with property the vote.
November 18 became known as
Black Friday as 300 women in detachments
of twelve for six hours
were attacked by police, who snatched their flags
and tore them
up, hit the women with their fists and knees, knocking them down
and dragging them to the crowd of spectators.
Two men and 115
women were arrested,
but only women accused of breaking windows
or assault were charged.
That night women broke windows of Cabinet
Ministers' houses,
and after three days a total of 285 had been
arrested;
75 women went to prison for window-breaking and assault;
ten admitted they struck police to protect other women.
After
this, stone-throwing became organized.
In March 1911 the Pethick
Lawrences were arrested,
and Christabel Pankhurst fled to Paris.
In China suffragists rushed the chamber of the Nanjing Assembly,
broke windows,
and assaulted members; soldiers were called in,
but women were given the vote.
Imprisoned women in England went
on hunger strikes for prisoner privileges
and were fed by force
until most had been released;
then the remainder were given their
rights.
The jury recommended leniency to Mrs. Pankhurst
and Mr.
and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence,
but the judge sentenced them to nine
months and
refused to let them be treated as First Class misdemeanants.
They fasted, resisted force feeding, and were soon released.
Emily Wilding Davison and Nurse Pitfield committed arson openly
and accepted punishment; but in July 1912 Christabel Pankhurst
from Paris
began organizing secret arson attacks, a strategy opposed
by her sister Sylvia and the Pethick Lawrences,
who withdrew from
the WSPU in October.
Votes for Women went back to the Pethick
Lawrences,
and the WSPU began publishing The Suffragette.
In the campaign of the new militancy directed by Christabel and
her mother
attempts were made to destroy mail in pillar-boxes
with red ochre, jam, tar,
varnish and inflammable substances.
False fire alarms were made 176 times in 1911 and 425 times the
next year,
resulting in fifty convictions; the numbers increased
in 1913.
Arson began targeting works of art and historic relics.
Sylvia Pankhurst turned her efforts to developing
a mass movement
in the poor East End of London.
Objecting to police brutality
at the station, Sylvia spilled an inkpot
and slapped a superintendent
with her inky hand.
At that time the WSPU was paying fines, and
she was released.
On her third arrest she was not allowed a fine
and was sentenced to two months hard labor.
She and Zelie Emerson
went on hunger strikes
and endured the misery of force-feeding.
Sylvia decide to walk until she was released
and finally was taken
to a doctor and sent home.
Parliament passed the "Cat and Mouse Act" that licensed
out hunger strikers
for short terms, suspending their sentences
until they returned to prison.
Bernard Shaw objected, "If
you take a woman and torture her, you torture me.
These denials
of fundamental rights are really a violation of the soul."20
Mrs. Pankhurst claimed responsibility for the militant campaign
and was
sentenced to three years; after she was emaciated from
fasting,
she was licensed out for a time.
Parliament decided to
crush the WSPU campaign by suppressing their meetings.
Emily Wilding
Davison had tried to kill herself in prison twice by throwing
herself
over corridor railings, but she was caught by a wire net;
she also threw herself down an iron staircase.
She never recovered
from these injuries, and at the Derby on June 4, 1913
she was
killed trying to stop the King's horse during the race.
Sylvia Pankhurst was sentenced to serve three months.
Under
the Cat and Mouse Act she, her mother, and other "mice"
would spend
a few days in prison refusing food and water until
they were released on license for seven days.
Then the "cats"
would try to find the "mice" and arrest them again when
they spoke
at meetings if their supporters were not able to protect
and hide them.
Soon 31 women and four men were being "moused."
On July 26, 1913 the non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage
Societies
(NUWSS) organized a massive meeting at Hyde Park.
Because
of riots and civil war in Ireland, the British government began
to grant
some suffrage rights to the Unionist Women of Ulster,
bolstering the militants' view that their tactics were effective.
Hundreds of fires had been set, but only thirteen persons were
convicted of arson.
In Paris the autocratic Christabel Pankhurst
demanded that her sister
Sylvia's less violent East London Federation
become separate from the WSPU,
because Christabel did not approve
of the Federation's
democratic constitution and working-women's
movement.
Violence escalated as the press reported 141 acts of
destruction
in the first seven months of 1914 with 35 arrests
and 107 cases of arson with nine arrests.
Some prisons, particularly
in Scotland, were still force-feeding hunger strikers.
When war came in August 1914, all the suffragettes were released.
Mrs. Pankhurst, Christabel, and most of those using violent tactics
supported the war effort by making recruiting speeches and stopped
demanding suffrage until after the war;
but the more nonviolent
Sylvia Pankhurst and her East End poor people
organized charitable
war relief and continued the hard work for women's rights.
Mrs.
Fawcett and a majority of the non-militant NUWSS dropped
the suffrage campaign to support the war effort
while a minority joined the
peace efforts of the Women's International League.
Sylvia's Federation
asked for the New Zealand system of franchise
for every woman
over 21 and noted that four provinces in Canada
granted complete
woman suffrage during the war.
They joined with seven London labor
organizations
and persistently lobbied the House of Commons.
While
the militarists such as Christabel agitated for conscription
of
all men and women from 16-60 years of age,
Sylvia Pankhurst demanded
human suffrage and no infringement of liberties.
Some of the suffragettes
joined Jane Addams at The Hague in 1915
to work for peace and
international order.
In 1917 the tide turned, and finally on January
11, 1918
the House of Lords approved the bill that gave the vote
to eight million women.
Complete woman suffrage was granted in
Britain by the Act of 1928.
Carrie Lane was born on a Wisconsin farm in 1859.
After her
first husband Leo Chapman died of typhoid fever,
she married engineer
George Catt, who supported her suffrage work.
She worked on the
campaign in South Dakota and on the Colorado victory in 1893,
becoming chairman of a new organization committee in 1895.
Another
fine orator for woman suffrage was Anna Howard Shaw,
who had earned
an M. D. from the Boston medical school in 1886.
She led the WCTU
suffrage efforts.
In 1900 the eighty-year-old Anthony chose Carrie
Chapman Catt as her successor.
After a decade of hard work, Catt
resigned the presidency of the NAWSA in 1904,
and Dr. Shaw was
president until Mrs. Catt returned to the position in 1915.
Meanwhile
Catt continued as president of the International Woman Suffrage
Alliance
and in 1912 she began working on the New York campaign
that took five years to win the vote for women.
During this progressive era women made important gains.
The
settlement house movement helped many women and immigrants
after
Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889.
Census figures
showed the number of women employed in the United States
going
from 4,005,532 in 1890 to 5,319,397 in 1900 to 7,444,787 in 1910.
The Equality League of Self-Supporting Women was formed
and later
was called the Women's Political Union.
The number of women graduating
from college increased
from 5,237 in 1900 to 8,437 in 1910.
After
the Equality League met with the New York Collegiate Equal Suffrage
League,
they merged; and by 1908 they had about 19,000 members.
The
Woman Suffrage Party began on October 30, 1909,
and Mrs. Catt
organized it with 2,000 election district captains in New York.
In 1910 women presented to the US Congress petitions
for a
woman suffrage amendment with 404,000 names.
That year Washington
state voted suffrage for women by nearly two to one,
and the next
year California passed a suffrage referendum.
In 1912 woman suffrage
finally passed in Oregon on its sixth attempt
and also won in
Arizona and Kansas; but it was defeated
by alcoholic politics
in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.
In Illinois the Progressive
party in 1913 helped pass a law giving women
the right to vote
in municipal and federal elections.
Battles with liquor interests
continued as woman suffrage completed its sweep
of the far west
in Montana and Nevada in 1914,
but it lost that year in the Dakotas,
Nebraska, Missouri, and Ohio.
Mrs. Leslie left Mrs. Catt $2,000,000
in 1914
to further the cause of woman suffrage.
In 1915 Carrie
Catt accepted the presidency of the National Association again
and appointed a board of women to work hard, replacing those who
could not.
Referenda in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and New Jersey
were defeated in 1915, but 1,234,593 men had voted
to give women the ballot.
The corruption of the liquor lobby was
monitored and challenged.
Indictments against Pennsylvania brewing
companies in 1916
resulted in their paying a fine of one million
dollars.
Alice Paul was a Quaker born in 1885.
She graduated from Swarthmore
in 1905, and from the University of Pennsylvania
she earned an
M. A. in 1907 and a Ph. D. in 1912.
She worked in English settlement
houses and studied
economics at the University of London.
In 1909
she was arrested with a deputation to the Parliament
that was
led by Mrs. Pankhurst, and she met Lucy Burns.
Both Alice and
Lucy were arrested for trying to speak at a protest outside of
where
Lloyd George was holding a meeting, and they were sentenced to
two weeks
in Holloway Jail; but they were released on the sixth
day of their hunger strike.
They were arrested and released again,
and on the third time
they were released after four days of fasting.
After being sentenced to thirty days, they were forcibly fed,
which affected Alice Paul's health for weeks.
In America after getting the recommendation of Jane Addams,
the NAWS
authorized a committee led by Alice Paul, Lucy Burns,
and Crystal Eastman
to lobby Congress for a Constitutional Amendment.
They organized a parade of 5,000 women the day before
Woodrow Wilson's
first inauguration in Washington.
Police failed to protect the
women from jeering men, and the cavalry
from Fort Myers was called
out to guard the marching women.
After an investigation the Washington
police chief was replaced.
Delegations visited President Wilson,
bringing 200,00 signatures.
Dr. Shaw allowed them to function
within the National Association
as the Congressional Union, and
they published The Suffragist.
After they clashed over
policy, Alice Paul resigned as chairman;
in 1914 the organizations
became separate.
The Union campaigned against Democratic candidates
even if they personally supported woman suffrage.
By 1915 the
Congressional Union had organized women in all 48 states.
They
gathered a million signatures on petitions and presented them
to President Wilson in a march on the Capitol on May 9, 1915,
and they opposed Wilson's re-election in 1916.
That year the CU
met in Chicago and became the National Woman's Party,
and 5,000
women marched in the rain to influence the Republican Party convention.
The Woman's Party organized the first picket of the White House
in January 1917 and lobbied there every day with banners.
Jeannette
Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected
to Congress and
voted against declaring war.
Carrie Catt believed they must support
the war for political reasons;
but the Woman's Party had many
Quakers and refused to approve of the war.
Mrs. Catt also urged
Wilson's censorship Committee on Public Information
led by George
Creel to suppress publicity about the Woman's Party protests
because
she thought it hurt their cause.
Signs that England and Russia
were already enfranchising women
during wartime particularly made
some Americans angry.
Occasionally patriotic fanatics tore down
their banners and abused the women picketing.
Arrests of the women
picketing began on June 22, 1917.
They refused to pay fines, and
at first the sentences were only three days.
In July sixteen women
were sentenced to sixty days
in the Occoquan Workhouse for "obstructing
traffic."
In October 1917 four pickets under a suspended sentence were
given six months.
So Alice Paul led a picket and was sentenced
to seven months in jail.
The air in the jail was so stifling that
she threw a book by Browning
through a window to gain the first
fresh air women there had enjoyed in a long time.
More women picketed
and were arrested and released but kept coming back,
joined by
others; Lucy Burns was sentenced to six months.
For the first
time in American history protesters in jail demanded to be treated
as political prisoners, and sixteen women at Occoquan
refused
to work and went on a hunger strike.
Forced feeding through the
nose caused bleeding and vomiting.
Poet Maria Moravsky had been
imprisoned in Czarist Russia and was surprised
to find the suffrage
prisoners treated worse than common criminals.
Lucy Burns was
put in solitary confinement, and Alice Paul was transferred from
the hospital to the psychopathic ward; but the reporter David
Lawrence,
who was
friendly with President Wilson, was allowed
to interview Alice Paul for two hours.
He explained that they
could not be treated as political prisoners because if others
opposing the war gained this status, they might destroy their
war program.
So a few days later on November 27 and 28
the Government
released all the suffrage prisoners.
In six months 218 women had
been arrested, and 97 had gone to prison.
On March 4, 1918 the
District of Columbia Court of Appeals
freed the prisoners and
invalidated the arrests.
In 1917 legislative action gave women the vote in North Dakota,
Ohio, Indiana,
Rhode Island, Nebraska, and Michigan; even Arkansas
broke through the
resistance in the South and gave women the right
to vote in primary elections.
Southern politicians feared that
giving women the vote would endanger
their Jim Crow laws that
had disenfranchised most Negroes.
Even the suffragists in the
South had segregated organizations.
On October 27 in New York
2,500 women paraded, and the Democratic machine
in Tammany Hall
decided not to oppose female suffrage that year;
New York City
provided 100,000 extra votes
in favor to carry the state by that
margin.
President Wilson announced he favored an amendment,
and
on January 10, 1918 ill and injured Congressmen provided the votes
to give it
the two-thirds majority it needed in the House,
though
it lacked this in the Senate by two votes.
State suffrage campaigns
that year won in South Dakota, Michigan, and Oklahoma.
Now more than seven million women could vote in fifteen states,
and the Woman's Party tried to influence the Congress with their
protests.
In August 1918 women were arrested for standing on the
statue of Lafayette
across from the White House, and Alice Paul
was arrested as the leader;
47 women were charged with "holding
a meeting on public grounds."
A few days later 38 more women
had their demonstration
broken up by police but were released.
The women previously held refused to cooperate with the trial
and were
sentenced to ten or fifteen days in prison; 24 women
went on hunger strikes.
On the first day of 1919 the Woman's Party
began burning the words of
President Wilson on the sidewalk in
front of the White House
and kept them burning as "watchfires
of freedom."
Alice Paul and three companions were detained
and released.
The suffragists were attacked by soldiers and sailors
to
destroy their banners and flags and break the urn.
Women were
arrested; some were released on bail
while others went on hunger
strikes.
In court women applauding the prisoners were sentenced
for contempt of court, joining the 22 hunger-strikers.
The Woman's
Party believed that these watchfires put the President
to work
to gain the vote needed for the Amendment.
On March 4, 1919 Alice
Paul and six others were clubbed by police
and arrested in New
York but were released.
President Wilson while in Paris gained the needed vote from
Georgia senator Harris,
and on May 20, 1919 he summoned a special
session of Congress.
The Federal Suffrage Amendment was finally
passed by the Senate on June 4, 1919.
Ratification required 36
states, and by March 1920 only one more state was needed;
but
it took until August 26, 1920 before Tennessee finally approved.
Nine states of the solid South from Louisiana to Maryland along
with Delaware
never did ratify the Amendment, which became law
for the entire United States,
enfranchising 26 million women in
the 1920 election.
After this triumph the NAWSA lost 90% of its
two million members,
but the League of Women Voters founded by
Carrie Catt exerted a continuing influence.
Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party continued to work
for women's rights.
She earned three law degrees and in 1923 formulated
the Equal Rights Amendment.
In 1928 they formed the Inter-American
Commission of Women
as part of the Organization of American States.
In 1938 she founded the World Women's Party for Equal Rights.
In 1945 Alice Paul worked so that the United Nations Charter would
recognize
the equality of men and women, and the World Woman's
Party
she founded got the World Court to accept this in 1948.
The National Woman's Party lawyers lobbied and got the 1964 Civil
Rights Act
to ban discrimination in employment based on sex in
Title VII.
In the 1960s and 1970s the National Woman's Party
concentrated
its efforts on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).
1. A Vindication of the Rights of Men by Mary Wollstonecraft
in
A Mary Wollstonecraft Reader, p. 243.
2. A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft,
p. 34.
3. Ibid., p. 37.
4. Ibid., p. 51.
5. Ibid., p. 141.
6. Course of Popular Lectures by Frances Wright quoted
in Feminism:
The Essential Historical Writings, p. 22.
7. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of
Women by
Sarah Grimké,
p. 10 quoted in Feminism:
The Essential Historical Writings, p. 38.
8. The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women
by Sarah Grimké,
p. 10 quoted in Century of Struggle
by Eleanor Flexner, p. 47.
9. Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott by Margaret
Hope Bacon, p. 84.
10. History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 1, p. 70-71.
11. Ibid., p. 116.
12. Ernestine L. Rose quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical
Writings, p. 125.
13. History of Woman Suffrage, Volume 1, p. 527.
14. Susan B. Anthony quoted in Feminism: The Essential Historical
Writings, p. 135.
15. "Solitude of Self" by Elizabeth Cady Stanton quoted
in Feminism:
The Essential Historical Writings, p. 158-159.
16. "Enfranchisement of Women" by Harriet Taylor Mill
in Essays on Sexuality, p. 107.
17. The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill in Essays
on Sexuality, p. 125.
18. Ibid., p. 175.
19. Ibid., p. 236.
20. Quoted in The Suffragette Movement by Sylvia Pankhurst,
p. 451.
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