What Hath God Wrought (124 page)

The spread of the women’s rights movement following the almost impromptu meeting at Seneca Falls provided evidence of a new consciousness on the part of women that was widely experienced—although one still so strange that very few women could identify it or dared voice it. By 1848, in certain parts of the United States, there had come of age a generation of women whose world was not bounded by the household and the traditional female occupations performed within it. In the nineteenth century, as in developing countries today, increased equality for women emerged in the train of economic modernization. In Seneca Falls and its vicinity, economic life had recently diversified, with commerce and manufacturing taking their places alongside agriculture. The falls that gave the town its name had been circumvented in 1817 by the canal that carried its produce to market. In 1828 this canal linked up with the Erie, and the town boomed. More recently, the falls had been turned from a liability into an asset: They now powered machinery that milled flour and manufactured water pumps. When, in the mid-1840s, the town recovered from the depression of the late 1830s, manufacturing led the way. The railroad connected Seneca Falls with Rochester and Albany in 1841. The village population rose from 200 in 1824 to 2,000 in 1831 and 4,000 by 1845; that of Waterloo reached 3,600 in the latter year. Seneca County held 24,874 persons in the census of 1840.
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The signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration included a wide variety of occupations, and many of the families had connections to manufacturing. The call for women’s rights at Seneca Falls reflected new conceptions of gender relations arising out of economic innovation.

As important a precursor as economic modernization was female education. Girls in New York state found secondary education widely available, and those from middle-class families generally took advantage of it. The jewel in the crown of New York education for girls was Troy Female Seminary, a mixed public-private institution founded in 1821, the creation of Emma Willard with support from Governor DeWitt Clinton. There Elizabeth Cady graduated in 1833. The Declaration of Sentiments exaggerated in claiming that “all colleges” were closed to women. Oberlin had been coeducational (and interracial) practically since its founding in 1833, and a number of women’s colleges, mostly under religious auspices, served constituencies scattered from New England to Georgia.
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Normal schools on Horace Mann’s pattern, for training teachers, came to be an important component of women’s higher education. Six months after the Seneca Falls convention met, an English immigrant named Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from a medical school not far away—in Geneva, New York—the first woman to do so anywhere in the modern world. The goals she set out for obtaining a medical education reflected the nineteenth-century aspiration to development of the human faculties: “The true ennoblement of woman, the full harmonious development of her unknown nature, and the consequent redemption of the whole human race.”
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But although the ideology of self-improvement was starting to be applied to women, that of self-fulfillment had not. No professional occupation save schoolteaching had yet opened up to women. Men no longer had to follow the occupation of their fathers, and women began to wonder why they needed to follow the occupation of their mothers. Working-class women now could earn money in factories. Middle-class women, though active in religious and reform societies, found few career opportunities compatible with their relatively high level of education. They compared the constraints imposed upon them with the freedom enjoyed by their husbands and brothers.
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The religious organizations, philanthropic institutions, and reform movements in which women had participated for a generation proved themselves effective schools too, in the practical sense that they had taught women lessons in self-assertion, leadership, and public communication. “Those who urged women to become missionaries and form tract societies,” Lydia Maria Child wrote in the
Liberator
, “have changed the household utensil to a living, energetic being.”
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Of all the benevolent causes in which women participated, probably the ones closest to direct political action were the petition campaigns to protest against Indian Removal and slavery in the District of Columbia. Of all antebellum congressional figures, John Quincy Adams probably did the most for the cause of women’s rights, by presenting and defending their petitions. After the Civil War, women continued to exploit their ability to petition, using it on behalf of temperance, the suffrage, and other causes.
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Having sought to help the oppressed, some women began to recognize that they themselves numbered among the oppressed. The Grimké sisters, like practically all the first generation of women’s rights proponents, came to the cause through their experience with abolitionism. “The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own,” observed Angelina Grimké.
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And like most abolitionists, the Grimké sisters came to their antislavery convictions through the experience of religious conversion. In their case, this involved an agonized spiritual migration from Episcopalianism to Presbyterianism to the Society of Friends, which led them in turn to their physical migration from Charleston to Philadelphia.
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Garrison welcomed them into his American Anti-Slavery Society, calling abolition and women’s rights two “moral reformations” bound together in “pure practical Christianity.”
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The characteristic concerns of antebellum religious benevolence—the creation of responsible autonomy to replace external coercion, and the redemption of individuals who had not been functioning as free moral agents—carried over to the women’s rights movement. Sarah Grimké’s
Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
(1838), the first comprehensive exposition of feminism in America, illustrates the continuity. “God has made no distinction between men and women as moral beings,” she argued, justifying her position with a logical analysis of both creation accounts in Genesis. Rejecting the idea that women and men had “separate spheres,” she believed it as important for women to have equal duties as for them to gain equal rights. Like Lucretia Mott, she supported women’s ordination to the ministry as well as equal pay for equal work. To fulfill their obligations as moral beings, women needed to have access to education. Nineteenth-century feminists, when they invoked the Enlightenment’s language of natural rights, typically interpreted it in the light of the Second Great Awakening of religion.
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Historians who specialize in the anatomy of revolutions have noticed that they often occur after conditions have begun to improve. The New York state legislature had in fact started to remedy gender discrimination in its Married Women’s Property Act of April 1848. This amended the common-law rule that all of a married woman’s property belonged to her husband, allowing women to preserve distinct the property they brought into a marriage by means of a prenuptial agreement. In earlier years, the common-law rule had been mitigated by New York’s courts of equity, headed by the eminent Chancellor James Kent; but in 1828 a statute limited equitable jurisdiction, throwing the status of married women’s property in doubt. After a dozen years of agitation, the legislature responded with the new law. Among other things it protected a wife’s property from her husband’s creditors; like the federal bankruptcy act of 1841 it responded (belatedly) to the depression of the late 1830s. Support for it had come from three quarters: reformers who saw it as a step toward equal gender rights, reformers who wished to protect some of a bankrupt family’s assets, and wealthy people wishing to preserve family estates through their daughters. But not until 1860 did New York alter the common-law rule that a wife’s wages belonged to her husband. (Stanton simply ignored the New York act of 1848 when she listed married women’s lack of property rights in her Declaration of Sentiments, since in many other states—especially those without courts of equity—the grievance remained unabated.)
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The women who met at Seneca Falls in the summer of 1848 were well aware of the European revolutions going on simultaneously. Margaret Fuller, the
New York Tribune
’s correspondent in Italy, reported fully on the revolutions in Sicily and the Papal States, emphasizing the role played by women. The London press contained vivid reports, reprinted in the United States, of the role of armed women in the Paris and Prague uprisings. In March, the daily
Voix des femmes
appeared on the streets of Paris, and the Society for the Emancipation of Women called on the French government to accord women equal rights in politics and education. In April, the new Second Republic abolished slavery in the French West Indies. In May, the Frankfort Assembly met to draw up a German national constitution, arousing the hopes of German feminists. In June, the French feminist Jeanne Deroin and the English feminist Anne Knight issued a joint call for “the complete, radical abolition of all the privileges of sex, of race, of birth, of rank, and of fortune.”
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Nevertheless, in July the women of Seneca Falls chose to model their own revolutionary appeal on 1776, not on contemporaneous events in Europe (which, of course, proved evanescent). The choice reveals something of Americans’ sense of their country’s “exceptional” status as a model for the rest of the world, and corresponding reluctance to view the revolutions going on in Europe as an example for America.

The Seneca Falls convention occurred in a world undergoing a revolution in communications. Earlier statements on behalf of women’s rights had attracted little attention in the United States, but now the telegraph and the newly formed Associated Press distributed the news made at Seneca Falls. Garrison’s
Liberator
hailed the convention as “The Woman’s Revolution.” Frederick Douglass’s
North Star
and Lydia Maria Child’s
Anti-Slavery Standard
strongly supported women’s rights. More importantly, the mainstream press accorded Seneca Falls coverage. A modern examination found 29 percent of newspaper articles on the convention favorable, 42 percent negative, and 28 percent neutral.
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The nationally circulated
New York Tribune
of Horace Greeley generally supported women’s rights and employed the feminist journalists Margaret Fuller and Jane Swisshelm. James Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald
often mocked rights for women, but his sensationalized coverage still gave the movement valuable publicity. (“By the intelligence which we have lately received, the work of revolution is no longer confined to the Old World, nor to the masculine gender,” the paper’s piece on Seneca Falls announced.)
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After its founding in 1851, Henry Raymond’s
New York Times
would take an intermediate position, critical of the women’s movement as a whole but sometimes supporting particular reforms. Besides news of events, the printing presses also generated a vast flow of novels, religious tracts, domestic advice, and social criticism—much of it written by women authors addressing a women’s audience. This output fostered greater respect for women even when not explicitly addressing legal and political issues. Without the communications revolution, it would have been much harder to change public opinion and mobilize support for a novel cause like women’s rights.

In Seneca Falls itself, press opinion divided. The
Seneca Observer
had supported women’s suffrage as early as 1843. But the rival newspaper, the
Seneca Democrat
, expressed the common hostile derision: “What absurd stuff is all this prattle about the ‘Rights of Woman!’” If women enjoyed equal rights, “in time of war how effective would be our army and navy—the commander-in-chief in a delicate condition [i.e., pregnant], her officers darning stockings.”
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In most parts of the country both major political parties, like most newspapers, opposed women’s suffrage, the Democrats somewhat more vociferously than the Whigs. Women of all races, classes, and ethnic groups engaged in religious and charitable activities, but the women’s rights movement involved a narrower constituency, and women’s suffrage a smaller one yet. The cause of women’s suffrage, like that of abolitionism, found more support among Yankees and the middle class than among other ethnic groups or the working class. Correspondingly, the Democratic Party showed less enthusiasm for women in politics than did the Whigs and their Republican successors. The greater openness of the Whig Party to the participation of women in political campaigning also reflected that party’s ties to evangelical reform movements like temperance and an imitation of their faith in the moral influence of women on men. Nevertheless, it indicated an unusually enlightened attitude when Abraham Lincoln, running as a Whig for the Illinois state legislature in 1836, announced that he favored giving “the right of suffrage” to women who paid taxes.
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The most important contribution the Whig Party made to ameliorating women’s traditional subjection consisted of its support for public education and economic development.

American history between 1815 and 1848 certainly had its dark side: poverty, demagogy, disregard for legal restraints, the perpetuation and expansion of slavery, the dispossession of the Native Americans, and the waging of aggressive war against Mexico. But among its hopeful aspects, none was more encouraging than the gathering of the women at the prosperous canal town of Seneca Falls. The women who met there in 1848 set in motion, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “a rebellion such as the world had never before seen.”
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Modern communications helped, and continues to help, this unprecedented revolution spread. “Thanks to steam navigation and electric wires,” observed Fredrick Douglass, “a revolution now cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence, but flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, until it has traversed the globe.”
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The revolution proclaimed in 1848 built upon that of 1776, and would transform the lives of more people more profoundly. Today, its implications continue to spread over all the globe.