Part XXII: Punishing Eve: A Century-long fight for Women with Church and State

This series focuses on the region from where the roots of Western Judaic and Christian civilization of today are traced: the northeastern, eastern, and southeastern region surrounding the Mediterranean  from Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine,  Jordan, Iraq, (western) Iran, and Egypt to Europe and then to the Americas.

PUNISHING EVE

The sphere of women

In reviewing history, it seems inconceivable that women in America had no rights: no rights to own property once married; no right to their own wage from their own labor; no right to child custody; no right to citizenship in the new republic. By law and by custom, they were virtually a house-slave, a reproduction machine, and sex-slave. They were invisible under the law, and by law a dependent appendage of men. It had been this way for centuries, becoming more so as Christian and common law wedded to make church doctrine legal doctrine. So while we marvel that their struggle for suffrage, or political equality, took 133 years—from the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 until the 19^th Amendment in 1920–considering that equal rights for women under the law was totally dependent upon men to grant it to them, it is perhaps surprising that it happened at all. After all, history shows us that those of privilege do not relinquish easily the power that their status of birth bestows—in this case, being born a man.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton submitted a resolution at the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention on “the duty of the women of this country to secure themselves the sacred right to the elective franchise,” others thought it was a mistake and tried to dissuade her from presenting it—it was too radical. And although the convention passed all other motions unanimously that addressed women’s rights to control their own property, their right to retain their own wages, have joint guardianship over children, and improved inheritance rights when widowed, it was deeply divided on women demanding the vote. That resolution barely passed. However, after the Seneca Falls Convention, there is no further evidence of reluctance within the women’s rights movement to demand suffrage. On the contrary, it quickly became the cornerstone of the program: “Resolved, that the main power of the women’s rights movement lies in this: that while always demanding for women better education, better employment, and better laws, it has kept steadily in view the one cardinal demand for the right of suffrage: in a democracy, the symbol and guarantee of all other rights.” That particular demand also generated the most opposition.[1]

State legislatures, it turned out, began to be more receptive to women’s lobbying and petition efforts for reforms in property law. By 1860, fourteen states had passed some form of women’s property rights legislation. Encouraged by these victories, the movement escalated its demands and shifted its emphasis from property rights to suffrage. The New York legislature passed the most comprehensive pieces of women’s rights legislation in the United States, the Married Women’s Property Act. This law granted New York women all the economic rights they demanded, but still refused women the right to vote. As this victory and defeat indicated, the demand for women’s suffrage was significantly more controversial than other demands for equality with men.[2]

Advocates for women’s rights believed that the vote was the repository of social and economic power in a democratic society. They used natural rights arguments and the rhetoric of the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence to make their demand. “In demanding the political rights of woman, we simply assert the fundamental principle of democracy—that taxation without representation should go together, and that, if the principle is denied, all our institutions must fall with it.”[3]

Male domination over women as cultural right

Why men were so resistant to applying principles to women that they had fought a revolutionary war to win for themselves is elusive. The answer seems to lie in the concept of “independence”—the major criterion for enfranchisement in classical democratic political theory, and yet which acted to exclude women from the political community. Women’s traditional relationships to men within families constituted the essence of “dependence.” Law and custom granted the husband ownership of the wife’s wealth, her labor power, wages she earned by it, her physical person as well, in sexual rights of the marriage relationship, and of the children she bore. No people, with the exception of chattel slaves, had less proprietary rights over themselves in early America than married women—and most women were by custom encouraged, forced even, to marry.[4] Of course, the same was true of European culture of the time, from which Americans were descendants.

Until the emergence of feminism, the dependent status that women held was considered natural, and if not right, then inescapable. Thus the demand for franchise challenged the assumption of male authority over women. The suffrage demand challenged that women’s interests were identical and compatible with that of men. As such, it embodied a vision of female self-determination. The feminist suffrage demand sent reverberations through the entire ideology of the sexual sphere of labor, family, and the public sphere. Enfranchisement would give women a public role and relation to the community not mediated by husband; it implied sexual equality in the home. A New York legislator responded to women’s rights petitions: “Are we to put the stamp of truth upon the libel set forth here, that men and women, in the matrimonial relation, are to be equal?” (Yes, really!) Elizabeth Cady Stanton penetrated to the core of this anti-suffrage response: “Political rights, involving in last results equality everywhere, roused all the antagonism of a dominant power, against the self-assertion of a class hitherto subservient.”[5]

At the time of the Seneca Falls convention, the United States was experiencing a tremendous acceleration of growth. The patriarchal war machine had been busy capturing new territory. The outcome of the Mexican War (initiated by the U.S. not by Mexico as our children’s books have taught us) gave us the western half of the continent. Exploration and settlement of “free land” speeded up. Then in January 1848, Marshall found gold in Sutter’s Creek, and the gold rush of ’49 was under way.

Conquest westward

Industrial development kept pace with territorial expansion. Weaving was no longer a home-centered cottage industry; it was all being done in factories. From 1840 to 1860 the textile industry’s consumption of cotton quadrupled, and the number of spindles more than doubled, reaching five million. Two years before the Civil War, industrial output for the first rime reached a total worth of almost $2 billion. And of the growing labor force it required, almost twenty-four percent were women.[6]

Industrial and social change was sharpening the issues before the nation. Chief among these were the extension of slavery into the new western territories and the question of freedom or continuing bondage for nearly four million slaves in the southern states. While slavery made plantation owners very rich, slavery affected the position of the wage-earner, in the North as well as the South, e.g., obviously driving wages for freemen and women down. It also bore heavily on the position of the southern white woman, whether plantation lady or poor farmer’s wife, who was effectively isolated by a slave society from the movement for greater equality and opportunity that began to emerge among northern women. It was a time when “giants walked the earth,” and American literature reached its finest flowering: the era of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, and Poe, as well as Hawthorne, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, and Greeley. In one year—1851—there appeared Moby Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The House of the Seven Gables. Walden was published in 1854, Leaves of Grass one year later. Everywhere (except in the South), horizons were broadening, old ways were being re-tested, new ideas fermenting. Transcendentalism, abolition, Utopianism, and women’s rights were currents in a broad stream of intellectual activity and reform.[7]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglas

As written about in previous chapters, northern women learned how to organize and petition for rights by participating in abolition—their expectation that when the black man and woman were freed and given the franchise, all women would be included in this wide social change. They were doomed to disappointment. For when the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed, the word “male” appeared for the first time. Black men born or naturalized in the United States were citizens, but women—black or white—were not defined as citizens.

The years following 1869 saw a vigorous organizational effort for women’s economic, educational, and professional advancement, and for women’s suffrage. The shifting landscape determining citizenship and rights of citizenship, before, during, and after the Civil War brought about the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. While the Fourteenth gave citizenship rights to black males, it was the Fifteenth amendment that gave them the right to vote. But because the Fourteenth Amendment restricted citizenship to “males”, the Fifteenth Amendment gave enfranchisement only to “males.”

It was the fight over whether or not to support the Fifteenth Amendment that brought about the first split in the women’s suffrage movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had worked vigorously for abolition, assuming it would include rights for women, was deeply angered over that vision being ignored, and the lack of support from free black male abolitionists, including Frederick Douglas, with whom she had been friends for years and an abolitionist collaborator. Cady Stanton formed the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) for women only, splitting with the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) because they did not support the vote for women and largely because the Equal Rights Association leadership was predominantly men.[8] Her friend and colleague since 1850, Susan B. Anthony joined her. Matilda Joslyn Gage had also been a member of AERA. But when it cut off funding for women, she joined Cady Stanton and Anthony in forming the NWSA.[9] Later that same year, a second suffrage organization was set up, calling itself the American Woman Suffrage Association. Anxious to keep out all those it considered “undesirable”, the American (AWSA) was organized on a delegate basis. Only representatives from “recognized” suffrage organizations were seated at the convention, a new development, since up to that time the women’s “conventions” had admitted and given the floor to anyone who walked in and asked to speak.[10] Joslyn Gage had always maintained that rights for working women and poor women were as important, if not more so, than for middle and upper class women. While the women’s rights movement was always a middle class movement in the nineteenth century, with the split of the AWSA from the National NWSA, this split in ideology, of the AWSA desiring to appear “respectable” to the church and to men, with the NWSA more radical, became even more pronounced

Women’s Christian Temperance Union

At first Anthony tried to work with them, but the split in ideology was too wide. The AWSA was led by conservatives Lucy Stone and Harry Blackwell. Though there were many differences, the main clash developed over not on whether women should vote, but on how that goal could be won. The AWSA believed it could be won only by avoiding issues that were irrelevant and calculated to alienate the support of influential sections of the community. Its leaders had no interest in organizing working women, in criticizing churches, or in the divorce question. While giving lip service to the principle of a Federal woman suffrage amendment, they concentrated their practical work for the franchise within the several states. Cady Stanton, Anthony, Joslyn Gage and their followers, on the other hand, continued to regard woman’s rights as a broad cause in which the vote might be of primary importance but other matters were also important. The breach between the two organizations would last for twenty years.[11] The AWSA would grow even more conservative as it joined forces with Frances Willard and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Women going west

It was no accident that the first states to give women the vote were in the West. Women who braved the Oregon and California trails in wagon trains had to be hardy and tough, partnering with their men folk in all aspects of daily life. The Territory of Wyoming granted suffrage to women in 1869. When Wyoming requested statehood, the Federal Government tried to blackmail the Territory with the condition of disenfranchising women voters. Whatever the purpose and condition that had granted women suffrage in Wyoming in 1869, Wyoming said it would not join the Union without its women as full and equal citizens; it became a state in 1890, the first state in the Union granting women the right to vote in all elections, local, state, and federal. Colorado granted women suffrage in 1893, and Utah and Idaho in 1896. But in the states where the AWSA waged suffrage campaigns, their efforts failed. The failure could largely be laid at the feet of their alliance with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Again, the granting of suffrage for women was entirely up to a male vote; and the WCTU was not popular with males in general—whether they were religious themselves, or not.

Women reformers had been concerned with the temperance question since the 1840’s, not merely out of sympathy with an abstract ideal, but because the law placed so many women at the mercy (or brutality) of their husbands. What might be a moral injustice if the latter was a sober citizen became a sheer tragedy if he were a heavy drinker who consumed not only his earnings but his wife’s, and reduced her and her children to destitution. Alcoholism was wide-spread in a society lacking in social hygiene, medical therapy, and any kind of welfare intervention, and whose recreational facilities were non-existent except for the well-to-do. A combination of idleness, boredom, and misfortune could make a man the bane instead of the mainstay of his family, while his wife would have no legal redress. Later suffragists, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone and others were temperance crusaders before they were abolitionists before they were suffragists. But since women had no “purse” it was impossible to form a crusade, particularly on a single issue—especially one that roused as much male opposition as did temperance. It was the particular gift of Frances Willard that she saw the possibility of harnessing women’s newly released energies in a multi-purpose organization which could not only work for temperance, but for a broader welfare program appealing to women, including woman suffrage as a means to an end.[12]

In 1874 a temperance movement with strong evangelical overtones originated in the Middle West, and spread throughout the country. Bands of singing, praying women held meetings, not only in churches but on street corners, penetrating into saloons themselves and closing them down by the thousands. Of course this result was short-lived and the saloons soon reopened. Willard’s long-range strategy was to preach that society would be more ‘moral’—her slogan, “For God, for home, and native land”—if Christian woman had the vote.[13] As an indication of the damaging influence or ineffectiveness of the AWSA in gaining suffrage in the individual states, no states adopted suffrage for women again until 1910. This would coincide with the death of the old guard, whether they were conservative Christians or radical feminists, and a wave of new, younger leadership would reinvigorate the drive for suffrage.

Matilda Joslyn Gage

But backing up to the late 1870’s, although the vote was still a primary concern, Joslyn Gage started to turn her attention to the roots of women’s oppression. Cady Stanton wrote that she, Joslyn Gage, and Edward M. Davis worked to inform women of the oppression of the church and presented resolutions against the church at every convention after 1878. Even though conservative Christian women, including Frances Willard, were in the crowd, Joslyn Gage opened one session at the International Council of Women (1888) with a prayer to a female deity. Indeed, she saw Frances Willard as the “most dangerous person upon the American continent today,” and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union as a serious threat to liberty.[14] Certainly, as an advocate of natural rights (as was Cady-Stanton) she saw the temperance movement as hindering and working at cross-purposes with the advancement of suffrage and rights for women in general. But as Cady Stanton and Joslyn Gage turned more of their attention to the oppression of the church, Anthony was growing more conservative and in alliance with Willard. What this move to conservatism represented was suffragist women maintaining their “churchly respectability” while the movement was co-opted by the patriarchal church and community (male) leaders.

Joslyn Gage had been a leader, holding prominent positions of the National Women’s Suffrage Association throughout its history. She was on the executive committee in 1888 when a merger with the American Women’s Suffrage Association was first proposed; she did not take it seriously. She was visiting her children and unable to attend the 1889 convention in which Anthony pushed the merger through in a midnight meeting. Many, including Joslyn Gage and Cady Stanton were upset by the event. Cady Stanton wrote, somewhat in resignation, to Olympia Brown: “The National Association has been growing politic and conservative for some time. Lucy (Stone) and Susan (Anthony) alike see suffrage only. They do not see woman’s religious and social bondage. Neither do the young women in either association, hence they may as well combine for they have one mind and one purpose.” Brown wrote back, “It will be a major setback for woman suffrage. I used to say that Susan B. Anthony was my pole star until I learned to make no one my guide but to follow truth at whatever cost.”[15]

Her words would prove to be prophetic, as the more Christian conservative the merged National American Women’s Suffrage Association became, the more it faded into oblivion and effectiveness on the national stage, as well as in the states. Joslyn Gage died in 1898, but not before publishing her landmark, “Woman, Church, and State.”  She also collaborated heavily on the first three volumes of “History of Women’s Suffrage” but for which she would get no publishing credits. Cady Stanton had published her own “Woman’s Bible.” But seemingly seeing how her anti-church ideas were unpopular, she began in the last years of her life to try to revise and repair her own history and ideology. Cady Stanton joined with Anthony in depriving Joslyn Gage any credits for “History” to thus distance themselves from her ideology, even though Cady Stanton’s had been the same for most of her life. Anthony’s and Cady Stanton’s historic betrayal of Joslyn Gage and her ideas was directly responsible for the loss of Joslyn Gage’s thought and analysis in the patriarchal reshaping of the movement’s history[16]—because that is exactly what happened. The church and conservative men reshaped it to their liking and almost killed it outright.

Cady Stanton died in 1902. And although she was credited for “History,” it would be Anthony, who wrote none of it (Anthony did not write by her own admission) who garnered most of the publishing credits. Anthony and her biographer Ida Husted Harper rewrote Anthony’s involvement in the history of the movement in Anthony’s biography; in doing so, they completely wrote Joslyn Gage out of its history and minimized the leadership of Cady Stanton. And then Anthony had Husted Harper burn all of her correspondence so that no later versions were to be told.  As a result of the manipulation of “History” and revisionism in Susan B. Anthony’s biography, she would (in 1922) be canonized as the suffrage leader who made it all possible.

As for the other suffragists at the turn of the twentieth century, they feared that Cady Stanton’s radical feminism and religious heresy would damn their chances for success. The concerns of the NAWSA’s leadership were not unfounded. Antisuffrage forces were recalling Cady Stanton’s allegedly anti-church, antifamily, pro-labor stance. To avoid the Cady Stanton stigma, the younger women intentionally isolated and ignored her. In an effort to appear respectable and politically acceptable, they censured Cady Stanton (eliminated Joslyn Gage from the record entirely) and canonized Susan B. Anthony. They provided “Aunt Susan” with a permanent seat on the executive committee, a secretary, and an annuity. After her death in 1906 they turned her home into a shrine and ultimately named the Nineteenth Amendment after her, despite the fact that Cady Stanton had proposed woman suffrage three years before she had met Anthony, and before Anthony would become involved in the movement. Later generations, not knowing any better, put Anthony on a postage stamp and on a coin. As a result, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, both notable and notorious in her own life, is better known as Susan B. Anthony’s side-kick than as an instigator and ideologue of the first woman’s movement.[17] Matilda Joslyn Gage is barely known and recognized at all.

While Anthony was an energetic organizer—e.g., forming, for the first time, captains to canvas districts within a state for petition drives—she was not the theoretician, the brains driving and defining the movement and its objectives. Those brains belonged to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony’s life-long friend, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. Anthony never wrote her own speeches—Cady Stanton wrote them while Anthony helped mind Cady Stanton’s seven children. Indeed, Anthony ultimately became the linchpin that became the cog that resulted in the movement stuttering to a stop. Had it not been for young women who took up the cause after her death in 1906 with an entirely new vision and tactics, suffrage for women in the United States would never have been realized. There was, after all, a very staunchly conservative male-dominated faction within both parties of government and who ran the institutions in society, who were adamantly opposed to giving women a political voice. For as John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail, in 1776, “Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems.”

One of the young women who would emerge to revitalize the suffrage movement was Cady Stanton’s daughter, Harriot. After graduating from Vassar, Harriot Cady Stanton went to Europe to join her brother Theodore and to basically decide what she wanted to do with her education—there weren’t many professional roles for women as yet. She met and married an Englishman, Harry Blatch. It would be one of the first genuine discriminations she would experience for the “sin” of being woman. For while her brother Theodore married a French woman, he maintained and retained his American citizenship. Harriot Stanton Blatch, in marrying an Englishman, lost her American citizenship—she was now merged with husband, and not a person in her own right under both English and American law.

Being the daughter of Cady Stanton, she became involved in the suffrage movement in England and learned from their methods. Though Harriot had traveled back and forth between the two continents during the eight years prior, when she returned to the U.S. for the final time in 1902, the America to which she returned was vastly different from the one she had left in the early 1880s. Politically, economically, culturally, technologically, her motherland was undergoing fundamental change at a rapid rate. As her daughter Nora, now a teenager, put it, moving from London to New York made her feel “as though a dynamo was driving me.” By 1900, the science and technology, aided by the massive expansion of the wage-labor force that was revolutionizing labor (especially that of women), had made the United States the most productive nation in the world.[18]

Yet these tremendous accelerations in productivity and wealth were running headlong into venerable political beliefs and social practices that could not accommodate such changes. Most notably, deep-seated convictions about the necessary compatibility of free-market capitalism and a national identity built around democracy were challenged by a great and growing gulf between rich and poor. The Great Depression of 1893, with its shocking masses of desperate unemployed people, constituted almost as profound a challenge to the American sense of historical mission as slavery had a generation before. It was no longer possible to take for granted the fundamental classlessness of American society which once had distinguished the new world from the old.[19]

Indeed a crystallization of class identity was taking place at every level. And at every level of society—bottom, middle, and top—the question of who and what constituted the “American nation” was particularly disrupted by the most spectacular social change of the era, the massive acceleration of immigration. As the United States became more and more multi-European in character, inclusiveness and exclusiveness were both in evidence. Yet, in spite of the intensity of this economic and social crisis, the nation’s mood inclined more to hopefulness and optimism than to dread and fear. It was, after all, the beginning of a new century, and everywhere there was widespread hope for the coming of a truly modern age.[20] (Keep that thought, and contrast it with the mood ushering in the twenty-first century which was overshadowed with a burgeoning Christian fundamentalist “End of Times”superstition and paranoia—and still is!)

At the turn of the twentieth century, dramatic changes had been happening in the lives of women. College education for women, which Harriot herself had helped to pioneer, now involved many thousand women, more than one-third of the baccalaureate population. The sense of fundamental division between masculine and feminine, the so-called system of separate spheres, had by no means vanished, but its peak had passed. Public life was opening up for women, powered by five million women wage-laborers and made visible by tens of thousands of club women, settlement workers, and civic reformers.[21]

Women take to the streets for suffrage

Given these epochal transformations in the lives of women of all classes, it was astounding how backward and oblivious to change the New York suffrage movement had languished and remained. The heavy hand of the nineteenth century pioneers of the movement was everywhere. The movement was now centered in the western part of the state in cities like Geneva and Rochester, the new leaders stubbornly unwilling to respond to the new class dynamics. On the contrary, established suffrage leaders charged that enfranchising women would favor the “unfit” at the expense of the “fit.”[22] Thus their capitulation to church and snobbery of middle-class male-dominated establishment was complete.

It would take women like Harriot Stanton Blatch and Carrie Chapman Catt to provide new vision and vigor. They, along with others, tapped into the vast pool of women wage-laborers, as well as forged links with the wealthy women who would provide funds—it was no longer a middle-class movement. They developed new tactics. No longer only conducting petition drives to present annually to a State or the Federal Congress, which never resulted in a bill, let alone progressing to the floor for debate or a vote, they penetrated the male political system, forcing Congress to bring bills to the floor. And though they suffered defeat many times before victory, they did not go away, but watched the vote, and began influencing the re-election efforts of those in Congress who opposed them. They took to the streets in marches, and they took their speeches to street corners. At first, those who were aghast at the “unladylike” methods shunned this new methodology. But they would soon be forced to join or face oblivion.

Again, it would be the western states where suffrage adoption would see the light of day. Washington State granted suffrage in 1910, California in 1911, and Oregon in 1912, with several other western states to follow. And though the resistance of male voters was high, the women became more organized in meeting the challenge. In California, the vote was very close, and had women not stayed until the late hours witnessing and monitoring the count in order to keep it honest, suffrage would have lost.

Winning the vote in any of the populace eastern states was much more rigorous, politically complex, and took Herculean effort, political savvy, and imagination. (And forget totally about  the South–they were never even part of the movement.) Not only were the cultural and class-based, male-dominated institutions more entrenched, and thus more opposed to granting suffrage, there was the influx of new European immigrant population with old world cultural conditioning of inferiority of women, plus the growing influence of the Catholic Church (ministering to many in this new immigrant population) which was opposed to suffrage for women (no surprise here!) The 1915 New York referendum was a hotly contested campaign, but suffrage lost. But then, in 1917, it was tried again and finally passed.

With all the western states as far inland as Oklahoma, Kansas, and South Dakota granting full suffrage to women, and now the populace state of New York, along with Michigan, joining them, politicians finally had to acknowledge the voting power of women. Attention shifted once again to a Federal Amendment granting suffrage in all states (always the original NWSA’s strategy, but gone dormant since the 1889 merger with the old, conservative AWSA).

Suffragists

There was considerable anxiety among politicians of both parties to have the amendment passed and made effective before the general elections of 1920, so President Wilson (originally opposed to suffrage, but who could not now ignore the inevitable power the women vote held) called a special session of Congress, and a bill, introducing the amendment, was brought before the House again. On May 21, 1919, it was passed, 304 to 89, (Republicans 200-19 for, Democrats 102-69 for, Union Labor 1-0 for, Prohibitionist 1-0 for), 42 votes more than necessary being obtained. On June 4, 1919, it was brought to the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays (Republicans 36-8 for, Democrats 20-17 for). Within a few days, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan ratified the amendment, their legislatures being then in session. Other states followed suit at a regular pace, until the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures.[23] The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution, ratified on August 18, 1920, prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex.

Amazingly, it took 133 years for the world’s modern “republic” to recognize women as enfranchised citizens under the law. P.S.: Mississippi did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1984, sixty four years after the law was enacted nationally.

Thus was the history of the first wave of feminism in the United States. It accomplished property, economic, education, professional, and suffrage rights for women—an impressive accomplishment and progression from their former status of being property and house/sex slave. The next wave of feminism would be fought in the twentieth century: that being to grant women legal jurisdiction over their bodily reproductive systems. For without that right to plan their reproduction, women cannot enter the educational and public sphere, and experience full rights to the pursuit of happiness. It would be another long and hotly contested fight.