WARS SOMETIMES OPEN SOCIAL SPACE FOR women. When men go off to fight and die, women take their places, running households and family businesses. Lucy Knox, wife of George Washington’s commander of artillery, wrote her husband, Henry, in 1777, hoping that “you will not consider yourself as commander in chief of your own house” after the war, “but be convinced… that there is such a thing as equal command.”1
In New Jersey some Revolutionary War–era women enjoyed equal rights to vote, thanks to the state’s first postcolonial constitution, ratified on July 2, 1776, which spoke of voters as “inhabitants,” not “freemen,” the word often used in other states. The phraseology may have been inadvertent—the constitution was rushed together in the face of an impending British invasion—but New Jersey’s women took note. A property qualification limited the number who might vote, since in marriage all property belonged to the husband. But single women and widows worth more than fifty pounds ($2,500 today) were eligible, and there were enough of these to constitute a voting bloc, which acquired a nickname—the “petticoat vote.”
Soon the space for women shrank again. Besides tradition and traditional interpretations of the Bible, the weight of Anglo-American law impinged on them. William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a transatlantic legal digest that had served as a textbook since its publication in the 1760s, explained the doctrine of coverture. “The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert.” Blackstone added, gallantly, “that even the disabilities, which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England”—and of America.2
New Jersey’s women eventually lost their vote—not by law but by ordinary political skullduggery. In 1807 the state suffered an election that was corrupt even by New Jersey standards (the issue was, should the capital be in Newark or Elizabeth: real property values were at stake). In the enthusiasm of the contest, some towns reported more votes cast than they had residents. Ashamed of what its political culture had produced, the state reformed itself by purging its voting rolls of women and free blacks.3
If change were to come, it would very likely begin in western New York, which by the 1820s had become a proving ground for reforms, religions, and enthusiasms.
The American Revolution had destroyed the region’s former occupants, the Iroquois Confederacy, too many of whom had sided with the British. The land opened for settlement; the Erie Canal (finished in 1825) brought commerce, canal towns, and factories. New York, which had been the fifth largest state in 1790, had become the largest by 1810.
The rolling countryside was also a “psychic highway,” a transmission belt for visionaries, moralists, and organizers.4 America’s first homemade religion (Mormonism), its first political third party (the Antimasons), and its longest lasting utopia (the Oneida Community, whose members shared property and spouses) flourished there. Innovators and improvers of all sorts arose, argued, and as often as not vanished—so many that the region was called, at first derisively, then simply descriptively, the burned-over district.
Elizabeth Cady was born in 1815 near this hotbed, in Johnstown, a colonial-era village north of the Mohawk River. She was well-off and well educated. Her father was a judge who had served a term in Congress; her mother was an offshoot of the Livingston clan. At age sixteen Elizabeth was given a piano; she attended a top-notch academy for young women in Troy, New York; she acted as her father’s de facto law clerk.
But all her young life she balked at the limitations placed on her sex. Her parents lost five of their ten children, including all their sons. Her grieving father often told her how sad it was that she had not been born a boy. Elizabeth vowed to do as well as any boy and resented that she would not be recognized for it.
When she was twenty-four, she married Henry Stanton, an abolitionist orator immersed in the whirl of New York and national politics. Slavery had been extinguished in the state in 1827, but the Missouri Compromise seven years earlier had given it new life beyond the Mississippi River, admitting Missouri as a slave state and allowing slavery in any territory below its southern border. Slave owners and their representatives began speaking of bondage not as an embarrassing necessity but as a positive good. John Calhoun told John Quincy Adams, in one of their conversations as cabinet secretaries, that slavery had “many excellent consequences.… It was the best guarantee to equality among the whites.”5 Slavery, it became clear, would not wither away. Its critics resolved to fight it by propaganda and by massive petitions to Congress, asking that it be outlawed in the District of Columbia (where Congress had the authority to act).
Henry Stanton, born in 1805, served the antislavery cause as a paid speechmaker, what one clergyman called a “he-goat” man, “butting everything in the line of… march,” made of “vinegar, aqua fortis and oil of vitriol, with brimstone, saltpeter and charcoal, to explode and scatter the corrosive matter.”6 Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave-turned-journalist who probably deserved the distinction himself, called Stanton “unquestionably the best orator” of the movement.7 Elizabeth embraced the cause as her own.
A month after their marriage, in June 1840, the Stantons attended a World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Elizabeth made as much of an impression as her husband, one British abolitionist praising her “eloquence… naivete… clearsightedness, candor, openness” and “such love for all that is great and good.”8
But there arose a difficulty, for her and for every other woman in attendance. Women had been active in the American abolition movement for years, organizing and signing petitions and forming women’s antislavery societies. They were becoming more active in mainstream American politics too. In the presidential campaign of 1840, women supporters of Whig candidate William Henry Harrison wore sashes bearing his nickname—TIPPECANOE—and the name of his running mate—TYLER—across their chests. Prudish supporters of Democrat Martin Van Buren chided them for flaunting their bosoms; they replied that Harrison, the old Indian fighter, had protected their homes and families; they were supporting him in return, as was their right and obligation.
American women were not welcome at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, however. The reasons were complex. British abolitionists were more staid than their American cousins. Many abolitionists, both in America and Britain, were Quakers, but there was a sectarian split in Quakerism (broadly speaking, between those who looked more to the Bible or more to the Inner Light for guidance), which made American women, who tended to follow the unfiltered Inner Light, doubly unwelcome.
There was a growing divide within American abolitionism itself, between purists and politicals. The purists, whose most prominent figure was the crusading journalist William Lloyd Garrison, viewed any institution tainted by slavery, including most churches and the entire American government, as hopelessly corrupt. Change could only come through exhortation and moral reform. The purists welcomed (moral) women as equal allies in the struggle. The politicals thought change could also come by campaigning and (with luck) officeholding and lawmaking. But this strategic choice made them reluctant to dilute the antislavery message with other causes, however worthy.
The first session of the London convention was consumed by debate on the status of the American women, with “cries of ‘order, order,’ ‘divide, divide,’ ‘No, no, no, no, no’… just like a House of Commons uproar,” one observer wrote.9 At the end of the day, a motion to seat them as delegates was beaten by a large margin.
The fight radicalized the young American woman who witnessed it. There in London, or perhaps a year later back home, Elizabeth asked another female American abolitionist “if we could not have a convention for Women’s Rights.”10
The Stantons moved to Boston, then to Johnstown (Judge Cady, for all he wished his daughter had been a son, was always willing to support her), then finally to Seneca Falls, a factory town in the Finger Lakes region of central New York, whose long narrow lakes stretch out like a spectral hand.
The mid-1840s saw two turbulences at opposite poles of western New York’s energy field. The politically minded founded an abolitionist third party, the Liberty Party (its main funder, Gerrit Smith, was a cousin of Elizabeth’s). Its showing in the 1844 election, though tiny—sixty-two thousand votes nationwide for Smith, versus over a million each for the major party candidates—was catastrophic for abolitionists. The issue of that campaign was whether or not the United States should annex Texas, then an independent slaveholding republic. Henry Clay, the Whig candidate, was moderately opposed, abolitionists ardently so; Democrat James Polk was as ardently in favor. The Liberty Party candidate took enough votes in New York, which would otherwise have gone to Clay, to tip the state, and the Electoral College, to Polk. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig politician in Illinois, wrote a chagrined letter to a local Liberty Party man about the debacle. “As I always understood, the Liberty-men deprecated the annexation of Texas extremely; and this being so, why they should refuse to so cast their votes as to prevent it… seemed wonderful.”11 The Liberty Party determined to keep trying; Henry Stanton threw himself into its efforts.
The purists experienced a debacle of their own when William Miller, a Baptist minister and a close reader of the Bible, concluded that the second coming of Christ would occur in 1843 or 1844. So worldly a man as John Quincy Adams gave Miller’s prediction serious consideration.12 The Great Comet of 1843, visible at peak brightness in broad daylight, seemed to highlight the prophecy. Here was the ultimate reason to eschew sinful half measures: the unregenerate world would end soon anyway. Its continuance as normal became known as the Great Disappointment.
But toward the decade’s end, thanks to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, purism and politics would experience a novel, and momentous, fusion.
By the summer of 1848, Stanton had been living in Seneca Falls for a year. Life had not been easy. While her husband was busy politicking, she had charge of their three children, boys ages six, four, and three. She may have miscarried shortly after moving into her new home; in June 1848, her sister-in-law lost two children fifteen days apart, the second to whooping cough while visiting the Stanton household. A picture of Stanton taken at this time—a daguerreotype, not a painting—shows her with two of her sons; she seems attractive, determined, and harassed.
On July 9, a Sunday, Stanton attended a tea party in nearby Waterloo at the home of Richard Hunt, a factory owner, and his wife, Jane. Also present were Lucretia Mott, whom Stanton had met at the London convention, Mott’s sister Martha Wright, and Mary Ann M’Clintock, wife of a Seneca Falls stationer. All these women, except Stanton, were Inner Light Quakers and relatives by blood or marriage. Like her, they were all abolitionists and supporters of women’s rights.
Years later Stanton recalled that on that afternoon “the general discontent I felt with woman’s position… the chaotic conditions into which everything fell without her constant supervision… my experience at the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention… and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul.” The assembled women shared her distress. According to Hart family tradition, Richard, who took tea with them, asked, “Why don’t you do something about it?” The women decided to hold a convention “to discuss the social, civil and religious conditions and rights of women” ten days later in Seneca Falls.13 The venue would be the Wesleyan Chapel, the newest and largest church in town, built by antislavery Methodists. Local papers, including Frederick Douglass’s North Star in Rochester, an hour away to the northwest, ran the notice.
Conventions were expected to provide stimulation in the form of oratory. That would come from Lucretia Mott, already well known as a speaker (one newspaper called her “a regular ultra Barn-Burning kind of woman”14). Mott, who lived in Philadelphia, was in New York only briefly to visit relatives, hence the haste of Stanton and her friends in calling their meeting. More important, conventions made motions and passed resolutions. They sought to leave some mark on the world.
On July 16 Stanton went to Waterloo again, to the M’Clintock house. Sitting around the parlor tea table, she, Mary M’Clintock, and her two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary Ann, drafted a set of resolutions and a Declaration of Sentiments. (The tea table is now in the Smithsonian Institution.) The resolutions began by quoting Blackstone, who, before he examined the details of marriage law, declared that the fundamental precept of natural law was that “man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness.” Therefore, wrote Stanton and her colleagues, any laws “that conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman” were invalid.15
This was a bold and clever gambit, citing the exponent of the doctrine of coverture to justify women’s rights. The Declaration of Sentiments began with a bolder one. As Stanton later wrote, the authors spent a long time casting about for the right rhetorical tone. Then, “one of the circle took up the Declaration of 1776 and read it aloud with much spirit and emphasis, and it was at once decided to adopt the historic document, with some slight changes.”16 This was brilliant. Blackstone was English; the Declaration of Independence was as American as it was possible to be. Quoting Blackstone against himself was combative—polemical judo. Adopting the Declaration of Independence was embracing: we all believe this; here is what it also means.
Such an embrace was necessary, given the incendiary implications of the women’s critique. If they were comprehensively oppressed, then men were their oppressors. King and Parliament had been an ocean away; once America was free of them, they would trouble it no more. Men, however, were here to stay. Calling on them as fellow Americans took the sting out of the critique.
The preamble of the Declaration of Sentiments tracked that of the Declaration of Independence almost word for word—“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal”—“Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.”
The bill of indictment against George III, however, had to be scrapped and replaced. The “injuries and usurpations” suffered by women fell into several clusters. One concerned property rights. A crack in the doctrine of coverture had opened in the New York legislature, which had been debating the property rights of married women since the 1830s. In April 1848 the (male) lawmakers passed a Married Women’s Property Act, guaranteeing to wives the property they owned at the time of marriage and any profits it might later throw off. Judge Cady, for all his conservatism, supported it: he wanted his daughter to be secure against the possible impecuniousness of her politico/orator husband.17
But more needed to be done. The Declaration of Sentiments surveyed society as a whole.
Man “has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those [that woman] is permitted to follow”—governess, schoolteacher—“she receives but a scanty remuneration.”
“He closes against her all the avenues to 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.” (The single exception as of 1848, Oberlin, proved the rule.)
“He allows her in Church [only] a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry.” The call for women to be ministers, and teachers of ministers, reflects the importance of religion in the burned-over district and in America. People seldom demand the right to do trivial things. It also reflects the Quakerism of Stanton’s coauthors: that sect had had women preachers since the seventeenth century, when Peter Stuyvesant expelled Dorothy Waugh and Mary Wetherhead from New Amsterdam.
“He has [given] 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.” Alexander Hamilton was a founding adulterer caught in a notorious sex scandal, but, as one contemporary of his observed, “if he fornicates with every female in New York and Philadelphia, he will rise again, for purity of character… is not necessary for public patronage.”18 Women who behaved so, however, were branded adventuresses or criminals.
Stanton’s contribution to the Declaration of Sentiments’ bill of indictment was to call for the right to vote.
He [man] has never permitted her [woman] 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.
Stanton’s life to this moment—daughter of a former congressman, cousin and wife of Liberty Party stalwarts—prepared her to insist on this point. Many of her allies, men and women, balked at her boldness. Her husband told her that the demand would turn the convention “into a farce.”19 “Lizzie,” said Lucretia Mott, raised among Quakers who seldom voted, “thou wilt make the convention ridiculous.”20 Stanton’s answer was contained in the points she made in the Declaration of Sentiments: deprived of a role in making decisions, women were left at the mercy of the decisions of others.
Politicals like Henry Stanton feared that the call for women’s suffrage would bring derision on causes like abolition, which were already hated enough. Purists like Mott disdained the act of voting itself as at best a distraction, at worst collusion in sin.
Defenders of the status quo had a traditional counterargument to any call for expanding the franchise. This was the concept of virtual representation. You may not be able to vote, but never mind; someone who has your interests, as well as his own, at heart can, and therefore virtually represents you. In nineteenth-century America, husbands and fathers virtually represented their wives and daughters. In 1776, Parliament in London virtually represented the empire as a whole.
Stanton fused the purity of principle with the grit of politics. And she rejected the notion of virtual representation, just as the Continental Congress, and the Jamestown General Assembly before it, had.
Her mention of male “foreigners,” in the third article relating to the franchise, was a slap at immigrants—a burst of old-stock resentment directed chiefly at the Irish, who had been coming to America, and voting, in increasingly large numbers. It would reappear to taint her rhetoric in later years.
The convention began on the morning of July 19, 1848, a Wednesday. No one had thought to bring a key to the Wesleyan Chapel, so one of Stanton’s nephews climbed through a window and opened the door from inside. The convention lasted two days. Women only were allowed on the first day, to hear and debate the resolves and the Declaration of Sentiments; men were invited on the second day and encouraged to sign the documents adopted in their final form. The temperature outside rose to the nineties; one woman years later recalled the chapel’s “dusty windows.”21 Three hundred people packed into the building, filling the ground floor pews and the galleries along the sides and at the back.
The only item that provoked debate was Stanton’s call for women to have the vote. On the second day, she spoke in favor. So did Frederick Douglass, the only black person who attended the meeting. His remarks no doubt anticipated the editorial he wrote in the North Star after the convention. He was not above teasing some of his fellow abolitionists. “Many who have at last made the discovery that negroes have some rights as well as other members of the human family, have yet to be convinced that woman is entitled to any.” His conclusion was dignified: “if that government is only just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to women the exercise of the elective franchise.”22 The call to allow women to vote was submitted to a vote and passed.
One hundred persons signed the Declaration of Sentiments—sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. One quarter of them were Quakers; ten were members, or related to members, of the Wesleyan Chapel. More than two-thirds of the signers came to Seneca Falls with family members: parents, children, spouses, siblings (not all of them signed, though they were obviously all supportive).23 Virtually all of the attendees, signers and non, were local and otherwise obscure (of twelve, all women, we know nothing). Listing so many names makes for an ungainly layout. Read them all anyway; on this day, they did something important.
Listed first are the women signers:
Lucretia Mott
Harriet Cady Eaton (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s older sister)
Margaret Pryor (mother of George W. Pryor)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Eunice Newton Foote (wife of Elisha Foote)
Mary Ann M’Clintock (mother of Elizabeth W. and Mary M’Clintock, wife of Thomas)
Margaret Schooley (wife of Azaliah Schooley)
Martha C. Wright (sister of Lucretia Mott)
Jane C. Hunt (wife of Richard Hunt)
Amy Post
Catherine F. Stebbins
Mary Ann Frink
Lydia Mount (mother of Mary E. Vail, sister of Richard Hunt)
Delia Matthews
Catharine C. Paine
Elizabeth W. M’Clintock
Malvina Seymour (wife of Henry W. Seymour)
Phebe Mosher
Catherine Shaw (age eighty-one, probably the oldest signer)
Deborah Scott
Sarah Hallowell
Mary M’Clintock
Mary Gilbert
Sophrone Taylor
Cynthia Davis
Hannah Plant (sister of Richard Hunt)
Lucy Jones
Sarah Whitney
Mary H. Hallowell
Elizabeth Conklin
Sally Pitcher
Mary Conklin
Susan Quinn (age fourteen, the youngest signer—and the only woman of Irish descent)
Mary S. Mirror
Julia Ann Drake
Charlotte Woodward
Martha Underhill (aunt of Edward Underhill)
Dorothy Matthews
Eunice Barker
Sarah R. Woods
Lydia Gild
Sarah Hoffman
Elizabeth Leslie
Martha Ridley
Rachel D. Bonnel (niece of William S. Dell, cousin of Thomas Dell)
Betsey Tewksbury
Rhoda Palmer
Margaret Jenkins
Cynthia Fuller
Mary Martin
P. A. Culvert
Susan R. Doty
Rebecca Race
Sarah A. Mosher
Mary E. Vail
Lucy Spalding (wife of David Spalding)
Lavinia Latham (mother of Hannah J. Latham)
Sarah Smith
Eliza Martin
Maria E. Wilbur
Elizabeth D. Smith
Caroline Barker
Ann Porter
Experience Gibbs
Antoinette E. Segur
Hannah J. Latham
Sarah Sisson
These are the men signers:
Richard P. Hunt (husband of Jane C. Hunt, brother of Lydia Mount and Hannah Plant, and the man who asked, “Why don’t you do something about it?”)
Samuel D. Tillman
Justin Williams
Elisha Foote (husband of Eunice Newton Foote)
Frederick Douglass
Henry W. Seymour (husband of Malvina Seymour)
Henry Seymour
David Spalding (husband of Lucy Spalding)
William G. Barker
Elias J. Doty
John Jones
William S. Dell (uncle of Rachel D. Bonel)
James Mott
William Burroughs
Robert Smalldridge
Jacob Matthews
Charles L. Hoskins
Thomas M’Clintock (husband of Mary Ann M’Clintock, father of Elizabeth W. and Mary M’Clintock)
Saron Phillips
Jacob Chamberlain
Jonathan Metcalf
Nathan J. Milliken
S. E. Woodworth
Edward F. Underhill (nephew of Martha Underhill)
George W. Pryor (son of Margaret Pryor)
Isaac Van Tassel
Thomas Dell (cousin of Rachel D. Bonel)
E. W. Capron
Stephen Shear
Henry Hatley
Azaliah Schooley (husband of Margaret Schooley)
At the end of the convention’s second session, a committee of five—consisting of Stanton, two of the M’Clintocks, and two other women—was appointed to publish the proceedings.
Fifty-eight newspapers, from Massachusetts to Missouri, reported on the convention, including the New-York Tribune, then one of the largest dailies in the country. Twenty-four were hostile (the Philadelphia Public Ledger and Daily Telegraph wrote that “the ladies of Philadelphia… are resolved to maintain their rights as Wives, Belles, Virgins, and Mothers, and not as Women”), sixteen were neutral, seventeen were positive (“Success to the cause in which they have enlisted!” wrote the Herkimer Freeman, adding a modernist touch: “A railroad speed to the end they would accomplish!”).24
The speed with which their end was accomplished was much slower than that. The issue of slavery monopolized the nation’s attention. The vote totals of antislavery political parties tell the story. In the 1848 election, most of the Liberty Party merged with antislavery Democrats and Whigs to form a new third party (zealously championed by Henry Stanton), the Free-Soil Party, which chose as its presidential candidate no abolitionist but former president Martin Van Buren, a wily opportunist who, after years of serving the interest of slave states, performed an about-face in order to get back in the game. This party won no electoral votes but took 10 percent of the popular vote (a quarter of the vote in New York State). Eight years later yet another new antislavery party, the Republicans, won almost 40 percent of the popular vote and carried eleven of thirty-one states. Four years after that, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the White House, and the country fell apart.
After the Civil War, Stanton and some of her women allies were impatient with the national focus on blacks at the expense of women. Imagine, she wrote bitterly, “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung… who never read the Declaration of Independence” making laws for women like herself. This prompted her old ally Frederick Douglass to explain the parlous condition of black freedmen: “When women, because they are women… are dragged from their houses and are hung from lamp-posts… then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”25
In 1867 a referendum in Kansas to give the vote to women failed. But the west was poised to go the other way. Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870), and Washington (1883) approved women’s suffrage as territories, followed by Colorado (1893) and Idaho (1896) as states. In the new century, more states joined in, including New York in 1917.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton had died in 1902. But a signer of the Declaration of Sentiments still lived in Geneva, New York, ten miles west of Seneca Falls. Rhoda Palmer had attended the convention with her father, Asa. Years later she remembered that they had had “an enjoyable time, excepting one little incident. Our carriage broke down on the way home, and we were obliged to stay overnight on the road.”26 In 1918, age 102, she was driven to the polls, without mishap, to cast her first ballot.
The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution—“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”—was ratified in August 1920. A number of countries, from the United Kingdom to Latvia, had granted the right earlier nationwide, but Utah, Wyoming, and the Seneca Falls Convention led the way.