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SLOWING THE MOMENTUM FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS

IN JULY 1848, A GROUP OF PROGRESSIVE-MINDED AMERICANS announced a concept that some people considered every bit as revolutionary as colonists demanding their independence or slaves seeking their freedom. The women and men who gathered in upper New York state said, simply and forthrightly, that liberty wasn’t the province of men alone but was—or should be—the birthright of women as well. The tangible product of their first historic meeting in Seneca Falls was a paraphrase of the Declaration of Independence, reading, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” Despite the impressive commitment, sound logic, and noble purpose of this stalwart band of activists, more than seven decades would pass before the crusaders were finally able to secure the right of American women to vote.¹

One of the most serious impediments to the march toward gender equality was the same force that already had built a record as a highly influential institution in American history: the news media. For by the mid-nineteenth century, it had been firmly established that the Fourth Estate was a body overwhelmingly peopled by—and largely committed to serving—men. Threatened by the possibility that women might be rising from their second-class citizenship to command a share of the male power base, the men who dominated the institution of journalism either ignored the Women’s Rights Movement or wrote about it in a tone of mockery and disdain.

American journalism’s oppressive treatment of women didn’t begin in Seneca Falls. From the beginning of the republic, the media had worked to limit women’s role in society, with publications of the late eighteenth century systematically restricting half the population to a narrow existence that had become known as the women’s sphere—essentially, the home. That strategy intensified with coverage of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 and remained firmly in place throughout the nineteenth century. Eventually, women’s rights leaders decided they’d need to follow the example of the abolitionists and create an entirely alternative publishing network—the suffrage press—in hopes of counteracting the male journalistic opposition that blocked their progress. But the feminists found that the male dictatorship was so pervasive that even this separate communication system did little to weaken it.

Confining the American Woman to Her Place

American women had begun making major contributions to society by colonial times, succeeding in such diverse fields as education, medicine, literature, law, and printing. Indeed, in 1777, Mary Katherine Goddard was such a respected printer that the founders of the country sought her out to print the first official copy of the Declaration of Independence. Despite the many accomplishments of colonial women, however, it became apparent after the American Revolution that women wouldn’t have the rights promised in the Constitution.

The Founding Fathers didn’t specifically state that women would be denied rights. Instead, those men simply ignored female citizens, failing to explore the possibility of defining women as part of “the people.” Western political thought provided no context for women being included as part of the body politic, and this was one political convention the male architects of democracy opted not to tamper with.

The average eighteenth-century woman assumed her place in society based on her husband’s identity. She was considered, by nature, to be incapable of serious thought or important decision-making. In addition to not being allowed to vote, a woman couldn’t retain property in marriage, even if she’d owned that property before her wedding day. So in case of divorce, she retained neither the ownership of land nor the custody of children. She typically married at sixteen and gave birth to a child every two years through her forties. A third of those children died early, and she lost her own health—as well as her looks—by her mid-twenties.

Women’s limited role in society was reinforced by the editorial content in the publications of the era. Fundamental was the message that the men’s sphere encompassed all of business and politics, with the women’s sphere being restricted to the four walls of the home. This distinct division of roles had to be faithfully adhered to for the well-being of the country, according to the American media of the late 1700s and early 1800s, because women lacked the ability to succeed in the public world, as they were intellectually as well as physically inferior to men.

The primary publishing venue for disseminating these messages was the handful of women’s magazines that emerged in the late eighteenth century. Ladies Magazine, founded in 1792, became the first American publication aimed exclusively toward women, although it was owned and published by a man. Other magazines, some exclusively for women and others for men as well as women, soon joined the Philadelphia monthly to create the first generation of periodicals that shaped the lives of the country’s women—but didn’t advance their progress.

Women’s limited abilities were a consistent theme in the magazines, through both their content and their paternalistic tone. Typical was an article in Ladies Magazine that bluntly stated, “The number of women who have solid judgment is very small.” American Museum, another magazine of the era, made the intellectual inferiority of women clear when it stated, “The author of nature has placed the balance of power on the side of the male, by giving him not only a body more large and robust, but also a mind endowed with greater resolution, and a more extensive reach.”2

The message was that domesticity dominated women’s very being because they weren’t capable of acting autonomously, and therefore only one path was appropriate for them: marrying a man. Once wed, a woman was to focus all her energy on pleasing her husband above all other goals. Ladies Magazine announced, “To make her husband happy and contented will ever be her wish, not to say her greatest pleasure.”3

While idealizing the docile woman, the magazines criticized the woman who allowed temptations to interfere with her wifely duties. Ladies Magazine warned women that their natures dictated that they had to struggle constantly to resist their “almost irresistible inclination to pleasure” through such follies as shopping and gossiping. “The female nature constantly shows a greater proclivity to the gay and the amusive, than to the sober and useful scenes of life.” And Weekly Magazine provided women with a checklist of some of the most common errors they committed when speaking, with those mistakes ranging from women not “acknowledging his [a husband’s] superior judgment” to women voicing their own opinions.⁴

Discrediting the Women’s Rights Movement

The historic meeting in the summer of 1848 was very much in conflict with the paternalistic tone that dominated late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century magazines. And so, as women made their first dramatic assault on men’s political and economic stranglehold on American society, the Fourth Estate responded by replacing paternalism with unrestrained hostility.

The event that marked the beginning of the Women’s Rights Movement in the United States unfolded in Seneca Falls, New York, because that community was the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The woman who ultimately became the movement’s leading theorist, writer, and orator was born in Johnstown, New York, in 1815 and married lawyer and abolitionist Henry B. Stanton. Her marriage was happy, but her husband’s work often took him away from home, leaving her with their seven children and the boredom of homemaking in an isolated setting. Stanton initiated the Seneca Falls convention by placing a public notice in the Seneca County Courier.5

Some 300 people heeded Stanton’s call. They included a large number of women, such as Lucretia Mott and Amelia Bloomer, whose confidence and organizational skills had been developed through their work within the Abolition and Temperance Movements. At the end of the two-day meeting, sixty-eight women and thirty-two men signed their names to a Declaration of Sentiments.

The signers directly challenged the concept of sex-segregated spheres. Their declaration read, “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.” The twelve resolutions encouraged women to enter the professions and demanded that women be granted property and child custody rights.⁶

The most controversial resolution demanded women’s suffrage, stating, “Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” Only after an eloquent appeal by African-American leader Frederick Douglass did the resolution pass.⁷

One of the less prominent statements in the Declaration of Sentiments was that women’s rights proponents would try to enlist the press on behalf of their cause, while acknowledging that, “In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule.” How right they were.⁸

The New York Herald, one of the most influential newspapers in the country, called the Seneca Falls meeting a “Woman’s Wrong Convention,” adding that it proved the country’s political and social fabric was “crumbling to pieces,” and the Worcester Telegraph in Massachusetts mocked the women at the meeting as “Amazons” who were “bolting with a vengeance.” The Philadelphia Ledger and Daily Transcript summarized its position on women’s rights perhaps more succinctly than any other journalistic voice of the era, saying, “A woman is nobody. A wife is everything.”⁹

The Seneca Falls convention was the first of many events designed to build momentum for the Women’s Rights Movement. By the early 1850s, Susan B. Anthony had emerged as an important complement to Stanton. Born in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1820, Anthony taught school for fifteen years before committing her life to reform efforts, beginning with temperance and abolition but eventually focusing on women’s rights. Unmarried and willing to devote her abundant talents to the effort, Anthony brought to the movement, in particular, strengths as an intellect and organizer.

Stanton and Anthony combined their abilities to create a dynamic partnership at the head of the movement. Hundreds of women’s rights meetings, petition drives, and public lectures erupted all over the country during the 1850s, with many of them attracting thousands of supporters. The two women also organized a national convention almost every year from 1850 until the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. And after the war ended and the Fourteenth Amendment gave former male slaves the vote, the women intensified the campaign for their own enfranchisement.

Regardless of what the particular event was, a flurry of hostile newspaper articles followed in its wake. The Syracuse Star derided an 1852 meeting in that city as the “Tomfoolery Convention,” calling the three days of speeches and discussions a “mass of corruption, heresies, ridiculous nonsense, and reeking vulgarities which these bad women have vomited forth.” After women attempted to take their campaign to the New York state legislature, the Albany Daily State Register wrote that women’s rights advocates initially were amusing, like “clowns in the circus” or “gentlemen with blackened faces.” The newspaper then cast aside all sense of amusement, saying, “The joke is becoming stale. The ludicrous is wearing away, and disgust is taking the place of pleasurable sensations, arising from this hypocrisy and infidel fanaticisms.”10

In addition to trivializing the movement, the newspapers attacked feminists on the ground that they were abandoning their responsibilities in the home. Typical was a vitriolic article in the Mechanic’s Advocate in Albany that criticized women for attending women’s rights activities “at the expense of their more appropriate duties.” Because increased rights would destroy the traditional division between women’s and men’s spheres, the Advocate insisted, such a shift would “demoralize and degrade from their high sphere and noble destiny women of all respectable and useful classes, and prove a monstrous injury to all mankind.” James Gordon Bennett was a leader on this theme, thundering from the New York Herald’s editorial page that feminists were belying woman’s true nature. He asked rhetorically, “How did woman first become subject to man, as she now is all over the world? By her nature, her sex, just as the negro is and always will be, to the end of time, inferior to the white race and, therefore, doomed to subjection.”11

Newspapers carried this accusation of violating the laws of nature to the point that they equated supporting women’s rights with committing a sin against God. The Herald screamed, “These ladies are, at least, trenching on immorality, and are in dangerous contiguity to, and companionship with, the most detestable of vices.”¹²

In an effort to discredit prominent leaders of the movement, papers attacked their unmarried status. Ignoring the fact that a nineteenth-century wife had to devote such enormous effort to household chores that little time remained for activism, the papers characterized the single leaders, especially Anthony, as sexual freaks. The New York Sun wrote, “The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion of one sex and victor over the other.” The Herald added, “These women are entirely devoid of personal attractions. They are generally thin maiden ladies, having found it utterly impossible to induce any young or old man into the matrimonial noose.”¹³

Newspapers routinely referred to women in the movement by such degrading terms as “poor creatures,” “unfortunate women,” “old maids,” and “unsexed women,” while calling men involved in the movement “Aunt Nancys,” suggesting, by innuendo, that men who supported women’s rights were either homosexual or totally dominated by their wives.¹⁴

Despite the scornful tone in mainstream newspapers, Stanton believed all publicity was good publicity because it ultimately would help move women’s rights onto the national agenda. Assessing the widespread coverage of the Seneca Falls convention, Stanton wrote in her personal correspondence, “There is no danger of the Woman Question dying for want of notice. Every paper you take up has something to say about it.” Opting for the point of view that it was better to be deplored than ignored, Stanton continued, “Imagine the publicity given to our idea by thus appearing in a widely circulated sheet like the Herald. It will start women thinking, and men too; and when men and women think about a new question, the first step in progress is taken.”¹⁵

Many American newspapers published denigrating comments about women’s rights leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seated at left, and Susan B. Anthony, right.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Other women’s rights advocates expressed similar sentiments. Lucretia Mott acknowledged in 1855 that the newspapers “ridiculed and slandered us” but was convinced, based on her work in the Abolition Movement, that the press went “through three stages in regard to reforms; they first ridicule them, then report them without comment, and at last openly advocate them. We seem to be still in the first stage on this question [of women’s rights].”16

Creating a Voice of Their Own

Visionary leaders such as Stanton and Anthony realized that if the Women’s Rights Movement were to succeed, the leaders would need to follow the example of the Abolition Movement and create their own alternative medium of communication. In January 1868, Stanton and Anthony founded the Revolution. Based in New York City, the newspaper carried the masthead “Men, Their Rights and Nothing More; Women, Their Rights and Nothing Less.” As radical in content as in its name, the Revolution insisted that securing suffrage was merely the first step in the women’s rights campaign. The paper argued, “The ballot is not even half the loaf; it is only a crust—a crumb.” With Stanton as its driving editorial force, the Revolution expressed liberal views on a wide range of social issues such as prostitution and divorce. Such controversial content alienated many potential readers and even more prospective advertisers. The Revolution’s circulation never exceeded 3,000, and the paper ceased publication in 1870, surviving only two years and leaving $10,000 in unpaid bills.¹⁷

Not all feminists agreed on the breadth of the women’s rights agenda, creating a major split in the movement. After Stanton and Anthony founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, formed the considerably less strident American Woman Suffrage Association in 1870.

Stone then founded Woman’s Journal, a more moderate journalistic voice than the Revolution. The Boston-based Journal focused on suffrage and its importance to such middle-class efforts as establishing women’s clubs and encouraging women to obtain higher educations. The Journal adopted the conventional journalistic writing style of an establishment paper, reporting on suffrage activities and legislative campaigns around the country and printing transcripts of women’s suffrage speeches and conventions. The newspaper’s stands appealed to many Americans, giving Woman’s Journal the support it needed to publish without interruption from 1870 through 1933, building a circulation of 6,000. What’s more, the Journal was a real business, financed through a stock company, that achieved financial solvency.

The Revolution and Woman’s Journal weren’t the only members of the suffrage press, as several dozen publications were created to spread the women’s suffrage ideology. Most of them served local communities and were short-lived, as they struggled both for circulation and financial support during an era when most women had little independent income. The various journals also tended to be driven by an individual editor and aimed at an audience of middle- and upper-class white women. One exception was Woman’s Era, a monthly paper that was distributed nationally by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a member of Boston’s African-American elite, from 1890 to 1897. “The stumbling block in the way of even the most cultured colored woman is the narrowness of her environment,” Ruffin wrote. “It is to help strengthen this class and a better understanding between all classes that this little venture is sent out on its mission.” A large number of the journals were published in western states where many of the earliest advancements in women’s suffrage were made.18

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that the suffrage press was a major force in transforming American society’s views on women’s rights. Few of the publications were able to build their circulation figures beyond a few hundred, and the majority of their readers were already committed to the Women’s Rights Movement. And unlike William Lloyd Garrison, editors focusing on women’s suffrage didn’t attract national attention by orchestrating spectacular public events—such as burning the Constitution during a Fourth of July celebration—or by provoking editorial screaming matches with mainstream editors who disagreed with them.

The most significant impact of the suffrage press was on the movement itself. The publications bridged the gaps of time and space, providing an important tie that bound together women from different locations to create a grassroots social movement. During an era when mass transportation didn’t exist, a women’s rights convention or lecture generally couldn’t draw more than a few dozen people, but a journal could reach several hundred, including people living in rural areas. Once a publication arrived at a woman’s home, it informed her of activities nationwide, articulated the ideology of feminist theorists, offered her arguments to use in her own community, and reinforced her sense of purpose. In fact, the very existence of a journal provided a tangible product that was vital to sustaining a long public campaign.

Intensifying the Attack

Even after many decades of women’s rights activism, most members of the mainstream press continued to express scorn toward the reform efforts. Indeed, many of the male-dominated papers responded to the increasing power of women leaders by increasing the intensity and viciousness of their attacks.

During the final decades of the nineteenth century, mainstream newspapers focused much of their unrelenting assault on the personal characteristics of the most high-profile women. Typical was an article in the New York Tribune, the most widely read and respected paper in the country, that attacked the leaders, saying, “Our heart warms with pity towards these unfortunate creatures. We fancy that we can see them, deserted of men, and bereft of those rich enjoyments and exalted privileges which belong to women, languishing their unhappy lives away in a mournful singleness.” That same year, the New York World sank to an equally low level of hate-filled rhetoric. One tirade insulted everyone in the Women’s Rights Movement by describing the women as “mummified and fossilated females, void of domestic duties, habits and natural affections,” and the men as “crack-brained, rheumatic, dyspeptic, henpecked men.”19

The most mean-spirited comments were written about Anthony. Newspapers ignored the substance of Anthony’s discourse and focused instead on her appearance and status as a “spinster.” In 1866, even though Anthony was by that time a figure of international stature, the New York World demeaned her by referring to her by her first name, saying, “Susan is lean, cadaverous; with the proportions of a file.” In 1870, the Utica Herald described Anthony in equally insulting language, asking, “Who does not feel sympathy for Susan Anthony? She has striven long and earnestly to become a man. She is sweet in the eyes of her own mirror, but her advanced age and maiden name deny that she has been so in the eyes of others.” And in 1879, the Richmond Herald wrote, “Miss Anthony is uncomely in person, has rather coarse, rugged features and masculine manners.”²⁰

A drawing from Life magazine depicted Elizabeth Cady Stanton as smug and grossly overweight, while portraying bespectacled Susan B. Anthony as grim and rail thin.

Reprinted from Life magazine.

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, technical advances in paper and printing production had ushered many inexpensive magazines into the journalistic mix. They attracted huge numbers of middle- and working-class readers by appealing to popular topics, including the various controversies involving women’s rights. Articles with titles such as “Manly Women” and “Is Marriage a Failure?” fueled the negative attitude toward the changing role of women.²¹

Magazines also exploited the emotional impact of images to lambaste women’s rights advocates. Particularly adept at this technique was Life, a forerunner of the photo magazine of the same name that would capture the American public’s imagination in the 1930s. The nineteenth-century version of Life used line drawings to place the modern generation of liberated women in uncomplimentary poses. One showed a female minister preaching to an empty church, and another depicted women smoking, drinking alcohol, and cavorting in a modern-day club for women. A two-page image in an 1896 issue was particularly memorable, depicting an obese Stanton and a resolutely grim Anthony dressed in the uniforms of male naval officers in front of an all-woman navy. The caption read, “The New Navy.”22

Victory Despite the Fourth Estate

After twenty years of separation, the two wings of the Women’s Rights Movement united in 1890 to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The activists still, however, stood far from victory. Between 1870 and 1910, feminists waged some 500 campaigns in cities and states nationwide to place initiatives before the voters, with only seventeen of those efforts even succeeding in bringing their issues to a vote.

Success didn’t begin in earnest until the early years of the twentieth century when the Progressive Movement pushed reform and liberal social thought into the national spotlight. This era of rapid change meant that the Women’s Rights Movement’s demands no longer seemed so radical compared to those of the men and women determined to remake American government and industry. The emphasis on efficiency and productivity that was key to the Progressive Movement manifested itself in a new generation of youthful leaders brimming with pragmatic strategies centering on public agitation, direct confrontation, and political tactics. These hard-driving, resourceful women focused much of their energy on women’s suffrage.

The rise of the adept new generation was dramatically demonstrated in 1907 when Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter, created the Women’s Political Union. Blatch broadened the movement to appeal to working-class women and to organize the first suffrage parades, which immediately became a popular and productive device. Alice Paul, another young activist, mobilized public demonstrations to push hard for a constitutional amendment and, in 1913, formed what later became the National Woman’s Party. When Paul’s militant tactics led to women being harassed and even imprisoned, the American public finally began paying attention and giving support to the issue of women’s suffrage. In the last phase of activism, Carrie Chapman Catt incorporated effective organization and political strategy into the movement. Catt’s “winning plan,” which she began in 1916, was a tactical and organizational masterpiece that pressured the House of Representatives into passing the Nineteenth Amendment in 1918. Two years later, after hard-fought battles in the Senate and then in the individual states, women’s suffrage became the law of the land in August 1920—seventy-two years after the call had gone out at Seneca Falls.

Suffering from the Power of the Press

It wasn’t until 1919 that mainstream American journalism finally began to treat the Women’s Rights Movement as a major social and political initiative. The majority of the press supported women’s suffrage only after the Nineteenth Amendment had cleared the Senate and ratification by the states appeared inevitable. Until that time, establishment newspapers and magazines chose to portray the American woman as they had throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—as a physical and intellectual cripple who had to be cared for and protected. Even though such highly capable women as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone were leading the potentially far-reaching movement by the mid-nineteenth century, the American institution charged with informing the public opted to treat this particular social movement with ridicule and hostility.

The role that American newspapers of the nineteenth century played in slowing the momentum for women’s rights is an example of the press abusing the mighty power it wields. Had the Fourth Estate mobilized that power as a positive force in support of the Women’s Rights Movement, there’s no question that half the American citizenry would have been granted its rightful voice in the democratic process far earlier than ultimately was the case. Nor would the nineteenth century provide the only example of the American news media slowing women’s march toward equality. Many observers have noted that journalistic attitudes toward women’s rights didn’t change until the few women involved in the field advanced to positions as editors and other policy makers. Anthony created a vivid image supporting this point of view in 1893 when she told the Chicago Tribune, “If the men own the paper—that is, if the men control the management of the paper—then the women who write for these papers must echo the sentiment of these men. And if they do not do that, their heads are cut off.”23