The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  Why did the suffragists lose women’s suffrage? The question has dominated the scholarship about the postwar years. But one can also ask, really, why did they ever think they could win? From any angle, the prospects were faint. True, a dozen Radical Republicans introduced amendments to state constitutions for universal suffrage, but on the other hand, there was no widespread discussion of the issue. A few congressmen supported suffrage, and there was no hard-core opposition—but this was because it was never likely to pass. Even if the word “male” had been omitted from the Fourteenth Amendment, the implications of a gender-neutral language would never have slipped past the public and the amendment would surely have faced an uphill ratification battle in the states. The principle of virtual representation was too entrenched in the nation’s political culture to be abandoned without anyone noticing.39

  The suffrage leadership’s confidence came from a giant miscalculation of the political salience of the loyalist to the Republican Party, when the loyalist was female. The problem they were left with was almost insoluble. The principle of universal suffrage alone was not going to be enough to float women into the harbor of full citizenship, but without the franchise, how could they ever get there?

  Despite the losses of longtime co-workers and fellow spirits, there were gains for Stanton and Anthony in the rift. Setting off on their own hook allowed them much more autonomy and creativity. In the NWSA, they elaborated on women’s grievances and put forth remedies without the constraints that the exigencies of Reconstruction imposed on the AERA. There would be no more talk of the Fifteenth Amendment, for or against, Anthony declared at a Chicago meeting: They were done with it. The question now was “Woman suffrage, and Woman suffrage alone.”40

  The concentration of effort bore fruit in The Revolution, the newspaper they published from New York City between 1868 and 1870 (backed by George Train’s money). The Stantons were living in the city, and locating the paper there shifted the locus of energy from New England and upstate New York, seedbeds of antislavery and moral reform, to the country’s hustling commercial capital. The brazen title, followed by the motto “Men Their Rights and Nothing More—Women Their Rights and Nothing Less,” declared that this paper was not business as usual. Even the advertising campaign spurned feminine decorum: Mark Twain (who spotted the invisible hand of George Train) was appalled at the sight of girl newspaper sellers on the streets of New York decked out in flashy uniforms of red, white, and blue, their belts emblazoned with “Revolution.”41

  The Revolution claimed any number of issues as the province of women’s rights. It discussed discrimination against female workers and celebrated female vocational accomplishments (a new postmistress where there had never been one!). Most sensationally, the paper broached the subjects of sex and marriage. One inspiration was John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, published in 1869. Mill’s writing on marriage as an institution of despotism followed several decades of critiques from British reformers and brought the discussion into the mainstream of liberal thought. Stanton revered Mill and used his ideas to hone her own.

  Stanton had briefly tangled with criticisms of marriage in 1860, at the last women’s rights convention before the war, when she provoked consternation among listeners by floating the idea that marriage was a contract that could be made and broken like any other. Antoinette Brown Blackwell had once been a severe critic of marriage herself, but by 1860 she was married and an ordained minister to boot. She rose to defend the institution on Protestant grounds, as a fusion of two souls ordained by God, to approbation from the crowd. Afterward, Stanton had to beat back the bogeyman of free love, and the newspapers accused her of trying to turn respectable women into prostitutes.42

  In 1869, though, Stanton was left to herself in the pages of The Revolution. With the challenge of locating a new constituency, she returned with gusto to themes of marriage and sexuality. The same zestful spirit that sent newsgirls into the streets to drum up business led her to seize on a local New York scandal as a polemical platform: the trial of Daniel McFarland for the murder of his ex-wife Abigail’s fiancé, Albert Richardson, a popular writer for Greeley’s Tribune. The story served Stanton’s determination to break through the hypocrisy that prevented frank discussion of marriage by bringing the steamy facts of desire, jealousy, and extramarital sex uncomfortably close in a way that oblique discussions about coverture could not.

  Stanton served up to readers a dementedly jealous, abusive husband, a virtuous wife who did everything in her legal power to throw off the chains of her marriage, and a charming, sympathetic lover. McFarland, who was an abusive alcoholic (if we believe Abby—Stanton certainly did), shot Richardson on two occasions. The first time, he wounded him only slightly; he followed up on his attack with two lawsuits, one against Abby for custody of their children and the second against Richardson, the man he nearly killed, for alienation of affections. Meanwhile, Abby went to Indiana to secure a divorce under the state’s relatively liberal law and returned to New York to marry Richardson. On hearing that the lovers were about to marry, the enraged ex-husband went to the Tribune offices and shot Richardson, this time mortally wounding him. At the trial, McFarland’s attorney described him as a responsible, loving man tormented by loss of hearth and home: Abby was a willful, careless woman led astray by a free-love cabal around the newspaper, and Richardson was her wily seducer. The judge refused to recognize Abby’s divorce, and thus prevented her from testifying against her former husband. The jury acquitted McFarland on grounds of insanity, despite the obvious fact that he presented a clear danger to his ex-wife. A divorced man could literally get away with murder.43

  Stanton used the verdict as an opportunity to call for changing an institution that could still be a life sentence. Practically, she called for divorce laws to be revamped along the lines of contract, citing luminaries in the British debate as her authorities—Bentham, Dickens, and Mill. She also used the occasion to sketch her thoughts on what relations between the sexes could be at their best, picking up on the older utopian idea that love flourishes free of coercion. Citing the Mills as models, she celebrated a “true union of the soul and intellect, which leads, exalts, and sanctifies the physical consummation.” Regardless of the falling-out with her political brothers, Stanton came back to her faith that men, whatever their present failings, were always to be considered companions in making a better future.44

  The core of her developing vision in the 1870s was individualist and egalitarian, applying the precepts and guarantees of liberal rights and possessive individualism—the ownership of the self—further into the domain of the household than Mill ventured, calling into question the entire edifice of male governance as Mill did not. She spoke for the sovereignty of the individual, the right of women to realize their potential away from the interposition of husbands’ directives. On this her favorite subject, marriage, she worked in black and white, not grays: Legal scholar Hendrik Hartog has shown that in fact the application of coverture was, in rulings of American judges, incomplete, highly varied, and contested, not monolithic as women’s rights polemicists made it out to be. Stanton, however, was never one to be troubled by inconvenient social facts. She hypostatized marriage as if only Blackstone determined social reality, to represent it in schematic form as her best target.45 For her, coverture was the grossest manifestation of the power that shrouded women’s personhood, even to themselves. Indissoluble marriage was a remnant of feudal, hierarchical society that had no place in a democracy.

  Emancipated women, she believed, would create a new form of marriage, freely chosen and companionate. “I think divorce at the will of the parties is not only right, but that it is a sin against nature, the family, the State, for a man or woman to live together in the marriage relation in continual antagonism, indifference, disgust. A physical union should in all cases be the outgrowth of a spiritual and intellectual sympathy; and anything short of this is lust not love,” she told an audience at a meeting protesting the McFarland v
erdict, sounding very much like Margaret Fuller thirty years earlier. On the road, she met listeners eager for these views. “I am speaking every night to fine audiences,” she wrote a friend in 1870 from Michigan. “Sometimes on suffrage, sometimes on marriage, sometimes on marriage & divorce. I shall be a reservoir of sorrows! O! the experiences women pour into my ears!” Plantation slavery was nothing next to these “unclean” marriages, she averred—she meant marriages where husbands used their wives sexually—so “let the press howl,”46 she would persevere in speaking.

  NWSA recruits tended to be too young or distant from political hot spots in the 1850s to have been in the thick of antislavery battles, but the Civil War prepared them for bold action. A younger generation came to the fore: Membership extended beyond the middle-class wives and mothers who made up the antebellum movement to a new demographic, workingwomen. They had slipped through small openings in the paid labor force, including the professions, to establish themselves as hotel and boardinghouse keepers, ranchers, schoolteachers, journalists, professional lecturers, homeopathic physicians, newspaper editors, and attorneys. Their interest in national and state politics was keen, since both the Republican and Democratic parties supported female auxiliaries, and the third parties all welcomed female supporters.47

  Many of the most engaged NWSA members were representatives of an evolving social type: vocationally oriented, tied to political parties through husbands or kin and poised to take up a part in a man’s world. The comparatively unknown Belva Lockwood, an NWSA member in Washington, D.C., is a good example. Lockwood is remembered for being the first serious female contender for the presidency; she staged a third-party campaign on the ticket of the minuscule National Equal Rights Party in 1884 and 1888. The candidacy was no novelty act but rather the culmination of years of involvement in Washington politics. Lockwood’s plainness, audacity, and tireless pragmatism maneuvering in an all-male political world, along with her hard-won achievements, exemplify the possibilities of the 1870s and ’80s as much as the Grimké sisters’ moral passion sums up the 1830s.

  Lockwood’s rise was not unusual in the years after the war, when economic expansion, migration, and the deaths of so many men pushed and pulled women out of the places they were born into situations where enough was yet to be settled that unusual initiatives could yield startling results. A woman from the far reaches of the country, by dint of a little education, hard work, connections to a sympathetic man, and engagement in women’s organizations managed to scramble to local repute: The story can be told about newspaper editors, homeopathic physicians, educators, writers, and actresses. In Lockwood’s case, the arc was from a farm in a remote county in upstate New York to the nation’s capital, running for president and being the first woman to win entry to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Forced by a hard-pressed father to leave school when she was fifteen and work as a teacher to bring in money, Belva Bennett married young and was left a widow in 1853 at the age of twenty-three, with a small child to support. Now Belva McNall, she resumed teaching and went to school, earning a college degree in 1857 from the institution that became Syracuse University. In 1866, by then the head of her own school, she made the bold choice to move with her daughter to Washington, D.C. The city was a muddy, shambling town, flooded with demobilized soldiers and freedpeople and electrified by the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and debates over Reconstruction. Avid for political intelligence, she watched from the “Ladies Gallery” in the new Senate chamber. There were few ways for a woman of modest resources without connections to make a living, but she found enough to establish herself. She acquired a boardinghouse and married an older man, becoming Mrs. Lockwood. It was an economic partnership, not a love match, but the marriage was sturdy and supported her through many difficulties and battles. By 1871, she was president of the local NWSA branch.48

  Lockwood brought to suffrage work an interest in workingwomen that was notably lacking in a movement that historically had been composed of women economically dependent on their husbands. Before the war, women’s rights conventions gave only cursory attention to the difficulties of earning a living: the issues of stark discrimination in wages and the segregation of the labor market that forced women into a few low-paid, overcrowded fields. These subjects were braided through European discussions, with different solutions. Socialists sought to remove women altogether from the labor force, to be supported at home by a man making a decent family wage; a few feminists followed Barbara Smith Bodichon in calling for the skilled trades to admit women; and in a few places, among more highly skilled workers, women organized into unions, although this was rare. But in the United States, Susan B. Anthony, the self-supporting woman who was the exception to the rule, was the one leader to address questions of labor. Anthony had little success, however, in broadening the movement’s sense of “Woman” to the laboring classes or even to middle-class women who worked.49

  In the United States and Europe, the problems were similar: a labor market strictly segmented by sex, with most jobs deemed men’s and a few seen as properly women’s. This meant that women were crowded into a few sectors of the industrial labor force, most prominently the sewing trades and textile manufacturing; barred from higher-paid skilled trades or segregated to subsidiary tasks within them; and paid about half the wages of the lowliest male workers. Everywhere, domestic service remained the largest female employment, with its grinding physical labor (in an age that lacked labor-saving domestic technologies that came with gas stoves, running water, and electric appliances). For women outside the cities, domestic service and farm labor were the only paid work. Except for teaching, available to women since the late eighteenth century, white-collar jobs deemed female only appeared in the United States after the Civil War when retail stores and businesses expanded to require an army of clerks and salespeople. But white-collar work, while deemed men’s preserve before the war and ostensibly more skilled and higher-status than manual labor, nevertheless presented women with the same problems: no trade unions, long hours and low wages, and jobs seen as less valuable once they moved in.50

  Lockwood, who supported herself in Washington as a boardinghouse keeper, had before her in the city a living demonstration of workingwomen’s wrongs in the white-collar sector. During the war, when male labor was scarce, the federal government hired female clerks to carry on the work of a vastly expanded bureaucracy, but paid them a fraction of men’s wages. In the Treasury Department, women, previously barred from jobs there, earned half of the men’s salary for doing exactly the same work. Lockwood decided to try to outlaw sex discrimination in federal employment. With the NWSA’s backing, she worked her congressional connections to put forth legislation that would outlaw pay discrimination on the basis of sex in federal jobs. She had enough sympathizers to make passage of the bill a real possibility. The strong words of Samuel Arnell, a Tennessee congressman who was its sponsor, show how far women’s rights thought pervaded some corners of the Republican Party. “Man has been unjust to women,” Arnell stated starkly in the House debate. Echoing NWSA language, he lectured his colleagues on man’s subjugation of woman as an atavistic remnant of barbarism, abhorrent to republican government: “The poor pay of woman is an undervaluation of her as a human being.” The bill passed in 1870, although conservatives watered it down. Nonetheless, the diluted provisions helped female clerks, who were able in a short time to quadruple their numbers in the top pay grade.51

  As for Lockwood, she went to law school. One of a handful of women pressing in the 1870s to be credentialed, she fought for and won admission to the Washington, D.C., bar in 1873, the second woman to be admitted after Charlotte Ray, an African-American graduate of Howard University. It took six years of wrangling and another act of Congress to win her next battle, admission to the bar of the Supreme Court; but in 1879, after years of pushing recalcitrant authorities and pestering reluctant supporters in Congress, she succeeded and was sworn in, the first woman to be admitted to argue b
efore the Court.

  Finally, Lockwood ran for president in 1884 on the ticket of the National Equal Rights Party, a third party founded by women on the West Coast who were tired of being knocked around by the Republicans. Lockwood took her candidacy seriously and meant others to do the same. Her experience in Washington taught her that there was no getting power unless women grabbed it, and the time was ripe. “The country is prepared to-day for a boldly aggressive movement on the part of the women of the country,” she judged.52 She did not know how dead wrong she was. Others would follow on the third-party track, but no woman would make a serious bid for the presidency for 120 years, until Hillary Rodham Clinton ran in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

  While the movement was proudly separatist—that is, composed of women and led by women—the “woman’s rights man” took shape as a distinct identity. Supporters like Samuel Arnell were important to the NWSA as strategists, co-conspirators, and sympathizers who provided emotional and material aid. These “new men” took the place of the male abolitionists the NWSA jettisoned in 1869. Isabella Beecher Hooker’s husband, John, for instance, submitted to the Connecticut legislature a married women’s property bill that he co-authored with his wife. Henry Olney and Eugenia Wilde Olney, publishers of The Silver World in the Colorado Rockies, hosted Susan B. Anthony when she came to the state to lecture: “both in full sympathy with our movement,” she found.53 These people were no longer brothers and sisters in Christ; no, these new partnerships were of this world, vocational and practical. And the aid of woman’s rights men made the prospects for change in this world that much more plausible.

  The NWSA’s most important activity in the 1870s was to push a militant strategy of constitutional change called the New Departure. Legal scholars Reva Siegel and Robert Post, surveying the long history of constitutional battles, argue that in volatile periods in American history, new interpretations of the Constitution move up from the bottom, from citizens to the Court, as well as in the usual way, from the Court down to the people. Americans revere the Court, Post and Siegel observe, but “they also expect their own constitutional beliefs to matter, and will, in extraordinary circumstances, mobilize to secure recognition of their views.”54 The early 1870s were such extraordinary circumstances, and the NWSA women were such citizens. Their sense they could change something as remote from them and abstruse as constitutional interpretation came from witnessing the war’s enormous augmentation of federal power and the transformations wrought by the Reconstruction amendments: “For if amending the Constitution could abolish slavery, what could it not do?” as Ellen Carol DuBois describes the mindset. Those years were an education in the Constitution. “Such a schooling in the principles of government, in the fundamental law of the land, in the broad principles of human freedom, had never perhaps come to any people,” Belle Squire, a feminist who lived through the period, declared in 1911. “No longer were such questions academic, or mere idle problems to be used for idle discussion, for they were found to be vital issues for which men were willing to give up their lives.”55 Suffragists became experts in constitutional theory.