1920 (11 page)

The most significant step that women took toward suffrage occurred in 1848, exactly two centuries and a decade after Margaret Brent confronted sexism in Virginia. Women's-rights leaders summoned as many of their followers as they could to join them in the Finger Lakes region of New York for the Seneca Falls Convention, the first assembly of its kind in the United States and, to this day, still the most influential. Like the Founding Fathers, these Founding Mothers were determined to produce a document that would last the ages and inspire future generations. They did just that, even if less famously.

To make the point that the female was entitled to the same kinds of freedom as the male, they began their Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions with familiar language: “When, in the course of human events. …” The second paragraph starts in similarly recognizable fashion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men
and women
[italics added] are created equal. …” The women of Seneca Falls were not copying the Declaration of Independence so much as trying to make the point that the document they were constructing was as basic to human rights as the one produced in Philadelphia by the Continental Congress. Further, they were slyly demonstrating that the Congress, in gainsaying female rights, was acting hypocritically, just as it was with Africans in American servitude.

That, at least, was the initial intent. But in continuing to make their arguments about treatment by males over the years, they resorted to
language much less restrained, much less subtle, and even more incendiary than a previous generation of men had used against the British. I quote at some length from their Declaration:

The history of mankind is a history of repeat injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. …

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. …

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead. …

He has denied her facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her. …

He allows her in church, as well as State, but in a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church. …

He has endeavored, in every way he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

Now, in view of this entire disenfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation,—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist they have
immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.

The women at Seneca Falls unanimously approved the provisions of the Declaration—except, surprisingly, the article that seemed the least controversial, the request for the vote, which, as the above demonstrates, was not even phrased as a request but rather a plaint. The organizers of the convention were astonished by the opposition. “It was argued,” writes Gurko, “that so excessive a demand would arouse such antagonism and derision that the movement would be killed before it even got under way.”

The argument is perhaps correct. But it is strange that the Seneca Falls delegates felt voting might be perceived as “so excessive a demand”; there is much more in the Declaration of Resolutions and Sentiments that seems likely to arouse men to opposition and derision than its statement of implied support for suffrage.

There were four women in particular whose support for suffrage was not implied, but vocal and insistent. Their places in history would have been assured even if the ban against women in the voting booth had never been lifted.

ELIZABETH CADY'S FATHER WANTED A
boy, and made no secret of his disappointment to either family or friends when his hard-laboring wife gave him the wrong choice. His daughter could have grown up feeling lonely and unwanted as a result; instead, she was motivated to succeed as a man might succeed, to satisfy both nature's product and her father's hopes. She might have been the first American female to insist that the word “obey” be omitted from her wedding vows. She did, however, take the name of her husband, the abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton.

Like Thomas Jefferson, Stanton was the principal author of her convention's Declaration; but also like Jefferson, she generously accepted the contributions and criticisms of others. But it was Stanton who made suffrage the first of the Sentiments in the Declaration, writing it in such a way that it implied, rather than insisted, that the time had come for men
to allow women to cast their ballots. It was, thus, also she who was the most mystified by her sisters' opposition to suffrage, and could not help but take it as a personal repudiation.

LUCRETIA MOTT, WHO WOULD EVENTUALLY
become one of the founders of Swarthmore College, had no interest in women's rights until, as a teacher at the Nine Partners Quaker Boarding School in New York, from which she had graduated, she discovered that male teachers were being paid three times as much as she and the rest of the female staff. It did not seem possible to her; but no sooner did she confirm the information than she began to seethe, and her naturally dour expression made her dissatisfaction all the more obvious.

She spoke to school officials about the disparity in wages, but to no avail. She was not able to obtain from them either satisfactory answers or a raise in pay.

Her husband, an educator and abolitionist whom she met at Nine Partners, was on her side. So were the five of her six children who survived childhood, reformers all. Yet another fifteen years would pass before Mr. and Mrs. Mott formed the American Equal Rights Association, of which she became the first president. But the Association was dedicated to abolition no less than to suffrage, thus choosing to fight the two most strenuously uphill battles in all the nineteenth century. The former led to the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, nominally ridding the nation of slavery, and Mott was delighted. That a full fifty-five years would pass before the Nineteenth Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, gained the approval of the states would have been a particular heartache to her had she lived long enough to know.

Mott's grand oeuvre was the
Discourse on Woman
, still debated today among scholars, an integral part of the curriculum of various women's-rights programs in higher education. Mott began as follows:

There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large—of man as well as woman—as the true and proper position of women. Much has been said, from time to time, upon this subject. It has been a theme for ridicule, for
satire and sarcasm. We might look for this from the ignorant and vulgar; but from the intelligent and refined we have a right to expect that such weapons shall not be resorted to,—that gross comparisons and vulgar epithets shall not be applied, so as to place woman, in a point of view, ridiculous to say the least.

Yet both before and after she wrote the
Discourse
, in fact all of her married life, Mott was a housewife and mother, and took great pleasure in both roles. She saw no conflict. She made her own choices.

IN
1847,
LUCY STONE, THE
daughter of a farm family with few educational interests running through its bloodstream, became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. After teaching for a while, she achieved another first, becoming, it is said, the first American female to insist that she not change her last name after marrying. “The precedent was so unusual,” writes Doris Weatherford in her history of the American suffragist, “that ‘stoner' became a commonly used nineteenth-century noun to denote a woman who kept her maiden name.” Poor Henry Browne Blackwell, in keeping rather than sharing his name with his wife, achieved what was for the time a most unfortunate distinction of his own.

Stone was tireless in her efforts to convince fellow academics that women deserved universal education no less than universal suffrage, but was not surprised to be met with indifference and opposition and ever more energetic rebuttal. In fact, according to at least one observer, she “protested her disenfranchisement in 1858 by allowing the seizure of her household goods at her Orange, New Jersey, home rather than pay taxes levied by a government in which she could not participate.” The goods belonged to her husband, too. Mr. Blackwell made no complaint.

Prior to that, Stone was more seriously accused of slipping a knife to a former slave named Margaret Garner, who was on trial for murdering her child to prevent the little one from growing up into slavery. The knife, it was said, was for Garner to use on herself if she was sentenced to return to a life of being a white man's commodity. Given a chance to address the court in her own defense, Stone seemed rather to speak for the prosecution. “With my own teeth I would tear open my veins and let
the earth drink my blood, rather than wear the chains of slavery. How then could I blame her for wishing her child to find freedom with God and the angels, where no chains are?”

Like Mott and so many other suffragettes, Stone was as well an abolitionist, believing that women deserved no more, no less, than Negroes of either gender. It was almost surely a joining of beliefs that worked against the woman's vote, but was also a connection that the more zealous of reformers simply could not sever. Stone died painfully, of stomach cancer, twenty-seven years before she would have known she was vindicated in her struggle for a woman's place in the institutions that governed society. “Ever the innovator,” Weatherford tells us, “she was the first person in New England to leave orders that she be cremated.”

SUSAN B. ANTHONY, THE FOURTH
of the most powerful voices of Seneca Falls, was used to getting her way, even when her way was prohibited by law. She and her sisters Guelma, Hannah, Mary, and Eliza were among the few American women ever to have voted in a Congressional election before 1920, a feat that took remarkable cleverness and no less remarkable courage. It is one of the more fascinating little-known events in the history of the female march to equality.

In 1872, when the Anthony girls attempted to register at the polls in Rochester, New York, they were, as expected, told to go away. That was Susan's cue. She withdrew a copy of the Constitution from her purse, waving it as she spoke. “[T]all and slender, with a fine, erect carriage, and almost classically regular features framed by smooth, glossy brown hair,” she captured the registration inspectors' attention from her first word. She claimed that the oft-ignored Fourteenth Amendment would not be ignored in her case, that its Due Process Clause gave her the “liberty” to vote as an American citizen, and that the same Amendment's Equal Protection Clause entitled her, as it entitled men, to participate in the process of electing public officials.

The voting inspectors did not know what to do, not at first. No one had ever made such an argument before, at least not in Rochester, New York. The officials talked among each other for a while; then, to Anthony's and her sisters' great surprise, their demand was approved. Two of the registration
inspectors agreed “to take the responsibility” of allowing the Anthonys to vote, even though aware they might later be fined for their actions. By election day, realizing the fines could be as much as $500, the two registrars had changed their minds. But it was too late: the ladies' names, appearing as out of place as they could be, had already been printed on the roster of eligible voters. Taking the precaution of hiring a lawyer first, Susan led her sisters and the attorney to the polls on the appointed November day, and they “had the incredible experience of exercising the democratic right of all citizens to a voice in their government: they voted.”

Two weeks later came a more expected experience. Susan, Guelma, Hannah, Mary, and Eliza Anthony were arrested. The trial, however, at which Susan, as the leader of her sisters' insurrection, was the only defendant, proved as much a burlesque as a legal proceeding could be. Susan was fined $100, but refused to pay and was not forced to do so. The registrars who had allowed her and the others to vote were fined, not $500 apiece, but a mere $25. When, as a matter of principle, they also refused to pay, they were sent to jail, where they enjoyed themselves immensely:

“The women who had voted,” Gurko relates, “kept them fed with superb meals, and hundreds of Rochester residents came to visit them.” After a week, President Ulysses S. Grant pardoned the two men, annoyed that he even had to deal with so trifling a matter.

According to social critic Gilbert Seldes, however, there was more to the leniency shown Susan B. Anthony than met the court record. “Knowing that she would be tried for this crime,” he later wrote, “Miss Anthony took the precaution to vote the Republican ticket and so mollified the Republican prosecutor, judge, and jury.” The Anthony sisters' counsel was himself a well-known Republican. These might have been the deciding factors in their favor.

In the late winter of 1906, approaching her eighty-sixth birthday, a year after having pleaded personally with President Theodore Roosevelt for an amendment allowing women to vote, Susan B. Anthony caught a cold from which she never recovered. She was “white and frail” as the end approached, and also greatly dispirited. “To think I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty,” she said weakly, on her deathbed, “and then to die without it seems so cruel.”