us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy.… To me it is perfectly clear that whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do.
Sarah could write with power; Angelina was the firebrand speaker. Once she spoke six nights in a row at the Boston Opera House. She was the first woman (in 1838) to address a committee of the Massachusetts state legislature on antislavery petitions. Her talk attracted a huge crowd, and a representative from Salem proposed that “a Committee be appointed to examine the foundations of the State House of Massachusetts to see whether it will bear another lecture from Miss Grimké!”
Speaking out on other issues prepared the way for speaking on the situation of women: Dorothea Dix, in 1843, addressed the legislature of Massachusetts on what she saw in the prisons and almshouses in the Boston area:
I tell what I have seen, painful and shocking as the details often are.… I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within this Commonwealth in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience!
Frances Wright was a writer, founder of a Utopian community, immigrant from Scotland in 1824, a fighter for the emancipation of slaves and for birth control and sexual freedom. She wanted free public education for all children over two years of age in state-supported boarding schools. She expressed in America what the Utopian socialist Charles Fourier had said in France, that the progress of civilization depended on the progress of women.
I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly…. men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex…. Until power is annihilated on one side, fear and obedience on the other, and both restored to their birthright—equality.
Women put in enormous work in antislavery societies all over the country, gathering thousands of petitions to Congress. In the course of this work, events were set in motion that carried the movement of women for their own equality racing alongside the movement against slavery. In 1840, a World Anti-Slavery Society Convention met in London. After a fierce argument, it was voted to exclude women, but it was agreed they could attend meetings in a curtained enclosure. The women sat in silent protest in the gallery, and William Lloyd Garrison, one abolitionist who had fought for the rights of women, sat with them.
It was at that time that Elizabeth Cady Stanton met Lucretia Mott and others, and began to lay the plans that led to the first Women’s Rights Convention in history. It was held at Seneca Falls, New York, where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived as a mother, a housewife, full of resentment at her condition, declaring: “A woman is a nobody. A wife is everything.” She wrote later:
My experiences at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul.… I could not see what to do or where to begin—my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.
An announcement was put in the Seneca County Courier calling for a meeting to discuss the “rights of woman” the 19th and 20th of July. Three hundred women and some men came. A Declaration of Principles was signed at the end of the meeting by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men. It made use of the language and rhythm of the Declaration of Independence:
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that they have hitherto occupied…
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness….
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. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world…
Then came the list of grievances. And then a series of resolutions. Women’s conventions in various parts of the country followed the one at Seneca Falls. At one of these, in 1851, an aged black woman, who had been born a slave in New York, tall, thin, wearing a gray dress and white turban, listened to some male ministers who had been dominating the discussion. This was Sojourner Truth. She rose to her feet and joined the indignation of her race to the indignation of her sex:
That man over there says that woman needs to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches.… Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles or gives me any best place. And a’nt I a woman?
Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And a’nt I a woman?
I would work as much and eat as much as a man, when I could get it, and bear the lash as well. And a’nt I a woman?
I have borne thirteen children and seen em most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And a’nt I a woman?
Thus were women beginning to resist, in the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, the attempt to keep them in their “woman’s sphere.” They were taking part in all sorts of movements, for prisoners, for the insane, for black slaves, and also for all women.
In the midst of these movements, there exploded, with the force of government and the authority of money, a quest for more land, an urge for national expansion.
Exercises
1. What effect does private property seem to have on the position of women in society?
2. How did European women manage to pay for their voyage to the American colonies?
3. How did masters exercise their control over female servants and slaves? How did husbands exercise control over their wives?
4. Was it better for a woman to be married or single in colonial America?
5. What was a fundamental obstacle preventing women from rebelling against their subordinate status?
6. Why was Anne Hutchinson banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
7. Why was Mary Dyer hanged?
8. What role did American women play during the American Revolution?
9. What was Abigail Adams’s argument in favor of giving women the vote? To whom did she make this argument?
10. What might one of Thomas Jefferson’s reasons have been for excluding women from politics?
11. In the periods before, during, and after the American Revolution, what factors caused some women to demand greater rights for themselves (or their sex)?
12. Why would women editors of a women’s magazine write a story discrediting the wearing of bloomers?
13. How did the proponents of the Cult of Domesticity (or the Cult of Womanhood) argue that the women’s sphere was separate but equal? One aspect of the “Cult” denned the role of women as being as responsible for the moral fabric of her family. How might a middle-class woman have used the ideology of being responsible for the moral fabric of her family to justify her involvement, outside the home, in the reform movements—abolition, peace, communitarianism, education, temperance?
14. What is the origin of the word “spinster”?
15.
