It's Oh So Easy to Forget the Pioneers in Women's Rights

In light of the recently released Shriver Report (“A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything”) which examines the status of American women today, we should not ignore the enormous debt owed to nineteenth-century women who initiated the fight for women’s rights. They held their first public convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 to protest female oppression and to demand change. For good reason, their guiding document, “The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” challenged the wording of the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming that “All men and women are created equal.”

How easy it is to forget that in mid-nineteenth century America, women virtually had no rights. They could not vote, hold public office, serve on juries, or claim custody of their children in rare cases of divorce. They found nearly all institutions of higher learning and the top professions closed to them. Wage-working women invariably earned far less than their male counterparts. When women married (and most did), laws held them under their husbands’ control. Wives could not sign contracts or claim possessions and property they brought into their marriages. In the ideal, woman’s domain was the home; man’s was the public arena.

From that 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, a group of determined women worked tirelessly and against enormous odds to claim the rights they felt they deserved as citizens of a nation espousing democratic ideals. Though hardly any of these women held paid jobs, they faced issues and made choices that resonate with women’s lives today. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a principal organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention and arguably the most radical and intellectual of the female leaders, bore seven children and claimed them as her first priority. Thus, she pulled out of the movement during its formative years but articulated her ideas through inspiring essays and letters shared at women’s rights conventions. Stanton’s father and husband shunned or denounced her activism.

Lucy Stone, a brilliant orator and committed abolitionist, initially rejected marriage, decrying laws that bound wives to husbands. But at thirty-seven, she married Henry Blackwell, a man who promised her the independence and support she needed in order to engage in the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements. When daughter Alice was born over two years later, Lucy temporarily gave up public life in order to raise her. Because Susan B. Anthony remained a spinster, she never faced the demands that wives and mothers experienced and thus could devote her life to women’s rights. She was anything but patient with fellow reformers, however, expressing irritation when Stanton bore more children and when Stone seemed inattentive to the movement due to maternal and domestic responsibilities.

Despite the hurdles, women acted singly or collectively to break down barriers and expand their opportunities. When Elizabeth Blackwell found all medical colleges closed to women, she applied anyway. Finally Geneva College admitted her, thinking her application was a joke. She graduated with a medical degree in 1849. Lucy Stone became the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree, working several jobs in order to put herself through Oberlin Collegiate Institute and graduating in 1847 at the age of twenty nine. In 1870, she and others began publishing The Woman’s Journal, the first long-running weekly newspaper devoted to women’s issues.  Suffragists later credited her paper as having an indelible effect on the women’s movement. Women denounced prevailing fashion by adopting the bloomer costume, which allowed them to discard confining undergarments and to enjoy freedom of movement. Anthony and eight other women cast ballots in the 1872 presidential election. When arrested for breaking the law, Anthony refused to pay her fine. Women challenged laws that prevented them from entering the legal profession. Other women refused to pay property taxes, harkening back to the Revolutionary War’s cry of “no taxation without representation.” They petitioned Congress and state legislatures and canvassed and lectured on behalf of women’s suffrage. No other group in our nation’s history fought so long and so hard to win the right to vote.

All this was undertaken amidst much opposition. Some critics tried to shout down female speakers at conventions; others threw rotten vegetables and books when women lectured at the podium. Most ministers were dead-set against female equality and against women stepping outside their assigned sphere. Ministers spoke up at conventions, quoting scripture that advocated women’s silence and secondary status. Congressmen and state legislators countered suffragists’ demands by insisting that if women voted, family harmony would dissipate and marriages would fail. If women voted, they would threaten their allegedly delicate natures by exposing themselves to the rough and tumble of politics. Politicians insisted that women were not well-informed and could not make sound political judgments. But as the former slave Sojourner Truth wisely observed, “It is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give [them] up.” Other critics feared the impact that college education might have on women, insisting that female bodies were closed energy systems. College women engaged in learning at the very time their bodies matured and thus drew vital juices from the “female apparatus” to their brains.

Perhaps most discouraging of all during the seventy-two-year fight for suffrage was women’s indifference or opposition. Understandably, many women were too busy, exhausted, or overwhelmed to have the time and energy to do anything other than make it through each day.  Issues regarding gender equality and suffrage had little impact on their daily lives. But as Quaker minister and activist Lucretia Mott commented, “So circumscribed have been her limits that she does not realize the misery of her condition.” In addition, by the late nineteenth century, a number of women began to organize to oppose female suffrage, preferring their dependence on men. Female opponents founded associations that sought to impede women’s advancement, ironically using the same political tactics that they denounced as unseemly for women.

Fortunately for us today, much has changed, and enormous strides have occurred in women’s lives since the nineteenth century. Those who fought so tirelessly and with such determination long ago would feel some pride if they could see American women today. They would also recognize, as the “Shriver Report” highlights, that gender equality still remains elusive in some areas. But we cannot truly understand women’s status today unless we give it historical context. We need to recognize and pay homage to our amazing foremothers who first identified women’s oppression and devoted their lives to making our nation a more democratic society.