The Myth of Seneca Falls

Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898

Lisa Tetrault

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781469614281
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

The story of how the women's rights movement began at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is a cherished American myth. The standard account credits founders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott with defining and then leading the campaign for women's suffrage. In her provocative new history, Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Stanton, Anthony, and their peers gradually created and popularized this origins story during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to internal movement dynamics as well as the racial politics of memory after the Civil War. The founding mythology that coalesced in their speeches and writings--most notably Stanton and Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage --provided younger activists with the vital resource of a usable past for the ongoing struggle, and it helped consolidate Stanton and Anthony's leadership against challenges from the grassroots and rival suffragists. As Tetrault shows, while this mythology has narrowed our understanding of the early efforts to champion women's rights, the myth of Seneca Falls itself became an influential factor in the suffrage movement. And along the way, its authors amassed the first archive of feminism and literally invented the modern discipline of women's history. 2015 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians

1. Woman’s Day in the Negro’s Hour 1865–1870

The newly formed American Equal Rights Association (AERA) appeared doomed before it even got started. At its second annual meeting, in 1867—two years after the Civil War had ended—George T. Downing asked whether those assembled would be willing to support the ballot for black men before women. Lucretia Mott confessed that women “had a right to be a little jealous” of such a development, but she tried not to pick sides. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was unequivocal: “I say, no; I would not trust him [black men] with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be . . . despotic.” Abby Kelley Foster then piped up. Women had no claim to priority because they were not “in the same civil, social and political status to-day” as black men, who were now “whipped and beaten by thousands, given up to the most horrible outrages, without that protection which his value as property formerly gave him.” Stanton disagreed. In her view, if there was to be a question of priority, white women—whom she deemed educated and therefore intelligent—must win out. “The safety of the nation as well as the interests of women,” she railed, “demand that we outweigh this incoming tide of ignorance, poverty and vice, with the virtue, wealth and education of the women of the country.” To which an outraged and astonished woman shouted, “Shame! shame! shame!”¹

Tensions over priority—who would vote first, black men or white women—wracked the AERA from its inception. Feminist-abolitionists had organized the AERA a year prior in an effort to jumpstart the women’s rights movement, which had suspended operations during the Civil War. What that movement now stood for—in a world where slavery existed no more—sparked intense debate. The AERA was dedicated to the enfranchisement of both black men and all women, in theory. But the practicalities of building a viable campaign around those goals—not widely supported by the general population—proved immediately vexing. Women’s and black men’s simultaneous enfranchisement seemed politically unrealistic to some. As a result, reformers began arguing among themselves about who should take priority. These clashes intensified over the late 1860s and early 1870s, splitting the feminist-abolitionist coalition into rival factions that lasted for decades.²

Disagreements over how to define a postwar rights agenda had a profound and lasting effect upon feminist memory practices. These debates drove some reformers to reach backward in an effort to chart a way forward. Very quickly, women began to make claims about where an antebellum women’s movement had begun, and they began to characterize that ostensible beginning in particular ways. Those characterizations generally expressed their hopes for the movement’s future. Pinpointing the origins of women’s rights would be an elusive target, however. It would be decades before any story won out. Although the stories postwar suffragists created centered on antebellum events, those stories were emphatically about elevating the importance of the vote in a postwar rights agenda as well as navigating the treacherous terrain of postwar politics. Put another way, the story of Seneca Falls was emphatically a post–Civil War story. To locate the roots of a Seneca Falls mythology, and to understand how it operated as both a resource and a strategy, requires looking here, at the late 1860s, where the battle over beginnings began.

The American Equal Rights Association

Quickly, and for complicated reasons, members of the antebellum abolition and women’s rights movements, which had overlapping membership, each decided upon the extension of voting rights, or enfranchisement, as the best guarantor of freedom and equality. With slavery ended, questions about the status of formerly enslaved persons consumed postwar politics. Were freedpeople citizens? If so, did they have the same citizenship rights as whites? What did freedom mean? Few people agreed. Freedpeople themselves demanded a host of rights, from land to the right to serve on juries.³ Many northern abolitionists, however, quickly settled upon voting rights as the innovation most needed, overlooking the broad constellation of freedpeople’s demands. Senator Charles Sumner, a leading Radical Republican (meaning those who supported some degree of equal rights for freed persons) argued that the ballot was “the great guarantee and the only sufficient guarantee” of human rights.⁴ “The ballot is the one thing needful, without which . . . all other rights will be no better than cobwebs, which the master will break through with impunity. To him who has the ballot all other things shall be given,” Sumner thundered.⁵ This broader political emphasis on the vote as a “sufficient guarantee” of freedom changed the ways in which some women defined a rights agenda after the Civil War. An antebellum women’s rights movement had been about a host of demands, of which the vote was only one. Now, an antebellum women’s rights movement shaded into a postwar women’s suffrage movement. The women who agreed with this shift in emphasis now called themselves suffragists, and they too began arguing that the vote was women’s best guarantee of freedom. But what this new suffrage movement would be—indeed, whether a movement would develop—had yet to be worked out.⁶

The American Equal Rights Association was suffragists’ first attempt at organizing on a national scale. Local women’s rights organizations and women’s suffrage organizations existed in various states, but the AERA was to be national in scope, setting a national agenda—in theory, anyway. It drew many of the same faces that had been arrayed in the antebellum feminist-abolitionist coalition. Lucretia Mott was an important member, as were Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone. Henry Blackwell, Stone’s husband, was a prominent member, as were other leading abolitionist men such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Philips, Robert Purvis, Frederick Douglass (now the nation’s leading African American statesman), and others. Northern black women also played important roles in the AERA. Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Purvis, and Sarah Remond were all members. Truth had been formerly enslaved in New York. She became free in the 1820s, and after a revelation from God became an itinerant preacher as well as an antislavery advocate. Harper, Purvis, and Remond were all born free black women, and they hailed from prominent reform families. They were all antislavery as well as women’s rights activists. The antebellum women’s rights movement had important roots in abolition, and AERA membership showed how important those connections remained after the war.⁷

The relationship between abolitionism and women’s rights had always been troubled, however, with some abolitionist men being tepid in their support for women’s rights. This tension quickly became evident after the war, when the American Anti-Slavery Society refused to support women’s voting rights. In the wake of Union victory, the American Anti-Slavery Society debated its postwar role. Abolition had been won. Was the society’s purpose then ended? Many argued it was not, because freed people did not yet enjoy basic civil rights. They committed the organization to a new goal: African American enfranchisement, as a protector of freedom. But many male abolitionists refused to support universal suffrage, meaning voting rights for all—men and women. Members such as Parker Pillsbury and Stephen Foster—husband of the esteemed women’s rights and antislavery advocate Abby Kelley Foster—tried to get the American Anti-Slavery Society to endorse universal suffrage over so-called manhood suffrage, but they failed.⁸ Wendell Phillips, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s president, famously called this the “Negro’s Hour.”⁹ Black voting rights, he insisted, must come first. Women’s voting rights would follow at some later, unspecified date—a distant, illusory promise. For understandable reasons, many women, and some men, found this deeply objectionable. The AERA was meant to be the American Anti-Slavery Society’s counterpoint, supporting voting rights for all women as well as black men.¹⁰

As the debate over priority within the AERA and the American Anti-Slavery Society underscored, black women found themselves in a difficult position. The Anti-Slavery Society’s support for black voting rights generally meant black male suffrage. Whereas white women in the AERA who demanded women’s voting rights generally meant white female suffrage. Northern black men too fell into the trap of assuming black to be male and women to be white, leaving black women struggling for visibility and access.¹¹ Black women’s rights were therefore frequently eclipsed in these postwar discussions. Women such as Harper, Purvis, Remond, Truth, and others fought to keep black women’s rights at the forefront of a postwar rights agenda. Harper had urged members of the 1866 AERA founding convention to remember that the rights of black men, black women, and white women were all “bound up together,” and that the organization therefore ought to avoid arguments over priority.¹² The battle of Harper and others for recognition—of their existence, their unique needs, and their theoretical contributions to the movement—proved to be particularly difficult and long lived.¹³

All of these tensions came to a head in Kansas in 1867. In that year, the Kansas legislature submitted two referenda to the state’s eligible voters (white men): one for black suffrage and one for woman suffrage. Voters in other northern states had already voted down several black suffrage proposals, but this was the first time any state had put the question of woman suffrage to a popular vote.¹⁴ Seeing Kansas as a litmus test, the AERA sent members to canvass the state in order to drum up support. Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Blackwell arrived that spring. Over the summer and fall, the AERA dispatched others to the state. They hoped Kansas might be an opening wedge in the fight for universal suffrage.

When opportunities opened in Kansas, AERA members were still reeling from the recent passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, for the first time, inserted “male” into the U.S. Constitution. The debates among the feminist-abolitionist coalition over how to define black men’s postwar rights wracked the U.S. Congress as well, which struggled to define the legal status of freedpeople. The proposed amendment extended citizenship to African Americans (which had been denied them since the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision). It also defined citizenship as “male.” This threw women’s citizenship—long presumed—into question. If women weren’t citizens, did they have any legal standing? Were they protected by the U.S. Constitution? Or did they have no legal rights whatsoever? The Fourteenth Amendment raised troubling questions. Instead of opposing its ratification, AERA members turned to Kansas, where they hoped the passage of women’s suffrage would settle these questions. If Kansas declared women voters, then they must be citizens.¹⁵

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Courtesy of the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-118946)

Leading Republican politicians, however, along with a host of abolitionist men, refused to endorse the woman suffrage referendum in Kansas. This frustrat...