“They do not appear to be satisfied with having unsexed themselves, but they desire to unsex every female in the land,” said a New York assemblyman who opposed one of the first petitions for a married woman’s right to property and earnings. Since “God created man as the representative of the race,” then “took from his side the material for woman’s creation” and returned her to his side in matrimony as “one flesh, one being,” the assembly smugly denied the petition: “A higher power than that from which emanates legislative enactments has given forth the mandate that man and woman shall not be equal.”4
The myth that these women were “unnatural monsters” was based on the belief that to destroy the God-given subservience of women would destroy the home and make slaves of men. Such myths arise in every kind of revolution that advances a new portion of the family of man to equality. The image of the feminists as inhuman, fiery man-eaters, whether expressed as an offense against God or in the modern terms of sexual perversion, is not unlike the stereotype of the Negro as a primitive animal or the union member as an anarchist. What the sexual terminology hides is the fact that the feminist movement was a revolution. There were excesses, of course, as in any revolution, but the excesses of the feminists were in themselves a demonstration of the revolution’s necessity. They stemmed from, and were a passionate repudiation of, the degrading realities of woman’s life, the helpless subservience behind the gentle decorum that made women objects of such thinly veiled contempt to men that they even felt contempt for themselves. Evidently, that contempt and self-contempt were harder to get rid of than the conditions which caused them.
Of course they envied man. Some of the early feminists cut their hair short and wore bloomers, and tried to be like men. From the lives they saw their mothers lead, from their own experience, those passionate women had good reason to reject the conventional image of woman. Some even rejected marriage and motherhood for themselves. But in turning their backs on the old feminine image, in fighting to free themselves and all women, some of them became a different kind of woman. They became complete human beings.
The name of Lucy Stone today brings to mind a man-eating fury, wearing pants, brandishing an umbrella. It took a long time for the man who loved her to persuade her to marry him, and though she loved him and kept his love throughout her long life, she never took his name. When she was born, her gentle mother cried: “Oh, dear! I am sorry it is a girl. A woman’s life is so hard.” A few hours before the baby came, this mother, on a farm in western Massachusetts in 1818, milked eight cows because a sudden thunderstorm had called all hands into the field: it was more important to save the hay crop than to safeguard a mother on the verge of childbirth. Though this gentle, tired mother carried the endless work of farmhouse and bore nine children, Lucy Stone grew up with the knowledge that “There was only one will in our house, and that was my father’s.”
She rebelled at being born a girl if that meant being as lowly as the Bible said, as her mother said. She rebelled when she raised her hand at church meetings and, time and again, it was not counted. At a church sewing circle, where she was making a shirt to help a young man through theological seminary, she heard Mary Lyon talk of education for women. She left the shirt unfinished, and at sixteen started teaching school for $1 a week, saving her earnings for nine years, until she had enough to go to college herself. She wanted to train herself “to plead not only for the slave, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my own sex.” But at Oberlin, where she was one of the first women to graduate from the “regular course,” she had to practice public speaking secretly in the woods. Even at Oberlin, the girls were forbidden to speak in public.
Washing the men’s clothes, caring for their rooms, serving them at table, listening to their orations, but themselves remaining respectfully silent in public assemblages, the Oberlin “coeds” were being prepared for intelligent motherhood and a properly subservient wifehood.5
In appearance, Lucy Stone was a little woman, with a gentle, silvery voice which could quiet a violent mob. She lectured on abolition Saturdays and Sundays, as an agent for the Anti-Slavery Society, and for women’s rights the rest of the week on her own—facing down and winning over men who threatened her with clubs, threw prayer books and eggs at her head, and once in mid-winter shoved a hose through a window and turned icy water on her.
In one town, the usual report was circulated that a big, masculine woman, wearing boots, smoking a cigar, swearing like a trooper, had arrived to lecture. The ladies who came to hear this freak expressed their amazement to find Lucy Stone, small and dainty, dressed in a black satin gown with a white lace frill at the neck, “a prototype of womanly grace…fresh and fair as the morning.”6
Her voice so rankled pro-slavery forces that the Boston Post published a rude poem promising “fame’s loud trumpet shall be blown” for the man who “with a wedding kiss shuts up the mouth of Lucy Stone.” Lucy Stone felt that “marriage is to a woman a state of slavery.” Even after Henry Blackwell had pursued her from Cincinnati to Massachusetts (“She was born locomotive,” he complained), and vowed to “repudiate the supremacy of either woman or man in marriage,” and wrote her: “I met you at Niagara and sat at your feet by the whirlpool looking down into the dark waters with a passionate and unshared and unsatisfied yearning in my heart that you will never know, nor understand,” and made a public speech in favor of women’s rights; even after she admitted that she loved him, and wrote “You can scarcely tell me anything I do not know about the emptiness of a single life,” she suffered blinding migraine headaches over the decision to marry him.
At their wedding, the minister Thomas Higginson reported that “the heroic Lucy cried like any village bride.” The minister also said: “I never perform the marriage ceremony without a renewed sense of the iniquity of a system by which man and wife are one, and that one is the husband.” And he sent to the newspapers, for other couples to copy, the pact which Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell joined hands to make, before their wedding vows:
While we acknowledge our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife…we deem it a duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.7
Lucy Stone, her friend, the pretty Reverend Antoinette Brown (who later married Henry’s brother), Margaret Fuller, Angelina Grimké, Abby Kelley Foster—all resisted early marriage, and did not, in fact, marry until in their battle against slavery and for women’s rights they had begun to find an identity as women unknown to their mothers. Some, like Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Blackwell, never married; Lucy Stone kept her own name in more than symbolic fear that to become a wife was to die as a person. The concept known as “femme couverte” (covered woman), written into the law, suspended the “very being or legal existence of a woman” upon marriage. “To a married woman, her new self is her superior, her companion, her master.”
If it is true that the feminists were “disappointed women,” as their enemies said even then, it was because almost all women living under such conditions had reason to be disappointed. In one of the most moving speeches of her life, Lucy Stone said in 1855:
From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after sources of knowledge, I was reproved with “It isn’t fit for you; it doesn’t belong to women”…In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.8
In her own lifetime, Lucy Stone saw the laws of almost every state radically changed in regard to women, high schools opened to them and two-thirds of the colleges in the United States. Her husband and her daughter, Alic
e Stone Blackwell, devoted their lives, after her death in 1893, to the unfinished battle for woman’s vote. By the end of her passionate journey, she could say she was glad to have been born a woman. She wrote her daughter the day before her seventieth birthday:
I trust my Mother sees and knows how glad I am to have been born, and at a time when there was so much that needed help at which I could lend a hand. Dear Old Mother! She had a hard life, and was sorry she had another girl to share and bear the hard life of a woman…. But I am wholly glad that I came.9
In certain men, at certain times in history, the passion for freedom has been as strong or stronger than the familiar passions of sexual love. That this was so, for many of those women who fought to free women, seems to be a fact, no matter how the strength of that other passion is explained. Despite the frowns and jeers of most of their husbands and fathers, despite the hostility if not outright abuse they got for their “unwomanly” behavior, the feminists continued their crusade. They themselves were tortured by soul-searching doubts every step of the way. It was unladylike, friends wrote Mary Lyon, to travel all over New England with a green velvet bag, collecting money to start her college for women. “What do I do that is wrong?” she asked. “I ride in the stage-coach or cars without an escort…. My heart is sick, my soul is pained with this empty gentility, this genteel nothingness. I am doing a great work, I cannot come down.”
The lovely Angelina Grimké felt as if she would faint, when she accepted what was meant as a joke and appeared to speak before the Massachusetts legislature on the anti-slavery petitions, the first woman ever to appear before a legislative body. A pastoral letter denounced her unwomanly behavior:
We invite your attention to the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent injury…. The power of woman is her dependence, flowing from the consciousness of that weakness which God has given her for her protection…. But when she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer…her character becomes unnatural. If the vine, whose strength and beauty is to lean on the trellis-work and half conceal its cluster, thinks to assume the independence and overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit, but fall in shame and dishonor in the dust.10
More than restlessness and frustration made her refuse to be “shamed into silence,” and made New England housewives walk two, four, six, and eight miles on winter evenings to hear her.
The emotional identification of American women with the battle to free the slaves may or may not testify to the unconscious foment of their own rebellion. But it is an undeniable fact that, in organizing, petitioning, and speaking out to free the slaves, American women learned how to free themselves. In the South, where slavery kept women at home, and where they did not get a taste of education or pioneering work or the schooling battles of society, the old image of femininity reigned intact, and there were few feminists. In the North, women who took part in the Underground Railroad, or otherwise worked to free the slaves, never were the same again. Feminism also went west with the wagon trains, where the frontier made women almost equal from the beginning. (Wyoming was the first state to give women the vote.) Individually, the feminists seem to have had no more nor less reason than all women of their time to envy or hate man. But what they did have was self-respect, courage, strength. Whether they loved or hated man, escaped or suffered humiliation from men in their own lives, they identified with women. Women who accepted the conditions which degraded them felt contempt for themselves and all women. The feminists who fought those conditions freed themselves of that contempt and had less reason to envy man.
The call to that first Woman’s Rights Convention came about because an educated woman, who had already participated in shaping society as an abolitionist, came face to face with the realities of a housewife’s drudgery and isolation in a small town. Like the college graduate with six children in the suburb of today, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, moved by her husband to the small town of Seneca Falls, was restless in a life of baking, cooking, sewing, washing and caring for each baby. Her husband, an abolitionist leader, was often away on business. She wrote:
I now understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated household and the impossibility of woman’s best development if in contact the chief part of her life with servants and children…. The general discontent I felt with woman’s portion…and the wearied, anxious look of the majority of women, impressed me with the strong feeling that some active measures should be taken…. I could not see what to do or where to begin—my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.11
She put only one notice in the newspapers, and housewives and daughters who had never known any other kind of life came in wagons from a radius of fifty miles to hear her speak.
However dissimilar their social or psychological roots, all who led the battle for women’s rights, early and late, also shared more than common intelligence, fed by more than common education for their time. Otherwise, whatever their emotions, they would not have been able to see through the prejudices which had justified woman’s degradation, and to put their dissenting voice into words. Mary Wollstonecraft educated herself and was then educated by that company of English philosophers then preaching the rights of man. Margaret Fuller was taught by her father to read the classics of six languages, and was caught up in the transcendentalist group around Emerson. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father, a judge, got his daughter the best education then available, and supplemented it by letting her listen to his law cases. Ernestine Rose, the rabbi’s daughter who rebelled against her religion’s doctrine that decreed woman’s inferiority to man, got her education in “free thinking” from the great utopian philosopher Robert Owen. She also defied orthodox religious custom to marry a man she loved. She always insisted, in the bitterest days of the fight for women’s rights, that woman’s enemy was not man. “We do not fight with man himself, but only with bad principles.”
These women were not man-eaters. Julia Ward Howe, brilliant and beautiful daughter of the New York “400” who studied intensively every field that interested her, wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” anonymously, because her husband believed her life should be devoted to him and their six children. She took no part in the suffrage movement until 1868, when she met Lucy Stone, who “had long been the object of one of my imaginary dislikes. As I looked into her sweet, womanly face and heard her earnest voice, I felt that the object of my distaste had been a mere phantom, conjured up by silly and senseless misrepresentations.…I could only say, ‘I am with you.’”12
The irony of that man-eating myth is that the so-called excesses of the feminists arose from their helplessness. When women are considered to have no rights nor to deserve any, what can they do for themselves? At first, it seemed there was nothing they could do but talk. They held women’s rights conventions every year after 1848, in small towns and large, national and state conventions, over and over again—in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Massachusetts. They could talk till doomsday about the rights they did not have. But how do women get legislators to let them keep their own earnings, or their own children after divorce, when they do not even have a vote? How can they finance or organize a campaign to get the vote when they have no money of their own, nor even the right to own property?
The very sensitivity to opinion which such complete dependence breeds in women made every step out of their genteel prison a painful one. Even when they tried to change conditions that were within their power to change, they met ridicule. The fantastically uncomfortable dress “ladies” wore then was a symbol of their bondage: stays so tightly laced they could hardly breathe, half a dozen skirts and petticoats, weighing ten to twelve pounds, so long they swept up refuse from the street. The specter of the feminists taking the pants off men came partly from the “Bloomer” dress—a tunic, knee-length skirt, ankle length pantaloons. Elizabeth Stanton wore it, eagerly at first, to do her housework in comfort
, as a young woman today might wear shorts or slacks. But when the feminists wore the Bloomer dress in public, as a symbol of their emancipation, the rude jokes, from newspaper editors, street corner loafers, and small boys, were unbearable to their feminine sensitivities. “We put the dress on for greater freedom, but what is physical freedom compared to mental bondage,” said Elizabeth Stanton and discarded her “Bloomer” dress. Most, like Lucy Stone, stopped wearing it for a feminine reason: it was not very becoming, except to the extremely tiny, pretty Mrs. Bloomer herself.
Still, that helpless gentility had to be overcome, in the minds of men, in the minds of other women, in their own minds. When they decided to petition for married women’s rights to own property, half the time even the women slammed doors in their faces with the smug remark that they had husbands, they needed no laws to protect them. When Susan Anthony and her women captains collected 6,000 signatures in ten weeks, the New York State Assembly received them with roars of laughter. In mockery, the Assembly recommended that since ladies always get the “choicest tidbits” at the table, the best seat in the carriage, and their choice of which side of the bed to lie on, “if there is any inequity or oppression the gentlemen are the sufferers.” However, they would waive “redress” except where both husband and wife had signed the petition. “In such case, they would recommend the parties to apply for a law authorizing them to change dresses, that the husband may wear the petticoats and the wife the breeches.”
The wonder is that the feminists were able to win anything at all—that they were not embittered shrews but increasingly zestful women who knew they were making history. There is more spirit than bitterness in Elizabeth Stanton, having babies into her forties, writing Susan Anthony that this one truly will be her last, and the fun is just beginning—“Courage, Susan, we will not reach our prime until we’re fifty.” Painfully insecure and self-conscious about her looks—not because of treatment by men (she had suitors) but because of a beautiful older sister and mother who treated a crossed eye as a tragedy—Susan Anthony, of all the nineteenth-century feminist leaders, was the only one resembling the myth. She felt betrayed when the others started to marry and have babies. But despite the chip on her shoulder, she was no bitter spinster with a cat. Traveling alone from town to town, hammering up her meeting notices, using her abilities to the fullest as organizer and lobbyist and lecturer, she made her own way in a larger and larger world.