Contemporaries sometimes called the nineteenth century
"The Woman’s Century." Certainly it
is true that there were dramatic changes in the status
and rights of women between the 1790s and 1900, foreshadowing
even greater changes in the twentieth century. Most
people who are interested in the subject at all know
a little about the women’s suffrage movement and
its fifty-two year battle to amend the Constitution
so that white women could vote. (Other women had to
wait another forty years.) But while suffrage was an
important part of the larger movement for women’s
rights, it was only a part. The 300 or so women and
men who came to Seneca Falls in 1848 cut a much wider
path than suffrage when they boldly declared that men
and women were created equal, and that the history of
mankind “is a history of repeated injuries and
usurpations on the part of men toward women . . .”
For evidence they included a long list of grievances.
Before this could happen, some women had had to think
and write about their own condition. We have no idea
how many women had long wondered why they were cut off
from many of the rights and privileges that men enjoyed,
but the first systematic effort to publish an analysis
of women’s situation came in the 1790s in a series
of articles and books written by a Massachusetts woman,
Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820). Like many of her
successors, Murray had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and
had found herself in hearty agreement with its central
argument, which was that what had so long been perceived
as women’s inferior intelligence was not something
inborn, but was a result of women’s lack of education.
The next reflection on what would soon be called “the
woman question” came from another New Englander,
Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829), descendant of the
celebrated Mathers, who had read both Wollstonecraft
and Murray, and who in 1818 published her own somewhat
rambling treatise, Observations on the Real Rights
of Women. She, too, stressed again the idea that
until women had equal educational opportunity, there
could be no basis for judging their minds to be less
able than those of men.
A far more systematic analysis of women’s condition,
also influenced by Wollstonecraft, came from the pen
of Sarah Grimké (1792-1873). Grimké, who
had been born into a Charleston, S.C. slaveholding family,
first became visible in the antislavery movement, where
her background meant that her opposition to slavery
carried particular weight. Her first statement about
women, in Letters on the Equality of the Sexes,
came in 1838. The clarity of her discussion corroborated
her father’s comment that if she had been a man
she would have been a great jurist. It is refreshing
to read her spare, well-argued prose after Crocker’s
rambling discourse. Grimké begins by saying that
she plans to “advance arguments in opposition
to a corrupt public opinion, and to the perverted interpretation
of the Holy Writ. . .” and she proceeds to demonstrate
that the parts of the Bible used to keep women subordinate
had been mistranslated by a male committee. As she grew
older, her views about women’s rights became steadily
more radical as she continued to write, publish, and
talk about the subject. Her friend and mentor Lucretia
Mott wrote later that Grimké had read and admired
Wollstonecraft; however it is possible that Grimké
hesitated to be publicly identified with Wollstonecraft
after William Godwin published his Memoir and
told the world of Wollstonecraft’s out-of-wedlock
child. This revelation enabled critics of Wollstonecraft’s
views about women to raise a hue and cry, vehemently
asserting that she was not to be taken as any model
for American women.
Like Grimké, Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) was extremely
active in the antislavery movement, and she was also
active among the Hicksite Quakers. Early on, she began
to read and think about women, and unlike Grimké,
she openly admired Wollstonecraft. In 1840, attending
the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, she met
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a bride on her honeymoon, and
they had many long talks. (When Stanton came home someone
asked her what she had seen in London. Her answer was
“Lucretia Mott.” It had been a transforming
conversation for her.) Mott took part in shaping the
Seneca Falls Convention, and was a major figure in the
movement. She believed -- and in her own life set an
example for [or exemplified] the belief -- that a woman
could live in the worlds of both activism and domesticity.
No inhibition about scandal kept Margaret Fuller (1810-50)
from declaring allegiance to Wollstonecraft in Woman
in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Although Fuller’s
book is carelessly written and filled with extraneous
material, and therefore very hard to read, her obvious
passion for the idea that women should be free to develop
fully whatever talents they possessed had strong appeal.
Fuller herself ranged widely in her interests. In Notable
American Women, Vol. I she is called author, critic,
teacher, and feminist. She was all these things, and
was recognized by the Transcendentalist philosophers
as one of their own. They chose her to edit The
Dial, the Transcendentalist journal. She grew rapidly
in intellectual stature, and there is no telling what
she might have become had she lived beyond her forty-first
year. As it was, she was -- and still is -- admired
for her intelligence and vigor of thought.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), like Mott, combined
family life with much spoken and written discussion
of women’s status. Stanton was one of those people
who are reasonably sure that the established opinion
on any subject is wrong. She raised seven children and
in the process developed advanced and controversial
theories of child rearing. She helped bring about the
Seneca Falls Convention and shocked even Mott when she
insisted on including a call for the ballot. First to
promote the cause of women and later to help pay for
the education of her children, she spoke all over the
country to large audiences; after each lecture she insisted
on private meetings for women only. She wrote speeches
for Susan B. Anthony, took part in compiling the first
source book for American women’s political history,
edited and published The Woman's Bible to make
the Bible friendlier to women, and in an essay called
“The Solitude of Self,” developed her own
philosophy of womanhood. As long as Mott lived, the
correspondence that she and Stanton kept up continued
to analyze the causes of women's repression.
Although the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
extended well into the twentieth century, no discussion
of nineteenth-century feminists can omit this writer
and thinker. Gilman’s Women and Economics
(1898) made a strong case for women’s economic
independence as the basis for all improvement in their
condition. Gilman was a complex woman of remarkable
intelligence and independent thought, who would have
flourished in the late twentieth century. As it was,
she was much in demand as a lecturer and popular author.
There were many other nineteenth-century American women
talking, thinking, and sometimes writing as they grappled
with society’s general view that women should
be subordinate to men, but the seven women discussed
here raised most of the significant arguments that provided
the underpinning for changes in law and custom that
were visible in their own time and that accelerated
in the next century. For anyone interested in the history
of American women, there is no substitute for reading
what these seven women had to say in their own words
and sensing the deep feeling that those words represented.
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