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Women's rights and the Seneca Falls Convention

Women lead the charges in many antebellum reforms, from transcendentalism to temperance to abolition. While leading these reforms, women gained the political traction to begin the first wave of US feminism. Paradoxically, the cult of domesticity—the view that women should remain relegated to the household—played a role in encouraging women’s participation in public movements. Women who rallied for temperance, for example, highlighted their role as moral guardians of the home to advocate against intoxication. Some women argued for a much more expansive role—educating children and men in solid republican principles, like liberty and justice.

Feminist appeals of the early 19th century drew heavily on religion, spurred by the spiritual revivals of the Second Great Awakening. But it was work in antislavery efforts that served as a springboard for women to take action against gender inequality. Northern women particularly came to the conclusion that they, like enslaved people, were held in shackles in a society dominated by men.

Two leading abolitionist women, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, played major roles in combining the fight to end slavery with the struggle to achieve female equality. The Grimké sisters had been born into a prosperous slaveholding family in South Carolina. Both were caught up in the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, and they moved to the North.

In the mid-1830s, the sisters joined the abolitionist movement, and in 1837, they embarked on a public lecture tour, during which they promoted abolition to audiences of both women and men, known as promiscuous assemblies. This public action thoroughly scandalized respectable society, where it was unheard of for women to lecture to men. William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the famous abolitionist newspaper,  The Liberator  endorsed the Grimké sisters’ public lectures, but other abolitionists did not. Their lecture tour served as a turning point—the reaction against them propelled the question of women’s proper sphere in society to the forefront of public debate.

Seneca Falls and The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments

Participation in the abolitionist movement led many women to rally for the cause of their own subjugation, which was compared to—but unequal to—that of African Americans at the time. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony lead the movement. Anthony left such a legacy for the feminist cause that progressive women everywhere were called Suzy Bs. The public considered Elizabeth Cady Stanton quite radical for suggesting that women should have the right to vote in the 1840s.

In 1848, about 300 male and female feminists, many of them veterans of the abolition campaign, gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York for a conference on women’s rights that was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It was the first of what became annual meetings that have continued to the present day. Attendees agreed to a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments based on the Declaration of Independence. It declared, “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,” the document continued, “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.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the principal author of the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, and Susan B. Anthony. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Republican Motherhood

Some northern female reformers saw new and vital roles for their sex in the realm of education. They believed in traditional gender roles, viewing women as inherently more moral and nurturing than men. Because of these attributes, the feminists argued, women were uniquely qualified to take up the roles of educators of children. This idea began in the late 1700s but was codified and gained support during the mid-1800s with the rise of the first women's rights movement.

Catherine Beecher, the daughter of Lyman Beecher and sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, pushed for women’s roles as educators. In her 1845 book, The Duty of American Women to Their Country, she argued that the United States had lost its moral compass due to democratic excess. Both “intelligence and virtue” were imperiled in an age of riots and disorder. Women, she argued, could restore the moral center by instilling in children a sense of right and wrong. Beecher represented a northern, middle-class female sensibility. The home, especially the parlor, became the site of northern female authority. This can be seen in James Peale's The artist and his family. The mother is the subject in the foreground, while the man is physically blocked by her figure, signifying the dominant role she plays caring for the children.

The spirit of religious awakening and reform in the antebellum era impacted women’s lives by allowing them to think about their lives and their society in new and empowering ways. Although this early phase of American feminism did not lead to political rights for women immediately—it was eclipsed by the fight for abolition in the mid 19th century—it began the long process of overcoming gender inequality in America.

The Temperance Movement

by Alice W. Campbell https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/religious/the-temperance-movement/

“Temperance” by Piero del Pollaiolo (1443-1496), Uffizi Gallery Photo: Public Domain

Prior to the 19th century, the word temperance connoted moderation and restraint in appetites and behavior. Representations of the Virtues frequently depicted Temperance as a woman pouring diluting water into a wine cup. Early Temperance advocates in America urged the avoidance of liquors in favor of less intoxicating beverages like beer or wine; many people believed that small amounts of alcohol could be beneficial for one’s health. (Stearns, 1994).

Restraint, however, did not characterize America’s behavior. By 1830, the average American over 15 years old consumed nearly seven gallons of pure alcohol a year – three times as much as we drink today. Among urban factory workers, this level of intoxication created unreliability in the labor force, dismaying employers. At home, women and children often suffered, for they had few legal rights and were utterly dependent on husbands and fathers for support. (Burns & Novick, 2011).

19th Century USA Temperance Union Pledge Photo: Courtesy of VCU Libraries Thompson Collection of Lincolniana,

 

Rise of Temperance Societies

During the first half of the 19th century, as drunkenness and its social consequences increased, temperance societies formed in Great Britain and the United States. These societies were typically religious groups that sponsored lectures and marches, sang songs, and published tracts that warned about the destructive consequences of alcohol.  Eventually these temperance societies began to promote the virtues of abstinence or “teetotalism.” By the 1830s and 1840s many societies in the United States began asking people to sign “pledges” promising to abstain from all intoxicating beverages.

The Women’s Christian Temperance Union

The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)  was founded in Ohio in November of 1874, and grew out of the “Woman’s Crusade” of the winter of 1873-1874. At a time when women had few opportunities for influence, or even to speak in public, the WCTU began to mobilize women to reform society.  The organization spread across the nation. Local chapters of the group were called “Unions” and were largely autonomous, but linked to the state and national organization. In time, the WCTU would become the largest woman’s organization in the United States. The white ribbon was selected to symbolize purity, and the WCTU’s watchwords were “Agitate – Educate – Legislate.” (Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, n.d.)

The temperance movement’s first successes were on the local and state level, but their aspirations were national. A number of other groups built on the foundation laid by the WCTU. The Prohibition Party, founded in 1869, played an important role in the temperance movement’s push for a constitutional amendment banning the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” (the Eighteenth Amendment). The Prohibition Party remains the oldest existing third party in the U.S. Though women did not yet have the right to vote, the Prohibition Party became the first to accept women as party members. (Anderson, 2011)

James Peale, The artist and his family, 1795, depicting the Republican Motherhood. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The spirit of religious awakening and reform in the antebellum era impacted women’s lives by allowing them to think about their lives and their society in new and empowering ways. Although this early phase of American feminism did not lead to political rights for women immediately—it was eclipsed by the fight for abolition in the mid 19th century—it began the long process of overcoming gender inequality in America.