Harriet Beecher Stowe's Multifaceted Response to the Nineteenth

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Multifaceted Response to the Nineteenth-Century Woman Question amy easton-flake Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/86/1/29/1793865/tneq_a_00256.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 N the decade following the American Civil War, the I renowned children of Lyman Beecher each took his or her own position along the broad spectrum of debate con- cerning woman suffrage. Henry Ward Beecher served as the first president of the American Woman Suffrage Association (estab. 1869); Isabella Beecher Hooker worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the National Woman Suffrage Association (estab. 1869); Catharine Beecher helped found the first female-led antisuffrage association, the Anti-Sixteenth Amendment Society (estab. 1870); and Harriet Beecher Stowe, despite pressure from her siblings and other movement leaders and an obvious interest in the issue, re- mained aloof from all organized groups. In the absence of any definitive statement from her, each faction claimed her as an advocate. Between 1870 and 1871, for example, each organi- zation’s journal either listed Stowe as a contributor or quoted from her writings.1 In recent years, literary critics Josephine Donovan and Bar- bara A. White have investigated Stowe’s relation to suffrage 1Stanton listed both Isabella Beecher Hooker and Harriet Beecher Stowe as “prin- cipal contributors” (p. 397)inthe23 December 1869 Revolution, organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association, although Stowe never contributed a single piece of writ- ing to it. Stowe did contribute numerous pieces to the Woman’s Journal. For instance, she praised the Woman’s Journal for its “conservative religious tone” and for not following George Sand and the French Woman’s movement (3 September 1870,p.273). The antisuffrage journal True Woman quoted extensively from Stowe’s novels My Wife and I and Pink and White Tyranny in August 1871,p.44. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXVI, no. 1 (March 2013). C 2013 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 29 30 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY movements.2 However, with the exception of noting her writings in antisuffrage publications and her comments that the vote would not solve women’s problems and should not be granted immediately, scholars have largely ignored Stowe’s in- volvement with or attitude toward antisuffrage organizations. Moreover, even though her primary manifesto on the Woman Question, her novel My Wife and I, brought her more letters Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/86/1/29/1793865/tneq_a_00256.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 than any of her works except Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it too has received little attention of late.3 If we place Stowe’s fictional and nonfictional works in conversation with both suffrage and antisuffrage associations and ideas, her contributions to the Woman Question become clear. Building on key tenets of both the suffrage and antisuffrage movements yet conforming to no specific creed, Stowe’s idiosyncratic vision of progressive wom- anhood is at once optimistic and multidimensional. Given her larger-than-life profile in the nineteenth century’s cultural, social, and political spheres, then, Stowe’s views about women’s place in a postwar society merit serious attention from histori- ans and literary critics alike, no less for what they say about the movements in general than for what they reveal about Stowe. The Context: Suffrage and Antisuffrage Organizations The Fifteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress in Febru- ary 1869 to grant black men the right to vote, ripped the woman’s rights movement in two. At the time, the Equal Rights Association, which had been founded in 1866 to promote both 2Josephine Donovan, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Feminism,” American Transcen- dental Quarterly 47–48 (1980): 141–57; Barbara A. White, The Beecher Sisters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 141–53. 3As Robert Forrest Wilson observes in Crusader in Crinoline: The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), “After its book-publication Harriet remarked that only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had brought her more letters from readers. When the story ended [in its serialized form] in the autumn of 1871,theChristian Union [in which it had appeared] had a circulation of nearly 90,000,atleasthalfof which had been added by the serial” (p. 566). Joan D. Hedrick corrects this number in her Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)to 133,000 (p. 379) and adds that when My Wife and I was brought out in book form it sold over 50,000 copies (p. 468). Commentary on the novel’s relation to woman’s rights appears almost exclusively in histories of the Beecher sisters. STOWE AND THE WOMAN QUESTION 31 racial and gender equality, accepted the prioritization of black over woman suffrage. Angered and dismayed, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony withdrew to form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in May 1869. Six months later, in November, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, who con- tinued to hold fast to the ERA’s founding principles, officially organized the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).4 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/86/1/29/1793865/tneq_a_00256.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Each new group pursued differing organizational models and strategies: the NWSA leadership was made up primarily of women and focused on obtaining the vote through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution; the AWSA leadership was com- posed of both men and women and concentrated on obtaining the vote through state amendments. The two groups diverged as well over issues and argument: the NWSA brought marriage, divorce, and the sexual division of labor into the debate;5 whereas the AWSA, which billed itself as a conservative al- ternative to the NWSA, refrained from a holistic critique of women’s position in American society and concentrated almost exclusively on obtaining the vote. Although personal rivalries and tactical disagreements dis- tanced the two organizations from one another until 1890, both sought to alter entrenched societal beliefs. One partic- ularly significant shift was to classify the individual, rather than the family, as the basic unit of society. As suffrage historian Ellen Carol DuBois explains, “Citizenship represented a rela- tionship to the larger society that was entirely and explicitly outside the boundaries of women’s familial relations. As citi- zens and voters, women would participate directly in society as individuals, not indirectly through their subordinate position 4For more information on the original break, see Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 150–52; Israel Kugler, From Ladies to Women: The Organized Struggle for Woman’s Rights in the Reconstruction Era (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 72–85; and Sally Gregory McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 177. 5Divorce reform was a major point of contention between the two groups. Stanton thought it was a central concern, but Stone, who considered marriage a lifelong com- mitment, did not believe divorce should be made easier to obtain. For more details, see Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Women’s Rights and the American Political Tradition (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 139. 32 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY as wives and mothers.”6 In promoting an independent status for women in the political sphere, early suffragists were not, by and large, advocating comprehensive gender equality. Although many may not have valued women’s traditional domestic roles as highly as Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catharine did, most early suffragists considered the private sphere the proper purview for most women. As DuBois writes, “No suf- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/86/1/29/1793865/tneq_a_00256.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 fragist of whom I am aware, including the otherwise iconoclas- tic Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seriously suggested that men take equal responsibilities with women for domestic activities. To nineteenth-century feminists, domestic activities seemed as ‘naturally’ female as child bearing, and as little subject to social manipulation.”7 As DuBois’s comments suggest, we have been all too ready to view women’s vanguard movement from a twenty-first- century feminist perspective rather than within its nineteenth- century historical context. In fact, there was a surprising degree of overlap between suffrage and female-led antisuffrage organizations, such as the Anti-Sixteenth Amendment Society— founded in 1870 by Madeline Vinton Dahlgren, Almira Lin- coln Phelps, Charlotte McKay, and Catharine Beecher8—but because antisuffrage was such a widespread, long-lasting, and most often male-directed phenomenon, scholars have tended to view the relatively limited number of female-led initiatives within the larger opposition effort and, therefore, have often misunderstood those groups.9 Contrary to today’s popular 6Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), p. 34. 7DuBois, Woman Suffrage, pp. 33–34. 8The Anti-Sixteenth Amendment Society was established to oppose Anthony’s fed- eral suffrage amendment (a potential sixteenth amendment). Presenting their own proposal to the United States Senate, the group focused on reforming property, marriage, and divorce laws; a remonstrance signed by five thousand women set forth their objections to woman suffrage. For more information, see Thomas J. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson Publishing, 1994), p. 3, and Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), p.

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