Unit 2 1870: Gender and the Reconstruction of American Democracy

Manisha Sinha Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study ’20 James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut https://history.uconn.edu/faculty-by-name/manisha-sinha/

International Council of Women, Washington, D.C., 1888, Seneca Falls Historical Site

The year 1870 marked an important turning point in the history of women’s suffrage in the United States. The decades preceding 1870 witnessed the emergence of a women’s rights movement and women’s activism within the movement to abolish slavery. Women’s activism reached its zenith during the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Most women involved in these campaigns saw their own cause as interconnected with that of enslaved and, after emancipation, freedpeople. However, with the passage of the 14th and 15th constitutional amendments that enfranchised adult Black men, women’s suffragists divided into two groups: those who retained their commitment to abolitionist feminism and those who sought to fight for women’s rights by any means necessary, including an expedient repudiation of the abolitionist commitment to racial equality.

Women’s rights activists organized themselves into two competing suffrage organizations and, after 1870, continued their long battle for the vote. Many forms of subsequent women’s activism—in temperance, social reform, churches, and clubs— intersected with the suffrage movement, because prominent women in these endeavors were suffragists. African American women developed their own organizations and clubs to fight both for the franchise and against new forms of racial oppression after the end of Reconstruction. After the schism in the suffrage movement, African American women were the true inheritors of the legacy of intersectional abolitionist feminism, fighting simultaneously for Black and women’s rights. Even as suffragists drew on lessons learned from Reconstruction politics—the use of federal law and constitutional amendments to win rights—evocations of racist ideas and tactics by some of them would bedevil the suffrage movement.

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Week 1: Women’s Mobilization During the Civil War and Reconstruction

The Civil War and Reconstruction marked the high point of abolitionist feminism. Women campaigned for emancipation and Black rights, and northern women were active in behalf of the Union cause. In 1863, white and Black abolitionist feminists formed the Women’s National Loyal League, which sent thousands of petitions for emancipation to Congress. During the war, Black and white northern women joined freedmen’s aid and relief societies and became teachers in freedmen’s schools. Other women, such as Mary Livermore, worked for the United States Sanitary Commission and became suffragists after the war. Freedwomen in the South fought their enslavers, combated racial and sexual abuse, and sought to use the Freedmen’s Bureau to protect their rights in freedom. African American women became politically active in the Republican Party and Reconstruction politics even though they had no right to vote. Some of them, including the Rollins sisters of South Carolina, founded the first women’s suffrage organizations in the South.

Primary Sources:

Selections from Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (1863). http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3837

Selections from Woman’s National Loyal League, Proceedings of the Meeting of the Loyal Women of the Republic, Held in New York, May 14, 1863 (New York, 1863). https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofmee00wome/page/10/mode/2up

2 Selections from Mary Livermore, My Story of the War (Hartford, CT, 1888). https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822020059424&view=1up&seq=1

Selections from Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences from My Life in Camp (Boston, 1902). https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/taylorsu/taylorsu.html

Selections from Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 382–511. (not available in open access digital format)

Selections from Rupert Sargent Holland, ed., Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884 (Cambridge, MA, 1912). https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005789561

Secondary Sources:

Elsa Barkley-Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865–1880,” in Ann D. Gordon et al., eds., African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 73–88.

Carol Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

Mary Framer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

Thavolia Glymph, The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battle for Home, Freedom, and Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1991).

Suggested Assignments:

Look at the digitized records of The Liberator (1860–1865), available from the Boston Public Library, to explore the following topics:

• The war work of abolitionist women

• The experiences of freedwomen during the Civil War

3 • Speeches and writings by northern women during the war

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Week 2: The Emergence of the Suffrage Movement During Reconstruction

During Reconstruction, abolitionist feminists formed the American Equal Rights Association to fight for Black and women’s suffrage. A schism developed in the organization when a group of suffragists led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony decided to oppose the 14th and 15th Amendments (passed in 1868 and 1870 respectively), which gave Black men the right to vote. Stanton and Anthony partnered with racist Democrats who wanted to overthrow Reconstruction. Most abolitionist feminists supported the Reconstruction amendments and were shocked by Stanton and Anthony’s expedient tactics. They called instead for a 16th Amendment that would enfranchise women. By 1869, the women’s movement had split between abolitionist feminists like Frances Watkins Harper and Lucy Stone, who founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, and suffragists led by Stanton and Anthony, who founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. In the 1870s, Black and white suffragists from both groups would try to vote under the 14th Amendment.

Primary Sources:

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “We Are All Bound Up Together” speech, National Woman Rights Convention, (1866). https://www.blackpast.org/african-american- history/1866-frances-ellen-watkins-harper-we-are-all-bound-together/

Lucy Stone, Woman Suffrage in New Jersey. An Address Delivered by Lucy Stone Before the New Jersey Legislature (Boston: C.H. Simonds, 1867). https://www.loc.gov/item/09032760/

Reconstruction Constitutional Amendments, 13th, 14th & 15th Amendments. https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1524

Susan B. Anthony, “Is It a Crime for a US Citizen to Vote?” (1873). https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/anthony-is-it-a-crime-speech-text/

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self” (1892). https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/solitude-of-self.htm

4 Secondary Sources:

Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Nell Irvin Painter, “Voice of Suffrage: Sojourner Truth, Frances Watkins Harper, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage,” in Jean H. Baker, ed., Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42–55.

Alison M. Parker, Articulating Rights: Nineteenth-Century American Women on Race, Reform, and the State (De Kalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

Manisha Sinha, “The Other Frances Ellen Watkins Harper,” Common Place, 16, no. 2 (Winter 2016). http://commonplace.online/article/the-other-frances-ellen- watkins- harper/

Brent Staples, “When the Suffrage Movement Sold Out to White Supremacy,” New York Times, February 2, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/sunday/women-voting-19th- amendment-white-supremacy.html

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850– 1920 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

Suggested Assignments:

Look through the digitized Blackwell Family Papers at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library and explore the personal and political partnership between Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone in the suffrage movement.

Explore further the thought of the Black abolitionist feminist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper by scanning through her published writings in Frances Smith Foster, ed., A Brighter Day Coming: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1990.

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Suggestions for Further Exploration

Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Ellen Du Bois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).

Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000).

Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

Sally G. McMillen, Lucy Stone: An Unapologetic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

Lynn Sherr, Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words (New York: Times Books, 1995).Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981).

Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Wendy Hamand Venet, A Strong-Minded Woman: The Life of Mary Livermore (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

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