EZRA HEYWOOD UNCIVIL LIBERTY: AN ESSAY TO SHOW THE INJUSTICE AND IMPOLICY OF RULING WOMAN WITHOUT HER CONSENT (1873) P RINCIPLES, PROPOSITIONS & D ISCUSSIONS FOR L AND & FREEDOM AN INTRODUCTORY WORD TO THE ANARCHIVE Anarchy is Order! I must Create a System or be enslav d by another Man s. I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create (William Blake) During the 19th century, anarchism has develloped as a result of a social current which aims for freedom and happiness. A number of factors since World War I have made this movement, and its ideas, dissapear little by little under the dust of history. After the classical anarchism of which the Spanish Revolution was one of the last representatives a new kind of resistance was founded in the sixties which claimed to be based (at least partly) on this anarchism. However this resistance is often limited to a few (and even then partly misunderstood) slogans such as Anarchy is order , Property is theft ,... Information about anarchism is often hard to come by, monopolised and intellectual; and therefore visibly disapearing.The anarchive or anarchist archive Anarchy is Order ( in short A.O) is an attempt to make the principles, propositions and discussions of this tradition available again for anyone it concerns. We believe that these texts are part of our own heritage. They don t belong to publishers, institutes or specialists. These texts thus have to be available for all anarchists an other people interested. That is one of the conditions to give anarchism a new impulse, to let the new 2 anarchism outgrow the slogans. This is what makes this project relevant for us: we must find our roots to be able to renew ourselves. We have to learn from the mistakes of our socialist past. History has shown that a large number of the anarchist ideas remain standing, even during the most recent social-economic developments. 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Martin CONTENTS An introductory word to the anarchive ................. 2 Uncivil Liberty : An Essay to Show the Injustice and Impolicy of Ruling Woman Without Her Consent ......... 5 Ezra H. Heywood........................................................ 5 Contents .................................................................. 5 Anarchism and Feminism: Not Just Universal Suffrage................................................................... 6 Introduction............................................................. 7 Uncivil Liberty...................................................... 14 5 ANARCHISM AND FEMINISM: NOT JUST UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE Ezra Heywood the author of the following essay on the woman's movement is regarded as an important influence on Benjamin Tucker. As James J. Martin summed him up in his book Men Against the State, he "is best remembered for his efforts in the propagation of native anti-government thought and literature during a period of transition when radicalism was receding almost to the vanishing point before a wave of post-war sentiment for continued conformity." He helped to bridge the gap between Tucker and his intellectual predecessors. 6 INTRODUCTION In reissuing this famous but long-neglected work for the first time in over a century, it is not intended that it furnish a pretext to leap into the complex controversy concerning "women's rights" which has become increasingly intensified in the last fifteen years. The object is rather to bring attention to an undeservedly obscured figure in American intellectual and ideological history, first of all, and to put on the contemporary record one of the overlooked phases of the struggle to achieve equality before the law, especially, for women in the USA. It has been observed that it has become progressively more difficult to write about any phase of this subject recently, as the language of these times becomes more jagged and hostile, and felicity of expression more and more becomes identified with patronization or condescension. Growing contempt for even the most elementary decencies of politeness and reciprocal civility among far too many, even in public life, has tended to drive from the scene many with something to say, unwilling to brave the blast of contumely and extravagant abuse likely to ensue. An aura of weary futility tends to spread over the entire subject, as it resolves more and more into a combat area reserved for the most intemperate and exaggerated polemic. And the combatants have frequently been various factions of women with one another, and not exclusively women challenging men in the enjoyment of traditional or conventional legalized advantages. In reality, the so-called "battle of the sexes" has been featured by extensive and continuous fraternization with the enemy on both sides, and periods of active enmity have been matched by eras of cordiality, as well as acts of mutual assistance and cooperation in many worthwhile 7 achievements. And this is so even in matters intellectual, though in some areas the paucity of female contributors has sparked accusations of conspiratorial scheming to deprive them of access. The American Civil War, like all profound and sweeping cataclysms, unleashed a wide variety of impulses and tendencies involving change. With the end of Negro slavery, the energy once spent in this drive was soon to be channeled to many other causes. The histories of'reform list a formidable array of interests which took the place of anti- slavery in the generation roughly after 1865, a much-told story which does not need be recounted once more here. One of these, even over a century ago, was called the "women's rights movement," though it, like many others, had an ancestry which went back well before that time. There have been certain conventions dealing with the historical narrative which concern this aspect of the country's social history. A well-informed person may become familiar with the life and labors of Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Fuller, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Dorothea Dix, Frances Willard, perhaps Lucy Stone, and surely Carrie Nation (and spiced probably with a few figures of the likes of Calamity Jane Canary). But it is not likely that this education will include acquaintance with such a brilliant and radical mind as Frances Wright. And while the numerous and sustained efforts to obtain the right to vote may be memorialized, it was not until very recent times that one was likely to be reminded of Victoria Woodhull, who ran for the presidency of the United States on a minority party ticket in 1872, almost 50 years before women were legally eligible to participate in national elections. This act of boldness and daring even now impels 'liberal' proper thinkers to recoil in 8 embarrassment, and to persist in smearing her as a "primitive muckraker" and an unbalanced 'nut.' (Her part in her spirited weekly paper in bringing back down to earth, among the rest of the mortals, the celebrated preacher Henry Ward Beecher, has been detailed in a succession of works.) Undoubtedly, conventional school histories still overlook very many women whose achievements have merited considerable respect in all quarters. But women are as divided among themselves as to whom they should hold in honor, and their range of attainments is about as wide as that of men. It would seem however that the problem is far from resolved. An example: while women were rejoicing in finally achieving "the vote" and formally entering national politics, who among them made a point of denouncing the gross injustice resulting to Dr. Mary E. Walker from the workings of these same politics at almost that same moment? The second woman to graduate from Syracuse University Medical School and a contract surgeon with the Union Army, she had been the first woman to receive the country's highest military distinction, the Congressional Medal of Honor, in 1866, only to be deprived of this honor fifty years later by an incredible ex post facto law and the workings of an entirely male bureaucratic caper. Here indeed was a 'free spirit'of the first rank, 'notorious'as a 'womens' rights zealot' in her own time, and a victim of one of the most shabby ploys at re-ordering history in the country's entire past, in effect a startling anticipation of the Orwellian "Memory Hole."* However, the theme motivating this publication event is that of men and women working together to bring about a state of affairs in which arbitrary and artificial barriers crippling the latter are targeted for dissolution.