Boston University School of Law Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law Publications Betsy Clark Living Archive 10-1989 The olitP ics of God and the Woman's Vote: Religion in the American Suffrage Movement, 1848-1895 Elizabeth B. Clark Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_pubs Part of the Family Law Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Elizabeth B. Clark, The Politics of God and the Woman's Vote: Religion in the American Suffrage Movement, 1848-1895, (1989). Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_pubs/3 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Betsy Clark Living Archive at Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholarly Commons at Boston University School of Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE POLITICS OF GOD AND THE WOMAN'S VOTE: RELIGION IN THE AMERICAN SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT, 1848-1895 Elizabeth Battelle Clark A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY October, 1989 © Copyright by Elizabeth Battelle Clark 1989 All Rights Reserved Thesis Abstract This thesis examines the role of religion— both liberal and evangelical Protestantism— in the development of a feminist political theory in America during the nineteenth century and how that feminist theory in turn helped to transform American liberalism. Chapter 1 looks for the genesis of women's rights language, not in the republican rhetoric of the Founding Fathers, but in the teachings of liberal Protestantism and its links with laissez-faire economic theory. The antebellum understanding of rights is shown to have encompassed social and civil rights alike, and to have arisen from a vision of the mutual benefits that derived from the individual's duties within the family and community. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the development of liberal feminism in the post-civil War period, focusing especially on the thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton was a classic liberal whose particular concern was with women's bodily autonomy and with self-government as the basis for citizenship. As a result of her efforts, it is argued, debates about liberalizing divorce laws, marital abuse, voluntary motherhood, and prostitution helped to widen the definition of liberalism to include a new zone of privacy, and to forge a consensus by the late-nineteenth century that the liberal individual was autonomous in personal as well as civil life, with rights extending to privacy of the body and freedom from physical coercion even within the home. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, evangelical feminists who made common cause with progressive reformers in addressing the problems of industrialization. The WCTU's vision of the maternal state, it is contended, especially as developed in the thought of its president Frances Willard, extrapolated the Christian obligation to care for others to the state, conceived of as a maternal and compassionate institution. The maternal state thus foreshadowed the welfare state, though with a vision of communal rights radically at odds with liberalism's. The WCTU's religious philosophy both enabled it to conceive of a welfare state and moved it to work toward the establishment of a theocratic state that contained the potential for the infringement of individual liberties as well as the protection of economic interests. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements......... vl Introduction ........................................ 1 Chapter I - Religion and Rights Consciousness in the > Antebellum Woman's Rights Movement .............. 19 The Christian Understanding of Politics and Power 22 Woman's Legal Culture and the Equality Problem . 32 Law, Nature, and R i g h t s ........... 47 Conclusion...................................... 80 Chapter II - Matrimonial Bonds: Slavery, Contract, and the Law of Divorce in Nineteenth-Century America . 8 9 Divorce in the Antebellum E r a .................. 92 Marriage and Slavery in the Post-War Period . 101 Marriage and Freedom of Contract ............... Ill Visions of the F a m i l y ............................ 123 Protectionism and Liberalism .................... 133 Conclusion................................. ; . 145 Chapter ill - Self-Ownership and the Political Theory of Elizabeth Cady Stanton ........................ 151 Self-Ownership Within the Family ................ 159 Stanton and the Liberal Individual .............. 167 Feminism, Fourier, and Free Love ................ 176 The Natural Roots of Natural Rights ............ 199 The Antinomian State ............................ 208 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter IV - The Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Moral Governance.................................. 222 The Relational Basis of Temperance Politics . 224 Maternal Governance ...... ................ 230 "The Home Going Forth Into the W o r l d " ............ 248 Chapter V - "Organised Mother Love" and the Maternal S t a t e ............................................ 267 The Evangelical Theory of Rights .................. 278 Local Governance.................................. 294 Anti-Legalism .................................. 304 Regulatory Bureaucracy .......................... 309 C o n c l u s i o n ............................................ 320 Select Bibliography .................................. 329 Primary Sources ................................ 329 Manuscript Collections .................... 329 Newspapers and Periodicals .......... 330 Printed Sources .................. 330 Secondary Sources .............................. 340 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgements I am privately grateful to many people, and will be grateful to them in private. Here I wish to be publicly grateful to the people who have helped me the most in the process of writing this thesis— although some private gratitude may slip in, too. One fall day at the University of Michigan law school after a particularly nauseating contracts class I walked into Tom Green's office and announced that I wanted to be a legal historian. For no apparent reason he and Charlie Donahue took me seriously. If they hadn't, I wouldn't be practising contract law somewhere, but I wouldn't be doing history either, and I thank them for their miraculous faith. I've grown enormously since coming to Princeton, in large part through working with the members of my committee. Stan Katz has taught me a great deal about the craft and art of being a legal historian, a wonderful guild to join. Christine Stansell's fine teaching and lucid intelligence have been an inspiration, and a corrective as well: whenever I feel an unusually sappy burst of communitarianism coming on I think of her and it abates. The night before my general exams I dreamed that Dan Rodgers, then Director of Graduate Studies, ran an orphanage on Bank Street where graduate students lived, sleeping on hard cots with threadbare blankets; but he kept us well fed. This dream has always symbolized for me his combination of candor, integrity, and intellectual rigor, with an openness of mind and a precise knowledge of when and how to be encouraging— all qualities which have benefitted me at different times. Working for a year at the University of Wisconsin Law School with Martha Fineman and Dirk Hartog changed my way of thinking for the better. Dirk in particular has always been available to talk about any question, and aside from once taking me to a terrifyingly bad restaurant in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has contributed nothing but wonderful insights to this project. Amy Dru Stanley and Carol Weisbrod, whom I met at Wisconsin as well, have also become good friends and critics in what has come to feel like an ongoing group project. I learned a great deal from my graduate student cohort, especially in the early years, when we combined an intense intellectual, social, and political life, usually "where the elite meet to eat." I need to thank in particular John Carson, a man with a talent for friendship who combines a great heart with a great mind; Laura Mason, who taught me vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. everything I know about fashion and my few good work habits;. Rachel Weil, who has egged me on over the years and been a wonderful reader and friend in the last days; Andrea Rusnock, whose gentle, ruthless editing of an undistinguished draft gave it new prospects for life; Barbara Corbett, who waded through too much about the WCTU; and Lou Masur, because he thanked me, although he's going to have to do more than that to get into the book. Finally, I thank Michael Jimenez, who always stimulated me to think better and harder; who never stopped asking, "What about class?"; and who broadened a legal historian's mind by always singing in the background statistics about the price of coffee. vii i Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction To understand what significance "law" and "rights" had for nineteenth-century female activists, we must interpret their concepts of power and governance according to the Protestant ethos which informed