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As an adult, Stanton became involved in the abolition movement. Her involvement supplied her with organizing skills that would cany over into her fight for woman’s rights. Eleanor Flexner, the pioneering historian of women’s nineteenth-century activism, noted: “It was in the abolition movement that women first learned to organize, to hold public meetings, to conduct petition campaigns. As abolitionists they first won the right to speak in public and began to evolve a philosophy of their place in society and of their basic rights.”3 She married a prominent abolitionist, Henry Stanton, in 1840, and together they fought to end the deplorable institution of slavery. In the same year they married, the Stantons traveled to London to attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. Here, Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s opportunities were once again hindered due to her sex. At the Convention, women abolitionists were prevented from actively participating and were forced to sit in the gallery behind a curtain to listen to the proceedings. Stanton noted, “Women, according to English prejudices at that time, were excluded by scriptural texts from sharing equal dignity and authority with men in all reform associations.”4 William Lloyd Garrison boycotted the convention and sat with the women in solidarity. The majority of men, including Stanton’s husband, continued to participate despite the fact that a portion of their movement was silenced. Stanton recalled that “the action of this convention was the topic of discussion, in public and private, for a long time, and stung many women into new thought and action and gave rise to the movement for women’s political equality both in England and the U.S.”5 In the early years of her marriage, Stanton remained active in the abolition movement, although after her new family moved to Seneca Falls she became rather isolated. She noted that “in Seneca Falls my life was comparatively solitary, and the change from Boston was somewhat depressing . . . Then, too, the novelty of housekeeping had passed away and much that was once attractive in domestic life was now irksome.”6 Her husband traveled often on business while her life revolved around running her household and tending to the children. This personal brush with inequality prompted her to action. According to Stanton, “my experiences at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, all I had read of the legal status of women, and the oppression I saw everywhere, together swept across my soul, intensified now by many personal experiences.., my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.”7 From that point on, the basis of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s arguments revolved around gaining equal rights under the law for women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton entrenched her struggles firmly in the public sphere, utilizing legal channels to gain equality for women. The limitations of the law in regard to women bothered Stanton tremendously, and throughout her life she was very concerned with legal and constitutional issues. When she was a girl of ten, Stanton’s father had told her, “When you are grown up... and able to prepare a speech, you must go to Albany and talk to the Legislature; tell them all you have seen in this office — the sufferings of these women, robbed of their inheritance and left dependent on their unworthy sons, and if you can persuade them to pass new laws, the old ones will be a dead letter.”8Her father did not realize it at the time, but that was what Stanton would eventually do. She devoted much of her life to changing the laws that subjugated women, such as those relating to women’s property and their inequality within marriage and the labor force. Shortly after moving to Seneca Falls, Stanton organized the first Woman’s Rights Convention in 184$ as a forum to address legal inequalities. Stanton and other women reformers such as Lucretia Mott and Lucy Stone put forth philosophical arguments dealing with natural rights. The women reformers targeted the oppression of women. They reiterated arguments used by colonists against the tyranny of the British. They concluded that certain basic, inalienable rights were given to both men and women simply as a result of being born human. They used the Declaration of Independence as a model for their Declaration of Sentiments presented at the First Woman’s Rights Convention, symbolically reinforcing their argument while stating that they would fight publicly through legislation to gain equality and full citizenship. In their Declaration they proclaimed “we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are 20 created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”9 The Declaration addressed many areas of inequality, including education, earnings, the closure of professions such as medicine and law to women, as well as addressing the double standard between men and women. Stanton believed strongly in the vote for women, believing it would be a panacea for the inequality between the sexes. Woman suffrage was a very controversial suggestion for many attendees of the first Convention and it passed by a very narrow margin; an endorsement of woman suffrage was the only measure not passed unanimously. Stanton devoted much of her life persuading the rest of the country of the necessity of enfranchising women, and eventually the Woman’s Rights Movement narrowed its focus as it took a conservative turn and fought solely for woman suffrage. Stanton, who was considered “the philosopher and chief publicist of the radical wing of the Woman’s Rights Movement,” wrote many speeches for Susan B. Anthony, and also went on lecture tours herself when time permitted)) She was the first woman in the state of New York to appear in front of the legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee, which she continued to do over the course of her By presenting petitions, writing pamphlets, preparing speeches, and holding conventions, the women reformers made slow progress. Eventually they called for an amendment to the Constitution allowing women the right to vote; it was titled the Anthony Amendment after Susan B. Anthony. The Anthony Amendment was introduced into Congress by Senator A. A. Sargent in 1878. After hard work and exhaustive campaigning state by state on the part of women such as Stanton, the same amendment would eventually be passed over forty years later as the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.’2 Stanton’s life and activism reveal that although she and other feminists of the mid- nineteenth century wished to share in the opportunities available to men in the public sphere, they did not attempt to revolutionize the private sphere. Like the majority of women organizers of the early and mid-nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton married and raised children. Alma Lutz, referring to the suffragists, noted “none of them were embittered by hard experiences or filled with antagonism toward men. All of them were happily married and were bringing up children.”3 Elizabeth Cady married Henry Stanton, an abolitionist, and they had seven children. Even when her domestic responsibilities created an obstacle to her reform work on behalf of women’s rights, Stanton seldom regretted her marriage or her childrearing duties. She considered her familial responsibilities her duty, and believed she owed her children the very best up bringing she could possibly give them. Once Stanton decided to organize the first Women’s Rights Convention her husband made it very clear that he would not support her in the endeavor. He, in fact, threatened to leave town if she followed through with her plans, and eventually did just that. Although she realized that subordination to the private, domestic sphere hampered women’s abilities to lead flail, productive lives, Stanton could not envision a way to produce change within the personal areas of their lives. Therefore, Stanton focused all of her attention on changing women’s legal and public status. It was not uncommon for women activists of the early movement with families to put their reform work on hold until their children were grown; most women did not question this sacrifice. However, with the help of servants and woman friends Stanton was able to continue working to reform laws on behalf of women, as well as for woman suffrage. Stanton was assisted by a housekeeper while her children were young, and later Stanton also relied on the help of Susan B. Anthony. Stanton and Anthony developed a dear friendship and a strong working partnership on behalf of woman’s rights lasting from their meeting in 1851 until death. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described Susan B. Anthony as “the most intimate friend I have had for the past forty-five years — with whom I have spent weeks and months under the same roof—I can truly say that she is the most upright, courageous, self-sacrificing, magnanimous human being I have ever known.” For over twenty years of her partnership with Susan Anthony, Mrs. Stanton was raising children, therefore unable to travel and fight on behalf of women’s equality with any 21 amount of freedom. Stanton was lucky to have Anthony as a companion, and many times Susan Anthony traveled to the Stanton residence and cared for Stanton’s seven children as Stanton prepared speeches and pamphlets for Anthony to disseminate. Nevertheless, it was only in Stanton’s later years, after her children were in college or married, that she embarked on her adventures internationally on behalf of woman suffrage, which included her lecture tours in the United States. As the twentieth century approached, the ideology of the Woman’s Rights Movement began to change course. Charlotte Perkins Gilman noted that “the political equality demanded by the suffragists was not enough to give real freedom. Women whose industrial position is that of a house-servant, or who do no work at all, who are fed, clothed, and given pocket-money by men, do not reach freedom and equality by the use of the ballot.”5 Gilman, who was born in 1860, came of age in a very different world than Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Gilman witnessed the birth of industrial capitalism and the forging of a national economy. By Oilman’s time the ideology of separate spheres was deeply embedded within the consciousness of middle class men and women. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was popularly debated, and reformers, intellectuals, and radicals proliferated. Oilman was inspired by the extraordinary political and intellectual happenings of the late nineteenth century and she became an essayist, lecturer, and writer of fiction and poetry, as well as a major theorist and an influential social critic. Oilman was also a proponent of women’s rights, although she did not argue for women’s equality using the natural rights argument of earlier feminists such as Stanton. Instead, she “argued that women were narrowed by their position in society and that they therefore narrowed the lives of their men and their children. To improve society as a whole, it was necessary to free women from their domestic place.”16 According to historian Ann Lane, Oilman attempted to “draw upon anthropology, biology, history, sociology, ethics, and philosophy to comprehend the contours of human evolution and human society in order to create a humane social order. She, along with other intellectuals of her time, sought to understand the world in order to change it.”7 The late nineteenth century was the appropriate time for a woman such as Oilman to come of age “because as the preindustrial code of morality and sense of community seemed to be eroding, voices of dissent began to be heard. This was a time of great intellectual speculation... it was a time when ideas were important and valued.”18In this freer atmosphere Oilman was able to write and lecture publicly; while not always embraced by the mainstream, she was allowed to have a public life. Many of Charlotte Perkins Oilman’s motivations for fighting for the equality of the sexes stemmed from personal experiences. Her father abandoned the family when she was young, leaving her to lead a life of poverty and self doubt. Her mother gave her little affection, believing she would never know the pain of rejection if she never experienced love. Unlike the generation of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women of Oilman’s generation tended to marry less often if they planned on entering the public sphere as reformers. In this tradition, Oilman decided early on to forego marriage and instead to pursue a career that would help humanity, following in the footsteps of women such as Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago: “From sixteen I had not wavered from that desire to help humanity which underlay all my studies. Here was the world, visibly unhappy and as visibly unnecessarily so; surely it called for the best efforts of all who could in the least understand what was the matter, and had any rational improvements to propose.”19The conventional roles of wife and mother made Oilman feel uneasy, although she did wish for the emotional bonding a husband and children could provide; she wanted a supportive family environment, although she could not bear to be confined solely to the domestic sphere. In her autobiography Oilman noted:
my mind was not fully clear as to whether I should or should not marry. On the one hand I knew it was normal and right in general, and held that a woman should be able to have marriage and motherhood, and do her work in the world also. On
a
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right,
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divorce,
English,
lead
equality
to
generally
she
when
intellectual
toward
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happy
Suffrage
“my women,
her
devotion
social.”24
for
society
for
on
felt
better
began Gilman’s
a
need
nineteenth
Elizabeth
being ministry,
and
was
Perkins
Gilman
forbade
and
legal
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would
of
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for
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proposed
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and
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because
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as autobiography
as
her
that
touring
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the
earned.
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care
late
gender
me
have
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home,
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who
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periodicals
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decided
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even
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could
creative
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the
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she exponents, reformers to
Gilman
Gilman,
domestic revolution
in also above
catastrophic woman
and pursue
duties, work
which misery 22 23
Oilman believed that the relationship between the sexes needed to be equalized and fundamental change within the private sphere and marriage needed to take place in order for women to achieve equality with men. Most important, she believed that women needed to build an economic power base of their own in order to produce a more just and equally balanced society for all inhabitants. As she analyzed her mother’s life, as well as her own individual experience with marriage, Oilman realized that to be free, women needed to be economically independent and allowed to have loving relationships simultaneously; women should not be forced to choose one or the other. One arena in which Gilman addressed inequality was within her fiction. The short story The Yellow Wallpaper revealed many personal aspects and hardships of Oilman’s own life which shaped her politics and belief that change within the domestic sphere was necessary. During the late nineteenth century many middle class women suffered from neurological ailments which were diagnosed as “Neurasthenia”; basically women were suffering increasing bouts of depression brought on by a contradiction in their roles and their confmement to the private sphere. The common cure at the time was the “Rest Cure” which provided that women do no work, no thinking, no writing; they simply ate a very rich diet, took long naps, and cared for their children. Gilman suffered through many bouts of depression through her life, and some of the most debilitating occurred shortly after her first marriage and the birth of her daughter Katherine. After being prescribed the “Rest Cure” by doctor S. Weir Mitchell and becoming progressively worse, Gilman wrote her story The Yellow Wallpaper in an attempt to tell the doctor, as well as society as a whole, what harm they were doing to women. Oilman commented that “ the real p9ose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways.” From personal experience within a confining marriage, Gilman realized that trapping women in the domestic sphere as housekeepers and mothers with no creative outlets was psychologically harmful, and she believed this was the cause of the rise in so called neurotic ailments among middle class women in the nineteenth century. “Her marriage to Stetson, with its debilitating assumptions about the nature of women and men, became the material for The Yellow Wallpaper, certainly among the most harrowing portraits of stultifying, self-destroying marriage ever written.”26 While confronting inequality in her fiction writings, Oilman also addressed problems relating to women within her essays and social commentary. She was very concerned with the need for economic independence among women. Gilman noted that “as to women, the basic need of economic independence seemed to me of far more importance than the ballot; though that of course was a belated and legitimate claim, for which I always worked as opportunity offered.”27One of her most revered works is Womenand Economics, in which she put forth the idea that women needed to address their economic dependence on males. According to Oilman, “woman’s economic profit comes through the power of sex attraction.., the female gets her food from the male by virtue of her sex-relationship to him.”28Gilman also advocated change in the way children were raised, advocating community involvement in her book Concerning Children while stressing “that we must teach children to learn, not to obey. They do learn in spite of us because ‘natural laws’ cannot be entirely shut out. But... the brain is an organ like any other: it needs nourishment and stimulation to achieve its full growth.”29In her third book, The Home: Its Work and Influence, she acknowledged the harm done to educated women who were confined to the home and whose primary duties revolved around children, husband, and housework. Oilman envisioned kitchenless houses, day care centers, public kitchens, and community dining rooms in an effort to abolish the idea of relegating women to a separate woman’s sphere. Oilman’s reforms centered around the personal arenas of women’s lives, not dealing with legal change so much as social change within the family context. For Oilman,
it was a world that in its externals reflected [her] inner struggles; the fear and powerlessness in the public place had their counterparts in her private existence.
a
to
of
to
far
By
the
the
the
the
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that
and
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was
who
well
work
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know many
future
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coexist as
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petition
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and order
spheres,
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with
link
political
to
of
of
humanist
Charlotte
lifestyles.
her
the
in
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and
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to 1970s.
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and
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sphere.
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and
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generation women.
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1999,
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challenged women
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politics 24 25
‘Alma Lutz, Created Equal: A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: Octagon Books, 1974), vii. 2 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 80 years and More: Reminiscences 1215-1897 (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 31. Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: The BellcnapPress of Harvard University Press, 1996), 38. Stanton, 80 years and More, 79. 5lbid.,$2. 6lbid., 145. 7lbid., 147-14$. 8 Lutz, Created Equal, 5. 9Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of WomanSuffrage I (New York: Amo Press, 1969), 67. 10 Stanton, 80 years and More, v. flexner and Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle, $1. ‘2lbid., 165. ‘ Lutz, Created Equal, 44. ‘ Stanton, Eighty Years and More, 183. Charlotte Perkins Gilinan, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (New York: 1). Appleton- Century Company, 1935), 235. ‘6Ari J. Lane, To Herland and Beyond: TheLife and Workof Charlotte Perkins Gilman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 232. ‘7lbid., 230. ‘8lbid., 11. ‘ Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 70. 20 Ibid 83. 21 Ibid 131. 22Ibid., 257. 23 Lane, To Herland and Beyond, 23$. 24 Flexner, Century of Struggle, 224. 25 Gihnan, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 121. 26 Sheiyl L. Meyering, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work (London: UMI Research Press, 1989), x. 27 Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 131. 28 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: a Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a factor in Social Evolution (New York: Gordon Press, 1975), 212. 29 Lane, To Herland and Beyond, 257. 30Ibid., 159.