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The Journey to Seneca Falls: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Legal Emancipation of Women

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The Journey to Seneca Falls: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Legal Emancipation of Women View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of St. Thomas, Minnesota University of St. Thomas Law Journal Volume 10 Article 9 Issue 4 Spring 2013 2013 The ourJ ney to Seneca Falls: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Legal Emancipation of Women Charles J. Reid Jr. [email protected] Bluebook Citation Charles J. Reid, Jr., The Journey to Seneca Falls: Mary Wollstonecraft, lE izabeth Cady Stanton and the Legal Emancipation of Women, 10 U. St. Thomas L.J. 1123 (2013). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UST Research Online and the University of St. Thomas Law Journal. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ARTICLE THE JOURNEY TO SENECA FALLS: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND THE LEGAL EMANCIPATION OF WOMEN DR. CHARLES J. REID, JR.* ABSTRACT “[T]he star that guides us all,” President Barack Obama declared in his Second Inaugural, is our commitment to “human dignity and justice.”1 This commitment has led us “through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stone- wall”2 towards the equality that we enjoy today. This Article concerns the pre-history to the Seneca Falls Convention of Women’s Rights, alluded to by President Obama. It is a journey that began during the infancy of the common law in medieval England. It leads through the construction, by generations of English lawyers and religious figures, of a strong and im- posing monolith of patriarchal rule. By marriage women lost their indepen- dent legal personality and were, for purposes of law, incorporated into their husband in accord with the legal doctrine known as coverture. The husband represented the family in civic affairs, was exclusively empowered to make all legally effective decisions for the family, and generally gov- erned his wife and household. This Article is a history of the early phases of the challenge brought against this mode of organizing domestic life. Mary Wollstonecraft, a self- made woman of the eighteenth century, objected to male domination in her books, essays, and works of fiction. She coined the expression “rights of * Dr. Charles J. Reid, Jr. is Professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis. I would like to thank Ann Bateson and the library staff of the University of St. Thomas for the wonderful support they invariably demonstrate. I would like also to thank the staffs of the Seneca Falls Historical Society and the Seneca Falls National Historic Site for their patience in answering my innumerable questions. Finally, I would like to thank my diligent and thoughtful research assistants—Natolie Hochhausen, Vaughn Frazher, and Lauren Anthone. 1. President Barack Obama, Second Inaugural Address (Jan. 21, 2013), in THE WASH. POST, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obamas-second-inaugural-address-transcript/ 2013/01/21/f148d234-63d6-11e2-85f5-a8a9228e55e7_story.htmlJ. 2. Id. 1123 1124 UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 10:4 women” and made a powerful case for the equality of the sexes. In America, her cause was taken up by several generations of campaigners. This Article focuses on three leading nineteenth-century figures—Sarah Grimk´e, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The Article closes with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and its call for women’s suffrage and the abolition of the restrictions of coverture. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction .............................................. 1124 II. A Monolith Made of Basalt: The Legal Dependency of Women in Early English Law............................. 1126 A. Coverture and Dependency: Medieval English Origins . 1126 B. Early Modern Writers Contemplate the Bible .......... 1128 C. The Legal Fictions of Sir Edward Coke ............... 1133 D. Early Eighteenth-Century Developments ............... 1137 E. William Blackstone .................................. 1141 III. Mary Wollstonecraft, Radical Critic ....................... 1145 A. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Life ........................... 1145 B. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Works ......................... 1149 1. Vindication of the Rights of Man ................. 1149 2. Vindication of the Rights of Women .............. 1152 3. The Wrongs of Women .......................... 1156 IV. Wollstonecraft in America: The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 .................................................. 1160 A. Introduction .......................................... 1160 B. The Still-Imposing Monolith .......................... 1161 1. Women’s Right to Vote: England ................. 1161 2. Women’s Right to Vote: America ................. 1163 3. Coverture and the Treatise-Writers ................ 1167 C. Seneca Falls, 1848 ................................... 1171 1. Sarah Grimk´e.................................... 1172 2. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton ......... 1175 3. July, 1848 ....................................... 1177 4. Speeches and Sentiments, July 19–20, 1848 ....... 1179 V. Conclusion............................................... 1183 I. INTRODUCTION Septicemia, once commonly known as “blood-poisoning,” is an espe- cially gruesome way to die.3 The patient’s circulatory system is infected by bacteria.4 Since the bacteria is in the blood itself, it can traverse the entire 3. CHRISTOPHER GILBERT MORRIS, ACADEMIC PRESS DICTIONARY OF SCIENCE AND TECH- NOLOGY 280 (1992). 4. JEFFREY POMMERVILLE, ALCAMO’S FUNDAMENTALS OF MICROBIOLOGY 618 (2010). 2013] THE JOURNEY TO SENECA FALLS 1125 body, causing individual organs to become diseased and shut down.5 If treatment is ineffective, the patient grows delirious and dies.6 Thirty-eight year old feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft suffered this very sort of cruel death in September 1797, after giving birth to a daughter, the future Mary Shelley,7 eleven days earlier.8 Her placenta was never prop- erly expelled during labor and the medical care she received was competent but unhygienic, as was typical of the day.9 Not surprisingly, the surviving records of her final illness inform us that she died in agony—alternately feverish and chilled, soaked in her own urine and blood, slipping into and out of consciousness, her body gradually turning toxic and gangrenous.10 As Mary Wollstonecraft fought this final struggle, she could not have appreciated the future fate of her life’s work. Her legacy was as yet uncer- tain and probably very far from her mind. But the dramatic story of her life and death and the heritage of her writings truthfully form the hinge upon which the history of the emancipation of women turns.11 She confronted a system that had grown ever more comprehensively dedicated to the pro- position that women, especially married women, were dependent creatures, entirely beholden to their husbands for their support, comfort, and even their legal personality. Surely, she would have had great difficulty imagining that this mono- lith might ever be brought down. But within fifty years, in the new nation of the United States, her principles and ideals were adopted as foundations to a new movement—championed by Sarah Grimk´e, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and other early campaigners for feminine equality. This new movement for women’s rights (the term itself borrowed 5. ARTHUR E. BAUE, EUGEN FAIST & DONALD E. FRYE, MULTIPLE ORGAN FAILURE: PATHOPHYSIOLOGY, PREVENTION, AND THERAPY 487 (2000). 6. S. HOSSEIN FATEMI & PAULA J. CLAYTON, THE MEDICAL BASIS OF PSYCHIATRY 18 (2008). 7. The wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley was a formidable essayist, novelist, and poet in her right. Most famously, she is the author of FRANKENSTEIN: OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, which she wrote between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one and published in 1818. On Mary Shelley’s life, see generally, among many good biographies, MIRANDA SEYMOUR, MARY SHELLEY (2000); EMILY W. SUNSTEIN, MARY SHELLEY: ROMANCE AND REALITY (1989). 8. Joanna Goldsworthy & Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Revolutionary Mothers and Revolting Daughters: Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, Anna Wheeler and Rosina Bulwer Lytton, in WOMAN TO WOMAN: FEMALE NEGOTIATIONS DURING THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 63, 73 (Carolyn D. Williams, et al. eds., 2010). 9. BEATRICE GOTTLIEB, THE FAMILY IN THE WESTERN WORLD FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO THE INDUSTRIAL AGE 127–28 (1994). 10. JANET TODD, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: A REVOLUTIONARY LIFE 450–57 (2000); LYNDALL GORDON, VINDICATION: A LIFE OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT 357–62 (2005); KENNETH NEILL CAMERON, SHELLEY AND HIS CIRCLE, 1773–1822 185–95 (1961) (collecting the notes con- cerning Mary Wollstonecraft’s final illness made by her husband William Godwin). 11. See Katharine T. Bartlett, Feminist Legal Scholarship: A History Through the Lens of the California Law Review, 100 CALIF. L. REV. 381–82 & n.1 (2012) (describing the various ap- proaches to recounting the feminist legal movement). 1126 UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 10:4 from Mary Wollstonecraft) would influence the path of the law from the 1840s to today and become the story of women’s emancipation. This Article cannot hope to tell the story of the emancipation of wo- men. More modestly, it proposes to develop the thesis that Mary Woll- stonecraft represents the great turning point in this much larger historical movement. The Article is divided into three sections. The first section sketches the outline of the legal regime that confronted Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1780s and 1790s, at the time she wrote her most famous essays on the cause of women’s rights. The section
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