I The Evolution of the Woman’s Rights Movement In the Nineteenth Century Alicia Vosberg There shall never be another season ofsilence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth. ---Susan 3. Anthony he year 184$ marked the official beginning of the organized Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. The Woman’s Rights Movement was a dynamic movement populated Twith many dedicated, brilliant, persevering women who posed a significant challenge to the political, legal, and social systems of the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century women in most states were unable to control their own earnings, manage property legally their own, or sign legal papers such as wills. Although relegated to their own private sphere and relatively powerless, some women took initiative and became involved in areas of reform such as temperance and abolition. This eventually opened the way for women to come together in an organized movement in the 1 $40s to fight for their own rights in such areas as equal education, labor, legal reform, and the professions. The longest baffle the Woman’s Rights Movement waged was the effort to enfranchise women; suffragists fought for over seventy-two years to gain the vote. Yet even as women in the nineteenth century began to sense that the drive for suffrage would gain success, other issues began to emerge that were significantly different from women’s demands in the early years of the movement. A detailed study contrasting the lives of two prominent activists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, illuminates a fundamental change in the Woman’s Rights Movement in the nineteenth century. In the early years of the movement the fight for equality centered around the public sphere, although as the nineteenth century progressed the focus shifted to reform within the private areas of women’s lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the pioneers of the Woman’s Rights Movement, was born in 1815. An early biographer stated that Stanton lived “in an era when the law cast the shadow of a ‘defect of sex’ over women.”’ Stanton lived a stable, middle class life as the daughter of a prominent judge in New York. While very young, she habitually sat in her father’s office while he counseled clients, many of whom were women seeking legal help. In her father’s office Stanton heard the sad stories of these women. Husbands took their wives’ wages and spent the money on alcohol while the family starved, or wives had property they brought into the marriage seized to pay their husband’s debts. In her autobiography, Stanton noted that “in our Scotch neighborhood many men still retained the old feudal ideas of women and property... the tears and complaints of the women who came to my father for legal advice touched my heart and early drew my attention to the injustice and cruelty of the laws.”2 Stanton observed how little the law recognized women’s rights as her father was forced to show pleading women statutes in his many law books validating their powerlessness. After her only brother’s death, Stanton vowed to take his place in order to gain her father’s approval and support. She studied Greek and Latin with a scholarly neighbor, and eventually attended Johnstown Academy where she continued to learn languages as well as mathematics; she was the only female student in attendance. At the age of fifteen she encountered obstacles in her education. When the boys with whom she studied at Johnstown Academy all went off to Union College, she could not join them because of her sex. Instead, she received an education from the Troy Seminary headed by Emma Williard. Although it was an excellent education for a girl of that time, she was unable to learn subjects that most interested her, which were those taught at Union College. Instead, she was matriculated into the domestic studies deemed appropriate for girls. 19 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.”8 Her 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.