History of Women in the United States: Volume 18/1 Women and Politics [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110971088, 9783598414725

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

Edited by Nancy F. Cott Series ISBN 3-598-41454-4

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W o m e n 's Bodies: H e a l t h and Childbirth ISBN 3 - 5 9 8 - 4 1 4 6 5 - X

12. Household Constitution and Family Relationships ISBN 3-598-41456-0

Education ISBN 3-598-41466-8

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Religion ISBN 3-598-41467-6

Domestic Relations and Law ISBN 3-598-41457-9

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Intercultural and Interracia Relations ISBN 3-598-41468-4

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W o m e n and War ISBN 3-598-41469-2

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W o m e n Together: Organizational Life ISBN 3-598-41470-6

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Social and Moral Reform ISBN 3-598-41471-4 Part ISBN 3-598-41695-4 P a r t :

Theory and Method in W o m e n ' s History ISBN 3-598-41455-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41477-3 Part 2

Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work ISBN 3-598-41458-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41475-7 Part 2

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The Intersection of W o r k and Family Life ISBN 3-598-41459-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41476-5 Part 2

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Working on the Land ISBN 3-598-41460-9

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Industrial Wage Work ISBN 3-598-41461-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41693-8 Part 2

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Women and Politics ISBN 3-598-41472-2 Part ISBN 3-598-41697-0 P a r t :

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Professional and White-Collar Employments ISBN 3-598-41462-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41694-6 Part 2

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Woman Suffrage ISBN 3-598-41473-0 Part ISBN 3-598-41696-2 P a r t :

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Prostitution ISBN 3-598-41463-3

Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality ISBN 3-598-41474-9

10. Sexuality and Sexual Behavior ISBN 3-598-41464-1

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

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Women and Politics

PART Ι

Edited with an Introduction by

Nancy F. Cott Yale University

K G · Saur Munich · New Providence · London · Paris · 1994

Publisher's Note The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality o f f p r i n t s and photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading ana text-curl common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to either correct or minimize this effect. Copyright information for articles reproduced in this collection appears at the end of this volume. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History of women in the United States : historical articles on women's lives and activities / edited with an introduction by Nancy F. Cott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: 1. Theory and method in women's history -- 2. Household constitution and family relationships -- 3. Domestic relations and law - 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work — 5. The intersection of work and family life — 6. Working on the land - 7. Industrial wage work - 8. Professional and white-collar employments 9. Prostitution ~ 10. Sexuality and sexual behavior — 11. W o m e n ' s bodies - 12. Education - 13. Religion - 14. Intercultural and interracial relations - 15. Women and war - 16. Women together - 17. Social and moral reform — 18. Women and politics — 19. Woman suffrage — 20. Feminist struggles for sex equality. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (set) 1. Women-United States-History. 2. Women-United States-Social conditions. 1. Cott, Nancy F. HQ1410.H57 1992 305.4'0973-dc20 92-16765 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP - Einheitsaufnahme History of Women in the United States: historical articles on women's lives and activities / ed. with an introd. by Nancy F. Cott. - Munich ; New Providence ; London ; Paris : Saur. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 NE: Cott, Nancy F. (Hrsg.) Vol. 18. women and politics - (1994) Pt. 1. - (1994) ISBN 3-598-41472-2

® Printed on acid-free paper/Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier Al! Rights Strictly Reserved/Alle Rechte vorbehalten K.G. Saur Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 1994 A Reed Reference Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America Printed/Bound by Edwards Brothers Incorporated, Ann Arbor ISBN 3-598-41472-2 (vol. 18/part 1) ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (series)

Contents Series Preface Introduction Part 1 The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective LINDA KERBER The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic JAN LEWIS Equity vs. Equality: Emerging Concepts of Women's Political Status in the Age of Jackson NORMA BÄSCH "Co-Laborers in the Cause": Women in the Ante-bellum Nativist Movement JEAN GOULD HALES "Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash": Women, Politics, and Social Activism in the 1850s LORI D. GINZBERG Harlots or Heroines? A New Look at the Richmond Bread Riot MICHAEL B. CHESSON Women in the Southern Farmers' Alliance: A Reconsideration of the Role and Status of Women in the Late NineteenthCentury South JULIE ROY JEFFREY The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920 PAULA BAKER

CONTENTS

Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902 PAULA Ε. HYMAN

212

Fighting for a Future: Farm Women of the Nonpartisan League KAREN STARR

227

Women and the Socialist Party MARI JO BUHLE

247

Other Socialists: Native-Born Immigrant Women in the Socialist Party of America, 1901-1917 SALLY M. MILLER

265

Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-of-Living Protests DANA FRANK

284

Defining Socialist Womanhood: The Women's Page of the Jewish Daily Forward in 1919 Μ ΑΧΙΝΕ S. SELLER

316

Socialism and Women in the United States, 1900-1917 BRUCE DANCIS

339 Part 2

Votes and More for Women: Suffrage and After in Connecticut CAROLE NICHOLS

403

Were Women to Blame? Female Suffrage and Voter Turnout PAULKLEPPNER

498

vi

CONTENTS

Female Ballots: The Impact of the Nineteenth Amendment S A R A A L P E R N and D A L E BAUM

521

Cornelia Bryce Pinchot: Feminism in the Post-Suffrage Era J O H N W . F U R L O W , JR

547

After Winning: The New Jersey Suffragists in the Political Parties, 1920-30 FELICE D. G O R D O N

565

"Disfranchisement is a Disgrace": Women and Politics in New Mexico, 1900-1940 JOAN M. JENSEN

589

W o m e n and the Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940 R O B E R T SHAFFER

620

Women, Citizenship, and Nationality: Immigration and Naturalization Policies in the United States VIRGINIA SAPIRO

666

Images of the Woman Juror CAROL WEISBROD

692

'The Forgotten W o m a n ' : Ellen S. Woodward and W o m e n ' s Relief in the New Deal M A R T H A H. SWAIN

716

W o m e n ' s Place in American Politics: T h e Historical Perspective L O U I S E M. Y O U N G

745

White Women Volunteers in the Freedom Summers: Their Life and Work in a Movement for Social Change M A R Y AICKIN R O T H S C H I L D

786

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CONTENTS

Women in The Mississippi Legislature (1924-1981) JOANNE V. HAWKS, Μ. CAROLYN ELLIS, and J.BYRON MORRIS

816

Copyright Information

845

Index

849

viii

Series Preface In the space of one generation, women's history has become the fastest-growing area of scholarship in U.S. history. Since the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, insistent questions about the historical meanings of "woman's place" have sowed and reaped a garden of scholarship. Where scholarly works used to be bare of mention of women, academic enterprise has now produced a vigorous growth of books and articles, bringing to light diverse women of every region, race, class and age. This research is marked by a renovating intent that refuses to accept as "human" history a history of men. Interest is lively and debate is stimulating and sought after: attendance at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women rivals the size of the annual convention of the American Historical Association. While books in women's history are daily increasing in numbers and strength, as in any fast-developing field the scholarly literature in the form of articles is most expansive and up-to-the-minute. All the history journals now publish articles on women's work, domestic settings, family relations, household matters, female politics and organizations and so forth, and new journals have sprung into being to concentrate on such topics. Women's historians publish in numerous regional and thematic history journals as well as in feminist outlets and in journals of other social science disciplines. This series brings together a collection of outstanding articles from the field, almost all written in the past twenty years and more than half published during the 1980s. It brings together, in volumes organized by topic, essays otherwise widely dispersed. These volumes reprint only articles that originally appeared in journals, not chapters of books; review articles are not included. Articles have been chosen for overall quality and for range. Each one was chosen for one or more of the following reasons: because it is the standard authority on its subject matter; represents an important statement on a topic by a recognized scholar; presages an important book to come; provides a first look at new evidence or new methods; or opens an untapped area or new controversy. Older articles have been reprinted if their data or interpretation have not been surpassed or if they marked an important stage in the historiography, even if since superseded. The historical coverage of the series extends from the Revolutionary era to the 1960s. The articles themselves are dated from the 1940s through 1988. Volumes are organized by topic rather than time period. Within each volume, the

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SERIES PREFACE

articles are ordered chronologically (with respect to substance), so that the whole can be read as an historical overview. The only exception to this ordering principle is Volume One, on Theory and Method, in which the contents are arranged in order of publication. Within each volume there is an attempt to include articles on as diverse kinds of women as possible. None of the volume topics is regionally or racially defined; rather, all volumes are topically designed so as to afford views of women's work, family lives, and public activities which cut across races and regions. Any volume in the series stands on its own, supplying as full a treatment of a designated subject matter as the scholarly literature will provide. Several groupings of volumes also make sense; that is, volumes two through five all center around domestic and family matters; volumes five through nine consider other varieties of women's work; volumes nine through eleven concern uses and abuses of women's bodies; volumes twelve through fourteen look at major aspects of socialization; and volumes fifteen through twenty include organizational and political efforts of many sorts. As a whole, the series displays in all its range the vitality of the field of women's history. Aside from imbuing U.S. history with new vision, scholarship in this area has informed, and should continue to inform, current public debate on issues from parental leave to the nuclear freeze. By bringing historical articles together under topical headings, these volumes both represent accurately the shape of historical controversy (or consensus) on given issues and make historians' findings most conveniently available for current reference.

Introduction In conventional political history, women are virtually absent before 1920, unless the woman suffrage movement is included. Even in political history of the decades since the Nineteenth Amendment, women usually appear as a slight and evanescent presence. In order for women to be seen as involved in the exercise of politics and therefore to be included in political history (especially before, but even after the U.S. Constitution barred sex discrimination in access to the ballot), the definition of politics and "the political" must be broadened beyond the electoral arena and the two-party system. If politics is seen as the arena of exercise of public power relations, including but broader than two-party electoral politics, women's participation becomes much more salient. In construing women's actions as political, women's historians are going against the grain of Western political thought The Western tradition of political theory has made a clear separation between the public and the private, or between the political and the domestic, and in this separation it is obvious which half of the dichotomy is associated with men and which with women. In fact, of course, the separation has never been entirely feasible, since some women have always taken public roles and all men have private lives. Historians of early America have been interested in the ways that new definitions and enactments of republican citizenship in the founding of the United States followed or reshaped traditional notions of the political status of women. The much larger role that voting, or political representation, played in establishing legitimate government in the United States as compared to the countries of Europe has also focused attention on women's exclusion from the vote. The struggle to gain the ballot has, historically, formed a large part of women's politics. Articles on the suffrage movement itself are so numerous as to compose another volume (XIX, Woman Suffrage), following this one. The political efforts described and analyzed in articles in this volume must be seen in the context of women's votelessness before the early twentieth century, and then in the context of women's new status as voters thereafter. Because voting, representative government, and the two-party structure that emerged by 1800 have been so strongly characteristic of American politics, women's politics have inevitably been judged by the standards of electoral success and have come up very short. Until women voted, women didn't hold elective office. That is why the tradition of women officeholders at the local level is so much longer and stronger than any other, because women in numerous states were admitted to vote for school-district offices and formunicipal offices long before they could vote for state or national leaders. Even after national enfranchise-

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INTRODUCTION

ment in 1920, however, only a tiny (though increasing) number of women gained elective office at state and local levels; only a handful of women were elected as representatives to the U.S. Congress. Until recently, no women became U.S. Senators or state governors except as widows of male officeholders. Although women obtained nominal parity with men in national party organizations in the 1920s, they gained no significant power within them until the 1970s. Because women were excluded from participation in voting for so long, and therefore from meaningful participation in the partisan organization of politics, examination of their electoral failure or success does not get to the heart or scope of their political actions. As revealed by the articles in this volume (and see the two prior, XVI, Women Together: Organizational Life, and XVII, Social and Moral Reform), women's politics have been expressed in social movements, in popular forms of protest, and by the latter nineteenth century, in third-party or left-wing political activity. The organization of women's demands on society and the state by means of voluntary association, petitions, public protests, public education, boycotts, and what would eventually be called lobbying, has been characteristic of women's political history before and after enfranchisement. Most frequently, allwomen organizations (see volumes XVI and XVII) were the vehicle for such political actions before enfranchisement. The articles in this volume expand the focus to women's part in demands made in conjunction with men, from bread riots to the antislavery movement to the Farmers' Alliance, Nonpartisan League, and Socialist Party. Women carried their characteristic modes of political action into joint efforts with men. That is, it seems notable that women joined movements of social or political protest with men which used the forms of voluntarism, public pressure, local organizing, etc., such as the peace movement or the Nonpartisan League. Secondly, even when women gained the ballot, there was a notable lack of mass conversion of their political proclivities toward ardent partisanship or purely electoral focus. Historians have lately been very interested in the reciprocal effects of interaction between women voters and the political process, after 1920. During the early twentieth century, voter turnout declined and the intense partisan organization of political expression visible in the latternineteenth century was transformed by the emergence of modern pressure-group, or interest group, politics. After the Nineteenth Amendment barred sex discrimination at the polls, the proportion of eligible voters who actually voted declined even farther. Contemporary commentators blamed this decline on the failure of women to vote, but historians now can perceive that the development was much more complicated: an intersection of continuing trends which made mass political participation less likely, with the tendency of women to focus their political energies less univocally on partisan and electoral issues than men did. In retrospect it is possible to see that enfranchised women followed three paths. Some joined and intended to exert leadership or influence in the Republican

INTRODUCTION

xiii

and Democratic partisan organizations, committing themselves to one or the other wholeheartedly. (Even before gaining the ballot, some women had—usually in conjunction with male relatives—developed loyalty to and worked on behalf of the Republicans or Democrats.) Others worked likewise within the party system, but formed independent-minded women's groups within the party, ready to oppose party decisions (such as the fielding of a "machine" candidate) which conflicted with their own priorities. A third path, probably the most followed, was political nonpartisanship: an amassing of women's political interests and goals outside the major party structure with the intent of affecting and influencing that structure. The League of Women Voters is the best known organization to operate in this manner. These paths were not parallel: they sometimes crossed. Indeed it is rare to find in American history, right up to the present day, a woman successful in electoral or partisan politics who has not also participated in women's nonpartisan interestgroup politics. Overall, this volume points the way to greater understanding of women's presence and actions in the political arena, by including social movements and nonpartisan interest groups in definitions of "the political," along with electoral politics and partisan organizations.

Women and Politics

WOMEN AND POLITICS

THE REPUBLICAN MOTHER: WOMEN AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT—AN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE LINDA KERBER University of Iowa

THE GREAT Q U E S T I O N S O F POLITICAL LIBERTY A N D CIVIC F R E E D O M , OF THE

relationship between law and liberty, the subjects of so many ideological struggles in the eighteenth century, are questions which have no gender. Philosophes habitually indulged in vast generalizations about humanity: Montesquieu contemplated the nature of society, Rousseau formulated a scheme for the revitalized education of children, Lord Kames wrote four volumes on the history of mankind. The broad sweep of their generalizations has permitted the conclusion that they indeed meant to include all people in their observations; if they habitually used the generic "he" two centuries before our own generation began to be discomfited by it, then it is a matter of syntax and usage, and without historical significance. Yet Rousseau permitted himself to wonder whether women were capable of serious reasoning. If the Enlightenment represented, as Peter Gay has remarked, "man's claim to be recognized as an adult, responsible being" who would "take the risk of discovery, exercise the right of unfettered criticism, accept the loneliness of autonomy," it may be worth asking whether it was assumed that women were also to recognize themselves as responsible beings. Is it possible, by definition, for women to be enlightened? The answers to that question have important implications for historians of political thought and for those who seek to write women's intellectual history. We should be skeptical of the generous assumption that the Enlightenment man was generic. Philosophe is a male noun: it describes Kant, Adam Smith, Diderot, Lessing, Franklin, Locke, Rousseau. With the conspicuous exceptions of Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, women are absent even from the second and third ranks. They hover on the fringes, creating a milieu for discussions in their salons, offering their personal and moral support to male friends and lovers, but making only minor intellectual

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

contributions. Mme. Helvetius and M m e . Brillon, M m e . Condorcet, even Catherine of Russia, are consumers, not creators of Enlightenment ideas. Is it by accident or design that the Molly Stevensons, the Sophie Vollands, the Maria Cosways figure primarily as the addressees of letters by Franklin, Diderot, Jefferson? A careful reading of the main texts of the Enlightenment in France, England and the colonies reveals that the nature of the relationship between women and the state remained largely unexamined; the use of man was in fact literal, not generic. Only by implication did the writers say anything of substance about the function and responsibilities of women in the monarchies they knew and the ideal communities they invented. Just as their inadvertent comments on the mob revealed the limits of their democracy, their comments on women reveal the limits of their definition of civic virtue. Perhaps the most striking feature of Enlightenment literature is that the more abstract and theoretical his intention the more likely it is that the writer would consider the function of women in the polity. Because a standard way of reinventing natural law was to posit the first family in a state of nature and derive political relationships from its situation, philosophes were virtually forced by the form in which they had chosen to work to contemplate women's political role—even if, with Rousseau, they did so in an antifeminist mode. By contrast, the more the writer's intention was specific criticism of contemporary affairs, as it was apt to be among the Whig Opposition, the less the likelihood of serious consideration of women as political beings. But both groups shared the unspoken assumption that women acted in a political capacity only in special and unusual circumstances. In the face of a denial that women might properly participate in the political community at all, there was invented a definition of women's relationship to the state that sought to fill the inadequacies of inherited political theory. The republican ideology that Americans developed included—hesitantly—a political role for women. It made use of the classic formulation of the Spartan Mother who raised sons prepared to sacrifice themselves to the good of the polis. It provided an apparent integration of domestic and political behavior, in a formula that masked political purpose by promise of domestic service. The t e r m s provided were ambivalent and in many ways intellectually unsatisfying; the intellectual history of women is not a whiggish progression, ever onward and ever upward, toward autonomy and liberation. The tangled and complex role of the Republican Mother offered one among many structures and contexts in which women might define the civic culture and their responsibilities to the state; radical feminist political movements would develop in dialectical opposition to it. This essay seeks to describe the elements of that republican role, and the gaps in available political theory it was intended to fill.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

To what extent was there room for women in the philosophe's vision of the political order? Let us begin with Locke, whose consideration of the relationship of women to public order was extensive, and who was read and generally admired by the philosophes of the eighteenth century.' Locke's Two Treatises on Government are a direct attack on Richard Filmer's Patriarcha. which spins a justification for absolute monarchy by divine right out of the biblical injunction to honor thy father. But the c o m m a n d m e n t , a f t e r all, is to " H o n o r thy father and mother"·, Filmer's defense of absolutism in government conveniently forgot mothers; it imagined a power structure that was masculine, that was absolute, and that descended through primogeniture. To create this structure and defend it as he did, Filmer had to ignore a large network of other relationships and impose a hierarchical subordination on all those he did acknowledge. Locke needed for his purposes only a reader who would concede that the biblical commandment was to " H o n o r thy father and m o t h e r " ; grant him that, and Locke could proceed to race through Filmer, restoring mothers as he went, and by that device undercutting Filmer's analogy between parental power and royal authority. If familial power is shared with women and limited by mutual responsibilities, the nature of royal authority must also be shared and limited. What Locke accomplished in the First Treatise was the integration of women into social theory. 2 " T h e first society was between man and wife," Locke wrote in the Second Treatise, "which gave beginning to that between parents and children; to which, in time, that between master and servant c a m e to be added." But these relationships are not all hierarchical: "conjugal society is made by a voluntary compact between men and women." 3 The grant of dominion made to Adam in Genesis is not, as Filmer would have it, over people in general and Eve in particular; it is to human beings over animals. If Adam is lord of the world, Eve is lady. T h e curse of Eve, Locke thought, could not justify women's permanent and universal submission to men; the curse was part of her punishment for sin, but it was a sin which Adam had shared and for which he too was punished, not rewarded. Husbands reigned over wives, wives suffered the pains of childbirth; but these were descriptions of reality and reality might be changed by human intention. Labor might be medically ' S e e Peter Gay, The Enlightenment An Interpretation—The Science of Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1969), 189 et passim. ' J o h n Locke, Two Treatises of Government. P e t e r Lasleti, ed. (London: C a m b r i d g e Univ. Press. 1967); see especially First Treatise. §§62-65. Robert Filmer, Patriarchal or the Natural Power of Kings. T h o m a s 1. Cook. ed. (New York: H a f n e r Publishing Co., 1947). ' L o c k e . Second Treatise. §§77. 78.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

eased; a woman who was queen in her own right did not become, when she married, her husband's subject. 4 Locke came closer than most of his contemporaries and successors to defining a political role for women. He underlined the rights and powers women ought to have in their domestic capacity: mothers have a right to the respect of their children that is not dependent on the husband's will; mothers have their own responsibilities to their children; women ought to control their own property. There is not even a hint in his work that women unsex themselves when they step into the political domain. 5 But once Filmer had been disposed of, and Locke could generalize more broadly about civic powers and responsibilities, his insistence on defining the role of women in the social order diminished. He did, however, phrase his most significant generalizations in the Second Treatise in terms of persons: the legislative body is composed of persons, the supreme power is placed in them by the people, "using Force upon the People without Authority . . . is a state of War with the People." 6 Women were included, presumably, among "the people," but they had no clear mechanism for expressing their own wills.7 Locke obviously assumed that women contributed in some way to the civic culture, but he was not very clear about what they might do were they to find themselves under a king who had forfeited their confidence. One ends by wishing he had written a Third Treatise. Montesquieu also returned to first principles: "I have first of all considered mankind." 8 The principles by which governments are regulated—virtue in a republic, honor in a monarchy, fear in a despotism—are abstractions apparently devoid of gender. The virtue that buttresses the republic is transmitted by parents (not only fathers) who are responsible for raising virtuous children (not only sons). Sensitive as he was to the implications of private manners for public style, Montesquieu argued that "The slavery of women is perfectly comformable to the genius of a despotic government, which delights in treating all with severity. . . . In a government which requires, above all things, that a particular regard be paid to its tranquillity, it is absolutely necessary to shut 'First Treatise. §§30, 47. 5 First Treatise. §§61, 63; Second Treatise. §§52, 65, 183. In t h e Second Treatise. §§80-83, Locke argues that the p r i m a r y justification for m a r r i a g e is the lengthy d e p e n d e n c e and vulnerability of the child, and he permits himself to " e n q u i r e , why this C o m p a c t , when Procreation and Education a r e secured, and Inheritance t a k e n c a r e for, may not be m a d e determinable, either by consent, or at a certain time, or upon certain conditions, as well as any other voluntary compacts, there being no necessity in the n a t u r e of the thing, . . . t h a t it should always be for Life. . . 'Second Treatise. §§124, 153, 154, 155. ' F o r women as a special c a s e of relatively minor significance, s e e S e c o n d Treatise. §§180-83, 233. "Charles Louis de S e c o n d a t , Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. T h o m a s Nugent, trans. (New York: H a f n e r Pub. Co.. 1949), Uvii- lxix.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

up the w o m e n . " On the other hand, " I n a republic, the condition of citizens is moderate, equal, mild and agreeable . . . an empire over women cannot . . . be so well exerted." 9 Although women did not play, for Montesquieu, a central role in shaping the civic character of the government under which they lived, the form that government ultimately took did have crucial implications for their private lives. By his description of the "connection between domestic and political g o v e r n m e n t , " Montesquieu provided strong support for the conclusion that it is in women's self-interest to live in a republic. H e offered no mechanism by which a woman unfortunate enough not to be born into a republic might change her condition, but the message that it was of crucial importance for women to live under certain forms of government and not under others was there, strongly phrased, available if anyone wished to use it. Condorcet came closest to inventing procedure for as well as justification for including women in politics. His feminist comments emerge naturally from his general vision of the social order; they appear most extensively in his essay " S u r I'admission des Femmes au Droit d e Cit£," and in his " L e t tres d'un Bourgeois de N e w - H e a v e n " (an appealing typographical error). 1 0 Condorcet argued that although it was true that women had not exercised the right of citizenship in any "constitution called f r e e , " the right to political voice in a republic is claimed by men on the grounds that they are "sensible beings, capable of reason, having moral ideas," qualities which can be equally well claimed by women. " M e n have . . . interests strongly different from those of women," Condorcet said in an unusual and forceful statement (although he did not specify what those differences were), and have used their power to make laws that establish " a great inequality between the sexes." O n c e it were admitted that people cannot legitimately be taxed without representation, "it follows from this principle that ail women are in their rights to refuse to pay parliamentary taxes." Condorcet proceeded to argue t h a t except in m a t t e r s requiring brute strength, women were obviously men's equals; the brightest women were already superior to men of "Montesquieu, 255-56. Book VII includes a curious pair of paragraphs headed "Of Female Administration" which offer the paradox that " I t is contrary to reason and nature that women should reign in families . . . but not that they should govern an empire." In families women's natural weakness "does not permit them to have the pre-eminence"; but in governments that same weakness means that they administer their governments with "more lenity and moderation." It is the classic double bind, and applies, in any event, only to women who inherit their thrones. Despite Montesquieu's defense of women's political ability, he suggests no devices which would increase the likelihood that they will use these abilities. "The essay, "Sur l'admission des Femmes," originally appeared July 3, 1790, in the Journal de la Societe de 1789; it is reprinted in Oeuvres de Condorcet (Paris: Firmin Didot Freres, 1847), X, 119-30. The letters were published as pages 267-71 in Vol. 1 of Filippo Mazzei, Recherches Hisloriques et Politiques Sur ies Etats-Unis . . avec Quatre Lettres d'un Bourgeois de New-Heaven sur iunite de la Legislation (Paris: A. Colle, 1788).

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limited talents, and improvements in education would readily narrow what gaps there were. He concluded what was perhaps his generation's most detailed statement of the political rights and responsibilities of women: Perhaps you will find this discussion too long; but think that it is about the rights of half of human beings, rights forgotten by all the legislators; that it is not useless even for the liberty of men to indicate the means of destroying the single objection which could be made to republics, and to make between them and states which are not free a real difference."

Condorcet is best remembered, of course, for his Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain, sometimes for the book's own sake, more often for the bravery of his authorship of a testament to the human spirit at the very moment when that same spirit was hounding him to a premature death. In the Esquisse, he imagined that women had been an integral part of prehistoric society and important contributors to the social order. The original society consisted of a family, "formed at first by the want that children have of their parents, and by the affection of the mother as well as that of the father." Children gradually extend the affection they naturally have for their parents to other members of their family and then to their clan. But before the first stage of primitive society has been outgrown, women have lost their central position. Condorcet suggests that the origins of governmental institutions resided in the meetings of men who planned hunting trips and wars. It seemed obvious to him that "the weakness of the females, which exempted them from the distant chase, and from war, the usual subjects of debate, excluded them alike from these consultations"; women were thus excluded at the outset from "the first political institutions" and consigned to "a sort of slavery." Their slavery is modified in the second, or pastoral epoch, and manners are "softened" and modified still more in the third epoch, which also sees the invention of alphabetical writing. "A more sedentary mode of life had introduced a greater equality between the sexes. . . . Men looked upon them as companions,. . . [but] even in countries where they were treated with most respect . . . neither reason nor justice extended so far as to an entire reciprocity as to the right of divorce. . . . The history of this class of prejudices, and of their influence on the lot of the human species . . . [evinces] how closely man's happiness is connected with the progress of reason."' 2 The more rational the government, the more improved will be the status of women. It is an important formulation, but Condorcet, oddly enough, "Leiires d'un Bourgeois . . .. 281-87, translation mine. " M a r i e Antoine Nicolas C a r n a l . M a r q u i s de C o n d o r c e t , title usually translated as Sketch for a Historical Piclureof the Progress of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1794), 24, 26, 28, 32, 43. In his list of t a s k s t h a t remained unaccomplished, C o n d o r c e t specifically listed the improvement of t h e status of women: his words on this point have frequently been reprinted. (P 280)

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does not develop it further. In its omission of women from the fourth through ninth epochs of one of the very few histories that begins as in fact a history of mankind in the generic sense, the Esquisse falls into traditionalism: " h e " lapses into literal usage, and the assumption that men represent the general case, women the rare and insignificant exception, is reinforced. Those who wish to find in Condorcet reiteration of the rule that the world is a man's world will find it in the Esquisse.13 Condorcet offered his comments on women in politics in direct challenge to those of Rousseau. Although much that Rousseau wrote implied sharp criticism of contemporary society and envisaged drastic change, what he said about women usually reinforced the existing order. This conservatism about women may well have served to make his radical comments about men's behavior more palatable; if the world were to be changed into a new one, characterized by a new style of men's behavior as demonstrated by Emile, governed by a General Will in accordance with a new Social Contract, it was surely reassuring to know that the women of that world, exemplified by Emile's wife Sophie, would not change—that they would remain deferential to their men, clean in their household habits, complaisant in their conversation. The key to Rousseau's understanding of women's political function is in his discussion of the origins of government in The Social Contract. The General Will, after all, is a concept without gender, the freedom of the social contract comes from the paradoxical identification of the ruler with the ruled. If it is obvious that women are among the ruled, ought they not also be among the legislators? There is a hidden paradox in this generally paradoxical essay: the women who are ruled are, at the same time, not ruled; because they are not ruled they need not participate in the General Will. They are invisible. As Rousseau explained in Emile, they lived in another world. Theirs is "the l3 See Keith Michael Baker's magisterial Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975). Baker does not, however, comment on Condorcct's treatment of women's role in political society or on the essay "Sur l'admission des Femmes au droit de cite" or the "Lettres d'un Bourgeois.. . ." In 1785 Condorcet's careful analysis of "the calculus of consent" was published as "Essai sur l'application de l'analyse ä la probability des decisions rendues ä la plurality des voix"; as Baker phrases it, the essay attempts to deal with the problem of " U n d e r what conditions will the probability that the majority decision of an assembly or tribunal is true be high enough to justify the obligation of the rest of society to accept that decision." Condorcet viewed "the process of political decisionmaking . . not as a means of ascertaining the strongest among a number of opposing parties—not, that is, as a mere expression of will—but as a method for the collective discovery of truth." Like Turgot, Condorcet rejected the claim that "monarchical government" could "impose a just order in a constant war of corporate claims and counterclaims" in favor of " t h e doctrine of a nation of individuals united by the common, reciprocal bond of citizenship." (Baker, 228-29) This reasoning has something in common with Rousseau's General Will, in which all individuals choose to submit to the community. But even in Condorcet's formulation, women are not explicitly part of the community.

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empire of softness, of address, of complacency; her commands are caresses; her menaces are tears." 1 4 This is not hyperbole; women have moral and physical relationships to men, but not political ones; not do they relate to any women other than their mothers. Rousseau is explicit. The shift from the generic to the literal " h e " occurs before The Social Contract has scarcely begun: the most ancient and only natural society is the family, Rousseau remarks, but children soon outgrow their dependence on their fathers.15 After that the specific terms in which the General Will is explained are masculine ones; it is only men, taken literally, whom Rousseau expects to display disinterested civic spirit. In Emile he takes it as self-evident that it is "the good son, the good father, the good husband, that constitute the good citizen.'" 6 Emile is a book about the task of forming a citizen for an idealized society. £mile is a body at ease with its mind, a sophisticated innocent, a person as paradoxical as the society for which he is educated. But Rousseau did not rethink the terms on which women ought to be educated for his new social order. He did not posit, for Sophie, as he did for £mile, a tabula rasa on which a rational mentor writes only what is necessary and natural; he did not end for Sophie, as he did for Emile, with a personality radically different from the one that standard systems of education were geared to create. Sophie is as traditional a woman as it is possible to imagine, reformed only in the sense that she does not dote on fashion or read novels. Rousseau's refusal to rethink the terms of Sophie's education was intentional. Due to his own private sexual tastes he had, after all, a substantial personal stake in the submissiveness of women. He was not loath to make the broadest generalizations: "To oblige us, to do us service, to gain our love and esteem . . . these are the duties of the sex at all times, and what they ought to learn from their infancy." 17 Relationships between men and women are always sexual, and always verge on the uncontrollable: "Woman is framed particularly for the delight and pleasure of man. . . . Her violence consists in her charms . . . [her modesty masks her] unbounded desires." 18 Nor did Rousseau need to rethink the bases of Sophie's mental development. As men's education became more highly developed it had strayed further from the natural into bookish abstraction. Rousseau needed a revolution to arrange for Emile to grow up among things rather than books, to postpone learning to read, to postpone foreign languages until he traveled to "Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius. Or. a Treatise of Education (Edinburgh: A. Donaldson 1768), 111, 10. ''Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract. G. D. H. Cole, ed. (London: Dent, 1913), Book I, Chap. II, p. 6. "Emilius. Ill, 14. "Ibid., 111,74-75. "Ibid., III, 5-6.

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countries where they were used. But girls were already barred from books, rarely taught foreign languages, already limited to physical tasks relating to household chores. Only erase excessive attention to fashion, and women's education needed no renovation. Emile thanks his mentor for having been "restored to my liberty, by teaching me to yield to necessity." But Sophie's life is at all times largely directed by necessity; the more that women's lives were shaped by repeated cycles of pregnancy, lying-in, nursing, and childrearing, the closer they were to nature; the less the need to reform their education. 1 9 Rousseau's most substantial target was Plato, who had offered, in Book V of The Republic, the classic attack on assigning social roles by gender. Rousseau defended Plato against the charge of encouraging promiscuity by inventing a community of women, but he was horrified by the "civil promiscuousness" implied by the assigning of the same employments to men and women. It represented, Rousseau sneered, the conversion of women into men. 2 0 The argument that women ought not be part of the political community (as they a r e in Plato) was reinforced by Rousseau's insistence that women who seek to do so deny their sexual identity. The woman who seeks to be a politician or philosopher does violence to her own character: " A witty [i.e. articulate] woman is a scourge to her husband, to her children, to her friends, her servants, and to all the world. Elated by the sublimity of her genius, she scorns to stoop to the duties of a woman, and is sure to commence a man. . . . " Rousseau was sure his readers would share his scorn of " a female genius, scribbling of verses in her toilette, and surrounded by pamphlets"; although if she were scribbling emotional effusions, as Julie "Ibid., III, 229. In Book V of The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith expresses similar admiration for the practical aspects of women's education. "There are no public institutions for the education of women, and there is accordingly nothing useless, absurd, or fantastical in the common course of their education. They are taught what their parents or guardians judge it necessary or useful for them to learn; and they are taught nothing else. Every part of their education tends evidently to some useful purpose; either to improve the natural attractions of their person, or to form their mind to reserve, to modesty, to chastity, and to economy; to render them both likely to become the mistresses of a family, and to behave properly when they have become such. In every part of her life a woman feels some conveniency or advantage from every part of her education. It seldom happens that a man, in any part of his life, derives any conveniency or advantage from some of the most laborious and t roublesome parts of his education." (The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937], Book V, ch. I, part II, article II, pp. 720, 734) When Smith comes lo reform the educational system, women continue to be excluded from it. Men are to envy women the practicality of their education, and the direct relationship between women's education and their adult roles; it is harder to predict what skills boys will ultimately find most useful. That women's education can be directly related to women's adult roles precisely because these roles are so limited and so predictable does not seem to Smith to be a cause for concern. "The Republic. H D P . Lee, tr. (London: Penguin, 1955). 209-10. Rousseau's comments appear in Emilius. Ill, 14.

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does throughout all six books of La Nouvelle Heioise, he apparently had no objection. "The art of thinking is not foreign to women," Rousseau conceded, "but they ought only to skim the surface of abstruse sciences." 21 Attacks on masculine, articulate women are one of the more common themes of English literature (both British and American) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The image would prove to be a formidable obstacle to feminists throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; if the concept is not original with Rousseau, surely he did much to strengthen it in precisely those liberal and reformist circles where it would be logically predicted to die out. Rousseau's impact on American thought is difficult to measure. There was no American edition of £mile. but it was available in translation in even more editions than Locke's Two Treatises. Much more widely circulated than either was Lord Kames' Sketches of the History of Man, which occasionally cites Rousseau and whose comments on women's place in society are in rough congruence with Rousseau's. For Lord Kames, women's history was " a capital branch of the history of man." It demonstrated a crude progress from women's debased condition among savages to "their elevated state in civilized nations." He explicitly denied that women have a direct responsibility to their nation; their relationship to their country is secondhand, experienced through husbands and sons, and they therefore have "less patriotism than men." Like Rousseau, Kames feared masculinization: "Remove a female out of her proper sphere, and it is easy to convert her into a male." He agreed that women's education ought to fit them to be sensible companions and mothers; the great danger to be guarded against was frivolity and disorderly manners. Having disposed of women in 97 pages, he was free to ignore them in the remaining 1,770 pages of his four-volume treatise; his final conclusion was merciless: "Cultivation of the female mind, is not of great importance in a republic, where men pass little of their time with women."" *

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We are left with an intellectual gap. The great treatises of the Enlightenment, which provided so changed a framework for attitudes toward the state, offered no guidance on how women might think about their own relationship to liberty or civic virtue. Even Rousseau, one of the most radical political theorists of an age famous for its ability to examine the assumptions it had inherited, failed to examine his own assumptions about women. Ought a woman dare to think? Might a woman accept "the loneliness of au"Emitius. I l l , 104-05, 139. " H e n r y H o m e , Lord K a m e s , Sketches Cadell, 1778), II. 1-2. 5 . 8 5 , 9 7 .

of the History of Man (Edinburgh: W. S t r a h a n & T .

WOMEN AND POLITICS

tonomy"? To be alone, in fact, was to be male; women were invariably described, even by Locke, in relationship to others. Only Condorcet occasionally imagined an autonomous woman: for Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Karnes, women existed only in their roles as mothers and wives. If Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Piatt are right in defining the Enlightenment as the expression of "a desire to end the commitments to passivity and dependence in the area of politics," women were not a part of it.23 Of all branches of Enlightenment thought, Americans were most attracted to the literature of the Commonwealth and Radical Whig opposition in England. As Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood have shown, eighteenthcentury Americans were familiar with the work of Trenchard and Gordon, Sidney, Harrington, James Burgh, Catharine Macaulay. American political theorists made much use of it. But this literature is largely concerned with specific issues of opposition to crown policy; it rarely needed a presocial family to make its argument. One result of the overwhelming influence of the Whig tradition in America was that American political theory was rooted in assumptions that never gave explicit attention to basic questions about women. It was the good fortune of male Whigs that they did not need to begin at the beginning, but that same good fortune inhibited the likelihood that they would include women in their contemplations of the good society. As Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace have brilliantly shown, Whigs had a major ideological concern for parent-child relationships, but their discussions faded into the specific case of sons and fathers, or the limits of the obligations of sons to mothers. 2 ' 1 Other variants of familial relationships were less thoroughly explored. John Trenchard, for example, addressed himself only to the evils of marrying women for money. In all four volumes of vigorously egalitarian rhetoric which rang the changes on the theme of the relationship between the state and the individual, Cato always contemplates political man, narrowly defined." Not even so articulate a feminist as Catharine Macaulay felt the need to discuss women in her histories and essays, though she did discuss women's education elsewhere. She attacked Rousseau, and wrote in the seven small pages of her twenty-second "Letter on Education" most of what it took Wollstonecraft hundreds of pages to "The Wish to be Free: Society. Psyche and Value Change (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 49 " E d w i n G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation." in Perspectives in American History. VI (1972), 167-306. See especially parts II and 111. " J o h n T r e n c h a r d , Cato's Letters, or. Essavs on Liberty. Civil and Religious and Other Important Subjects (London: J. Wilkins, T . Woodward, et al., 1733), II, 201-12. T h e r e a r e no c o m m e n t s on women in T r e n c h a r d and T h o m a s Gordon's The Independent Whig (London: J . Peele, 1721).

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argue in the Vindication. But Macaulay, who was confident enough to plunge directly into public political debate and to criticize a Hobbes or a Burke without even a passing apology for the frailties of her sex, apparently felt no need to address the responsibilities of women to political society. Perhaps she believed she had made her position clear by implication and in practice. But her direct c o m m e n t s speak of the private responsibilities of women—even reformed, chaste, nonfrivolous women—to individual men. In this she was more in agreement with Rousseau than she thought. 28 American Whigs were as unlikely as their British counterparts to integrate into political theory a concept of the proper relationship between women and the body politic. It may even be that Americans ignored the problem because the British did. Any body of theory that addresses basic issues of sex role must reach back to presocial or psychological sources of human behavior. The issues are so basic that they demand probing to the deepest and most mythological layers of human experience. Americans felt little need to do this; James Otis was o n e of the few to try, in the opening pages of the 1764 pamphlet. The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved: The original of government has in all ages no less perplexed the heads of lawyers and politicians than the origin of evil has embarrassed divines . . . the gentlemen in favor of [the theory that government is based on] the original compact have often been told that their system is chimerical and unsupported by reason or experience. Questions like the following have been frequently asked them. . . . Who were present and parties to such compact? Who acted for infants and women, or who appointed guardians for them? Had these guardians power to bind both infants and women during life and their posterity after them? . . . What will there be to distinguish the next generation of men from their forefathers, that they should not have the same right to make original compacts as their ancestors had? If every man has such right, may there not be as many original compacts as there are men and women born or to be born? Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature? If every man and woman born or to be born has and will have a right to be consulted and must accede to the original compact before they can with any kind of justice be said to be bound by it, will not the compact be ever forming and never finished? Otis raised embarrassing questions about women's political role: If upon abdication all were reduced to a state of nature, had not apple women and orange giris as good a right to give their respectable suffrages for a new King as the " C a t h a r i n e Macaulay. Leiters on Education tvith Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London: C. Dilly, 1790): An Address to the People of England. Ireland and Scotland, on the Present Crisis of Affairs. 3d ed. (New York, n.p., 1775): Observations on the Reflections of Edmund Burke . . (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1791); Loose Remarks on Certain Positions to be Found in Mr Hobbes . . . (London: T. Davies, 1767).

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philosopher, courtier, and politician? Were these and ten millions of other such . . . consulted?" Although Otis could ask embarrassing questions and imply their answers, on this as on so many points of theory, his developing mental illness prevented him from suggesting constitutional devices for implementing them. Nor did his sister, the vigorous M e r c y Otis Warren, deal with the questions he had opened. She was certainly intelligent and a fluent writer. She could viciously criticize men for their private treatment of women and counsel friends that flirting and deference were "a little g a m e " by which one charmed male admirers into doing what one wished, but even she avoided the theoretical questions: what responsibility does the state have to women? what responsibility do women have to the state? The closest she c a m e was to describe the political woman as observer and commentator, not participant. If the ideas were valid, she wrote, " I think it very immaterial if they flow from a female lip in the soft whispers of private friendship or are thundered in the Senate in the bolder language of the other sex." 2 8 But it must be said that her belief that private recognition of woman's political potential is more important than public recognition loses some of its force when hejd up against the fact of her own publication of her history of the Revolution, and the fact that the "soft whispers" of the sister of J a m e s Otis and the wife of James Warren were more likely than those of most women to be heard by politically influential men. W a r r e n ' s c o m m e n t s supported the notion that the family circle is a woman's state. •

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It was left to postrevolutionary ideology in America to justify and popularize a political role for women, accomplishing what the English and French Enlightenment had not. Montesquieu had implied that if women had the choice they ought to choose to live in republics; Condorcet had said explicitly that republics were imperfect until they took account of the political claims of half of their people. But Americans did not move directly to the definition of women as citizens and voters. T h e only reference to women in The Federalist is to the dangers to the safety of the state posed by the private intrigues of courtesans and mistresses. 2 9 Instead, Americans offered an ironic compromise, one which merged Rousseau and Condorcet. It represented both an elaboration of the image of Sophie and a response to attacks like " R e p r i n t e d in Bernard Bailyn. ed.. Pamphlets of the American Revolution. 1750-1776 (Cambridge: H a r v a r d Univ. Press, 1965). 1 . 4 1 9 - 2 2 . " M e r c y Olis W a r r e n to C a t h a r i n e M a c a u l a y , 29 Dec. 1774, Mercy Otis W a r r e n L e t t e r b o o k , Massachusetts Historical Society. " E d w a r d M e a d e Earle, ed., The Federalist ( N e w Y o r k : Modern Library. 1941), 28-29.

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Rousseau's on the mental capacity of women. In this, as in so many other cases, Rousseau provided his own oxymoron. The path not taken was suggested by one of the rare direct attacks on Rousseau that appeared in America, a pamphlet that contemplated the details of the integration of women into the political community. It c a m e in 1801 from the pen of an "aged m a t r o n " f r o m Connecticut who signed herself " T h e Female A d v o c a t e . " She bristled at the arrogance of those who would deride "masculine w o m e n " : if by the word " M a s c u l i n e " be meant a person of reading and letters, a person of science and information, one who can properly answer a question, without fear and trembling, or one who is capable of doing business, with a suitable command over self, this I believe to be a glory to t h e o n e sex, equally with the o t h e r . . . custom, which is not infallible, has gradually introduced the habits of seeing an imaginary impropriety, that all science, all public utility, all superiority, all that is intellectually g r e a t and astonishing, should be engrossed exclusively by the male half of mankind.

The Female Advocate wished to function primarily as a citizen, only secondarily as a subject. She a t t a c k e d contemporary refusals to include women in m a t t e r s of church and public governance. She complained that " m e n engross all the emoluments, offices, honors and merits of church and state." She would grant that St. Paul had counseled women to be silent in public, and "learn from their husbands at h o m e , " but she pointed by contrast to St. Paul's own willingness to appoint women deaconesses. Women were not unsexed by taking p a r t in community decisions: What if they have no husbands, or what if their husbands . . . a r e not of the church, or what if, as is very common, the h u s b a n d knows less of the scriptures than the wife? . . . the p o i n t . . . is carried much too f a r , in the exclusive m a l e prerogative to teach, to censure, to govern without the voice of women, or the least regard to the judgment or assent of t h e other sex. If a woman may not vote, o r speak, on any occasion whatever, even tho' she have no husband, if she may not take any active part, by approbation or disapprobation, no not even in a silent vote, and that too when perhaps one of her sex is the subject of discipline or controversy, yea, when, farther, as is generally the case, the g r e a t majority of the church is female—how, pray you, is the sex to be viewed? A r e they mere cyphers . . .?

The proper model for females, she thought, was the biblical Deborah, who lived actively in both the religious and the secular worlds: "Behold her wielding the sword with one hand, and the pen of wisdom with the other: her sitting at the council board, and there, by her superior talents, conducting the arduous affairs of military enterprise! Say now, shall woman be forever

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destined solely to the distaff and the needle, and never expand an idea beyond the walls of her house?" 30 Other Americans had also made demands for the direct participation of women in public affairs: there is the well-known comment by Abigail Adams, which her husband jokingly turned away, that women required the right to participate in the new system of government, arguing pointedly that "all men would be tyrants if they could." All her life Abigail Adams would be a shrewd private commentator on the political scene, assuming as active an obligation to judge good and evil as though she were called on annually to vote on it. But she was known, of course, only in a circle which, though relatively large, remained private. Charles Brockden Brown sneered at the "charming system of equality and independence" that denied women a part in the choice of their governors, but the circulation of Alcuin was small; St. George Tucker conceded that laws neither respected nor favored females, but he made the concession in a minor aside in a three-volume work.31 The women whom Esther de Berdt Reed and Sarah Bache led through Philadelphia collecting contributions for the American soldiers in 1780 encountered many who thought, with Anna Rawle, that "of ail absurdities the ladies going about for money exceeded everything." The campaign, as we know, was a success: they collected some 300,000 paper dollars, managed to keep Washington from merging it into the general funds "contributed by the gentlemen"; and they saw to it that the soldiers knew to whom they were indebted for their new and much-needed shirts. The effort formed the model for a score of postwar women's philanthropic groups, but it did not, it has to be said, provide a model of political action except by sacrifice. 32 Direct political participation and influence require voting and office-holding. American intellectuals who sought to create a vehicle by which women might demonstrate their political competence shrank from that solution, hesitating to join the Female Advocate in the wish that women be admitted to active participation and leadership in civic government. To do so would have required a conceptual and political leap for which they were apparently not prepared. Instead of insisting that competence has no sex, an alternate model was proposed in the 1790s. It contained many traditional elements of the woman's role, but it also had a measure of critical bite. The theorists of this alternate position were Judith Sargent Murray, Su*°The Female Advocate {Ue* Haven, C o n n . : T . G r e e n , 1801), 22, 10. 31 Alcuin; A Dialogue (New York: G r o s s m a n , 1971), 32-33; St. G e o r g e T u c k e r , ed., Blacksione's Commentaries (Philadelphia: n.p., 1803), II, 145,445. " A n n a Rawle to R e b e c c a Rawle S h o e m a k e r , J u n e 30, 1780, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. 35 (1911), 398; The Sentiments of an American Woman (broadside], Philadelphia, J u n e 10, 1780.

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sannah Rowson, and Benjamin Rush. 3 3 They deplored the " d e p e n d e n c e for which women are uniformly educated"; they argued that political independence in the nation should be echoed by self-reliance on the part of women. The model republican woman was to be self-reliant (within limits); literate, untempted bv the frivolities of fashion. She had a responsibility to the political scene, though not to act on it. As one fictional woman put it, " I f the community flourish and enjoy health and freedom, shall we not s h a r e in the happy effect? If it be oppressed and disturbed, shall we not endure our proportion of evil? Why then should the love of our country be a masculine passion only?" 3< But her competence did not extend to the making of political decisions. Her political task was accomplished within the confines of her family. T h e model republican woman was a mother. T h e Republican M o t h e r ' s life was dedicated to the service of civic virtue; she educated her sons for it; she condemned and corrected her husband's lapses from it. If, as Montesquieu had maintained and as it was commonly assumed, the stability of the nation rested on the persistence of virtue among its citizens, then the creation of virtuous citizens was dependent on t h e presence of wives and mothers who were well informed, "properly methodical," and free of "invidious and rancorous passions." As one commencement speaker put it, "Liberty is never sure, 'till Virtue reigns triumphant. . . . While you [women] thus keep our country virtuous, you maintain its independence." It was perhaps more than mere coincidence that virtu was derived from the Latin for man, with its connotations of virility; political action seemed somehow inherently masculine. Virtue in a woman seemed to require another theater for its display. To that end the theorists created a mother who had a political purpose, and argued that her domestic behavior had a direct political function in the republic. 35 «

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Western political theory, even during the Enlightenment, had only occasionally contemplated the role of women in the civic culture. It had habit" S e e especially Judith S a r g e a n t M u r r a y . The Gleaner (Boston: I. T h o m a s . 1798), 111, 188-224, 260-65; Benjamin Rush, " T h o u g h t s upon F e m a l e Education. A c c o m m o d a t e d to t h e Present S l a t e of Society, M a n n e r s and G o v e r n m e n t in the U n i t e d S t a t e s of A m e r i c a " (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall. 1787). reprinted in Frederick R u d o l p h , ed.. Essays on Education in the Earlv Republic (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1965); S u s a n n a h Rowson, Reuben and R a r A f / ( B o s t o n : H a n n i n g a n d Loring, 1798). " H a n n a h F o s t e r . The Coquette (Charlestown, M a s s : Ε a n d S . Larkin, 1802), 62. " Λ > κ . York Maga2ine. May 1795, pp 301 05 I have discussed this in g r e a t e r detail in " D a u g h t e r s of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787 1805," in The Hofstadler Aegis: A Memorial. Stanley Elkins and Eric M c K i l r i c k . eds. (New Y o r k . Knopf. 1974), 36-59. For t h e idealization of the S p a r t a n mother, see Elizabeth Rowson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 1969).

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ually considered women only in domestic relationships, only as wives and mothers. It had not devised any mode by which women might have a political impact on government or fulfill their obligations to it. The Republican Mother was a device which attempted to integrate domesticity and politics. The ideology of Republican Motherhood also represented a stage in the process of women's political socialization. In recent years, we have become accustomed to thinking of political socialization as a process in which an individual develops a definition of self as related to the state. 36 One of the intermediate stages in that process might be called the deferential citizen: the person who expects to influence the political system, but only to a limited extent. Deference represents not the negation of citizenship, but an approach to full participation in the civic culture. The best description of the genre is Charles Sydnor's of the voters of Jefferson's Virginia, who freely chose their social superiors to office rather than exercise a claim on office themselves. Deference was an attitude that many women adopted and displayed at a time when it was gradually being abandoned by men; the politicization of women and men, in America as elsewhere, was out of phase. Women were still thinking of themselves as subjects while men were deferential citizens; as the restrained, deferential democracy of the republic gave way to an aggressive, egalitarian democracy of a modern sort among men, women invented a restrained, deferential but nonetheless political role. The voters of colonial Virginia did not think themselves good enough to stand for election but they chose legislators; the deferential women whom Judith Sargeant Murray prescribed for the republic did not vote, but they took pride in their ability to mold citizens who would. This hesitancy of American women to become political actors would persist. Are not the women of the postsuffrage twentieth century who had the vote but did not use it to elect people like themselves to office similar to the deferential males of Sydnor's Virginia? T h e r e was a direct relationship between developing egalitarian democracy among men and the expectation of continued deferential behavior among women. Emile needs Sophie; the society in which he functions cannot exist without her. Just as white democracy in the antebellum South rested on the economic base of slavery, so egalitarian society similarly rested on a moral base of continuing deferential behavior among a class of p e o p l e women— who would devote their efforts to service: raising sons and disciplining husbands to be virtuous citizens of the republic. The learned woman, who " S e e Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture Political Attitudes and Democracy m Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963). Almond and V e r b a view politicization as a gradual process by which individuals cease to think of themselves as invariably acted on by the state, and end by tliinking of themselves as actors, who f o r c e governm e n t s to respond to them. T h e r e are many stages along this continuum, and t h e r e is room for internal contradictions.

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might very well wish to m a k e choices as well as influence attitudes, was a visible threat to this arrangement. 3 7 A political community that accepted women as political actors would have to eliminate the Rousseauean assumption that the world in which women live is s e p a r a t e from t h e empire of men. T h e political traditions on which American politics w e r e built offered little assistance in defining the point at which the w o m a n ' s private domain intersected with the public one. T h e Republican M o t h e r seemed to offer a solution. T h e notion that mothers perform a political function is not silly; it represents the recognition that political socialization t a k e s place at an early age, and that the patterns of authority experienced in families are i m p o r t a n t factors in the general political culture. T h e willingness of American women to discuss politics at home is apparently more characteristic than in o t h e r western democracies; so is the r a t e of women's interaction in their communities, their rate of office holding in voluntary associations. 3 * Americans live—and have long lived—in a political culture in which the family is a basic part of the system of political communication. This did not "just happen." It is a behavior pattern that challenges far older ones. The separation of male and female domains within a community is a very ancient practice, maintained by a wide range of often unarticulated but nevertheless very firm social restrictions. 3 5 T h e r e a r e nations t o d a y — e v e n fairly m o d e r n democracies—in which these s e p a r a t e domains and premodern patterns still shape the political community: where women are much less likely than their American counterparts to discuss politics; where men a r e much more likely to carry on their political discussions among men, outside the home. In premodern political cultures mothers do not assume a clear political function. In this sense. Republican Motherhood was a very important—even revolutionary—invention. It altered the female domain in which most women had always lived out their lives; it justified an extension of women's absorption and participation in the civic culture. In the years of the early republic there developed the consensus that a mother could not be a citizen but that she might serve a political purpose. Those who said that women ought to play no political role at all had to meet " I t is hard to find objective grounds for a fear of learned ladies; as Kenneth Lockridge has shown, literacy among women lagged substantially behind literacy among men in the colonial years. The subject has been insufficiently studied, but it appears that women's literacy rates do not catch up with men's until well into the nineteenth century. See Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy :r Colonial New England (New York: Norton. 1974), 38-42: Daniel Calhoun, The Intelligence of a People (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. 1974), Appendix A. "Almond and Verba. 377-401 " O n female spheres, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society. I (1975), 1-30: Rayna Reiter, ed. Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review press. 1975).

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21

the proposal that women might play a deferential political role through the raising of a patriotic child. The concept of Republican Motherhood began to fill the gap left by the political theorists of the Enlightenment. It would continue to be used by women well into the twentieth century; one thinks of the insistence of Progressive women reformers that the obligations of women to ensure honesty in politics, efficient urban sanitation, pure food and drug laws were extensions of their responsibilities as mothers. But the ideology of Republican Motherhood had limitations; it provided a context in which skeptics could easily maintain that women should be content to perform this limited political role permanently and ought not to wish fuller participation. For one woman, Republican Motherhood might mean an extension of vistas; for another it could be stifling. The ambivalent relationship between motherhood and citizenship would be one of t h e most lasting, and most paradoxical, legacies of the revolutionary generation.* • A n earlier version of this essay was read at t h e Annual Meeting of t h e Southern Historical Association in N o v e m b e r , 1975. T h e a u t h o r is g r a t e f u l to Anne Firor S c o t t and Linda G r a n t dePauw for c o m m e n t s offered on that occasion.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic J a n Lewis

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H E N the American colonists commenced rebellion against the British government and assumed the separate and equal station to which they believed the laws of God and nature both entitled them, they found in marriage—"that S O C I A L U N I O N , which the beneficent Creator instituted for the happiness of Man"—a metaphor for their ideal of social and political relationships. In the republic envisioned by American writers, citizens were to be bound together not by patriarchy's duty or liberalism's self-interest, but by affection, and it was, they believed, marriage, more than any other institution, that trained citizens in this virtue. Thus "L," writing in the Royal American Magazine in 1774, explained why this "social union is so essential to human happiness." The married man, he wrote, "by giving pleasure . . . receives it back again with increase. By this endearing intercourse of friendship and communication of pleasure, the tender feelings and soft passions of the soul are awakened with all the ardour of love and benevolence. . . . In this happy state, man feels a growing attachment to human nature, and love to his country." 1 Marriage was the very pattern from which the cloth of republican society was to be cut. Revolutionary-era writers held up the loving partnership of man and wife in opposition to patriarchal dominion as the republican model for social and political relationships. T h e essays, stories, poems, and novels Ms. Lewis is a m e m b e r of the Department of History at Rutgers University, N e w a r k . S h e wishes to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities f o r a Fellowship f o r Independent Study and Research, and Ruth H . Bloch, J a y Fliegelman, D r e w R. M c C o y , and, especially, N o r m a Bäsch for their advice. ' " T h o u g h t s on Matrimony," Royal'American Magazine (Boston), J a n . 1 7 7 4 , 9Historians have explored the anti-patriarchal dimensions of the Revolution. S e e J a y Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority. 17$01800 ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 8 2 ) ; Edwin G . Burrows and Michael Wallace, " T h e American Revolution: T h e Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in American History. V I ( 1 9 7 2 ) , 1 6 7 - 3 0 6 ; Winthrop D . J o r d a n , "Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1 7 7 6 , " Journal of American History. L X ( 1 9 7 3 ) , 294-308; and Melvin Yazawa, From Colonies to Commonwealth: Familial Ideology and the Beginnings of the American Republic (Baltimore, 1 9 8 5 ) . Fliegelman has noted that the Revolutionary generation found in the "affectionate union" of marriage an alternative to the patriarchal model of political relationships {Prodigals, chap. 4)·

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that established this model created in republican marriage an ideal that d r e w upon recent social trends and infused them with political meaning; in so doing, their authors created f o r w o m e n an important n e w political role, not so much as a mother, as Linda K . K e r b e r has s u g g e s t e d , 2 but, rather, as a wife. As an indispensable half of the conjugal union that served as the ideal f o r political as well as familial relationships, the Republican W i f e e x e m p l i f i e d the strengths and w e a k n e s s e s of the R e v o l u t i o n a r y era's notion of woman's role and, indeed, o f republicanism itself; neither can be understood fully except in the context of the other. B e c a u s e historians have begun to question whether A m e r i c a n political discourse in the period 1 7 7 5 - 1 8 1 5 can be understood in terms of republicanism alone, it is important to note that the adjective " r e p u b l i c a n " will be used here much as Americans of the period used it—to signify not only classical republicanism but also that fusion of civic humanism and evangelical ardor achieved by Americans at the e v e o f the Revolution. T h e key to republicanism is virtue, the self-sacrificial and disinterested quality that was prized in both sacred and secular traditions. 3 T h e premium that 2

Linda K. Kerber coined the term "Republican Motherhood" to describe the peculiar political mission assigned to American women in the Revolutionary era. In an influential article and book she used the term to characterize the indirect political role that women were to play by "raising sons and disciplining husbands to be virtuous citizens of the republic" ("The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective," American Quarterly, X X V I I I [1976], 187-205, quotation on p. 203, and Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980]). Although Kerber focused upon the domestic rather than the maternal character of woman's political participation, her term has taken on a life of its own and is often assumed to say more about motherhood than Kerber herself ever claimed. (See, for example, Mary Beth Norton, ' T h e Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review. L X X X I X [1984], 6 1 6 - 6 1 9 ; Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780-1860 [New York, 1984], chap. 2, and passim: and Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. [New York, 1983], 1 0 1 - 1 0 4 . ) Indeed, as Ruth H. Bloch first suggested, comparatively little attention was paid in the period 1 7 8 5 - 1 8 1 5 to the republican dimensions of motherhood, in relation to woman's other roles ("American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1 7 8 5 - 1 8 1 5 , " Feminist Studies, IV [1978], 1 2 5 - 1 2 6 , n. 67). More recently Kerber has argued that "republican motherhood was a conceptualization which grafted the language of liberal individualism onto the inherited discourse of civic humanism," which could not, in and of itself, "effectively describe an active role for women in the republic" ("The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation," Am. Qtly.. X X X V I I [1985], 486, 484) The argument here is that American republicanism offered women a role as wives. It was left to liberalism, as Kerber suggests, to extol the political dimensions of motherhood. 3

See especially Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1969); his analysis of the meaning of republicanism informs this essay. For a discussion of the meaning of virtue to contemporary Americans see Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, X I I I (forthcom-

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republican thought placed upon disinterestedness has obscured the revolutionary nature of its views about women. To be sure, republican theorists were unwilling to think of women, or any other group, as having different and perhaps antagonistic interests; 4 hence, they did not address women as a separate group. Republicanism assumed, however, that America's dawning glory would cast its beneficent rays upon the whole of society, a new and different society in which women would be required to play a new and unprecedented role. If we would understand the role designed for women in the early national era, we must look to that body of Anglo-American literature that addressed political issues indirectly and found a wide and appreciative audience among the rapidly expanding reading public. Jay Fliegelman has shown that when we read those popular literary, pedagogical, and didactic works for their political meaning, we gain a new perspective on both the development of political thought in the eighteenth century and the intimate connections between family and polity in eighteenth-century thought. Much of the commentary about woman's nature and her proper role can be found in novels and in the fiction and essays of the growing number of popular magazines.5 ing). A useful review of the literature of republicanism is provided by Robert E. Shalhope, "Republicanism and Early American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Set., X X X I X (1982), 334-356. Although republicanism can be described as a wholly secular ideology, and the exact contributions of religious thought and feeling to it are certainly debated, its religious dimension must be recognized; as a popular ideology—that is, as one that was expressed in fiction and magazines by writers who reflected m o r e than they shaped its key beliefs— republicanism was an amalgam of secular and sacred elements. Perhaps its ability to tap so many in-some-ways-contradictory roots explains republicanism's broad and enduring appeal. 4 See W o o d , Creation, esp. 53-65, for the republican hostility to "interest." For the history of women in the era of the Revolution see G e r d a Lerner, ' T h e Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of W o m e n in the Age of Jackson," in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History ( N e w York, 1979), 15-30; Joan Hoff Wilson, " T h e Illusion of Change: W o m e n and the American Revolution," in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, 111., 1976), 383-445; Mary Beth N o r t o n , Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (New York, 1980); and Kerber, Women of the Republic. For a review of this literature see N o r t o n , "Women's Experience," AHR, L X X X I X (1984), 593"6i9· 5 Fliegelman, Prodigals. For the growth of literacy see Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974). For the tastes of the American reading public see David Lundberg and H e n r y F. May, ' T h e Enlightened Reader in America," Am. Qtly., XXVII (1976), 262-293; Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y., 1978), esp. pt. 4; and H e r b e r t Ross Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America. 1789-1860 (Durham, N.C., 1940), esp. chap. 1. T h e relevance of literature to an understanding of women's history has been explored by Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eigh-

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Americans drew no clear distinctions between that which was "fiction" and that which was not, between works addressed to men and works addressed to women, or even between British literature and original American creations; nor should we. Moreover, what concerns us here is the meaning that American men and women might derive from popular literature. The moral message in what might seem a diverse body of works was remarkably consistent. Magazine editors, for example, aimed both to instruct and to entertain, devoting their periodicals to "knowledge and entertainment," "entertaining knowledge and instructions," and "amusement and instruction." They and their readers could find knowledge entertaining and a properly written piece of fiction instructive. 6 Indeed, fiction served to illustrate the workings of character. In the moral world of the eighteenth century, character was all, and the study of character was an important aspect of moral philosophy, itself a branch of post-Newtonian natural science. 7 Here art and science might fuse. Similarly, although some periodicals seem to have been addressed primarily to men and others to women, most welcomed both sexes as readers and authors and printed articles that presumably were of interest to both sexes. 8 In fact, no magazines intended exclusively for women were published in America until early in the nineteenth century. 9 The themes of courtship, marriage, and seduction figured to a greater or lesser extent in a wide range of early national publications, not only the Boston Women's Magazine but also, for example, Paine's Pennsylvania Magazine and Webster's American Magazine. The topic of marriage was not reserved to women or their magazines, for it was an issue of public, indeed political, import. Finally, we must note that much of what was read in America had been written in Britain. Popular British novels were brought out in American editions, and American editors, unable to fill their periodicals with original works, borrowed freely from each other and from their British counterparts. 10 Y e t what matters is not only the origin and intent of such works

teenth-Century America (Port Washington, N . Y . , 1966 [orig. publ. New Y o r k , 1935))» and Janet Wilson James, Changing Ideas about Women in the United States, 1776-1825 (New Y o r k , 1 9 8 1 ) . 6 General Magazine and Impartial Review of Knowledge and Entertainment (Baltimore), 1 7 9 8 ; Ladies Magazine, and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge (Philadelphia), 1 7 9 2 ; and New York Weekly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction. 1 8 1 4 . 7 See Gordon S. Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," WMQ. 3d Ser., X X X I X (1982), 4 1 4 , and passim ' S e e , for example, American Magazine (New York), Dec. 1 7 8 7 , 3, welcoming "fair readers" as both subscribers and correspondents. 5 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 17 41-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 5 7 ) , 139. 10 For the popularity of British works in America see Fliegelman, Prodigals, chap.

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26

but also the lessons Americans might have derived from them. Bernard Bailyn has shown the special meaning British political writings may have had for Americans immersed in an imperial crisis. 11 So also with the popular literature of marriage. Indeed, a British work might be edited for the American audience in ways that would make it more applicable to the American situation. In Clarissa, the novel of the patriarchal family par excellence, the heroine is, as Fliegelman has put it, "purely a victim caught between two tyrannies," that of the father and that of the seducer. Although Richardson held the disobedient daughter partly responsible for her sad fate, eighteenthcentury American editions of the book removed that assessment of the heroine from both the subtitle and the introduction, making Clarissa instead the innocent victim of male arrogance, imperiousness, and design. Yet Clarissa was more than a seduction story; it was a political parable with particular lessons for Americans, as a fearful John Adams recognized when he observed that "Democracy is Lovelace and the people are Clarissa." 12 Americans who aimed for the separate station of a viable republic would have to learn better than Clarissa how to resist the tyrannies and seductions that republican theorists were certain they faced. Because eighteenth-century thought placed the family and the state on one continuum, that of "society," and did not yet—as the nineteenth century would—erect a barrier between the private sphere of the family and the public one of the world, it could dramatize issues of authority in terms of relationships between members of a family. 13 Accordingly, the young woman's quest for a suitable husband and her attempt to navigate between the eighteenth-century's Scylla of overweening power and its Charybdis of seductive liberty was the nation's plot as well. Americans, successfully completing a revolution against one sort of tyranny, were bound to conclude that their young men and women also could achieve independence. The anti-patriarchalism of Revolutionary ideology dictated that tyranny presented the most immediate and obvious threat to American happiness, and patriarchal domination the chief obstacle to happy and virtuous marriage. According to the republican view, patriarchs such as "The Inexorable Father" who was "unfeeling as adamant, hard of heart as the nether mill stone," threatened always to block the happiness of their children; in this case, the father refused to let 2. For the reprinting of British articles in American magazines see Mott, History, 14-15· " I n particular, Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 6 7 ) , and The Origins of American Politics ( N e w Y o r k , 1967). 12 Fliegelman, Prodigals. 8 3 - 8 8 ; the quotation is f r o m p. 87 and refers to abridgments only; Adams is quoted on p. 2 3 7 . 13 See n. i , above, and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man ( N e w Y o r k , 1977).

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his daughter marry a promising young physician who was too honest to enrich himself by overcharging his patients. 14 So resonant was this anti-patriarchal theme that well after the Revolution American magazines published articles excoriating "parents . . . who are daily offering up the honour and happiness of their children at the shrine of interest and ambition," 1 5 much as the British government had sacrificed its American colonies. Instead, "marriages should be contracted from motives of affection, rather than of interest." Fortunately, such unions were possible in "happy America," where partible inheritance— "provided our conduct does not render us unworthy"—formed "the basis of equality and the incitement to industry and caution." If America's sons and daughters were educated to "virtue and good morality," they would choose to marry for love rather than interest. 16 Being capable of exercising sound judgment, children were not obligated to obey the injunctions of narrow-minded or rapacious parents. The rhetoric of marriage bears the same relationship to the prevailing customs as does republican ideology to the events it sought to shape and define: in each case, the terms of analysis explained long-range trends by turning them into dramas enacted by villains and heroes—or, more commonly, heroines. Historians of the family have shown that parental control of marriage declined over the course of the eighteenth century, while children's autonomy increased. 17 That trend had its roots in the

14

Massachusetts Magazine (Boston), Oct. 1 7 9 1 , 619-620. See similarly ' T h e Unfeeling Father," ibid., May 1 7 9 2 , 286, and ' T h e Precipitate Lover," Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country Magazine (Boston), Oct. 1 7 9 4 , 227-232. " " E s s a y on Parental Care and Filial Duty," New York Magazine, Jan. 1 7 9 4 , 49. This article may well have originated in Britain, for it speaks of "rich and noble parents." See also "On the Treatment of the Fair Sex," Lady's Magazine and Musical Repository (New York), Apr. 1 8 0 1 , 2 1 4 : "It has been remarked, that the public affairs of most nations have been conducted with more or less elegance, dexterity, and success, as they respectively restrain or give freedom to their women." Such articles had as their object proving (or bringing about) American superiority, of which the status of women was deemed a fit measure. See also Wood, Creation, 46-48, 9 7 - 1 0 7 . " " I m p r o v e m e n t s Suggested in Female Education," N.Y. Mag., N.S., Aug. 1 7 9 7 , 407; "Lindor to Caroline," Mass. Mag., May 1 7 9 2 , 3 1 2 , 3 1 3 . See also "On Marriage," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Mar. 1789, 85-86; "On Parental Authority," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Oct. 1 7 9 2 , 239; and "The Censor," Christian's, Scholar's, and Farmer's Magazine (Elizabethtown, N.J.), Apr.-May 1790, 49. " S e e Daniel Scott Smith, "Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts," Journal of Marriage and the Family, X X X V (1973), 419-428; Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New Y o r k , 1976), 9 8 - 1 0 2 ; Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, N . Y . , 1980), chap. 4; and Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New Y o r k , 1983), 187-203. See also Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Reformation; Protestantism, with its insistence that "mutual comfort" was one of marriage's primary purposes, had licensed the consensual, affectionate union. 1 8 Although American Puritan ministers still retained for parents, by virtue of their supposedly superior wisdom, a key role in selecting their children's mates, they nonetheless recognized that "marriage is one of the weightiest actions of a person's life, and as the Y o k e fellow is suitable or unsuitable, so that condition is like to be very comfortable or uncomfortable." N o r did wealth establish a potential spouse's suitability. As Cotton Mather rhymed it, ' T h e Wretch that is alone to Mammon Wed, / May chance to find a Satan in the B e d . " 1 9 Interest alone, whether personal or dynastic, had never been an acceptable basis for marriage in the colonies; what changed were, on the one hand, determinations of who was best qualified, the parents or the children, to recognize merit in a potential spouse and, on the other, perceptions of how likely the affections of marriage were, in and of themselves, to assure lasting happiness. During the eighteenth century, parents grew less willing or able to exert the full range of pressures at their command to shape their children's destinies; the balance tipped in favor of the younger generation's discretion. Thus rhetoric that implicitly likened late eighteenth-century parents to designing court ministers, bent upon subjecting their dependents, grossly exaggerated the control that parents retained over their children's marriages and, in fact, overstated the power parents had held a century earlier. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of marriage, much like that of politics, served both to expose underlying fears and to legitimate and encourage patterns that had already come to prevail. Republican theorists endeavored to show how, in a post-patriarchal world, citizens could govern themselves, how they could form a society bound by love rather than fear. Because they deemed marriage the school of affection, authors who wrote about the institution were addressing one of their age's most pressing questions: how to make citizens fit for a republic. For example, if the choice of a mate were, or should be, the individual's, he or she must know how to select wisely. And if the parents no longer did, or should, have control, substitute parents could still give Century England ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 8 ) , chap. 2, and Lawrence Stone, The Family, and Marriage in England, 1 5 0 0 - / 8 0 0 ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 7 ) . chaps. 7 , 8.

Sex,

" S e e Stone, Family. 1 3 5 - 1 4 2 , Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 8 5 ) , chap. 1; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 8 2 ) , chap. 6; J o h n D e m o s , A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 0 ) , 8 2 - 9 9 , 1 5 0 - 1 7 0 ; and Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Religion and Domestic Relations in SeventeenthCentury New England ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 6 (orig. publ. Boston, 1 9 4 4 ] ) , chap. 2. S e e also Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge, I 9 7 9 ) . I 4 5 - I 7 3 · " B e n j a m i n Wadsworth, The Well-Ordered Family (Boston, 1 7 1 2 ) , 4 2 ; Cotton Mather, Eureka; or A Vertuous Woman Found . . . (Boston, 1 7 0 3 ) , 3.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

advice, which they did at great length in numerous tracts and essays. Parents did not abdicate; rather, they refashioned themselves into friendly paternalists who exerted influence in their families by more subtle, psychological means and in the wider world by words of friendly counsel. 2 0 Thus the author of "A Father's Advice to his Daughters" recommended that his own daughters and those of other men "place confidence in those who have shown affection for you in your early days, when you were incapable of making them any return." 2 1 Y e t even those dethroned patriarchs who posed as kind advisors believed they best served young men and women by enabling them to choose wisely their own partners. What sort of man made the ideal husband? H e was republican virtue incarnate, moderation personified. H e was "devout without superstition, and pious without melancholy, . . . careful without avarice, [manifesting] a kind of unconcernedness without negligence." He should be well educated but not "a pedant." A woman should look for "virtuous conduct, good temper, discretion, regularity and industry," and a "mild and even" disposition. 22 Unlike her European sisters, who supposedly married to raise their status, the American maid aimed at—and hoped to maintain— a happy medium, a domestic version of that steadily improving yet never-changing society that Gordon S. Wood has identified as the ideal society of republican dreams. Thus the happily married woman would find that her husband "would always be the same, and always pleasing." 23 The good husband was like the good citizen; he wed "not by interest but by choice," and "he treats his wife with delicacy as a woman, with tenderness as a friend." He "ever studied the happiness of the woman he loved more than his own." 2 4 In fact, the ideal husband resembled more than a little the popular portrait of the Revolutionary War officer, which is precisely the occupation Royall Tyler chose for the hero of his play The Contrast. To ensure that the officer/suitor's character could not be mistaken, Tyler dubbed him "Colonel Manly" and gave him such quintes20 See Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness. 1 7 5 - 1 8 7 ; Jane Turner Censer, North Carolina Planters and Their Children. 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1984), esp. 60-64, 68-70; and Fliegelman, Prodigals. 259-266. 21 Christian's Mag., Feb.-Mar. 1790, 697. This article is an extract from A Father's Legacy to His Daughters by Dr. John Gregory of Edinburgh. Originally appearing in England in 1 7 7 4 , it proved one of the most popular books published in this era in America, where it went through at least 1 5 editions and sold more than 20,000 copies. See Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America. 59-60, and Fliegelman, Prodigals. 39. " " T h e Maid's Husband," Baltimore Weekly Magazine. May 20, 1 8 0 1 , 297; "On the Choice of a Husband," Columbian Magazine or Monthly Miscellany (Philadelphia), Feb. 1788, 67; "On the Choice of a Wife," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Apr. 1 7 8 9 , 147; "Choice of a Husband," Columbian Mag., Feb. 1788, 65. " " M a i d ' s Husband," Baltimore Wkly. Mag., May 20, 1 8 0 1 , 297. Wood, Creation, 70-75· 24 "Character of a Good Husband," Mass. Mag., Mar. 1789, 1 7 7 ; ' T h e Suspicious Lover," ibid., Sept. 9, 1796, 495·

29

30

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

sentially republican opinions as that ancient Greece declined because "the common good was lost in the pursuit of private interest" and that "the man who can plant thorns in the bosom of an unsuspecting girl is more detestable than a common robber, in the same proportion as private violence is more despicable than open force, and money of less value than happiness." 25 The qualities that made a man honorable in public life, then, distinguished him as a potential husband as well. Men, likewise, were supposed to select republicans as their life p a n ners. As the author of "On the Choice of a Wife" put it, "virtue, wisdom, presence of mind, patience, vigour, capacity, and application, are not sexual qualities; they belong to all who have duties to perform and evils to endure." Echoing standard Protestant assumptions, Americans and the British writers they chose to republish argued that the most important considerations in the selection of a wife were her "qualifications as a companion and a helper."2* The choice was difficult, for women were not equally qualified. Suitors should be wary of frivolity and mere physical beauty or what the author of "The Intrinsic Merits of Women" called "the fashionable follies of the age." It was not that all women were suspect but that only certain types—great beauties, heiresses, and coquettes—were likely to be dangerous. Thus "the husbands of beauties are the most miserable of husbands. . . . Vexed by the vanity, exhausted by the extravagance, tortured by the inconstancy . . . life, instead of a blessing, becomes to them a purgatory." The republican gloss is equally evident in the simple reminder that "riches . . . will never alone afford happiness to their possessors." 27 Men and women both were thus advised to seek for their mates what we can recognize as embodiments of republican ideology. They were warned at even greater length to avoid certain notorious types, those associated with the despicable aspects of European court life: flatterers, deceivers, flirts, fops, coxcombs, coquettes, and all persons lacking in honor and virtue. Indeed, writers devoted so much effort to delineating the characteristics of the coxcomb and coquette that one cannot help suspecting that the type, rather than presenting a bona fide threat to naive American beaux and belles, served as a distillation, much like the tyrannical ruler or the designing minister, of what the age most feared. Flirts and fops, coxcombs and coquettes romp through the pages of republican literature with abandon. Their names are code words that signify luxury, vice, and deceit; their presence in a story points almost without exception to an " R o y a l l Tyler, The Contrast: A Comedy in Five Acts (Boston, 1920 (orig. publ. Philadelphia, 1790]), 80, 82. 26 Boston Weekly Magazine, Dec. 29, 1804, 37; printed also in Lady's Mag. ( N e w York), Mar. 1802, 168, 165. T h e articles are selections f r o m Letters from a Father to His Son (1794) by J o h n Aiken, an English physician, q u o t e d in James, Changing Ideas, 143-144. 27 Christian's Mag., Dec. 1789-Jan. 1790, 6 2 8 , 627. ' T h o u g h t s on the Choice of a Wife," Columbian Mag., Mar. 1792, 176. See also " O n the Choice of a Wife," Christian's Mag., Aug.-Sept. 1790, 351-353-

W O M E N A N D POLITICS

unhappy ending. They promise ruin not only for themselves and their victims but also f o r the infant nation, for they practice habits that were commonly believed to spell the death of republics. So reasoned the author of " T h e Philosophy of Coquetry": "so long as the sensualities and pride of one sex shall delight in luxurious habits and ostentatious living; so long as the vanities of the other shall be gratified by splendid personal decorations, costly refinements, and glittering equipages—or, more philosophically speaking, so long as w e shall be enslaved in a refined state of society, by numerous and factitious wants, we shall look in vain for disinterested alliances, and an union of the sexes resulting from mental attachment." 2 8 R e f o r m began with the individual; a republican society required virtuous men and women. That belief permeates the purportedly " T r u e Story" of "Eugenia—or the C o q u e t t e . " The girl of the title had parents w h o were "dissipated and luxurious. . . . [T]hey looked forward to immense wealth. . . . Pride, pomp, and luxury dazzled their eyes." Indeed, "without a particle of principle, [Eugenia's] father countenanced depredation, at a time when the hirelings of tyranny were not sparing in the arts of devastation." In this republican vision a nation could be no better than the individuals w h o constitute it. In this story a sad fate for the nation is averted when Eugenia, w h o has inherited her parents' vices, jilts the decent young man who had courted her, freeing him to marry "a woman, w h o boasts only thbse real charms. . . . which constitute the perfect wife. . . . [A]s she never experienced the deceit of a fop, so he congratulates himself that he has escaped from the smiles of a coquette." Significantly, Eugenia herself is almost incidental to the story. It is her parents, stand-ins for a corrupt British government, and their ability to thwart a truly affectionate union that are most feared. In such a view, to fall for a coquette is to surrender republican virtue, and to flirt is to commit an act of treason. 2 9 When courtship and marriage are infused with political meaning, women inevitably and inescapably become political beings. M a k e no mistake: these first formulations of a feminine political role w e r e not fundamentally feminist. T h e y were not devised by women in particular, nor was their aim primarily to enhance the position of women. T h e dynamic, rather, was republican and anti-patriarchal: it juxtaposed the virtuous, independent child and the oppressive, corrupting parent, and it found in the union of two virtuous individuals the true end of society and the fit paradigm for political life. Such a conceptualization of the relationship between family and polity represents more a subtle shift than a clean break from earlier models. When Puritans designated the family "a little 2 » N . Y . Λ1 ag.. N . S . , N o v . 1 7 9 6 , 583. T h e classic example, of course, is Hannah Foster's The Coquette: or. The History of Eliza Wharton . . . (Boston, 1 7 9 7 ) . 29 Columbian Mag.. N o v . 1 7 9 2 , 3 3 4 - 3 3 5 . See also " T h e Flirt. A Moral Tale," ibid.. J u n e 1 7 9 1 , 3 8 9 - 3 9 1 ; " A Vindication of the Fair Sex, Against the Charge of Preferring Coxcombs to Men of Worth and G e n i u s , " ibid., J u l y 1 7 9 2 , 2 8 - 3 0 ; and " T h e Ladies N e w Catechism," Baltimore Wkly. Mag.. May 20, 1 8 0 1 , 3 0 3 .

31

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

32

commonwealth," they meant it to be "a schoole wherein the first principles and grounds of government and subjection are learned: whereby men are fitted to greater matters in Church or commonwealth." 30 In such a family the relationship between parent and child was most important. When anti-patriarchalists in the eighteenth century substituted marriage for parenthood as the fundamental familial relationship, they did not, however, question the assumption that the family was but the society in miniature. Society still appeared as the family writ large, with the same sorts of relationships deemed appropriate for both the as-yet-undifferentiated spheres of home and world. Y e t in shifting interest from the parent-child nexus to the husband-wife bond, eighteenth-century authors necessarily raised women to a new moral and political stature. When the key relationship in a society is that between father and son or ruler and subject, women may conveniently be ignored; when the most important relationship is between conjugal equals, and when the family is still seen as the correlative of the larger society, then women can no longer be overlooked. If the affectionate union between a man and his wife, freely entered into, without tyrannical interference, is the model for all the relationships in the society and the polity, then the wife, as an indispensable half of the marital union, is a political creature. T o the extent that the success of the republican endeavor rested upon the character of citizens, republicanism demanded virtue of women, not because it numbered them as citizens but because it recognized how intimately women, in consensual unions, were connected to men. A virtuous man required a virtuous mate. Moreover, republicanism called upon every means at its disposal to assure male virtue. That obsession with virtue, deriving its force from the fusion of Protestant and republican notions of character, persisted long after the Revolution had been won and the Constitution ratified. Well into the nineteenth century, Americans linked the fate of their nation to the virtues of its people. 3 1 Even if, as several historians have suggested, certain thinkers, before the end of the eighteenth century, had embraced liberalism and its premise of the self-interested individual, 32 popular writers and, presumably, their audience had not. One writer put it emphatically: "Private vices are not public 30

William Gouge, 0/Domestical!Duties (London, 1 6 2 2 ) , quoted in Demos, Little Commonwealth, xix. 31 See Perry Miller, "From the Covenant to the Revival," in James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison, eds.. The Shaping of American Religion (Princeton, N . J . , 1 9 6 1 ) , 322-368. For the legacy of republicanism see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, N . C . , 1980). 32 See, for example, Joyce Appleby, "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in the Early Republic," JAH. L X V I 1 I (1982), 833-849. and "What Is Still American in the Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson?" WMQ, 3d Ser., X X X I X (1982), 287-309; John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New Y o r k , 1984); and Isaac Kramnick, "Republican Revisionism Revisited," AHR, L X X X V I I (1982), 629-664.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

benefits." Thac rejection of Bernard Mandeville infused much of the early national literature, and that conceptualization of society—which continued to see the family as the microcosm of the wider world and to insist that "public good must grow out of private virtue" 3 3 —held out a significant role for women. "A woman of virtue and prudence is a public good—a public benefactor." She has the power to make "public decency . . . a fashion—and public virtue the only example." And how is woman to accomplish that great end? By her influence over the manners of men. Indeed, "nothing short of a general reformation of manners would take place, were the ladies to use their power in discouraging our licentious manners." Such a role might seem trivial did Americans not consider "the general reformation of manners" one of the young nation's most important goals, and did they not think women fully capable of contributing to it. Women might begin by reforming themselves, for "there is not a more certain test of national depravity, than that which presents itself in the degeneracy of female manners." 34 Male manners, however, were of more concern, and in changing them women were to play their most important role. So argued men, such as the essayist who held that women who were the beneficiaries of a "virtuous and refined education" might contribute "no less to public good than to private happiness. A gentleman, who at present must degrade himself into a fop or a coxcomb in order to please the ladies, would soon find that their favor could not be gained but by exerting every manly talent in public and private life." That same view could be expressed by a woman—for example, Miss C. Hutchings, who assured her fellow boarding-school graduates of the influence of "female manners on society in general": "were all women rational, unaffected and virtuous, coxcombs, flatterers and libertines would no longer exist." Such arguments rested on several important new assumptions. First, although the concern with "manners" betokened an upper-class emphasis upon gentility, the insistence that women are—or can be—a moral force transforms manners into mores, into the moral foundation of the society. Thus "it is . . . to the virtues of the fair . . . that society must be indebted for its moral, as well as its natural preservation." 35 Second, women play their moral role not by denying 33

Gent and Lady's Mag.. July 1 7 8 9 , 5 1 1 ; " R e v i e w of the Boarding School," Columbian Ρhenix and Boston Review. May 1 8 0 0 , 278. S e e also " T h e Reflector N o . V , " Ladies' Monitor (New Y o r k ) , D e c . 5, 1 8 0 1 , 1 2 4 - 1 2 5 . 34 " S c h e m e for Increasing the P o w e r of the Fair S e x , " Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), J u n e 1 7 9 2 , 2 2 , 24, reprinted in Baltimore Wkly. Mag., Apr. 1 , 1 8 0 1 , 2 4 1 ; " T h e Reflector N o . I X , " Ladies' Monitor. J a n 2, 1 8 0 2 , 1 5 6 . 35 " T h e Influence of the Female Sex on the Enjoyments of Social Life," Christian's Mag.. Oct - N o v 1 7 8 9 , 4 9 7 , reprinted in Columbian Mag., Mar. 1 7 9 0 , ι 53-1 54; "Influence of the Female Character on Society in G e n e r a l , " Boston Wkly. Mag., Oct. 30, 1 8 0 2 , 3; " R e f l e c t o r N o . I X , " Ladies' Monitor, J a n . 2, 1 8 0 2 , 1 5 6 .

33

34

H I S T O R Y O F W O M E N IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S

their sexuality, by becoming " p a s s i o n l e s s , " 3 6 but by using it to tempt m e n to be good. T h i s conceptualization o f female influence seems to have intrigued m e n and women in the decades just after the Revolution. Magazines printed and reprinted numbers o f articles with similar titles and sentiments: " F e m a l e Influence," " S c h e m e for Increasing the P o w e r o f the Fair S e x , " " T h e Influence o f the Female S e x on the Enjoyments o f Social Life," ' T h e Power o f B e a u t y , and the Influence the Fair S e x might have in R e f o r m i n g the Manners o f the W o r l d . " 3 7 T h e s e , with a host o f similar articles, argued that the potential for beneficial female influence was almost unlimited. T h e height o f a woman's influence was reached during the period o f "love and courtship," which, "it is universally allowed, invest a lady with m o r e authority than in any o t h e r situation that falls to the lot o f human beings." A young man who addressed his classmates at Columbia College's c o m m e n c e m e n t elaborated: " S h e can mold the taste, the manners, and the conduct o f her admirers, according to her pleasure." M o r e o v e r , " s h e can, even to a great degree, change their tempers and dispositions, and superinduce habits entirely new." T h u s it was not in childhood that a man was most malleable; rather, it was when, grown to maturity, he sought the favors o f a young lady that he was most susceptible to influence. " B y the judicious management of this noble passion [love], a passion with which the truly accomplished of the fair sex never fail o f inspiring men, what almost miraculous reformations may be brought a b o u t ? " 3 8 O n c e she had seduced him into virtue, the married woman's task was to preserve her husband in the exalted state to which her influence had raised him. " I t rests with her, not only to confirm those virtuous habits which he has already acquired, but also to excite his perseverance in the paths o f r e c t i t u d e . " 3 9 T h e boldness o f this formulation is stunning. What earlier 36 On the changing conceptualization of woman's nature see Ruth H. Bloch, "Untangling the Roots of Modern Sex Roles: A Survey of Four Centuries of Change," Signs. IV (1978), 237-252, and "Feminine Ideals," Feminist Studies, IV (1978), r o i - 1 2 6 ; Catherine M. Schölten, Cbildbearing in American Society, 1650-1850 (New York, 1985); and Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, IV (1978), 219-236. 37 "An Oration delivered at the Annual Commencement of Columbia College," N.Y. Mag.. May 1795, 297-305; Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), June 1792, 22-24, and Baltimore Wkly. Mag., Apr. 1, 1801, 241; Christian's Mag., Oct.-Nov. 1789, 496-497; Columbian Mag., Mar. 1790, 1 53-1 54; Boston Wkly. Mag., Mar. 3, 1804, 73-7438 "Female Influence," N.Y. Mag., May 1 7 9 5 , 299, 300. See similarly Benjamin Rush. "Thoughts upon Female Education, Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government in the United States of America," in Frederick Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 25-40. See also Rush's "A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania," ibid., 21-22. 39 "Femaie Influence," N.Y. Mag.. May 1795. 3°o.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

35

Americans perceived as Eve's most dangerous characteristic, her seductiveness, is here transformed into her capacity for virtue. Woman was to lead man into rectitude, to lure him to the exercise of manly virtue. What miraculous reformations became possible when the attraction between the sexes, which for millennia had been considered the cause of the fall of mankind, could be transformed into the bedrock of the nation! Women indeed had great power—nothing less than the ability, as one magazine implored, "to make our young men, not in empty words, but in deed and in truth, republicans." 40 That was why so much importance was attached to the education of women. Passion could and must be tempered by reason. If Eve's daughters could deserve, as one young woman put it, to be "extolled for the beauties of their minds instead of their persons . . . , then would mankind enjoy that happiness which was first intended for the happy pair in Paradise." Were women properly educated, "then will the halcyon days dawn, and human nature appear in its highest beauty and perfection." Few topics excited more interest in the early national period than education, for it seemed to hold the key to making "our women virtuous and respectable; our men brave, honest, and honorable—and the American People in general an E X A M P L E of H O N O U R and V I R T U E to the rest of the world." 4 1 Writers were not always clear or certain about whether the American people were naturally virtuous or whether, instead, they merely had unusual potential to be so; hence the extremes of millennial hope and overwhelming fear, as men and women envisioned both the prospect of paradise on earth and the potential for disastrous failure. 42 Unless we recognize how grandiose American expectations could be and how terrifying was the possibility that they might not be realized, we cannot fully appreciate how central female education was to the republican agenda. While it is true that some reformers advocated educating women so that they, in turn, could teach their children, 43 the more important 40

"Female Economy," Ladies' Literary Cabinet (New York), July 8, 1820, 67. See also "Woman," N.Y. XPkly. Museum, Aug. 27, 1814, 132. 41 "Clio," "On Female Education," N.Y. Mag., Sept. 1794, 570; 'The Gossip No. XXVII," Boston Wkly. Mag., May 28, 1803, 125. See also "On Female Education," Royal Am. Mag., Jan. 1 7 7 4 , i o , and Ladies' Lit. Cab., Aug. 1 2 , 1 8 2 0 ,

112. For the importance that republicans attached to education see Lawrence A.

Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1785-1876

(New York,

1980), 103-148. See also the essays in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education. 42 Wood, Creation, chap. 3; Miller, "Covenant to Revival," in Smith and Jamison,

eds., Shaping of American Religion, 3 2 2 - 3 6 8 ; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-178} (Chapel

Hill, N.C., 1979)· See also "Education," Aw. Mag., Dec. 1787, 22-26. 43 For example, "Review of the Cultivation of Female Intellect in the United

States," Virginia Evangelical and Literary Magazine (Richmond), May 1 8 2 7 , 244,

June 1827, 292, as well as the works cited in n. 39, above. See also Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds.. The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York, 1974), 36-59·

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED S T A T E S

consideration, always, was to make women into fit companions f o r republican men and, especially, reliable guarantors of masculine virtue. Hence, as one man put it, "would the females keep in view the influence they possess over our education, they would not fail to perceive an attention to their own as nearly connected with the welfare of mankind. . . . D o they admire and respect the man of sense, and treat with contempt the coxcomb and the fop, [a young man] will, to recommend himself to their esteem, form himself to usefulness and virtue." 4 4 N o one argued that women were naturally more virtuous or pure than men; rather, they had the capacity to overcome weakness and become good. N o r , certainly, were all women natural republicans; the books and magazines of the age are populated with as many coquettes and flirts as coxcombs and fops. Human nature was malleable, and if it could be bent toward the good, to make a republican, it might also be warped toward evil, 4 6 creating a coxcomb or coquette. Obviously, those who believed in the malleability of character rejected Calvinistic assumptions about innate depravity, and nowhere is their departure from the older orthodoxy more clear than in their expectations of feminine virtue. Thus one essayist advised women of the enormous power they had at their disposal, "as Milton says, The world lies all before them, and it is theirs to mould into what shape they please." 4 6 That paraphrase and application of the penultimate lines of Paradise Lost are a good deal more sanguine than the original. So optimistic a reading of Milton, with its suggestion that the world was Eve's to make, even into a new paradise, drew upon millennial hopes that had become an integral part of American culture. 4 7 T o be sure, such expectations did not always express a literal belief in the imminence of Christ's thousand-year reign, and they were often dampened by a lurking fear that they might not be realized. Still, the Revolution unloosed a flood of optimism—so much, in fact, that some Americans could begin to think of themselves as " n e w " men, veritable American Adams, given the opportunity to make the world and themselves anew. As Paine put it, America "has it in her choice to do, and to live as she pleases. T h e world is in her hands." This persistent strain in American thought is well known to students of American culture. 4 8 Y e t there could be no Adam without an Eve; in the garden, as described in Genesis and by Milton, Adam had a companion who sinned first. Without Eve, Adam presumably would have remained in Paradise; that reminder of ""Op. Love," General Mag. and Review. June 1798, 22. 43 Fliegelman, Prodigals, 15. 4e "The Power of Beauty, and the Influence the Fair Sex might have in Reforming the Manners of the World," Boston Wkly. Mag., Mar. 3, 1804, 74· 47 See Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (New York, 1985) 48 "The Crisis, No. 15," in Howard Fast, ed., The Selected Work of Tom Paine and Citizen Tom Paine (New York, 1946), 84. See, in particular, R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955), and D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1923).

WOMEN AND POLITICS woman's unhappy role in effecting human destiny had never been far from the minds of Puritan ministers such as Cotton Mather. 49 T o the extent that the Fall was the most compelling of all biblical episodes for Puritans, woman played a central, and unenviable, role in the central drama of mankind. Milton's version of the Fall achieved wide popularity in America at the end of the eighteenth century, and not just among the heirs of the Puritans; 50 his Eve, although more sympathetic than the stock Puritan version, still bore primary responsibility for the great calamity. Thus, to move to a more helpful view of human potential, it was necessary first to come to terms with the Fall. Several avenues were available. One was to shift the focus of religion from Fall to Redemption; that path was taken, particularly in the nineteenth century, as American Protestantism became more Christocentric. 51 Another option was for Adam, in effect, to go his own way, without Eve, remaking the world as an all-male paradise; classic American literature, written by men, followed that route in the nineteenth century. 52 But Americans of the late eighteenth century, steeped as they were in orthodox readings of the Bible, and reminded of them by Milton, could not remake Adam and give the story of the Fall a happier ending without first remaking the woman who had been first in sin. And that is precisely what they did. Some revamped Eve clearly and consciously, offering new exegeses of Genesis, as did the author of ' T h e Nobility of Woman Kind," who reasoned that "the man gave us death; not the woman. The woman did amiss ignorantly and from deception: But the man knew, that he did amiss." Judith Sargent Murray, writing in the Massachusetts Magazine under the pen name "Constantia," offered an even more positive assessment of Eve's brief residence in Eden. Eve's motive in eating the forbidden fruit, Murray suggested, was admirable; she hungered for knowledge. Even though Adam could see that his mate had grown no wiser, he nonetheless tasted the fruit himself. His motive? "A base pusillanimous attachment to a woman! . . . Thus it should seem, that all the arts of the grand deceiver. . . were requisite to mislead our general mother, while the 49 S e e , f o r e x a m p l e . C o t t o n M a t h e r , Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion; or, The Character and Happiness of a Vertuous Woman . . . ( C a m b r i d g e , M a s s . , 1 6 9 2 ) , 1. S e e also Schölten, Childbearing. 12. 50 G e o r g e F. Sensabaugh details the spread o f Milton's w o r k s in America. A l t h o u g h his picture of connubial bliss was occasionally r e f e r r e d to in American publications b e f o r e the R e v o l u t i o n , it was the final quarter o f the century and especially its last decades that brought " A m e r i c a n acceptance o f Milton's authority on a national scale" (Milton in Early America (Princeton, N . J . , 1 9 6 4 ] , 98, and passim). 51 S e e H . Richard N i e b u h r , The Kingdom of God in America ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 3 7 ) . chaps. 3 and 4, and A n n D o u g l a s , The Feminization of American Culture ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 7 7 ) , chap. 4. S e e also Fliegeiman's brilliant analysis of " T h e Familial Politics o f the Fortunate Fall," in Prodigals, chap. 3. 52 S e e Leslie A . Fiedler, Lore and Death in the American Novel ( N e w Y o r k , i 9 6 0 ) , and L a w r e n c e , Studies.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES father of mankind forfeited his own, and relinquished the happiness of posterity, merely in compliance with the blandishments of a female." 6 3 Thus could common assumptions about feminine moral weakness and masculine intellectual strength be turned cleverly on their heads. Still, most writers who wished to revise popular evaluations of Eve did not take so assertively feminist a tack as to reinterpret the story of the Fall. For one reason, they might be refuted by traditional readings that kept a culpable sensuality, both feminine and masculine, at the center of the story. 54 Instead, those who were inclined to paint the first mother in more flattering hues tended to focus not so much upon her unhappy departure from Eden as upon her more pleasing qualities when she was still there. Here Americans took their cue from Milton, and in the years just after the Revolution his Eve "began to emerge as a pattern of womanly perfection." 56 Sometimes an author quoted Milton directly, as did Dr. John Gregory, an Edinburgh physician whose Legacy to his daughters was popular in America: "Milton had my idea, when he says of Eve 'Grace was in all her steps. / Heaven in her eye. In every gesture dignity and love'." Samuel Low, author of the play The Politician Out-witted, must have assumed that his audience would recognize his source when he quoted the same lines, without attribution, to describe his heroine. 66 Often Milton's influence was indirect but unmistakable; his "fair angelic Eve," created "for softness . . . and sweet attractive grace," 57 served as model for the ideal woman who would display "softness and delicacy of manners, unaffecting beauty, unassuming worth, modesty happily blended with good humour." The Miltonic influence is also clear in a poem entitled "Female Character," published in 1792: Queen of every gentle passion, Tender sympathy and love; Perfect work of Heav'nly fashion, Miniature of charms above. Love and grace in rich profusion, Soft'ning man's ferocious soul; S3 RoyalAm. Mag., Mar. 1 7 7 5 , 104; " O n the Equality of the Sexes," Mass. Mag., Apr. 1790, 2 2 4 - 2 2 5 . See also "On Woman," Boston VIYkly. Mag., July 2 1 , 1 8 0 4 , 1 5 3 : "if our first parents were at all to be blamed, Adam was by far the most culpable." 54 For example, " T h e Passenger No. X X X I , " Boston Wkly. Mag , Sept. 1 5 , 1 8 0 4 , 1 8 5 , and "On the Forbidden Fruit," Mass. Mag.. Oct. 1 7 9 1 , 6 1 7 - 6 1 8 . 55 Sensabaugh, Milton, 115. Μ Reprinted, without attribution, under the title " A Father's Advice to his Daughters," Christian's Mag., June-July 1 7 8 9 , 1 9 1 ; The Politician Out-witted, in Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative Plays by American Dramatists ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 1 8 , 1946), 1, 572. 57 Paradise Lost, bk. 5, line 7 4 , bk. 4, line 298.

WOMEN AND POLITICS All creation's fair conclusion, Form'd to beautify the whole. 5 8 Woman is the last of God's works, created not, as the pre-Miltonic tradition had it, to bring about man's fall, but rather to remind him, after that event, of the paradise they had once shared and hoped still to regain. 59 Jay Fliegelman has noted that Milton's description of Eve played an important role in "the secularization and feminization of 'grace'" in the eighteenth century as the word took on an aesthetic meaning. 60 By the same token, woman, "Heav'n's last best gift," promised salvation; she, like Christ, pointed the way toward redemption. Yet it is redemption with a difference, for when sacred history is rewritten in such a way—as American popular writers would have it—that woman is gracious and man has not yet sinned, then we can imagine the time before the Fall when the world was Paradise and our first parents In naked majesty seemed lords of all, And worthy seemed, for in their looks divine The image of their glorious Maker shone . . . 6 1 It was to this image of prelapsarian godliness that Americans, in the era just after the American Revolution, responded. The Republican Wife, then, was Eve, and republican marriage represented Paradise, a veritable "heaven on earth." Taking their model from Milton's hymn to wedded love in Book IV o f Paradise Lost, American publications described marriage in unabashedly Edenic terms. "The house of the married man is his paradise. . . . In the existence of a married man, there is no termination[;] when death overtakes him, he is only translated from one heaven to another." 6 2 Marriage is "the highest state of human felicity, and resembles that of the beneficent beings above." For this reason the choice of a marriage partner was so important. A correspondent to the Christian's, Scholar's, and Farmer's Magazine put it simply: "The Choice of a Wife" was one "on which not only (mankind's] present welfare, but even their everlasting felicity may depend." 6 3 5 8 " O n Masculine Manners in the Fair S e x , " Boston Wkly. Mag., May 5, 1 8 0 4 , 109; N.Y. Λ1 ag.. May 1 7 9 2 . " S e e Diane Kelsey McColley. Milton's Ere (Urbana, 111., 1 9 8 } ) . 6 0 Fliegeiman, Prodigals. 130. See also " O n the Difference between G r a c e and Beauty," Royal Am. Mag.. Feb. 1 7 7 5 . 4 3 - 4 5 61 Paradise Lost, bk. 5, line 19, bk. 4, lines 2 9 0 - 2 9 3 . 62"On Matrimonial Felicity," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Sept. 1 7 8 4 , 1 9 4 ; " T h e Felicity o f Matrimony," ibid., Aug. 1 7 8 9 , J 7 5 - J 7 6 , reprinted in N.Y. Mag., N . S . , Sept. 1 7 9 7 , 4 7 4 . For direct references t o Milton see " O n Love," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), J u n e 1 7 9 2 , 3 4 - 3 5 , and Sensabaugh, Milton, notes on 4 2 , 1 1 1 - 1 1 3 , 195-200. " " L e t t e r from Eliza," Pennsylvania Magazine (Philadelphia), Apr. 111(3, 168;

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES The Edenic vision of marriage, then, served to bridge the antipatriarchalism of the eighteenth century and the domesticity of the nineteenth. If the patriarchal model of familial relationships was suited to a hierarchically organized society, and if, as Nancy F. Cott has suggested, 64 domesticity went hand in hand with mid-nineteenth-century democratic liberalism, the Edenic vision fit just as nicely with the canons of republicanism. Like republicanism itself, Edenic republican marriage presented itself as egalitarian. Republican characterizations of marriage echoed with the words equal, mutual, and reciprocal, and marriage was described as a friendship between equals. An essay "Addressed to the Ladies," for example, urged "every young married woman to seek the friend of her heart in the husband of her affection. There, and there only, is that true equality, both of rank and fortune, and cemented by mutual interests, and mutual. . . pledges to be found. . . . There and there only will she be sure to meet with reciprocal confidence, unfeigned attachment and tender solicitude to soothe every care." Indeed, no word better summarizes republican notions of marriage than friendship. "Marriage is, or should be, the most perfect state of friendship. Mutual interest produces mutual assistance." Another writer defined the good marriage in almost the same words as "the highest instance of human friendship." In fact, "love" was nothing more than "friendship raised to its highest pitch." 65 Marriage, quite simply, was friendship exalted. Its pleasures derived from "mutual return of conjugal love. . . . When two minds are . . . engaged by the ties of reciprocal sincerity, each alternately receives and communicates a transport that is inconceivable to all, but those that are in this situation." Marriage was intended, another writer concluded, "to be the basis and the cement of those numberless tender sympathies, mutual endearments and interchanges of love between the mutual parties themselves, which make up not the morality only, but even the chief happiness of conjugal life." Marriage was moral because it fused "virtuous love and friendship; the one supplying it with a constant rapture, the other regulating it by the rules of reason." True marriage was quite unlike "those unnatural and disproportionate matches that are daily made upon worldly views, where interest or lust are the only motives." 66 True marriage was Christian's Mag., Aug.-Sept. 1790, 3 5 1 - 3 5 3 . See similarly "On Matrimonial Felicity," Gent, and Lady's Mag.. Sept. 1 7 8 4 , 1 9 3 - 1 9 4 . " C o t t , The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England. 1780-18}^ (New Haven, Conn. 1977), 65. " " O n Friendship," Christian's Mag., June-July 1 7 9 0 , 226; "Praise of Marriage," Boston Wkly. Mag.. Apr. 7, 1804, 93; "On Marriage," General Mag. and Review, July 1798, 42; "Reflections on Marriage Unions," N.Y. Mag., Oct. 1790, 561. See also "Gossip No. X X X I I , " Boston Wkly. Mag., July 9, 1 8 0 3 , 149; "Conjugal Love," Mass. Mag.. Feb. 1 7 9 2 , 102; and "Philo. No. X I V , " ibid., Nov. 1 7 9 0 , 664: "Friendship is the reciprocal attachment of two persons of the same sex. Love of two persons of different sexes." 66 "Conjugal Love," Mass. Mag., Feb. 1 7 9 2 , 102; "On the Pleasures Arising from a Union Between the Sexes," Columbian Mag., Jan. 1 7 8 7 , 244.

W O M E N A N D POLITICS

proportionate; put another way, it was symmetrical. Indeed, the mutuality and reciprocity that republicans so prized were inconceivable in an asymmetrical union—the "slavery" of so-called barbaric cultures, in which w o m e n w e r e thoroughly subordinated to men. 6 7 That republican marriage was symmetrical does not mean that it was fully egalitarian; rather, men and women were opposite sides of the same coin or, as a popular fable had it, two halves of a being that had once been sundered. Neither could be whole until it found its other half. 6 8 N o r could the halves be fully moral when separate, for Eve's love and Adam's reason w e r e equally necessary to the prelapsarian vision. As heirs to the Enlightenment, American republicans sought the happy medium bet w e e n — o r , more precisely, a fusion of—passion and intellect, head and heart. Eighteenth-century moral philosophy, as it was popularized in American magazines, taught both that passion must be regulated by reason 6 9 and that " n o real felicity can exist independent of susceptibility and affection, and the heart of him who is cold to the soothing voice of friendship, dead to the melting strains of love, and senseless to the plaintive pleadings of distress, is a mansion only calculated for demoniac spirits, or a cheerless dwelling for disgust and spleen." 7 0 Adam and Eve, reason and love, are each indispensable, and the symmetrical marriage brings them together. 67 For the assertion that the subordination or "slavery" of women was characteristic of barbaric cultures see, for example, "On the Treatment of the Fair Sex," Lady's Mag. (New York), Apr. 1 8 0 1 , 2 1 4 - 2 1 5 ; "An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex," Penn. Mag., Aug. 1 7 7 5 , 362-364; "Domestic Life of the Arabs," General Mag. and Revtew, July 1798, 34-36; and 'The Influence of the Female Sex on the Enjoyments of Social Life," Columbian Mag., Mar. 1790, 153-154: "Matrimony, among savages, having no object but propagation and slavery, is a very humbling state for the female sex." On the other hand, the position of women in societies characterized by commerce, large cities, and an advanced, complex civilization was not necessarily more enviable. See, for example, "Marriage Ceremonies of different Countries Compared," ibid., June 1787, 491: ' T h e trade of fortune-hunting . . . seemfs] to be confined to the old crowded cities, while the tedious peculiarities of European settlements of fortunes, &c are scarcely understood by the inhabitants of America." Americans saw their society—and its women—poised somewhere between barbarity and excessive economic and cultural development with its attendant corruptions. See McCoy, Elusive Republic, chap. 1. See also "Education," Am. Mag., Dec. 1787, 22-26. To be sure, the cyclical view of the rise and fall of civilizations, which McCoy illuminates, and the linear Christian eschatology are inconsistent; nonetheless, both sorts of cultural analysis appeared side by side in the era's magazines. Perhaps the pessimistic cyclical paradigm only made the more hopeful Christian one more appealing.

" " O n Marriage," General Mag. and Review, July 1798, 43. 69 For example, Boston Wkly. Mag.. Sept. 24, 1803, 193, and "On the Government of the Passions," Mass. Mag., July 1796, 402-404. See also Wills, Inventing America. 70 "On the Duties which we Owe to Society," Lady's Mag. (New York), Jan. 1 8 0 1 , 16.

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For this reason—that in checking passion and socializing reason the conjugal union made mankind truly virtuous—marriage was the model for society. The single life, according to John Witherspoon, writing as "Epaminondas" in the Pennsylvania Magazine on the eve of the Revolution, "narrows the mind and closes the heart." He asserted unequivocally the "absolute necessity of marriage for the service of the state." 71 The pure love of marriage formed the basis for "social virtue," for "while other passions concentrate man on himself, love makes him live in another, subdues selfishness, and reveals to him the pleasure of ministering to the object of his love. . . . The lover becomes a husband, a parent, a citizen." The "marriage institution," then, "is the first to produce moral order." For that reason, "marriage has ever been considered by every wise state the sinew of its strength and the foundation of its true greatness." Marriage formed the basis of all other relationships, both in the family, because it led to parenthood, and in the society, because it schooled men in the disinterested benevolence that was supposed by republican ideologues to constitute virtue. 72 In sum, as an essayist in the Key put it, "nothing is so honourable as MARRIAGE, nothing so comfortable both to body and mind. . . . It is marriage alone that knits and binds all the sinews of society together and makes the life of man honourable to himself, useful to others, and grateful to the God of nature. . . . Is there anything on earth nearer heaven?" Lest that promise of heaven-on-earth be insufficient to persuade his readers, the writer continued: "That M A N who resolves to live without WOMAN, or that WOMAN who resolves to live without M A N , are [j/c] ENEMIES TO THE C O M M U N I T Y in which they dwell, INJURIOUS TO THEMSELVES, DESTRUCTIVE T O THE WORLD, APOSTATES TO NATURE, and REBELS A G A I N S T HEAVEN A N D EARTH." 7 3 The man or woman who proposed to live alone, then, was heretic and traitor both.74 Like republicanism, the doctrine of symmetrical marriage subordinated individual interest to the greater good of the whole. Accordingly, marriages based upon interest were to be loathed; true marriage was the model for disinterested benevolence. Unlike the canon of domesticity, in which "women's self-renunciation was called upon to remedy men's 71

"Reflections on Marriage," Penn. Mag., Sept. 1 7 7 5 , 4 1 1 . 4 ° 8 . later published as "Letters on Marriage" in The Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon . . . , 2d ed. (Philadelphia, 1 8 0 2 ) , I V , 1 6 1 - 1 8 3 . 72 " O n Love," N.Y. Mag., J u n e 1 7 9 1 , 3 1 1 , " A Second Vindication of the Rights of W o m a n , " Ladies' Monitor. Aug. 1 5 , 1 8 0 1 , 1 2 ; " T h e R e f l e c t o r N o . 1 , " ibid., N o v . 7, 1 8 0 1 , 92. S e e also "On Matrimonial Felicity," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Sept. 1 7 8 4 , 1 9 3 - 1 9 4 ; " O n L o v e , " Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), J u n e 1 7 9 2 , 3 4 - 3 7 ; "Fashionable Miscellany," Baltimore Wkly. Mag., J u l y 1 2 , 1 8 0 0 , 9 1 - 9 2 ; and " O n Marriage," General Mag. and Review. J u l y 1 7 9 8 , 4 1 - 4 5 . 73 "From the G e n i u s of Liberty," Key (Fredericktown, Md.), Apr. 1 4 , 1 7 9 8 , 105-106. 74 Numerous articles attacked bachelors while pitying spinsters. S e e , for example, Columbian Mag., Apr. 1 7 9 0 , 2 1 3 - 2 1 4 , and Mass. M e g . , J u l y 1 7 9 1 , 4 1 0 - 4 1 1 .

WOMEN AND POLITICS self-alienation," 75 idealized republican marriage required men and women both to display virtue. Male and female were two halves of one whole whose name was concord; the ideal marriage was a scene of prelapsarian harmony. As the author of "On the Necessity of Domestic Concord" noted, "peace" was more important even than "plenty." 76 In order for "harmony" and "concord" to prevail, husband and wife were to be of one mind; they could not disagree.77 To prevent a conflict-filled marriage, one must choose one's mate wisely; probably no consideration was more important than "a similarity of sentiments and dispositions," for where there is "an union of souls, and a consistent harmony of mental ideas . . . discord will keep at an awful distance, and an universal sympathy, productive of an ineffable bliss, will ever attend them. . . . Ο happiness divine! source of concordant minds!" An essayist in New York Magazine expressed the same idea more matter-of-factly: 'There cannot be too near an equality, too exact a harmony, betwixt a married couple." Indeed, "the idea of power on either side should be totally banished." 78 Conjugal affection, then, was not coercive. Nor did it admit of any "selfish or sensual alloy." Marriage was the republic in miniature; it was chaste, disinterested, and free from the exercise of arbitrary power. And, like republican citizens, husband and wife were most likely to find happiness when, as Witherspoon suggested, they shared the same rank, the same education, and the same habits of life. 79 It is tempting to suppose that the ideology of the republican marriage was but the rhetorical manifestation of the newly affectionate conjugal union, and that both rhetoric and reality represented positive and progressive change.80 Yet we must remember that republicanism, like Janus, 75

Coct, Bonds. 90. The model of self-denying femininity was the mother; the idealization of motherhood, hence, was more characteristic of 19th-century domesticity than of late 18th-century republicanism. 76 Key. Apr. 7, 1798, 93· 77 "Fashionable Miscellany," Baltimore Wk/y. Mag.. July 1 2 , 1800, 92; "Remarks on Family Government," Mass. Mag.. June 1 7 9 1 , 3 5 2 - 3 5 3 ; " A Panegyric on the Delights of Matrimony," ibid., Oct. 1793, 6 1 0 - 6 1 2 . See also "From a Mother to her Daughter, Just on the Point of Marriage," Boston Wkly. Mag., May 5, 1804, 1 0 9 - 1 1 0 , and "Conduct of St. Augustin's Mother Monica," Christian's Mag., Oct.-Nov. 1790, 429-430. 78 " A Short Sermon on Marriage," Baltimore Wkly. Mag.. Apr. 8, 1 8 0 1 , 249, printed earlier in Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Aug. 1 7 9 2 , 1 0 8 - 1 1 0 ; "On Marriage," N.Y. Mag., N.S., Dec. 1796, 656. 79 "On Conjugal Affection," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Sept. 1792. 176. "I consider a parity of understanding and temper to be as necessary towards forming a happy marriage, as an equality of years, rank, and fortune" ("Letters," in Works of Witherspoon. IV, 169). 80 See, for example, D. B. Smith, Great House, chap. 4; Trumbach, Egalitarian Family, chap. 2; Stone, Family, chap. 8; D. S. Smith, "Parental Power "Jour. Marriage and Family, X X X V (1973). 419-428; and Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York, 1984), chap. 1. Of course,

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looked to the past as well as to the future; it f o c u s e d more upon the welfare of the society than the well-being of the individual. Thus it had an implicitly anti-individualistic dimension, 8 1 one that was exposed whenever conflict arose. We can see that tendency in the ideal of marital concord, which could be—and was—used to legitimate both coverture and the exclusion of women f r o m direct participation in politics. Indeed, the rhetoric of harmony seems almost a gloss upon the doctrine of marital unity—the English common law fiction that in marriage the husband and w i f e are one, and the husband is the one. 8 2 It has puzzled some historians that American Revolutionaries did not jettison coverture along with other pieces of undemocratic British baggage such as primogeniture and entail. 83 Y e t republican theorists prized harmony a b o v e all else; they created the ideal of the affectionate marriage not so much to liberate the individual as to assure concord in the family, the building-block of society. Republicanism aimed to avoid conflict. Hence, using the same principle that predicted that small republics would be the most harmonious, 8 4 those who applied the theory to the family suggested that husband and wife should share similar dispositions, beliefs, and interests, that they should be as one. Even so, conflict might arise, and the recommendations republicans made to restore harmony in such unfortunate cases expose the limitations of the republican model for family and polity alike. T h e ideal, of course, was equality; no good republican would have disagreed with the egalitarian sentiments expressed by the woman who styled herself " A Matrimonial Republican." " T h e obedience between man and w i f e , " she wrote, "is, or ought to be mutual." 8 5 T h e catch was in the "ought to be," for here the weaknesses in the republican ideal show through. What, for example, was a w i f e with an errant husband to do? Although it was certainly true that "man has no m o r e right to sin with impunity than woman," husbands seemed to fall m o r e often, and it became a wife's duty to lure her errant mate back to rectitude with "the charm of good humour and uncomplaining sweetness." In other words, only heightened expectations o f marriage may have w o r k e d against the end they sought to secure; see Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness. 1 8 7 - 2 0 4 , and C o t t , Bonds, 7 6 - 8 } . 81 W o o d , Creation, esp. 7 0 - 7 5 . C o n s i d e r also j . G . A . P o c o c k ' s f a m o u s description of the A m e r i c a n R e v o l u t i o n as " t h e last great act o f the R e n a i s s a n c e " ( " V i r t u e and C o m m e r c e in the Eighteenth C e n t u r y , "Journal of Interdisciplinary History, III [1972], 120). 82 For c o v e r t u r e see N o r m a Bäsch, In the Eyes of the Lau·: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century Neu• York (Ithaca, N . Y . . 1 9 8 2 ) , chaps. 1 and 2, and " E q u i t y vs. Equality: E m e r g i n g C o n c e p t s of W o m e n ' s Political Status in the A g e of J a c k s o n , " Journal of the Early Republic, I I ! ( 1 9 8 3 ) , 2 9 7 - 3 1 8 . F o r the justification f o r excluding w o m e n f r o m politics see, f o r e x a m p l e , " R e m a r k s on F e m a l e Politicians," Ladies' Monitor. May 2 9 , 1 8 0 2 , 3 2 4 - 3 2 5 . 83 For e x a m p l e , K e r b e r , Women of the Republic. 1 1 9 - 1 2 1 , 1 3 5 - 1 3 6 . M W o o d , Creation. 58, 3 5 6 . See also " R e f l e c t i o n s o n M a r r i a g e U n i o n s , " N.Y. Mag.. Oct. 1 7 9 0 , 5 6 1 - 5 6 2 . 85 " O n Matrimonial O b e d i e n c e , " Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), J u l y 1 7 9 2 , 66.

WOMEN AND POLITICS redoubled feminine virtue could reclaim a husband from masculine vice. " D i s p u t e not with him, be the occasion what it will," advised one writer. 8 6 Better to let errors g o unremarked, warned another, than to "strike too often the unharmonious string." Indeed, "the best way of a married woman to carry her points is to yield sometimes." 8 7 Harmony, then, took precedence over equality; in the interest of concord a woman would sometimes have to forbear. B u t w h y not the husband? In a truly reciprocal marriage would not the two parties compromise? Almost all essayists who addressed the issue of conflict in marriage argued that it was the wife who had to bend. T h e responsibility for anchoring marriage fell disproportionately to women because they were, supposedly, more compliant than men, 8 8 or, at least, they would find it "necessary, for political purposes, to consider man as the superior authority." 8 9 T h e symmetrical marriage thus gave way, under 86

" T h e Gossip No. X V , " Boston Wkly. Mag., Feb. 5, 1 8 0 3 , 6 1 ; "Rules and Maxims f o r promoting Matrimonial Happiness," Gent, and Lady's Mag., May 1 7 8 4 , 28. Although occasional articles and stories describe the failings of bad wives, most focus upon deficient husbands. For a description of a bad wife see ' T h e Extravagant Wife: An American Tale," Mass. Mag., July 7, 1 7 9 1 , 425-426. For bad husbands see ' T h e Matron," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Dec. 1 7 8 9 , 581-583; "Genuine Letter from an Injured Wife to Her Husband," Christian's Mag., June-July 1 7 8 9 , 242-243; "The History of Adrastus and Camilla," Ladies' Monitor, Mar. 20, 1 8 0 2 , 2 4 1 ; " A Female Character," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Sept. 1 7 9 2 , 1 8 2 ; "Conjugal Prudence," N.Y. Mag., Mar. 1 7 9 1 , 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 ; and "Harriot," Mass. Mag., J an. 1789, 3-7· 87 "Advice to Married Ladies," Mass. Mag., June 1 7 9 3 , 3 3 1 - 3 3 2 ; " A Letter to a very good natured Lady married to a very ill natured Man," Christian's Mag., Aug.-Sept. 1 7 8 9 , 3 1 9 - 3 2 0 . 88 "Woman: An Apologue," Columbian Phenix, July 1800, 438-439. See also "Letter to good natured Lady," Christian's Mag., Aug.-Sept. 1789, 3 1 9 - 3 2 0 ; Wm. Alexander, M.D., "On the Happy Influence Arising from Female Society," Mass. Mag.,]\ily 1 7 9 5 , 220-22 3; and "Female Biography," Baltimore Wkly. Mag., Aug. 9, 1800, 1 2 5 . 89 " A n Address to the Ladies," Am. Mag., Mar. 1 7 8 8 , 245. There was no consensus on whether those differences between men and women that led to the expectation that women would defer to male authority were innate or merely convenient. Some writers were themselves uncertain, as was "The Gentleman at Large," who concluded that women were morally equal to men; that their minds had a "nice and delicate texture," which proved that "the situation for which Heaven designed them in this world is of a nature the most benevolent and engaging," while "the more rugged and invidious offices of life were appropriated to man, as being better suited to his firm and sturdy disposition"; and that women should "voluntarily" adopt certain responsibilities in the home (Columbian Phenix, May 1800, 266-269). Most writers, however, seem to have adopted a symmetrical, different-but-equal model of gender, which could manifest itself—as early as 1788—as a fully articulated version of "separate spheres." (See "An Address to the Ladies," Am. Mag., Mar. 1788, 2 4 1 - 2 4 6 ; Miss M. Warner, "Rights of Woman," Boston Wkly. Mag., Oct. 30, 1802, 2; Miss P. W. Jackson, "Concluding Address, at exhibition at Mrs. Rowson's Academy," ibid., Oct. 29, 1 8 0 3 , 2-3; and "Gentleman

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very little pressure, to a disproportionate one in which the wife, in order to maintain domestic tranquillity, was expected to defer. D e f e r e n c e , of course, was the solution republicans o f f e r e d for the problem of conflict in the polity; persons deficient in judgment or inferior in status, they believed, should simply yield to those of superior wisdom. Y e t although, as W o o d has shown, Federalists offered the Constitution as a "republican r e m e d y " for the republican vice of disharmony, no similar rearrangement was forthcoming for the family. Indeed, as Americans showed increasing acceptance of conflict in the market and the polity, they became less willing to tolerate it at h o m e . 9 0 T h e insistence upon feminine deference revealed fears about conflict in the society and nation, and not merely concern about unhappy marriages. Indeed, very f e w of the essays that enjoined women to complaisance mentioned those character flaws w e might expect w o m e n to have confronted most frequently in their mates: irritability, distasteful habits, slovenliness, insensitivity, an inability to earn an adequate income, or even the arbitrary exercise of power. Rather, the single failing that drew the most censure—and also the most extravagant claims for the power of female influence—was infidelity. Stories with titles like ' T h e Way to Reclaim Him. A Moral Tale" purported to show how supreme feminine virtue could recall an errant husband to the path of rectitude. In that story, as in such another as "Conjugal Prudence," the wronged wife won back her wayward husband by embracing, literally, his mistress and illegitimate offspring, and by insisting upon an education for the children and an annuity (and, implicitly, banishment) for the mistress. Such acts of generosity never failed. T h e husband in the former story clasped his wife to his breast, "murmured o u t . . . 'Excellent woman! matchless wife!"'and promised "to remain immutably attached to her alone to the last moment of his existence." Similarly, the husband in the latter exclaimed, " T h o u heavenly woman! . . . is it thus thou upbraidest me f o r my infidelity to the most amiable woman that ever existed! O, my love, forgive!—but that's impossible! I am, I will be only y o u r s ' . " 9 1 The authors of such stories seem to be exploring the farthest reaches of at Large," Columbian Phenix, May 1 8 0 0 , 2 6 6 - 2 6 9 . ) B u t because these distinctions were grounded in a reiigio-cultural metaphor of the first parents, rather than in science, they w e r e quite flexible, could b e put to any number of uses, and were quite inconsistent. F o r an analysis of the "paradoxes and contradictions" in late eighteenth-century depictions of femininity, see Mary P o o v e y , The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago, 1984), chap. 1 , quotation or. p. 1 5 . 90 W o o d , Creation, chap. 1 1 . Consider the premise of Carl N . D e g l e r , At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 8 0 ) ; Cott, Bonds. 98-99; and Tocqueville's classic analysis of the origins of individualism in Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley ( N e w Y o r k , 1 9 8 0 ) , II, 98-99. 91 Gent, and Lady's Mag-, N o v . 1 7 8 4 , 2 9 9 - 3 0 2 , quotation on p. 3 0 2 ; N.Y. Mag., Mar. 1 7 9 1 , 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 , quotation on p. 1 2 8 .

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self-abasing virtue; they imagine the most extreme instances of domestic cruelty a wife might endure in order to see whether the depths of depravity may be exceeded by the heights of virtue. When the answer is yes, the resolution takes the form of a conversion, with the husband confessing his sins and the wife playing the part, in the words of another contrite fictional husband, of "my guardian angel sent by heaven to prevent my ruin." 92 Stripped of her original culpability, Eve is easily transformed into Christ's surrogate, able to work a sinner's "reformation." "Trust me," the wronged wife says. "I assure you, that search the habitable globe, you will meet with no woman more inclined to serve, love, obey, and oblige you, than your Emilia." 93 Like Christ, the wife has to suffer, and like him, she redeems. It was, however, equally possible for women to suffer yet not redeem. That was the sad fate of the heroine of Susanna Rowson's Sarah; or, The Exemplary Wife, a novel in which "virtue is represented, in all her native simplicity and beauty; and vice . . . is exhibited in her own proper ugliness and deformity." Although "the story is far from being improbable," 94 it is really a parable, with virtue pitted against vice. Virtue is represented by Sarah, a lovely young woman who is forced by mercenary relatives to wed a reprobate, somewhat as if Clarissa had been made, against her will, to marry Lovelace. Although her husband kept a mistress, even bringing her into the home he shared with his wife, and although he despised Sarah for her goodness, she never wavered in her patience, charity, or virtue. When her husband bankrupted himself and even her clothing was claimed by his creditors, she entered into service to support him and herself. And when she discovered his illegitimate child, "said she calmly . . . 'if the child owes its being to you, give orders that it be brought home, and I will see it is properly taken care of; but let me entreat you not to add to the offence already committed against religion and morality, the unpardonable one of leaving your offspring to perish'." Whereupon the errant husband exploded, " 'D—n-t—n. . . . Of all the plagues a man can have, a moralizing, sentimental, canting, hypocritical wife is the worst'." After years of such trials, Sarah died, secure in her conviction that "even in thought she had never dishonoured her husband." Thereupon he married his mistress. 95 Here there is no conversion; virtue will not prevail. Nevertheless, "who of 92 "Conjugal Affection," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Feb. 1 7 8 9 , 4. The repentant husband wished "every man blessed with a wife like thee to break his fall whenever he deviated from virtue's paths." " " G e n u i n e Letter from an Injured Wife to her Husband," Christian's Mag., June-July 1789, 242-243 See also "Harriot," Mass. Mag., Jan. 1789, 3-7; " A Female Character," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Sept. 1 7 9 2 , 182; "Emilia," N.Y. Mag., Oct. 1793, 592-595; and "History of Adrastus and Camilla," Ladies' Monitor. Mar. 20, 1802, 2 4 1 . M As announced in Boston Wkly. Mag.. June 16, 1804, 136. The novel was serialized in the magazine in 1804 as "Sincerity, a Novel, by a 'Lady of Massachusetts'," but published as Sarah (Boston, 1 8 1 3 ) . 95 Boston Wkly. Mag.. May 19, 1804, 1 2 0 , June 30, 1804, i44-

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48

common reflection but would prefer the death of Sarah, resigned as she was, and upheld by faith and hope, to all the splendors, wealth and honors ever heaped upon the heroine in the last pages of a novel" in which a heroine met only an earthly reward? 96 To put it another way, Susanna Rowson expressed doubt about whether feminine virtue could prevail in a corrupt world. The doctrine of the Republican Wife suggested that a good wife could influence a susceptible man; Sarah raised the question whether she could reclaim, as well, a man who was confirmed in viciousness. The answer was that she could not. Here was a fundamental dilemma for the new nation: how could virtue be exacted from the vicious? Republican ideology offered a number of plausible ways to encourage the good to be more so; chief among them were education, benevolent reform, and female influence. 97 But it faced an insurmountable obstacle when it confronted men who were beyond all hope of reformation. The problem was infidelity, not merely the faithlessness of a spouse but apostasy itself—the unpardonable sin; for it, republicanism had no cure. Republican advocacy of virtue was powerless before persons who had no conscience. How bedeviling this problem was can be seen when we examine the conventional seduction story. Tales such as Charlotte Temple and The Coquette may be considered as not very subtle warnings to young women without dowries that their value lay in their virginity; if they would be sought after on the marriage market, they must keep that commodity intact. The sentimental tale of seduction thus has been seen as an instrument of bourgeois respectability and middle-class conformity. 98 Such a view is not untrue, for surely no early nineteenth-century girl enhanced her marriage prospects by squandering her virginity. Chastity was esteemed, but for republican as much as bourgeois reasons. Consider "Reflections on Chastity, or Female Honour," a brief definition printed in at least three magazines before 1800: "What Bravery is in man, Chastity is in woman. This virtue, by making them triumph over every wicked attempt to dishonour them, bestows on them, as the first reward of 96

Rowson, Sarah, iii. On education see Kerber, Women of the Republic, chap. 7; Norton, Liberty's Daughters, chap. 9; and Ann D. Gordon, "The Y o u n g Ladies Academy of Philadelphia," in Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton [eds.], Women of America: A History (Boston, 1979), 68-91. For benevolent activities see Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York. 1984), chap. 7. For examples of women's benevolent organizations see Fred J . Hood, Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States, 178}-i8}7 (University, Ala., 1980), 1 5 1 , 1 5 3 , 167, and "Religious," Boston Wkly. Mag.. Dec. ι 5, 1804, 29. 98 See Christopher Hill, "Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times," Essays in Criticism, V (1955), 3 3 0 - 3 3 1 ; Wendy Martin, "Profile: Susanna Rowson, Early American Novelist," Women's Studies, II (1974), 6-7; and Ian Pierre Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe. Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley, Calif., 1 9 5 7 ) . See also Cott, "Passionlessness," Signs. IV (1978), 2 1 9 - 2 3 6 . 97

WOMEN AND POLITICS victory, an universal esteem." 99 Once again we see the symmetrica] expectations of men and women; in this case, chastity is the feminine version of the absolute standard of courage expected of Revolutionary War soldiers. For patriots like the Reverend Robert Cooper, cowardice was sin; thus he warned in 1775 that " i f . . . you would escape deep guilt before God, and lasting contempt among men, forward you must go. . . . Y o u have, in a word, no alternative, but either to venture your lives bravely, or attempt to save them ignominiously; to run the hazard of dying like heroes, or be certain of living like cowards." 100 Bravery, like chastity, was an absolute; it allowed not the slightest deviation nor tolerated any taint. Brave men and chaste women were expected to "triumph over every wicked attempt to dishonour them." What Charles Royster has said of this Revolutionary attachment to exacting standards of bravery applies to chastity as well: it reflected an evangelical tendency to establish dichotomies between good and evil, salvation and grace, God and Satan. T o waver in one's courage was to fall from grace; similarly, to surrender one's chastity was to sin. Americans of the Revolutionary era held out an impossible standard of purity for women and men both. Yet the Continental army, as Royster has shown, would come to a more workable notion of human capability, as would the political theorists who framed the Constitution. Standards of female virtue, however, fully as unrealistic as the expectation that no soldier would ever feel fear or no citizen advance his own interest, only became more rigid. 101 In many ways chastity was a fit emblem for republicanism, which, when infused with evangelical ardor, could demand absolute and undeviating virtue from its citizens. Hence we must read the era's popular literature of seduction not merely as cautionary tales addressed to young women but also as political tracts in which men and women explored the possibilities for virtue in a corrupt world. Surely it is significant that the most popular novel of the early national period—indeed, the most popular American novel of all until the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin—was Charlotte 99

Royal Am. Mag., Feb. 1 7 7 5 , 6 1 ; Mais. Mag.. Oct. 1 7 9 1 , 629-630; Key, Feb. 1 7 , 1 7 9 8 , 44100 Quoted in Royster, Revolutionary People. 225. 101 Ibid.. 2 7 - 3 1 , 47-49, 224-230, and passim. For other discussions of chastity see "On the loss of Chastity," N.Y. Mag., N.S., Apr. 1 7 9 7 , 2 1 3 ; "The Gossip No. 25," Boston Wkly. Mag., May 7, 1803, 1 1 3; "On Female Chastity," ibid., Nov. 24, 1804, 18; and "An Address to the Ladies," Am. Mag.. Mar. 1 7 8 8 , 241-246: "chastity really exists in the mind; and when this fountain is pure, the words and actions that flow from it will be chaste and delicate" (p. 242). The best discussion of the origins of the ideal of chastity is Cott, "Passionlessness," Signs, IV (1978), 2 1 9 - 2 3 6 . There is some debate about how fully American women abided by this ideal. (See, for example, Carl N. Degler, "What Ought to Be and What Was: Women's Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century," AHR. L X X I X [1974], 1 4 6 7 - 1 4 9 0 , and Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vol. I: Education of the Senses [New Y o r k , 1984].) But there is no question about the pervasiveness of the ideology.

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Temple, Susanna Rowson's classic tale of seduction and abandonment. 1 0 2 In this novel it takes not one but two designing men to seduce Charlotte from the path of virtue. The work is begun by Montraville, a Lovelace type who is drawn to the innocent young woman he ensnares but is unwilling to make a disadvantageous match; it is completed by his "friend" Belcour, whose oniy apparent motivation is to destroy both Charlotte and her faithless lover. Under such an assault, Charlotte's innocence stands not a chance. 1 0 3 Like Charlotte and her forerunner Clarissa Harlowe, the heroines of the sentimental tales of seduction are all sympathetic. Eliza Wharton, The Coquette, seemed "to possess both the virtues and the graces"; her weaknesses were "an air of gaiety in her appearance and deportment" and a fatal naivete. 1 0 4 Indeed, the flaws ascribed to the unfortunate heroines were traits that republicans usually valued: "a heart . . . formed of sensibility"; "unsuspecting innocence"; "innocent herself, she expected to find others so"; a mind "pure and unsullied"; "innocence and simplicity"; "amiable, ingenuous and sensible." 1 0 5 Pure, innocent, without guile, such young women are nothing less than contemporary versions of Eve; they are endowed with her attributes and given her signs. T h e unfortunate Amelia, for example, is "one of the fairest blossoms in the garden of society," while Almira is "as beautiful as the daughters of Paradise, as gentle as the breezes of spring; her mind was spotless, and her manners artless." 1 0 6 Such innocence fell once from Paradise, and it was destined to fall again and again in countless tales of seduction in the early republic. 1 0 7 102 Susanna Haswell R o w s o n , Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (Philadelphia, 1 7 9 4 ) . For the popularity of Charlotte Temple see Francis W. Halsey's introduction to the 1 9 0 5 N e w Y o r k edition, and Fliegelman, Prodigals. 261-262. 103 A s Fliegelman notes, Charlotte's parents—who are cast in the affectionate, post-patriarchal moid—might, in theory, have protected her, and in falling, she b r o k e their hearts; but paternalism, no more than patriarchalism, represented an acceptable option f o r post-Revolutionary Americans (Prodigals, 2 6 1 - 2 6 2 ) . 104 Foster, Coquette. 62. 106 " C o p y of a Letter from Miss to Μ , " Penn. Mag., Mar. 1 7 7 5 , 1 1 4 ; " I n n o c e n c e B e t r a y e d , " Lady's Miscellany ( N e w Y o r k ) , Aug. 24, 1 8 1 1 , 2 8 2 ; "Story of Philenia," Mass. Mag.. D e c . 1 7 9 1 , 7 2 9 ; "Maltiida," Key. A p r . 1 4 , 1 7 9 8 , 1 0 7 ; " T h e Fatal Effects of Seduction," Gent, and Lady's Mag.. J u n e 1 7 8 9 , 2 5 0 , "Melancholy T a l e of Seduction," Mass. Mag.. Apr. 1 7 9 5 . 4t l0i ' T h e Sorrows of Amelia," Baltimore Wkly. Mag.. Juiy 5. 1 8 0 0 , 8 7 ; "Treachery and Infidelity Punished," Gent, and Lady's Mag.. A u g . 1 7 8 9 , 340. 107 O t h e r seduction tales include "Gossip N o . L 1 V , " Boston Wkly. Mag., Feb. 1 8 , 1 8 0 4 , 6 5 , " A d v i c e to the Unguarded Fair of this Metropolis." Gent, and Lady's Mag.. N o v . 1 7 8 9 , 5 4 7 - 5 4 8 ; "Passenger N o . X I , " Boston Wkly. Mag., D e c . 1 0 , 1 8 0 3 , 2 5 ; and ' T h e G o s s i p N o . X X V , " ibid.. May 7. 1 8 0 3 , 1 1 3 . See also the stories in n. 1 0 5 . For different readings of the literature of seduction, in particular The Coquette, see Cathy N . Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel tn America ( N e w Y o r k , 1986), esp. chap. 6, and Carroll S m i t h - R o s e n b e r g , "Reinterpreting Antebellum Culture" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, 1987)·

WOMEN A N D POLITICS

W e have seen that feminine influence had its limits; no wife could expect to triumph over a thoroughly corrupted man on this side of the grave. Likewise, feminine innocence was at the mercy of masculine vice. N o matter how many times the story of the Fall was reenacted, it came out the same way, as a correspondent to the Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country Magazine was well aware: "Most angelic and ever-admir'd blossoms of earthly eminence—how few are the instances of thy pure innocence ever reaching the summit of that bliss, uninjured, for which thy Maker intended it." Why? Because of "the wicked designs of artful men, more ravenous than the hungry lions, which go about seeking whom they may devour." Thus he cautioned "the fair daughters of Eve," but could his warning against the "seducers of female excellence" have any more success than G o d ' s to Adam and E v e ? 1 0 8 H o w closely the seduction story was modeled upon that of the Fall is even more apparent in a tale entitled 'Treachery and Infidelity Punished." Almira, the picture of innocence and "as beautiful as the daughters of Paradise," is seduced by one Lothario: "Oh! the base dissembler—had ingratiated himself too far in her affections: with fondness she listened to his deceitful tales, and with too great avidity devoured his insinuating discourse." 1 0 9 Like her mother Eve, Almira fell, for like Eve, she faced the most artful of deceivers, Satan himself, barely disguised. Without question, most of the fictional seducers are Satanic; they are described in terms that leave no doubt about their true nature. Seducers are "those reptiles, those anamacules [j/γ] , who really come under the class of non-descripts in creation." Even when the deceiver is not a snake, he is animal-like, "a lordly brute [who] fixed his cruel fangs" on one who was "gay . . . lovely . . . innocent . . . h a p p y . " 1 1 0 The seducer "stalks through the polite world like a satiated lion, who wants only the impulse of hunger to sacrifice another victim." The "vile seducer" is indeed subhuman, for he lacks the ability to love. Instead, he perverts affection, preying upon the credulity of the innocent; "falsehood guides [his] tongue, whilst an infamous baseness, under a plausible appearance of love or friendship conceals a heart destitute of every f e e l i n g . " 1 1 1 Indeed, the seducer is the enemy of love, and much like the Devil who envied Adam and Eve their innocent bliss, he plots its destruction. Hannah Foster modeled Eliza Wharton's seducer at least as much on Satan as on Lovelace, jealous of the minister Eliza seems to prefer and angered by her virtuous friends, Sanford sets out to trap the lovely girl who has caught his eye. The responsibility is hers, he claims: "If she will 108

"Advice to the Unguarded Fair of this Metropolis," Gent, and Lady's Mag., Nov. 1789, 547-548. 109 "Treachery and Infidelity Punished," ibid.. Aug. 1789, 340-341 """Gossip No. X X V , " Boston Wkly. Mag., July 30, 1803, 1 6 1 ; 'The Seducer," tbid.. May 18, 1805, 1 1 7 · 111 "On Seduction," Mass. Mag.. May 1792, 308; "General Characteristics of Modern Novels," Boston Wkly. Mag., Aug. 24, 1805, 174; "A Virtuous and Prudent Conduct Recommended," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Nov. 1792, 265.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES play with a lion, let her beware of his paw, I say." 1 1 2 Charlotte Temple's Belcour is cut from the same cloth, as are Sidney in "Charles and Amelia, or the Unfortunate Lovers," and Orlando, who contrives Narcissa's fall. In each case, most of the plot is devoted to the stratagems used to "ensnare" the heroine's virtue. 1 1 3 Such men, surely, are beyond the compass of normal experience. Each is attracted only to the most singularly virtuous of girls and is not satisfied until he has succeeded in ruining her. Judith Sargent Murray wrote that it was hard to "conceive of turpitude so enormous, as that which must excite a being, deliberately to perpetrate the murder of the peace of a fellow creature, without a single apparent motive to stimulate a deed of such atrocity,"114 But it should not have been difficult at all; loathsome as the creature was, his prototype could be found in Genesis. For this reason—that seduction tales essentially reenact the Fall, with the victim cast as Eve and the seducer as Satan himself—we should not read such'tales too literally. While they certainly reinforced emerging Victorian standards of sexuality, it is doubtful that this was the primary objective. Rather, they represent another chapter in the early nineteenth century's secularization of religion. In them, the seducer is a secularized— but nonetheless recognizable—version of Satan. 116 The real subject of the seduction stories is not whether young girls should resist sexual temptation, but what hope innocence has in a corrupt world. The answer was grim, and mankind's—not merely Eve's—repeated fall had grave implications not only for women but for all of American society. That was the lesson o f ' T h e Seducer: Addressed to the Fair Daughters of America." Its author, typically, was incredulous that a being so depraved as the "base seducer" could exist: "Such a one is a monster in creation. . . . To obtain his desires, he practices every art of dissimulation, and he does not hesitiate to violate the most solemn engagements. Falsehood and perjury become familiar to him. . . . Virtue is sacrificed to· his lust." Yet it is not only his innocent victim who suffers, for "the peace of individuals, families, and societies is destroyed. . . . Such are more dangerous to meet than bears bereaved of their whelps. They ought like ravenous wolves to be hunted from civilized society." 116 The satanic seducer was an enemy to society, the snake in the grass of the infant republic. 112

Foster, Coquette. 82. R o w s o n , Charlotte Temple; General Mag. and Review. July 1 7 9 8 , 33-36; ' T h e History of Narcissa." Mass. Mag.. Mar. 1792. 1 7 9 - 1 8 1 . 1,4 Murray, The Gleaner (Boston, 1 7 9 8 J , II, 55. See also "Melancholy Tale of Seduction," Mass. Mag., Apr. 1795, 40-42; "An Admonition to those who glory in seducing the affection of the fair, and then deserting them," Columbian Mag., N o v . 1 7 9 2 , 303; and "On the Power of Love," Ladies Mag. (Philadelphia), Nov. 1 7 9 2 , 255-256. 115 See also Wood, "Conspiracy and Paranoid Style," WMQ, 3d Ser., X X X I X (1982), 4 2 0 - 4 2 1 . 116 Baltimore Wkly. Mag., Mar. 25, 1 8 0 1 , 2 3 1 . 113

WOMEN AND POLITICS

To the list of republicanism's stock villains, to the tyrannical ruler and the designing courtier, we thus must add several other names: those of the coxcomb, the coquette, and—most of all—the vile seducer. All threatened the consensual union that served as the metaphor of what republicans wanted their society to be. Yet if republicanism found ways to vanquish the tyrant and banish the sycophant, it was powerless when confronted by this most insinuating and devilish seducer. He put republicanism, as a system of belief, on trial—and he won. H e revealed republicanism's fatal flaw; although it could imagine ways by which reasonably virtuous men and women could make each other more so and might live with each other in harmony, it was utterly baffled by confirmed depravity. In some ways, republicanism represented a quarrel with Genesis. So long as republicanminded men and women could rewrite sacred history in such a way that the Fall never took place and Eve was never tempted, they could imagine themselves inhabiting an earthly paradise, living with their mates in a prelapsarian bliss. But the men and women who were the heirs of the Reformation could never fully forget the Fall; they knew that, when tempted by a deceiver of satanic proportions, humankind would fall and fall again. The best solution they could devise for the inevitability of sin was the metaphor of republican marriage, in which like-minded and virtuous men and women would guide each other's steps along the paths of rectitude. Yet in their fiction they were drawn irresistibly to the seduction story, and there virtue—and the republic—fell. Most of this discourse, naturally, was expressed in codes; because it was so metaphorical, we cannot read it literally. Clearly, it was not merely sexual lust that republicans found so threatening, but immoderate desires of all kinds, ambition and selfinterest chief among them. The vile seducer represented republicanism's inability to come to terms with power, which it tended to equate with evil. Still, because women figured so prominently in it, we must ask what bearing the literature of republican marriage had for actual republican women. We see embedded in these works many of the themes that historians have already exposed: a growing acceptance of affection as the only proper basis of marriage, increasing respect for feminine virtue, the feminization of religion, the idealization of chastity, and, finally, a growing interest in the possibilities for feminine influence. These themes are all compressed into the person of the Republican Wife: affectionate, virtuous, chaste, and capable of enormous moral authority over her husband. The Republican Wife represented, in the ideology at least, a real and important role. Yet even as an image, she was limited. Indeed, she led to a dead end, for her capability always depended upon masculine susceptibility. She had no more power than man allowed, and even if republican doctrine suggested that men ought to welcome feminine influence, that doctrine held no sway over those who did not subscribe to its credo. That generalization, of course, describes the fundamental weakness in republicanism; it had no power over those who were not or did not want to be virtuous.

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In that sense republicanism served women no more poorly than it did men: all were baffled by unalloyed vice. Even though republicanism enhanced woman's status and legitimated improvements in her education as well as her entry into benevolent reform movements, 1 1 7 it also placed implicit checks upon her power. And it confronted her with the image of the seduced maid, condemned to fall repeatedly in tale after tale, seemingly incapable of learning from her experience. Women who wanted more status, influence, or power would have to look for another model. Thus the ideal of the wife would give way, by perhaps 1 8 3 0 , to that of the mother. Men might not be malleable, but children were, and they seemed to offer a more promising opportunity for the exercise of influence. Y e t before that transition could be effected, the many elements that brought it about would have to fall into place, not merely a sentimental conception of motherhood—already widely shared by the end of the eighteenth century, as Ruth Bloch has shown—but also the removal of the father's place of work from the home, new views on the nature of childhood and child rearing, and, perhaps most important of all, an acceptance of childhood conversion. 1 1 8 This shifting of emphasis from woman-as-wife to that of woman-as-mother had important implications for reform, for it rested upon the assumption that women had a special role to play as mothers and that, consequently, they represented a separate interest. This transition in the conceptualization of woman's nature and her role would have parallels in other aspects of eariy national life. T h e 1 8 2 0 s and 1830s may represent a watershed, for not only would the Republican Wife be replaced by the Victorian mother, but in other ways as well the republican synthesis would dissolve, yielding to a more fragmented social vision. In politics, the semblance of an era of good feelings would give way to the second party system. Reform, also, would pass on to a new and more militant phase, beyond benevolence; vague plans for colonization or the eventual abolition of slavery would yield to immediatism, and hopeful schemes to "civilize" the Indian tribes would be replaced by the reality of the reservation. The republic of harmony proved ephemeral; it simply could not work, for it faltered in the face of intransigent slaveholders, Indians who did not want to be white, drunkards who would not give up the bottle, and, most simply, men who would not reform. When confronted by such enormous obstacles, the Republican Wife, like the theory that begot her and like the original woman in whose image she was cast, tasted of the fruit of knowledge and, inevitably, fell. 117 n8

See n. 97, above. See Bioch, "Feminine Ideals," Feminist Studies, IV ( 1 9 7 8 ) ; Anne Louise

K u h n , The Mother's Role in Childhood Education: New England Concepts, (New Haven, Conn., 1 9 4 7 ) ; Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother:

Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860 Child and the Republic: The Daun

1830-1860 American

(New York, 1982); Bernard Wishy, The

of Modern American Child Nurture

1968); Cott, Bonds; anci Douglas, Feminization of Culture.

(Philadelphia,

WOMEN AND POLITICS

EQUITY VS. EQUALITY: EMERGING CONCEPTS OF WOMEN'S POLITICAL STATUS IN THE AGE OF JACKSON Norma Bäsch Ο ne of the hallmarks of scholarship in women's history has been the quest to understand women on their own terms and in their own words — to see history through women's eyes. The quest has revolutionized the formulation of questions, the choice of sources, and the contours of periodization. It has yielded rich results for the period traditionally designated the Age of Jackson, the heyday of the cult of domesticity, when women were largely excluded from the extravagantly egalitarian political rhetoric of the era. Clearly Jacksonian politics, narrowly defined, were not part of woman's sphere. 1 But while emphasis on the separate, private, domestic world of white middle and upper class women has given us profound insights into their personal lives and even into their quasipolitical activities, it has also diverted us from exploring emerging

Ms. Bäsch is a member of the Department of History, University College, at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. ' As historians have subjected the cult of domesticity to increasingly sophisticated analyses over the past decade and a half, they have engendered controversy over its political implications and its connections to antebellum feminism. For a clear delineation of the controversy, see Ellen Carol DuBois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium," Feminist Studies, 6 (Spring 1980), 26-64. Historical literature on the cult of domesticity is extensive. T h e following examples merely highlight the development of the controversy- For a critical and now classic evaluation of the cult of domesticity, see Barbara Welter, " T h e Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," Amencan Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 151-174. For a more recent but still critical approach, see Ann Douglas, The J O U R N A L O F T H E E A R L Y R E P U B L I C . 3 (Fall 1983). ©

1983 S o c i e t y (or H i J t o n a n s o f i h e E a r l » A m e r i c a n R e p u b l i c .

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n o t i o n s o f w o m e n ' s r e l a t i o n s h i p t o t h e state. Perhaps t h e rejection o f a n d r o c e n t r i c a p p r o a c h e s a n d s o u r c e s h a s led us t o view t h e m a l e / f e m a l e , p u b l i c / p r i v a t e d i c h o t o m y so literally as t o h a v e o b s c u r e d subtle shifts in c o n c e p t s a b o u t w o m e n t h a t w e r e e m a n a t ing f r o m t h e " d o m i n a n t " or m a l e legal a n d political c u l t u r e s . 2 T h i s essay is a n a t t e m p t t o s k e t c h s o m e o f those shifts by focusing o n t h e c o n n e c t i o n s b e t w e e n t h e legal a n d political cultures o f the J a c k s o n i a n e r a . T h e h y p o t h e s i s put f o r w a r d h e r e is t h a t a m o d e s t t r a n s i t i o n in t h e legal c u l t u r e (the passage o f legislation g r a n t i n g property rights t o m a r r i e d w o m e n ) was t h e first stage in a significant t r a n s i t i o n in t h e political c u l t u r e — t h e i n t e g r a t i o n o f

Feminization of American Culture (New York 1977). On ties between domesticity and the class structure, gender roles, and political status, see Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson," Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 10 (Spring 1969), 5-15. On the possibilities of protofeminism in the cult of domesticity, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America," American Quarterly, 23 (Oct. 1971), 562-584. For a pioneering exploration of the compensatory aspects of domesticity, see Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven 1973). For both the possibilities and limitations that the cult of domesticity exerted over the development of feminism, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven 1977). For the emergence of "domestic feminism," see Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Soafll History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pieck (New York 1979), 222-245. In contrast, Ellen DuBois has taken historians of women to task for their failure to appreciate the political necessity for women's penetration beyond the boundaries of the domestic sphere. See "The Radicalism of the Woman Suffrage Movement: Notes toward the Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Feminism," Feminist Studies, 3 (Fall 1975), 63-71, and Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America (Ithaca 1978.) 2 Scholars who have bridged the public/private gulf have done so by defining politics broadly. For an overview of this trend, see Elaine Tyler May, "Expanding the Past: Recent Scholarship on Women in Politics and Work," Reviews in American History, 10 (Dec. 1982), 216-217. But scholars in women's history have not pursued the activities of formal political institutions such as state legislatures with the same zeal. Some social historians, moreover, consider a focus on the relative status of women and men, and a reliance on male prescriptive sources "counterproductive." For a critique of this trend, see Hilda Smith, "Women's History and the Humanities," OA Η Newsletter, May 1983, 14.

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women into an egalitarian political ethos. 3 These transitions shed some light, moreover, on the origins of antebellum feminism.4 The public dialogue over the property rights of married women which emerged and intensified during the second quarter of the nineteenth century unleashed two competing and overlapping clusters of ideas about the appropriate status of American women. At the core of one cluster was the concept of equity; at the core of the other was the concept of equality. The concept of equity assumed that the property a wife brought to marriage or inherited afterward, if it were separated from the property of her husband with an appropriate legal instrument, was hers and entitled her to certain privileges, not the least of which was the insulation of her property from her husband's creditors. It also assumed that she might be considered a distinct and independent legal personality with respect to her separate estate. 5 Most of the time it cohered quite comfortably with the doctrine of separate sexual spheres and, although it challenged the husband's conjugal authority, protection from creditors presented advantages to the husband. Some adherents of

' For the pathbreaking study on the married women's acts, see Elizabeth Bowles Warbasse, " T h e Changing Legal Rights of Married Women, 1800-1861" (Ph.D. diss., Radcliff College 1960). See also Kay Ellen Thurman, "The Married Women's Property Acts" (LL.M. diss., Univ. o f Wisconsin Law School, 1966); Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as Force in History: A Study in Tradition and Realities (New York 1946); Peggy A. Rabkin, Fathers to Daughters: The Legal Foundations of Female Emancipation (Westport 1980); John D. Johnston, Jr., "Sex and Property: T h e Common Law Tradition, the Law School Curriculum, and Developments toward Equality," New York University Law Review, 47 (Dec. 1972), 1033-1092; and Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (New York 1973), 179-186. 4 For problems in the various definitions o f feminism, see Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York 1979), 4-5, 48-49. Feminism is defined here as a doctrine advocating for women the same political and legal rights granted to men — a definition that is fraught with legal and semantic ambiguities and quite narrow by contemporary standards, but that was profoundly radical in the historical context of the nineteenth century. 5 On the wife's separate equitable estate, see William S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law (14 vols., London 1903), I, 395-468; V , 278-338. For early America, see Marylynn Salmon, " T h e Property Rights of Women in Early America: A Comparative Study" (Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College 1980), and "Women and Property in South Carolina: T h e Evidence from Marriage Settlements, 1730 to 1830," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 39 (Oct. 1982), 655-685.

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the equitable model demanded statutes that sheltered the wife's property as judicial precedents had done, and advocated that the wife be able to enjoy her separate estate without any specific legal device. For reasons often unrelated to the rights of women, they were willing to modify power relationships within the family to the wife's advantage. They frequently insisted, however, that the wife was represented in politics by her husband. If the equitable model was political, it was by implication only. Proponents of equality asserted that the legal disabilities with which wives struggled were the direct result of women's political powerlessness. Only woman suffrage and (for the most radical) the concomitant right of women to serve on juries, hold political office, and be admitted to the bar, could begin to adjust the inequities of marital property. T h e egalitarians in the debate assumed that the ground rules for marital property and for the rights and duties of spouses — legal arrangements for the domestic sphere — were inseparable from the disposition of power in the political arena. They believed that every woman, married or single, was a discrete legal and political personality and possessed an individual relationship to the state. Their position challenged the very doctrine of separate spheres and asserted that political sameness between the sexes was the first step toward legal fairness and social equality. Neither of these spare and tidy abstractions, simplified for purposes of clarity, was new. What was new was the breadth and consistency with which they were disseminated. Furthermore, both concepts challenged one of the most powerful paradigms in AngloAmerican law and western political theory, that of coverture. Coverture, the formal designation for the wife's status at common law, placed the wife and her property under the protection and control of her husband, thereby rendering her economically dependent and legally invisible. 6 Her political invisibility was, in 6

This essay concentrates on the common law concept of coverture, but elements of coverture existed in community property systems. Although the community property systems of the civil law are considered less harsh to the wife, especially as the survivor of her husband, it is fair to say that coverture functioned as a legal and political paradigm in both systems. Community property systems in states that drew on French or Spanish origins, such as Louisiana, Texas, and California, gave control of the community during the marriage to the husband. For the increasing similarities between the two systems in nineteenth century America, see Judith T . Younger, "Marital Regimes: A Story of Compromise and

WOMEN AND POLITICS part, a corollary of her legal invisibility. 7 T o consider the wife by statute as a separate, autonomous individual capable of owning and managing her own property was to undermine t h e paradigm of coverture, lay bare its political implications, and subject it to stresses that would be exploited in the mid-nineteenth century by the women's rights movement. O n e issue t h a t generated early debate over the legal status of married women was the conflicting n a t u r e of decisions on the wife's powers over her equitable estate. A l t h o u g h American courts relied extensively on the decisions of English equity, the comprehensive reporting of American cases permitted reliance on the decisions of other states, especially those of jurisdictions with separate courts of equity led by chancellors with a high degree of technical proficiency, such as James Kent of New York a n d Henry Desaussure of South Carolina. American cases attest to widespread confusion over both English a n d American precedents. There were no clear answers for a n u m b e r of critical questions. What kind of legal instrument was absolutely necessary to create a separate estate for the wife? If the deed creating her estate did not spell out her powers, might they be implied? If so, under what circumstances? W h a t were the extent of her powers? A n d since a married woman was to be regarded as a single woman only with respect to her separate estate, and in all o t h e r circumstances under the disabilities a n d protections of coverture, when was she acting as a single woman and when as a married woman? A Pennsylvania supreme court judge commenting o n the wife's separate estate in 1829 stated, " T h e English decisions have unsettled everything." 8 In the same year in a case involving the wife's debts, Chancellor Desaussure complained, "This case involves a question which is too frequently occurring before the court." 9 In 1837 Chancellor Reuben Walworth of New York

Demoralization T o g e t h e r With Criticisms a n d Suggestions for R e f o r m , " Cornell Law Review, 67 ( N o v . 1981), 45-102. 7 Susan Moller O k i n , Women in Western Political Thought ( P r i n c e t o n 1979), 144-146, 250-252, 272-273; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and • Ideology in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill 1980), 7-32. 8 Lancaster v. Dolan, 1 Rawle 247 (Penn. 1829). 9 Boggs v. Reid, cited in "Trust Estates," Carolina Law Journal, 1 (Jan. 1831), 330.

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alluded to the fact that "conflicting decisions have taken place in England as to the power of a feme covert to render her separate estate liable for debts." 10 In an 1845 New Jersey case which contains an excellent overview of conflicting American and English decisions, Chancellor Daniel Haines asserted, "One of the most vexed and embarrassing questions raised in a court of chancery is that which relates to the power of disposition by a feme covert of her separate estate." 11 Aside from conflicting interpretations of the wife's powers, discussions of the wife's separate estate reveal a variety of rationales for its existence. Marriage settlements, Kent asserted in a fairly traditional explanation, protect the wife from "being overwhelmed by the misfortunes, or unkindness, or vices of her husband," and proceed from "the warm and anxious affection of parents" and friends.12 Desaussure emphasized the protection of the whole family. T o objections that settlements were "mischievous to creditors" and "dangerous to the peace of families," he pointed out that in "most civilized countries, the estate of the wife, is more fully protected by the general law, than they [sic] are in England or in America, by special contracts and marriage settlements." The woman about to marry should have a right to say, "I have property which I wish protected for the benefit of the family." 13 Statements about the harsh effects of the common law on women and the ameliorating qualities of equity were common. Chancellor Bland of Maryland declared that the "stern and ungallant rules of the common law by which marriage so sinks the wife under the absolute sway of the husband" had been modified to a degree by equity. As a matter of policy, he argued that "more latitude of free will as to contracts and a larger extent of individuality of character in relation to the right of property" might benefit both husband and wife. 14 The common law, traditionally associated with the fundamental rights of English men, was often depicted as despotic and "feudal" with respect to American women. Judge John Bannister of Pennsylvania insisted that "in no 10 North American Coal v. Dyett, 7 Paige Ch. 15 (N.Y. 1837). " Leaycraft v. Heddert, 4 N.J. Equity Reports 547 (1845). 12 Kent, Commentaries on American Law, ed. George F. Comstock (1 Ith ed., 4 vols., Boston 1867), II, 157-158, 181. 13 "Trust Estates," 332-333. 14 Helms v. Franciscus, 2 Bland Ch. 562 (Md. 1830).

WOMEN AND POLITICS country where the blessings of the common law are felt and acknowledged, are the interests and estates of married women so entirely at the mercy of their husbands, as in Pennsylvania."15 Each rationale for marriage settlements engendered its own particular problems. If the purpose of the separate estate was the traditional one of protecting the interests of the wife's family of origin against the newly formed one, it made the husband the wife's enemy and cast marriage into a distinctly premodern mold.16 If the purpose was to protect the combined assets of the marriage from the husband's creditors, it created a palpable advantage for the wealthy in an era of high risk speculation and debt, and (by inference) a disadvantage for those without the assets or foresight to separate their property.17 If its purpose was to ease the degrading dependency and invisibility to which the common law relegated wives, it created serious doubts about the desirability of the basic common law rules for marriage. One solution was to denounce marriage settlements altogether. They smacked of a cash nexus in the marriage contract and sullied the institution that was supposed to be a buffer against the materialistic, acquisitive world. They were antidemocratic, noted a writer for the American Law Magazine, because they tied up property in trusts and destroyed "that just authority which nature and the laws give a man over his wife, as well as that obedience and subjection which the rules of the gospel prescribe in the deportment of woman." The wife, he warned, might contract to be free from the husband's control, thereby turning marriage into a "quasi divorce." Tampering with the old rules for marriage endangered the whole social order: "Where the female's person and happiness are entrusted, there should her property be confided

15 Watson v. Mercer (1844), cited in Charles W. Dahlinger, "The Dawn of the Women's Movement: A n Account of the Origin and History of the Pennsylvania Married Woman's Property Law of 1848," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1918), 74. " O n the role of kinship in marriage settlements, see Lawrence Stone, " T h e Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England: T h e Patriarchal Stage," in The Family in History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia 1975), 19-20, 24-25. 17 O n shifts in debtor-creditor relations, see Peter J. Coleman, Debtors and Creditors in America: Insolvency, Imprisonment for Debt and Bankruptcy, 1607-1900 (Madison 1974), 283-285.

61

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also." A n d if perchance matrimony was somehow unsafe without these special arrangements, then, he advised, marry not at all. 18 Marriage settlements, however, were not likely to disappear. T h e same law journal, which conscientiously digested English and American decisions on the married woman's estate, reached the following conclusion: "Unless all the rules of equity on this subject are overthrown, on the ground that a divided interest is inconsistent with the policy and the nature of the contract, marriage cannot be considered as an absolute election by the feme sole to merge her rights in those of the husband." 1 9 T h e dialogue within the legal community over the status of married women helps us to understand the legal context in which married women's statutes were passed and subsequently adjudicated. With the exception of a few avid lawyer-reformers such as T h o m a s Herttell of New York or T i m o t h y Walker of Ohio, both of whom attacked coverture as the source of women's political inferiority and economic dependence, most professionals did not envisage obliterating coverture, but only refining and clarifying the equitable exceptions to it with which they were familiar. T h a t is not to suggest consensus within the profession. Codifiers clashed with common lawyers, and democrats with the defenders of an erudite, professional elite, over whether the solution to the married woman's estate was to be statutory or judicial. Nevertheless, coverture was the paradigm with which they all began. Every law student, whether he learned his law from a Blackstone and a casual apprenticeship, or whether he was among the privileged few to receive a broad and rigorous education, learned the principles of coverture first. From the legal perspective, the problem of married women was defined by coverture and the fictional unity of spouses that it mandated; the solutions lay in equity jurisprudence. T h e dilemma was more procedural than it was substantive. T h e dialogue, however, was extended beyond procedural issues. In an 1828 North American Review article, Caleb Cushing remarked that "a spirit alike destitute of manliness and of gallantry, has too often presided over the formation of the laws, which fix the rights and obligations of woman in the social " "Marriage Settlements," American Law Magazine, 3 (April 1844), 16-22. " " T h e Validity o f Settlements in Exclusion of the Marital Rights of a Future Husband," ibid., 3 (july 1844), 297.

WOMEN A N D POLITICS

scheme." He criticized the husband's extensive powers, the wife's lack of legal personality, and the meager and problematic benefits of equity. It is noteworthy that Cushing added: "The maxim, that taxation and representation should go hand and hand is most salutary; but no general maxim in morals is free from exception or qualification." We do not commend " t h e institutions of an Amazonian republic," he protested, cautiously establishing the limits reform should take. " T h e constitution of nature" has "settled the question" of suffrage. 20 Political participation by women was clearly Amazonian. There was no excuse, said the New York Mirror, "for a female desertting (sic] her allotted privacy, and volunteering to encounter gladiators in the political arena." 2 1 If coverture were only a legal paradigm, we would not find it discussed in conjunction with suffrage and politics. Coverture was a political paradigm as well, a n d therein lies the historical significance of the debate over married women's property rights. Denials of the connections between property holding and voting often accompanied demands for a married women's statute. In fact, the consistency of the denials is a testimony to the durability of the connections. T o give married women the right to own property by statute was to create an important new class of disfranchised property owners. Americans, even as they dropped property qualifications for voting, were not so removed from Enlightenment assumptions as to have forgotten the political implications of owning property. Debate over broadening male suffrage revitalized the connections. T h e notion that the propertyless were dependent, without a real stake in the society, and incapable of full citizenship was inextricably intertwined with the legal disabilities of married women. It seems that in the early national period in New Jersey, a state with liberal loopholes in its earliest provisions for suffrage, the fact that some married women voted constituted a gross violation of social norms. 2 2 In the "civic humanism" of the eighteenth century, the function of property was to guarantee independence, and "the end

2 0 Cushing, " T h e Legal Condition of Women," North American Revieu/, 26 (April 1828), 316-356; the citations are at 316, 319, 318. 21 "Female Politicians," New York Mirror and Repository, 8 (Sept. 1830), 95. " Sophie H. Drinker, " V o t e s for Women in 18th-Century New Jersey," Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, 80 (Jan. 1962), 37.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

of independence was citizenship a n d vr-iral personality." 2 3 The reason for property qualifications, wrote Blackstone, "is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation as t o be esteemed to have n o will of their own." 2 4 T e n a n t s , urban wage-earners, indentured servants, children, idiots, a n d married women did n o t possess the independence requisite for full citizenship. Single women were assumed to be similarly dependent upon the male head of the household. Consequently it was o n coverture that Abigail Adams, the very model of republican m o t h e r h o o d , focused in 1776 when she wrote to her husband and asked him to "remember the ladies."» A n d it was on coverture t h a t Mrs. Carter, the fictional widow living under her brother's roof, concentrated when she discussed the political status of women in Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin.26 Linda Kerber has cogently demonstrated that t h e persistence of coverture in the wake of revolution was inherently antirepublican; it was, then, blatantly antidemocratic, and m e n and women of the Jacksonian era covertly or overtly perceived it as such. 27 T h e dilemma t h a t confronted legislators was how to allow the married woman a separate legal estate, which was not precisely the same as an equitable one, while maintaining t h e validity of her virtual representation. T h e law of husband and wife presented a particularly compelling example of t h e principle t h a t the interests of m e n and women were not the same. If men truly represented women, why had they arrogated so much power to themselves in marriage? Egalitarians in the 1830s, drawing o n the political culture of the American Revolution, denounced t h e concept of women's virtual representation. John Neal, an early advocate of woman suffrage, predicted that women were not likely to remain satisfied with virtual representation. Binding this t h e m e to coverture, he said that "the interests of no two persons t h a t ever lived were identical any

" J.G.A. Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York 1971), 92. 24 Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, ed. T h o m a s Cooley (4th ed., Chicago 1899), 1, 171. 25 Abigail Adams to John Adams, M a r c h 31, 1776, in Alice Rossi, ed.. The Feminist Papers (New York 1974), 10-11. 26 Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue, ed. Lee R. £dwards (New York 1970), especially 29-32, which were p a n ot the segments first published in 1798. 27 Kerber, Women of the Republic, 139-155.

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more t h a n their bodies a n d souls." 28 In her Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, S a r a h G r i m k e related the fact t h a t w o m a n was "a cipher in the n a t i o n " to her legal invisibility in marriage. 2 9 In his Introduction to American Law, first published in 1837, Timothy Walker moved easily from a diatribe on married women's c o m m o n law disabilities to a critique of women's inferior political status. T h e "theory of the law," he asserted, referring to coverture, degraded A m e r i c a n females almost "to the level of slaves . . . . We require t h e m t o contribute their share in the way of taxes, to the support of t h e government, but allow t h e m n o voice in its direction." Apply t h e same language to males, he said, and it is a form of slavery; only custom inures us t o apply the language differently to females. 30 A b r a h a m Lincoln reputedly wrote the following letter to t h e Sangamon Journal of Illinois in 1836: "I go for all sharing t h e privileges of t h e government w h o assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the rights of suffrage w h o pay taxes or bear arms (by n o means excluding females)." 31 During t h e 1830s a n d t h e 1840s there is some evidence of impassioned appeals to the inalienable rights of women that are significantly reminiscent of t h e rhetoric of t h e American Revolution. These emotive, evocative appeals, made in the midst of broadened male suffrage, suggest a conscious effort to underscore the exclusion of women f r o m the egalitarian implications of the revolution. W h e n T h o m a s Herttell proposed a married women's bill to the N e w York legislature, he argued t h a t married women "equally with males a n d unmarried females, possess the right of life, liberty, a n d PROPERTY and are equally entitled to be protected in all three." W o m e n were deprived of their property and their full citizenship, he claimed, because they were compelled to

" Cited in August Genevieve Violette, Economic Feminism in American Literature Prior to 1848 (Orono, Me. 1925), 51. For Neal's continued support of married women's rights and suffrage, see his Brother Jonathan, 5 (June 1843), 83-85, and 5 (July 1843), 304-309. 29 Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (Boston 1838), 74. 10 Walker, Introduction to American Law (3d ed., Boston 1855), 234. See also "Walker's Introduction to American Law," American Jurist and Law Magazine, 18 (Jan. 1838), 375-390. " Cited in Violette, Economic Feminism, 53.

HISTORY O F W O M E N IN THE U N I T E D STATES

obey laws made by men. 32 Similarly, a htter from an anonymous woman in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review attributed the legal disabilities of married women to the political tyranny of the male sex over the female sex. 33 Arguments that women were victimized by the common law and that their families were subjected to economic hardship seem to have enjoyed considerable popularity. Appeals to self-evident truths, denouncements of taxation without representation, and assertions of the political tyranny of the male sex over the female sex, especially when made by females, met with ridicule or outrage. Political action by women o n their own behalf was more menacing to the social order t h a n the public activities of female abolitionists and reformers, and constituted a clearer breach of the doctrine of separate spheres. Such action, unlike the altruism of other reforms, was antithetical to the cooperative, noncompetitive, nurturing values attributed to the family. Demands that women be entitled to full political participation as individual citizens of the state without the mediation of men were often softened by assurances and probably backed by t h e real conviction that women would and should continue to fill their special familial roles. John Quincy Adams' 1838 speech in Congress on behalf of the right of women to petition against the acquisition of Texas is a rare instance in which "the woman question" intruded into national politics, albeit tangentialiy. Although Adams' defense of political action by female abolitionists is well known, what has been overlooked are his closing remarks which reconcile such action with conventional notions of domesticity. The speech was sparked by the comments of Representative Benjamin C . Howard of Maryland, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. While attempting to introduce a gag rule against the Texas memorials, he had expressed sorrow at the women petitioners' departure from their appropriate domestic sphere, and labeled their actions "discreditable." 34 52 Thomas Herttell, Remarks Comprising in Substance Judge Herttell's Argument in the House of Assembly of the State of New-York, in the Session of 1837, in Support of the Bill to Restore to Married Women "The Right of Property," as Guaranteed by the Constitution of this State (New York 1839), 22-23. 31 "The Legal Wrongs of W o m e n , " United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 14 (May 1844), 478. M Speech of John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts, upon the Right of the People, Men and Women, to Petition . . . (Washington 1838), 65.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

Adams launched into a passionate defense of the right of the petitioners, the wives and daughters of his Massachusetts constituents, to engage in political action. He celebrated the women of the Old Testament, the queens of Europe, and the heroines of the revolution. For contemporary heroines, he referred to the two ladies from South Carolina, whom congressmen could readily identify as Sarah and Angelina Grimke. Caustically he urged Congress to petition Queen Victoria to abdicate because affairs of state do not belong to women. Shall women not petition because they cannot vote, he asked? "Is it so clear that they have no such right as this last! And if not, who shall say that this argument . . . is not adding one injustice to another?" In the end, however, Adams insisted that he did not countenance women stepping out of their circle except with the appropriate "motives, means and ends." A petition, he remarked, "is a prayer — a supplication — that which you address to the Almighty Being above you," and highly appropriate to the female sex.35 Nevertheless, Adams' models for female action provoked severe criticism, and it was not limited to southern congressmen. A writer for the Lady's Companion questioned Adams' choice of heroines, especially the two Catherines of Russia whom he characterized as "infamous and odious monsters of debauchery and evil." He even found that Deborah Gannett, who donned soldier's garb to fight in the revolution, imparted satisfaction only "when contemplated from a distance." T h e mothers of America, he said, have responded to the question of their political activity with, "Let the men take care of politics, we will fulfill our duty to our children." Summing up the woman question, he divided the spectrum of opinion into "the New Lights, clamorous for equal rights, high prerogative, and an erasure of 'to obey' from the marriage covenant; the Old lights — willing to abide by the past . . . and the Moderates."36 The marriage covenant actually figured prominently in all three positions. The traditionalists or Old Lights were omnipresent and their cause, buttressed by the common law and the Bible, was succinctly set forth in the Broadway journal: "The true position

» Ibid., 63-78, 81. , 6 Henry P. Harrington, "Female Education," Lady's Companion, 9 (Sept. 1838), 232, and 9 (Oct. 1838), 182.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

of woman is not a disputable point; the universal sentiment of mankind has determined it; God himself has said her desire shall be u n t o her husband, a n d he shall rule over her." 3 7 T h e egalitarians or New Lights were not likely t o generate m u c h approval for married women's statutes because, like the traditionalists, they displayed an abiding awareness of the connections between women's legal and political status. Moderates, on t h e other h a n d , managed to gain ground in t h e 1840s by minimizing t h e political implications of undermining coverture, and by drawing, instead, o n t h e time-honored rationales for the married woman's equitable estate — to protect the wife from a profligate h u s b a n d and to insulate the family from pauperism. A n 1843 editorial in Timothy Walker's Western Law Journal alleged that public opinion was shifting in favor of married women's property rights. 1 8 Walker was promoting a cause to which he was devoted, but there was validity t o his statement. By the summer of 1848, when feminists met in Seneca Falls to launch officially the women's rights movement, nineteen states h a d some sort of married women's provision o n their books. 39 They included northern, southern, a n d new western states. T o be sure, regional concerns and anomalies appear in the married women's provisions. As o n e might expect, slaveholding dominated the provisions of the 1839 Mississippi statute. 4 0 Debate preceding the New York statute of 1848 reveals concern with the ambiguities of the state's uses and trusts provisions in its Revised Statutes.41 T h e first attempt at a state constitution in Wisconsin, which was rejected by the voters in 1847, linked the property rights of married women to homestead exemptions for debtors. 4 *

37

Broadway Journal, 1 (Mar. 1845), 182. " "Law Reform," Western Law Journal, 1 (Mar. 1843), 281-282. 59 Warbasse, "Changing Legal Rights," 272. 40 Laws of Mississippi, 1839, chap. 46. 41 Revised Statutes of the State of New York, 1829 (Albany 1829), I, 727, sec. 47; Hentell, Argument in the House of Assembly, 12-14. 42 " T h e Convention of 1846," ed. Milo M. Quaife, Wisconsin Historical Society Collections IWHSC), 27 (1919), 631-670; Bayrd Still, "State-Making in Wisconsin, 1846-48: An Illustration of the Statehood Process," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 20 (Sept. 1936), 37. For similar issues in Michigan, see Report of the Proceedings and Debates in the Convention to Revise the Constitution of the State of Michigan (Lansing 1850), 240, 674-682. Michigan had a married women's statute (Michigan Aas, 1844, no. 66) and controversy emerged, as it had in Wisconsin, over the

WOMEN AND POLITICS

The one experience that cast ominous shadows over these disparate jurisdictions was the panic of 1837 and the depression beginning in 1839. Legislators were spurred to insulate some of the family's assets from the husband's creditors, and to protect the state and its taxpayers from the burdens of welfare. Married women's acts were, among other things, debtor exemption acts. In an 1837 speech to the legislature, Governor George Paschal of Georgia found that married women's common law disabilities had inflicted a heavy financial toll on families in the state. 43 In Mississippi, which passed the first major married women's statute in the nation in 1839, Τ. B. J. Hadley, who had introduced the "Woman's Law" into the Mississippi legislature, introduced a bill in the same session for the relief of himself and his security, a Samuel M. Puckett.44 On the other side of the ledger was Marshall M. Strong, a delegate to the 1846 Wisconsin convention, who vehemently opposed a married women's clause and was said to have separated his wife's property from his own with a secure prenuptial agreement. He had, therefore, little desire to extend and democratize the redistributive aspects of the married woman's separate estate.45 George Geddes, on the other hand, who led support for the 1848 bill in the New York Senate, had a will with a trust for his daughter with which he was dissatisfied bepropriety of placing such a provision into the constitution. Texas, however, drawing on its Spanish legal origins as a former part of Mexico, placed a married women's provision into its constitution that was linked to a homestead provision in 1845 (Texas Constitution, 1845, art. 7, sees. 19 and 22). At its constitutional convention of 1849, California followed the Texas provisions verbatim. California Constitution, 1849, art. 9, sees. 14 and 15. See 'Translation and Digest of Such Portions of the Mexican Laws . . . as are Supposed to be Still in Force," in Report of the Debates of the Convention of California on the Formation of the State Constitution . . . 1849, ed. J. Ross Browne (Washington 1850), xxiv-xxvii; and Peter Thomas Conmy, The Historic Spanish Origins of California's Community Property Law and Its Development and Adaptation to Meet the Needs of an American State (San Francisco 1957). 45 Eleanor M. Boatright, "The Political and Civil Status of Women in Georgia, 1783-1860," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 25 (Dec. 1941), 310. 44 Elizabeth Gaspar Brown, "Husband and Wife — Memorandum on the Mississippi Woman's Law of 1839," Michigan Law Review, 42 (Apr. 1944), 1113-1114. 45 Isaac P. Walker, "Address to the People of Wisconsin, March 31, 1847" in "The Struggle Over Ratification," ed. Milo M. Quaife, WHSC, 28 (1920), 602-604. Walker pointed out that the goal of the constitution was to dispense with the lawyer and the fee that marriage settlements seemed to require.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

cause of uncertainties in the uses and trusts provisions of New York law.« T h e financial circumstances of individual politicians serve to highlight the economic underpinnings of the issues. It is safe to assume that there were more Hadleys in antebellum American than there were Strongs, and it was for the relief of the former that the married women's statutes were passed. As one historian of the statutes has asserted, these reforms stood a chance because there was something in them for men, and it had nothing to d:> with feminism. 47 The narrowness of the statutes supports her view. In New York the scope of the statutes was restricted by the equitable precedents on which they were based and by the economic exigencies that impelled their passage. Legal elements of coverture prevailed long after the passage of the statutes. 48 Nevertheless, there was something in the statutes for women: a legally modest but symbolically significant improvement in their common law status that was more in keeping with their elevated position in the family — compensation, so to speak, for their disfranchisement that converged felicitously with economic motives. The compensatory aspects of married women's property rights were a persistent theme in arguments for a statute. If a wife was to be her husband's helpmeet, his equal within marriage, queen of the household, arbiter of its morals, and teacher to the next generation of citizens, then she deserved something better than her childlike common law status. Governor Francis Shunk of Pennsylvania appealed to the legislature to adjust the law to a more companionate ideal of marriage. "The liberal and enlightened spirit of the age," he claimed, "has developed and secured the rights of man, and has redeemed woman and elevated her, from the degrading position she occupied, and placed her, where she always should have been, at the side of her husband, his equal in

46 G e o r g e G e d d e s t o Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nov. 28, 1880, in Elizabeth C a d y S t a n t o n , Susan B. A n t h o n y , Matilda joslyn Gage, a n d Ida Husted H a r p e r , eds., A History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., Rochester and New York 1881-1922), I, 65. 47 Suzanne D . Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction a n d t h e P r o p e r t y Rights of S o u t h e r n W o m e n , " Journal of Southern History 43 (May 1977), 197-198. 48 For an analysis of t h e limitations of t h e married w o m e n ' s acts, see N o r m a Bäsch, In che Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca 1982).

W O M E N A N D POLITICS

rank and dignity." Her legal status should not be defined "by the contracted and illiberal enactments of an age when her husband was her lord and he might chastise her by law as if she were a servant." 49 Shunk's rhetoric is particularly revealing because it parallels the rights of man with the elevation of woman. He associated an improvement in the legal status of married women with the rights of man while he simultaneously distinguished it from those rights. His statement exemplifies the possibilities and limitations of the equitable model. From the available remnants of state legislative debates, and from the much fuller record of debate in the Wisconsin and New York constitutional conventions of 1846, a clear and consistent pattern of argument emerges. 50 Most proponents of a married women's provision adhered to the equitable model and argued on the grounds of debtor relief, the protection of the family, and the elevation of women from the despotism of the common law. A few egalitarians argued on the grounds of woman's inalienable right to property and alluded to or demanded woman suffrage. So entrenched was the concept of female disfranchisement, that it was used to justify the disfranchisement of black males in the Iowa convention of 1844 and of foreigners at the Illinois convention of 1847.51 Opponents of married women's property rights relied on the sanctity of the biblical and common law doctrine of the absolute unity of spouses, and predicted frauds against creditors, licentiousness, a rash of illegitimate children, social chaos, and woman suffrage if a married women's provision were passed. 52

49 Governor Francis Rawn Shunk, "Annual Message to the Assembly, 1848," Pennsylvania Archives, 4th ser., 7 (1902), 213-214. 50 For New York, see William G. Bishop and William H. Attree, eds., Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of New York (Albany 1846), 1038-1042, 1056-1064. For Wisconsin, see WHSC, 27 (1919), 631-636, 638-640, 645-670, 702-703; and WHSC, 28 (1920), 59, 61-62, 99-100, 124-125, 174-175, 275-280, 325, 351, 360-362, 366, 384-385, 464-466, 510-513, 532, 536, 567-575, 580, 602-604, 667-669, 681, 684. 51 Ruth A. Gallaher, Legal and Political Status of Women in Iowa (Iowa City 1918), 173-174; for Iowa's married women's statute, see Laws of Iowa, 1845-1846, chap. 5; on woman and alien suffrage in Illinois, see The Constitutional Debates of 1847, Illinois State Historical Library Collections, 14 (1919), 546. 52 See the statements of Charles O'Conor at the New York convention in Bishop and Attree, eds., Report of Debates, 1056-1060.

71

HISTORY OF W O M E N IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S

Woman suffrage was the very embodiment of chaos, the ultimate eradication of separate sexual spheres. All these elements of the debate appeared in Wisconsin where the married women's provision of 1846 was hotly contested at the convention and in the battle for ratification. The Racine Advocate, a proponent of the married women's provision and the homestead exemption clause, argued that the two measures were destined "to make men better, more stable, more equal, and to prevent uncertain and feverish speculations and grumbling." 53 David Noggle, a delegate to the 1846 convention, predicted that with the passage of the two clauses, the "little, humble cottage will no longer be the asylum of grief." The elevation of women was a persistent theme on all sides of the debate. "Elevate your wives and elevate your daughters," said Noggle, "and you elevate the race that follows."54 William R. Smith characterized the common law status of wives as "a remnant of the feudal system, which ought to be abolished." 55 To arguments that separate property had encouraged bastardy and prostitution in France, one delegate pointed to flourishing prostitution in London and New York where the common law prevailed.56 A few egalitarians at the Wisconsin convention presented an amendment to the suffrage provision that would erase the word male from the suffrage requirements, but it was defeated. They also advocated a change of language in the bill of rights, which proclaimed all men free and equal, insisting that it was antithetical to the suffrage provision, which excluded women, Negroes, and mulattoes.57 Egalitarian arguments, however, were used to attack the married women's provision and the "specious reasoning about woman's rights" on which they rested. Because suffrage was the logical component of owning property, the married women's provision must be defeated. "By parity of reasoning," went the argument, it is right that women "should vote and be eligible to the highest offices of state or nation, and thus is dissolved at once

53 "The Constitution - No. 1," Racine Advocate, Jan. 6,1847, in WHSC, 28 (1920), 436-437. M Speech of Noggle, Dec. 7. 1846, ibid., 27 (1919), 663. 55 Ibid., 631. " "Remarks of Mr. Singer in the Territorial Legislature," Feb. 6, 1847, ibid., 28 (1920), 278-279. " Ibid., 27 (1919), 214, 259, 522.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

the charm, the beauty, a n d the glory of t h e female character." This provision "will tend to subvert t h e whole order of society." It is favored by "rogues" and "tight-fisted fathers," who view marriage not as a "sacred, indivisible union," b u t as "a mere matter of convenience or at best as a mutual contract of separate parties." 58 Marshall M. Strong, who resigned from the 1846 convention during the heated debate over the married women's clause and homestead exemption clause, continued his opposition in the territorial legislature: The Bible says that woman shall leave father and mother and cleave unto her husband, and they twain shall be one flesh. The constitution says that they twain shall be as separate and distinct persons as any other two individuals in the community, or as any laws can make them . . . . Woman is to be transferred from her appropriate domestic sphere, taken away from her children, and cast out rudely into the strifes and turmoil of the world, there to have her finer sensibilities blunted, the ruling motives of her mind changed, and every trait of loveliness blotted o u t . " References made by Strong and other opponents t o the legislation of other states suggest they were aware of a national trend toward married women's acts a n d were cognizant of state-by-state variations. T h e Madison Express reprinted a speech made by Charles O ' C o n o r to the New York convention of 1846, a speech which closely resembled the one made by Strong to the territorial legislature in the following year. 60 T h e Express pronounced itself in favor of the 1845 Massachusetts bill, which merely recognized by statute the separate estate of a married w o m a n if it were created by a prenuptial agreement. 61 Texas, a state which passed a married women's provision in its 1845 constitution that was similar to the Wisconsin measure, was denounced as a "noted asylum for all the desperados in the country," and a poor model for morals or laws. 62

58 "M's Views o n t h e Rights of Married W o m e n , " Madison Express, M a r . 9, 1847, ibid., 28 (1920), 400, 401. 59 Speech of Marshall M . Strong in t h e Territorial Legislature, Feb. 5, 1847, ibid., 239. 60 " M r . O ' C o n n o r [sic] o n Rights of M a r r i e d W o m e n , " Madison Express, Mar. 16, 1847, ibid., 404-409. 41 "Massachusetts Provision for t h e Rights of Married W o m e n , " Madison Express, Jan. 19, 1847, ibid., 384-385. " "Speech of Marshall M . Strong, O n t h e Passage of t h e Article o n t h e

74

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

Occasional debate coverage in a wide range of periodicals informed a literate middle class comprised of a variety of social aggregates. In 1845, for example, t h e Massachusetts Ploughman, an important New England agricultural journal, reprinted an article from the Cincinnati Chronicle t h a t referred to bills before the Missouri, Alabama, and Georgia legislatures and supported them on the basis of debtor relief and a needed improvement in the status of women: The law must change because the reason of the law has changed. In all civilized society, it must be a great object to keep families together, and support them upon a homestead, because if they are not so kept together and supported, the chances are, that the public, the state itself, must contribute to their support.

The article condemned the subservience and dependence to which the common law relegated wives, and concluded t h a t women "should not be made slaves." 63 T h e moderate, equitable model was attractive to those female writers and reformers who would not align themselves with an overtly political feminist position, but who sought, instead, to enlarge the influence of women within the domestic sphere. Sarah Hale backed an 1837 New York bill in her editorial column in Godey's Lady's Book, probably t h e most respectable and influential women's magazine of the period. She predicted that the bill would promote "the security and happiness of domestic life" and "preserve more indissolubly t h e union of hearts." T h e tyranny that Hale emphasized was always personal and domestic. In one of her typical attacks on the indiscretions of men, she praised the bill for its ability to prevent the husband from wasting his wife's property "on his wicked indulgences."" T h e Advocate of Moral Reform, dedicated to the obliteration of prostitution, the double sexual standard, and intemperance, asserted that the husband tended to view his wife as a species of property, as "a useful article of furniture" rather than as a "helpmeet." It reprinted the married women's provision from the proRights of Married Women and Exemption from Forced Sale," Dec. 7, 1846, ibid., 27 (1919), 647-648. 63 "Rights of Married Women," Massachusetts Ploughman, Mar. 8, 1845; this journal printed the Massachusetts married women's statute on its front page of April 10, 1845. 44 "Rights of Married Women." Godey's Lady's Book, 14 (May 1837), 212-214.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

posed Wisconsin constitution, and characterized it as guaranteeing the wife's property "beyond the power of alienation by a drunken or otherwise profligate husband or father." Female reformers' attack on the concept that men owned property in women was important, but they did not carry their attack to its logical political conclusions. They did not reach past their personal, familial relationships to demand the right to full political participation. That task was taken up by the women's rights movement. 65 In the 1840s women's rights advocates began uncoordinated efforts to lobby for married women's property rights in several northeastern states. This was true of Mary Upton Ferrin in Massachusetts, and of Paulina Wright, Ernestine Rose, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in New York. Clarina Howard Nichols wrote a series of articles for the Windham County Demoaat of Brattleboro on behalf of the 1847 Vermont statute. Jane Grey Swisshelm (publisher of the Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor), Lucretia Mott, and Mary Grew organized support for the 1848 Pennsylvania statute.66 Petitions grew more strident. Forty-four married women petitioned the New York legislature in March 1848 on egalitarian rather than on equitable grounds; they made their demands as women, a class of disfranchised and disaffected citizens, rather than as economically disadvantaged and victimized wives.67 By the 1850s the drive for married women's property rights had become pivotal to the development of antebellum feminism. Feminists drew on the equitable model. But it was their reliance on and refinement of the egalitarian model that strengthened their movement, infused it with staying power, and exposed and exploited coverture for the political paradigm that it was. 6 5 "Evils of Despotic Government," Advocate of Moral Reform, Feb. 15, 1838, 28; "Rights of Women - T h e Homestead Inalienable," ibid., Feb. 15, 1847, 31. O n the Female Moral Reform Society that the Advocate represented, see Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman." O n the connections between men owning property in women and the double standard, see Keith Thomas, " T h e Double Standard," Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (Apr. 1959), 195-216; and Nancy F. Cott, "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850," Signs, 4 (Winter 1978), 219-236. 46 Notable American Women, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S . Boyer (3 vols, Cambridge 1971. II, 625-626, III, 416; Ira V . Brown, " T h e Woman's Rights Movement in Pennsylvania, 1848-1873," Pennsylvania History, 32 (Apr. 1965), 155; Bäsch, In the Eyes of the Law, 165-168. 6 7 Petition of forty-four ladies of Genesee and Wyoming, praying for the

HISTORY O F W O M E N IN T H E U N I T E D STATES

The equity-vs.-equality dialogue suggests a few final observations. From a legal perspective, the easing of married women's common law disabilities paralleled the easing of debtors' obligations. It was part of a larger trend in family law as well. In the areas of courtship, marriage, divorce, and child custody, state judiciaries and legislatures enlarged the rights of individuals in the family at the expense of the power held by the male head of the household. 68 Yet the dialogue within the legal community, which revolved around the proper implementation of the equitable model, rarely touched on the political implications of modifying coverture. Nor does it appear to have been disseminated to or understood by the public. As the institutional context of the dialogue shifted, the issues shifted. As discourse moved beyond the courts and the legal profession to state legislatures and constitutional conventions, it radiated in unanticipated directions. Discourse took shape in popular journals and assumed genuinely public dimensions. It became increasingly difficult to modify coverture without broaching its political implications. From a political perspective neither the neoclassical republican culture of the revolution nor its revamped Jacksonian counterpart can be construed as congenial to the cause of women's rights. Nevertheless, as egalitarians fused fragments of the republican tradition to the drive for marital property reform, they generated severe stresses in coverture as a political paradigm. In light of the outlines of the public dialogue that they sparked, the Jacksonian era might be appropriately characterized as a transitional period with respect to the status of women in the political culture. It might be viewed as an ambiguous stage during which the political role of women was still defined by Republican Motherhood while at the same time the first steps toward integrating women into an egalitarian political ethos were being taken. 69

repeal of certain laws, Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, 1848 (Albany 1848), V , Document 129 (March 15, 1848). 68 For changes in family law, see Michael Grossberg, "Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America" (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University 1979); Jamil S. Zainaldin, "The Emergence of a Modern American Family Law: Child Custody, Adoption, and the Courts, 1796-1851," Northwestern University Law Review, 73 (Feb. 1979), 1038-1089. " O n Republican Motherhood, see Kerber. Women of the Republic, passim.

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W O M E N AND POLITICS

"CO-LABORERS IN THE CAUSE": Women in the Ante-bellum Nativist Movement

Jean Gould Hales the ante-bellum nativist movement as an emotional crusade to stem the tides of change that engulfed America at mid-century. Two respected authors reiterate this theme in articles discussing nativism and women. Basing their conclusions primarily on the lurid exposes of Catholic convents which portrayed lecherous priests defiling innocent girls, they suggest that nativists clung tenaciously to traditional sex roles and denied women an active role in the movement. Bather, nativists confined woman to the proverbial pedestal as the sumbol of national purity—a purity endangered by Catholicism.1 In reality, the nativist movement was a complex blend of conservatism and liberal reformism, and it attracted a remarkably diverse following. Moreover, a critical examination of women's involvement in the movement reveals nativism's wide appeal and dual character. Coincidentally, it suggests that historians also need to reassess their conception of the nineteenth-century doctrine of femininity. Like nativism, the "cult of true womanhood" was not always the repressive bulwark of the status quo that its popular image implies. Nativists, of course, were vocal exponents of the traditional values encompassed in the cult of true womanhood. They agreed that the home was woman's proper sphere and motherhood her highest calling. Yet they were also sympathetic to working women who had to leave the domestic circle. Furthermore, nativists urged women of all classes to join their crusade and even to participate in ways that were sharply at variance with the prevailing culture. Sometimes their appeals to women were tentative and betrayed ambivalence; at other times, they were bold and unqualified. Several factors apparently nudged ante-bellum nativists toward an expanded vision of women's roles: a propensity to perceive their movement as a moral rather than a political crusade; the HISTORIANS OFTEN DISMISS

1 David 11. Bennett, "Women in the Nativist Movement," in Carol V. R. Ceorge (ed.), "Remember the Ladies": New Perspectives on Women in American History (Syracuse, 1975), 71-82, also 83-89; David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,"Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XLVII (1960), 205-224.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

needs of their female constituents; and, ironically, their very belief in the tenets of true womanhood. Tacitly acknowledging that women had a legitimate role to play in the movement, most nativist organizations instituted women's auxiliaries. The first female societies appeared in Philadelphia in early 1844 as adjuncts of the fledgling Native American party. Party auxiliaries, called Female Native American Associations, Native American Benevolent Associations, or American Republican Benevolent Associations, subsequently appeared in Boston, New York City, New Orleans, and in several New Jersey towns. 2 Nativists also formed several ostensibly non-partisan patriotic and benevolent societies in the 1840's. New Yorkers, in December, 1844, organized the Order of United Americans (O.U.A.), and, on November 27, 1845, they created a women's auxiliary, the United Daughters of America (U.D.A.). B y the mid-1850's, the U.D.A. had ten chapters in New York City and additional chapters in Newark, Baltimore, and in scattered communities in upstate New York and Massachusetts. 3 In 1845, Pennsylvania nativists established the United Sons of America (U.S.A.) and its auxiliary, the Patriotic Daughters of America (P.D.Α.). By 1851, the P.D.A. had at least seven camps in Pennsylvania, two in Baltimore, and one each in New Jersey and Massachusetts. 4 Native-bom working men and women instituted a third order, the United American Mechanics (O.U.A.M.), and its counterpart, the United Daughters of America (U.D.A.). T h e U.D.A. was probably the most successful of the ante-bellum female societies. By 1852, it had thirty-eight councils in Pennsylvania, six in New York state, four in New Jersey, two in Baltimore, and one in Wilmington, Delaware. 5 Several minor women's societies apparently flourished without male affiliates. Among these were the American Daughters of Liberty of New York City and a militia group, the Female Infantry and Lancers. The latter society, which one reporter dubbed the "Fairy Guards," appeared in the 1850's in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.® 2 A Philadelphia newspaper, the American Woman, is the best source for the Native American auxiliaries. Also see American Banner and National Defender (Philadelphia and Camden, N.J.;, 1850-1856; Boston American Signal, 1847; New York American Republican, 1844-1845; Louisville Courier, 1845. 1 Sec especially The Republic. A Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Politics and Art, I-IV (Jan. 1851-Dec. 1852), edited by O.U.A. leader Thomas Whitney, Also see "United Daughters of America," in Henry Baldwin (ed.), American Papers. Copies of Papers from Various sources respecting the United States Government and the History of American Organizations, collected by Henry Baldwin, I (Library Americana, Item 36, New York Public Library), 87-89; Anna Ella Carroll, The Creat American Battle; or, the Contest Between Christianity and Political Romanism (New York, 1856), 258-259. 4

Information on the P.D.A. appears in the American

Banner, 1850-1856.

The O.U.A.M. newspaper, the Rhinebeck (N.Y.) American Mechanic published a directory of U.D.A. chapters several times in 1851. See also American Banner, 1850-1856; Baltimore Clipper, Feb. 21, June 16, 1852. 5

6

American Woman,

Apr. 12, 1845; Boston American

Patriot, May 13, 1854.

WOMEN AND POLITICS Of the major ante-bellum nativist organizations, only the American or Know-Nothing party of the 1850's did not establish a women's auxiliary. This probably stemmed from the fact that "conscience nativists" doubted the sincerity of party politicians and therefore carefully maintained the patriotic-benevolent societies as independent guardians of true American principles throughout the party's existence. Women also served the movement as propagandists. Their contributions ranged from sentimental poetry and prose, expounding patriotic, religious, and maternal themes, to sophisticated discussions of ideology and politics. In 1845, Kentuckian "Amelia" Welby wrote poems extolling the virtues of the American Republican party; a decade later "Rebecca" sent numerous letters to the Boston Know-Nothing; and American Crusader? One nativist weekly, The Bunker Hill, began publication in July, 1844, pointedly announcing that there were "a few ladies" on its literary staff.8 Two women, Harriet Probasco of Pennsylvania and Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland, were especially important to the movement. Harriet Probasco published a Philadelphia Native American newspaper, The American Woman, during its brief life from September 7,1844 to July 19,1845. Her paper represented the liberal reformist wing of the nativist movement and blended traditionalist rhetoric with moderate feminism. Staffed and financed entirely by women, the fourpage weekly encompassed literary criticism and history, women's health, education, and dress reform, and the Sabbath and peace movements. Its primary concerns, however, were temperance and nativism. Probasco and her female correspondents discussed the principles and electoral campaigns of the Native American party and the activities of the Female Native American Associations. Her paper also helped to mobilize Pennsylvania women for the party and provided a unique outlet for their views.9 A decade later, Anna Ella Carroll was a prominent publicist for the American party. She wrote a number of books and pamphlets for the presidential campaign of 1856 and, between 1856 and 1861, contributed anonymous articles and letters to newspapers around the country. Carroll was an important voice for the conservative antiCatholic wing of the nativist movement and an articulate exponent of its Unionist ideology. She also warned of the dangers emanating from unrestricted immigration, the declining caliber of politicians, and 7 American Woman, Jan. 11, 1845; Boston Know-Nothing and American Crusader, June-Aug. 1854. Also see letters to Louisville Courier, Dec. 4,28,1844, from a woman who used the pseudonym "America." " New York American Republican, July 27, 1844; Louisville Courier, Aug. 8, 1844. 9 For the scope, purpose, and staff composition of the American Woman see Sept. 7, Dec. 7,28,1844, July 19,1845. On Jan. 11,1845, the editor announced that her paper would not accept contributions from its male friends. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has the only known copies of the paper.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES the rise of demagoguery and excessive partisanship. Her most popular book, The Great American Battle; or, the Contest between Christianity and Political Romanism, was an eloquent appeal to women to enlist in the nativist crusade.10 Nativists of both sexes shared a heightened sense of nationalism, a political philosophy best characterized as conservative republicanism, and a disquieting belief in the fragility of liberty and self-government. They feared, moreover, that cultural and religious pluralism would destroy the Republic. But beneath this commonality, nativists were a heterogeneous group. Many women, non-working and working alike, joined the movement because it addressed their economic concerns and promised to meet their most pressing needs. Sparse membership records make it impossible to draw an accurate socio-economic profile of nativist women, but it is evident that a substantial proportion were working women, probably seamstresses, factory hands, or perhaps domestics. The United American Mechanic's auxiliary, the Daughters of America, for example, consisted primarily of working women who supported themselves and often several dependents, or supplemented meager family incomes. These women reportedly had joined hands in "self-defense" to combat the influx of cheap European workers and the subsequent "suppression of female labor."11 Furthermore, male nativists typically belonged to occupational groups which suffered periodic economic reverses in the 1840's and 1850's.12 It is therefore probable that their wives and daughters worked at some time during those decades; certainly they shared the aspirations and frustrations of their menfolk. Significantly, male and female nativist societies of the ante-bellum era were benevolent associations which promised members and their dependents a modicum of economic security. Societies paid weekly sums to unemployed members and helped them find work. The female 10 For Carroll's appeal to women see Great American Battle, especially xii, 21, 26-27, 258-259, 329-332, 340-341. Chapter I is entitled " T h e Women of America." Can-oil's other publications for the party included: A Review of Pierce's Administration; Showing Its only Popular Measures to Have Originated with the Executive of Millard Fillmore (Boston and New York, 1856); The Star of the West; or, National Men and National Measures (Boston and New York, 1856); The Union of the States (Boston and New York, 1856); Which? I'illmorc or Buchanan.' (Boston, 1856).

" American Banner, Apr. 13, 1850. T h e U.D.A. directory in the Rhinebeck American Mechanic reveals that U.D.A. chapters were clustered in towns and cities with manufacturing establishments, particularly clothing and textile mills. For example, Krankford, a Philadelphia suburb with an unusual concentration of textile mills, spawned nine U.D.A chapters, but only one O.U.A.M. chaptcr. Moreover, in a number of towns with U.D.A. chapters, women outnumbered men. A surplus female population generally indicated an unusual number of single or widowed working women. 12 Male nativists typically were semi-skilled workers, skilled artisans, and members of the petit-bourgeois class. See Jean Could Hales. " T h e Shaping of Nativist Sentiment, 18481960" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1973), 142-144; Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Conn., 1975), especially 44-77; Bruce Laurie, " T h e Working People of Philadelphia, 1826-1853" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1971), especially 126-152.

WOMEN AND POLITICS Native American Associations of Philadelphia dispensed relief to any needy family if either the husband or wife belonged to a Native American organization.13 Male and female societies provided disability and funeral benefits for members, and several operated cemeteries. One Female Native American Association, which apparently had many working members, provided $30.00 for the funeral of a deceased sister and an equal sum for a member's dependents. Male societies also paid partial funeral expenses for members' wives and maintained funds to aid the widows and orphans of deceased brothers. 14 In 1851, the O.U.A.M. alone aided some sixty-three widows in Philadelphia City and County. 15 In times of need, a nativist woman could count on financial assistance if she or her husband were members of one of the patriotic-benevolent societies. Nativist spokesmen regularly hailed their affiliation with the mechanic class and pledged to address the needs of American workers. Their panacea for labor was a capitation tax on immigrants. This "working man's tariff," they contended, would protect American men and women from the "unfair competition" of "ignorant and degraded foreigners."1® Nativist publications sometimes called for wider economic opportunities and more equitable wages for women,17 and frequently described the plight of certain female workers. In particular, they exposed the low wages and pitiful working conditions of seamstresses. " American

Woman,

Mar. 1, 1845, Oct. 26, 1844.

Constitution and By-Laws of the Washington Female Native American Association of Southwark (Philadelphia, 1848), 3-5. T h e constitution allowed $30 for the burial of a member's dependent husband, parent, sister, brother, or child over age six. For information on benevolent activities and expenditures see the following nativist publications and society records: The Republic, I-IV; American Banner; American Woman; New York O.U.A.; Rhinebeck American Mechanic, 1851; Constitution of the O. U.A. and By-Laws of Alpha Chapter No. 1 (New York, 1849), 38-39; Constitution, ByIMWS, Rules of Order and Discipline of Fredonia Council, No. 52, of the Order of United American Mechanics, of the State of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1853); Constitution and IMWS of the Benevolent and Patriotic Association of the United Sons of America (Philadelphia, 1852); Journal of the State Council, of the Order of United American Mechanics, of the State of Pennsylvania, for the Years 1845-1853 (Philadelphia, 1848-1853); Charter and By-l^aws of the United American Mechanics' and United Daughters of Amcrica Cemetery Association. Chartered December 4, 1848 (Philadelphia, 1854). 14

,5

American

Banner, Apr. 24, 1852.

For proposals for a capitation tax, see American Banner, Apr. 13, 1850, Mar. 8, 1851; toast at U.S.A., O.U.A.M., J.S.A., and P.D.A July 4th celebration in Pittsburgh, as reported in American Banner, July 12,1851; Boston American Signal, June 14, Oct. 4,1847, July 1, 1848; Baltimore Clipper, Nov. 15, D e c . 5 , 1844; Louisville Courier, Aug. 8, Sept. 13, 17,19, 1845. For general appeals to labor, see Hales, " T h e Shaping of Nativist Sentiment," 138-142; Laurie, "The W orking People of Philadelphia," 143-148; Leonard Tabachnik, "Origins of the Know-Nothing Party: A Study of the Native American Party in Philadelphia, 1844-1852" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1973), 191-206. 16

17 Republic, 1:36-37; Uriah H. Judah, "The Village School," Republic, 111:228; excerpt from Philadelphia Sun in American Banner, Sept. 28,1844; American Woman, Jan. 4, July 5, 1845; excerpt from New York Sun in Louisville Courier, Aug. 6,1845; Courier, Aug. 14, 1851, Aug. 25, 1854; Tabachnik, "Origins of the Know-Nothing Party," 201-203.

82

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

As a remedy, editors supported efforts to organize these women and occasionally advocated the creation of sewing cooperatives. They also exhorted readers voluntarily to pay higher prices for finished goods.18 Some nativists sought to make domestic service a viable occupation for native-bom women. They argued that Irish women had degraded the occupation by depressing wages and by lazy, immoral, and dishonest conduct. As a corrective, they proposed that employers hire American rather than immigrant girls, that wages of domestics be raised, and that a vigorous campaign be waged to improve public attitudes toward domestic employment. 19 Nativists also bemoaned shrinking opportunities for employment in New England factories. They castigated mill owners for dismissing "intelligent and virtuous" Yankee girls and replacing them with "ignorant" immigrants. Likewise, they accused companies of deliberately cutting wages to force native-born girls to resign to make room for cheap foreign workers. In addition, they charged that Irish girls robbed factory work of respectability and hence forced decent American girls to seek other jobs.20 Northeastern nativists fought for effective ten-hour laws and for legislation prohibiting child labor in manufacturing establishments. In 1851, two nativist newspapers supported Gloucester, New Jersey strikers who were protesting a company's refusal to comply with the state's new ten-hour law. Most of the workers, the editors observed, were women and children who toiled under wretched conditions. They needed the state's protection. 21 Recognizing the peculiar legal disabilities of working wives, a number of nativists advocated passage of married women's property laws. In fact, the nativist-dominated legislature of Massachusetts passed a law that gave married women the right to sell property, transact business, perform any labor and services, and retain all earnings as their exclusive property. 22 Although nativists preferred that women remain in the American Banner, Jan. 4, Apr. 12, 1851, Apr. 23, 1853; " F e m a l e E m p l o y m e n t " from O.U.A.M. Mechanics Advocate as reprinted in Banner, Nov. 1, 1852; excerpt from Philadelphia Sun and editorial in U.A.M. column in Banner, May 7, 1853; Philadelphia Sim, May 5,1848, Feb. 4,1850, Aug. 30,1853; Baltimore Clipper, Apr. 12,1853; Louisville Courier, Oct. 14,1851, Aug. 24,1853; New York American Republican, July 23.30, Aug. 14, 1844. " Philadelphia Sim, Dec. 7, 1849; Boston American Patriot, May 20, 1854. See also American Patriot, Nov. 25, 1854; "American Female Domestics" from N e w York Daily Budget in American Banner, Apr. 15, 1854. 20 lixcerpt from National Intelligencer in O.U.A., Nov. 25, 1848, O.U.A., Jan. 13, 1849. Sec also American Woman, Jan. 11, Feb. 1, 1845; Philadelphia Sun, May 18,1848; Boston Bee, Sept. 25, 1854. 21 Boston American Signal. July 1,1848; American Banner, Aug. 9,1851; speech by Sarah Wilson, a striking factory operative, Lewiston Maine, as r e p o r t e d in Banner, Apr. 15,1854; excerpt from Newark Daily Advertiser in Philadelphia Sun, Sept. 13, 1849. On the Gloucester strike, see American Banner, July 19. 26, 1851, a n d Rhinebeck American Mechanic, July 24, 1851. 22

Massachusetts, Laws and Resolves, 1855, ch. 304, pp. 710-711. See also Philadelphia

WOMEN AND POLITICS

home, they recognized that for many work was a necessity. Significantly, they offered working women both sympathy and concrete reforms. Nativists, moreover, addressed the psycho-social needs of their working-class constituents. Fictional and non-fictional articles in their publications extolled the virtues of honest labor and praised the mechanic, seamstress, and domestic as archetypal Americans. The literature deplored the widening gulf between classes and condemned class snobbery. It repeatedly urged a return to republican simplicity, egalitarian values, and respect for the inner worth of individuals. 23 The nativist message undoubtedly provided solace to those who found their skills less and less in demand and their socio-economic status deteriorating in the wake of massive immigration and profound changes in the nation's economy. Certainly it offered reassurance to working women whose lives contrasted so sharply with the pervasive ideal of domesticity. The nativist movement also attracted non-working, traditionalist women, for it addressed issues of fundamental concern to them and usually assigned women responsibilities that were consonant with the feminine ideal. Perhaps more importantly, the movement promised relief from the boredom that often accompanied confinement to the domestic sphere. Nativist auxiliaries gave women a respectable escape from the home, and their fund-raising and educational activities enlivened and enriched members' lives. Moreover, like other female voluntary societies, the auxiliaries offered members the rewards of sisterhood with women of similar interests and provided the social and psychological support that enabled women to begin to cast off traditional restraints and inhibitions. The history of the nativist auxiliaries suggests that ante-bellum women's societies also served to bridge the chasm between women's sphere and the male-oriented circles from which women were excluded. Indeed, male nativists referred to members of their sister councils as "colaborers" or "coadjutors in the cause" and expected them to join in a cooperative effort to save the nation.25 By engaging in activities in Sim, F e b . 13, 1851; American Banner, D e c . 21, 1850; Louisville Courier, O c t . 23, 1845. U n d e r C o m m o n Law, a w o m a n suffered "civil d e a t h " u p o n m a r r i a g e . She b e c a m e o n e with her h u s b a n d , and ceased to exist as a legal entity. H e r earnings, p r o p e r t y , a n d prior legal rights a n d p o w e r s w e r e t r a n s f e r r e d to her h u s b a n d for u s e at his sole discretion. n See fiction in columns entitled "A Selcct T a l e " in the American Banner, J u n e 14, 21, Aug. 2, 30, S e p t . 6, 13, Nov. 29, 1851; L.A. W i l m e r , "Killed b y the Fashion Plate," Banner, Au« 1", 1850; fiction and articles on working-class values in Banner, Sept 18, O c t . 2, 23, 1852: Uriah H. J u d a h , ' The D r e a m e r . " Republic, I: 17-19; American Woman. J a n . 11, Mar. 22, Apr 26, 1845. Also, see tributes to the l a b o r i n g classes, "the b o n e a n d s i n e w " of the nation, in t h e Baltimore Clipper, Louisville Courier, Philadelphia Sun, N e w York American Republican. 2 * For i n f o r m a t i o n a b o u t the b e n e v o l e n t a n d e d u c a t i o n a l activites of the auxiliaries see American Woman; American Banner; O.U.A.; Republic, I-IV; Boston American Patriot, Boston Know-Nothing: and American Crusader. 25

Toast to P.D.A. at U.S.A. celebration, r e p r i n t e d in American

Banner,

M a r . 15, 1853;

84

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

support of nativist men and co-sponsoring some movement functions, the auxiliaries restored some of the companionship between the sexes that had disappeared as America entered an age of economic specialization and rigid role differentiation. Lyrically reiterating popular notions of femininity, nativists proclaimed that women could exert a profound influence on society without violating the canons of domesticity. In fact, they proposed that women should play a central part in the regenerative work of the movement. Warning that political Catholicism, unassimilated immigrants, and selfserving politicians were destroying the Republic, nativists called for a revival of morality, patriotism, and Protestant values. Appropriately, publicist Anna Carroll asserted that God had given woman the primary responsibility for the religious and moral reformation of America. "Woman's high political mission" is to act "as a moral agent—her aim is to develop the child for God and his country . . . /'Carroll contended. "The fate of America is the work of America's daughters. . . ."2β Nativist leaders tried to help women fulfill their mission. They created the auxiliaries to mobilize and augment women's influence. Typically, the Patriotic Daughters of America portrayed itself as a "higher college" that would teach each member a "proper conception of her high duties as an American mother" and train her to assume her grave responsibilities.27 Nativists also offered George Washington's mother as a model. Idealizing Washington as a paragon of virtue, they attributed his statesmanship and character to his mother's influence. They urged women to emulate her: to set a positive example for their children; to love, discipline, and instruct them; and to instill moral excellence. In so doing, they would rear a new generation of desperately needed statesmen—perhaps even a second great American hero!28 Carroll, Great American Clipper, J u n e 16, 1852

Baltic,

258. Also, sec ( ) . U . A . M . a d v e r t i s e m e n t in Baltimore

26 Carroll, Great American Battle, 13-14,18,20, See also American Woman, S e p t . 7, Dec. 7, 1844; P h i l a d e l p h i a Smi, J a n 25,1845; " C h a n c e r y of U.I). A. to C h a n c e r y of ( ) . U.A. .April 12, 1852," Republic, 111:268; J a c o b B r o o m , An Address Pronounced before the Order of the United Suns of America, at Philadelphia, on the Twenty-Second Day of February, A.D. 1850 ( P h i l a d e l p h i a , 1850), 17; J. Sawtelle, r e s p o n s e to " T o a s t to the l - a d i e s " a t Native A m e r i c a n c e l e b r a t i o n in Shirley Village, r e p o r t e d in Boston American Patriot, D e c . 30, 1854; American Patriot, M a y 13, 1854, J u n e 2, !855; resolution a d o p t e d b y Native American Mass M e e t i n g in Spring G a r d e n . r e p o r t e d in American Banner. May 10, 1851; letter entitled " T r u e A m e r i c a n i s m " f r o m " A m e r i c a " in Louisville Courier. D e c . 4, 1844 2T American Banner, Mar 19, 1853. See also " C h a n c e r y of U.I).A. lo C h a n c e r ) of Ο U.A.," Republic, 111:268; "United D a u g h t e r s of A m e r i c a , " Republic. 1:285. iK Uriah J u d a h , Filial Obedience,'" Republic. 111:280-281; J u d a h , " W o m a n . " Republic·, 1:256; L I I. S i g o u r n c y , " The Mother of W a s h i n g t o n " in Anony., The Wide-Awake Gift. A Know-Nothing Token for 1855 ( N e w York, 1855), 44-46; A n d r e w J a c k s o n , " T h e M o n u m e n t to M a r y Washington" in ibid., 276-278; Carroll, Great American Battle, 14; Louisville Courier, July 1,1845. See also Philadelphia Sun, J a n . 25, 1845; Boston American Patriot, J u n e 2 , 1 8 5 5 ; " A d d r e s s , by Mrs. C a t h a r i n e S h u r l o c k " in American Woman, Sept. 7, 1844; " A d d r e s s of Vespasian Ellis, Esq., President of Missouri N a t i v e A m e r i c a n Association, d e l i v e r e d July 5, 1841, b e f o r e t h e A m e r i c a n p a r t y , a n d p u b l i s h e d in

WOMEN AND POLITICS

Nativists insisted, above all, that women should inculcate their children with Protestant values by teaching them to know and respect the Bible. By thus shaping the moral fiber of the nation's youth, mothers would insure the success of republican government. 29 They also urged women to protect their offspring from the debilitating influence of Catholicism by dispensing with Irish servants. Patriotic mothers, nativists asserted, should willingly "bare their arms to labor."30 Nativists pointedly reminded their female constituents that by exerting her love and moral influence a wife could shape her husband's behavior and, through him, change society. Expanding on this popular image of wifely power, Harriet Probasco proposed that women should be well-educated so that they could be companions and soulmates to their spouses. Then, she predicted, their influence would be limitless and the regeneration of American would be assured. Women, cultivate these high companionable qualities, and you will close every dramshop, and prostrate every distillery in the land—our prisons will be rendered tenantless, and our almshouses will be given over to the bats and the owls.31

Even as they proclaimed that women could exert their influence most effectively within the family circle, however, nativists wittingly or unwittingly stretched the bounds of woman's proper sphere. They did so, it seems, because they believed in woman's moral and spiritual superiority and they desperately wanted their cause to triumph. Thus, nativists urged women to leave the hearth and join their crusade to save Protestantism and restore public morality. Happily, their pleas fell upon receptive ears. For several decades Protestant leaders had been exhorting women to serve as handmaidens of God and help rehabilitate society. By the 1840's, they had enlisted women in a variety of reforms, ranging from temperance and moral reform to the antislavery movement. 32 With these precedents, women could respond to nativist appeals without fear of compromising their femininity or arousing public disapproval. O b e d i e n c e t o a Η evolution of t h e Association." in American American Woman, Oct. 19, 1844, A p r . 19. 1845.

Woman.

Sept. 21. 18-1-1:

Sot·, for e x a m p l e , Philadelphia Sun, Jail. 31, 18-15; "Address, b y Catharine S l m r l o e k . " American Woman, S e p t . 7, 1844; " A d d r e s s of V e s p a s i a n KHis." American Woman. S e p t . 21, 1844; C a r r o l l , Great American Battle, 28.. Letter f r o m a " N a t i v e A m e r i c a n d a u g h t e r " a n d editorial r e m a r k s in Boston KnowNothing: anil American Crustuler, J til ν 1.1854; also, Boston American Patriot. M a v 2 0 . 2 7 . 1854. " American Woman. Jan. 18, 1845. See also CM). S t u a r t . " W o m a n ' s Bights." Republic. 1:218-22(1; J u d a h , " W o m a n . " Republic. 1:254-2(5; "Amiability." Repuldic. 111:147; » r o o m . An Address . 185(1. 17; " T h e Influence of W o m a n . " American Rainier. M a y 2 4 , 1851: American Woman. J a n . 18. 18-15; " O u r s e l v e s a n d O u r C a u s e . " American Woman. O c t . 5. 1844; Boston Know-Nothing: and American Crusader. May 13. 1854. Λ: B a r b a r a W elter, " T h e F e m i n i z a t i o n of A m e r i c a n lieligion: 1800-1860." in M a r y H a r t m a n a n d Lois B a n n e r (eds.) Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women ( N e w York. 1974). 137-157; HonaW W. Homeland. " " Π ι ο F e m a l e A p p e n d a g e ' : F e m i n i n e Life-Styles in A m e r i c a , 1820-1860," in J e a n E. F r i e d m a n a n d

86

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Women quickly answered the nativist call for organized resistance to Catholicism. As faithful parishioners, they had been subjected since the 1830's to a steady stream of anti-Catholic propaganda that emanated from the pulpits and presses of nearly all Protestant sects.33 Many women joined the missionary tract societies that formed the vanguard of the Protestant crusade against papal influences. Others wrote exposes of convents and priestly debauchery or general anti-Catholic works.34 Countless women simply needed a spark to ignite their latent distrust of Catholicism. The public schools controversy provided that spark in such states as New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland. The schools controversy surfaced in 1840-1843 when Catholics, led by New York Bishop John Hughes, demanded that common schools abolish daily readings from the Protestant Bible. Catholic leaders next requested a share of state education funds for parochial schools. In response, angry Protestants flocked to the Native American associations. The reassertion of Catholic demands in the early 1850's likewise precipitated the growth of the patriotic-benevolent societies, their auxiliaries, and the American party.35 Fearing that these demands were the beginning of an assault on republican institutions, nativists campaigned to keep the Bible in schools and to block state appropriations to Catholic institutions. They urged women to participate in these efforts, arguing that mothers and the schools were engaged in the common task of rearing morallyresponsible citizens. Nativists predicted that once maternal instincts were aroused, women would fight "like eagles to protect their young"

William C. Shade (eds.), Our American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought (Boston, 1976), especially 139-141; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social StTess in Jacksonian America," American Quarterly, XXIII (1971), 562-584; Keith Melder, "Ladies Bountiful: Organized Women's Benevolence in Early 19th-century America," New York History, XLVIII (1967), 231-255. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 (Chicago, 1964), 32-141. * Ibid., 90-117, on the anti-convent literature written by women. The most popular work was Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal, first published in 1836. For a sampling of anti-Catholic writings by women see Carroll, Great American Battle, letters from "Rebecca" and unidentified women in Boston KnowNothing: and American Crusader, June 10-Aug. 19,1854; American Woman, Sept. 28, Oct. 26,1844, Jan. 11,25, Feb. 1, May 10, July 5,1845; CraceCreenwood, "The Roman Catholic Religion" and "Blessing the Beasts" in Wide-Awake Gift, 155, 237-238. Also, see letters to Anna Carroll concerning her projected work on Catholicism from Kenneth Rayner, Mar. 7. 1856, Jacob Broom, July 21, Oct. 25,1858, and John M. Botts, Dec. 31,1858, in Anna Ella Carroll Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. r> For the nativist response to the schools controversy see Boston American Patriot·, Boston Know-Nothing: and American Crusader; American Banner; Baltimore Clipper, 1853; Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 142-192, 289-321, 407-430; Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots, especially 85-96; Tabachnik, "Origins of the Know-Nothing Party," 1627; Hales, "The Shaping of Nativist Sentiment," III, 86-106.

WOMEN AND POLITICS from the menacing despotism of the Church. 38 They were not disappointed. Women attended protest meetings and distributed propaganda. They wrote polemics and even made speeches defending the Bible as nonsectarian and demanding that all children be educated in the common schools.37 Ultimately, they ventured into the political arena and circulated petitions urging legislators to reject Catholic requests for a share of public funds. 38 In May and July, 1844, bloody riots involving Irish Catholics and Native American partisans erupted in the Philadelphia suburbs of Southwark and Kensington. Protestant women as well as men responded quickly to the outbreak of violence. Contemporaries reported that Southwark women were as active "as in the French Revolution, cheering on the men and carrying weapons to them." 39 After peace was restored, the Female Native American Associations aided families of fallen heroes and visited nativists in prison. Finally, they sent a delegation of members to Harrisburg to urge the governor to pardon the Protestant prisoners. 40 Clearly, the anti-Catholic aspect of antebellum nativism was a powerful magnet for many women. Moreover, as nativist men welcomed women as allies in the anti-Catholic crusade, they tolerated behavior they normally would have condemned as highly unfeminine. Although the evidence is more tangential, the nativist movement apparently won many female converts through its efforts to combat the social disintegration that seemed endemic in ante-bellum cities. Nativists provided two simple, yet plausible, explanations for social instability—the sudden, massive influx of intemperate, immoral immigrants and a declining respect for Protestant values. As a remedy, M "Address, by Catharine Shurlock American Woman, Sept. 7,1844. See also Carroll, Great American Battle, especially 22-24; American Woman, Sept. 7,1844; "Address of Vespasian Ellis," American Woman, Sept. 21, 1844; Boston American Patriot, May 13, 1854. •1T See, for example, letters from women and editorial response in Boston Knou> Nothing: and American Crusader, June 10, Aug. 19,1854; Carroll, Great American Battle, especially 20-26,56-57,78,81-82,331,340-341; American Woman, Sept. 7, Oct. 26, Dec. 14, 28,1844, Mar. 15, Apr . 12, May 10,31,1845; report of a Philadelphia ladies' mass meeting in Baldwin, American Papers, 1,85. Native American women often presented banners with anti-Catholic motifs to male Native American associations. Some depicted the American Eagle clutching a serpent (the Catholic Church) in its claws, with an open Bible in the foreground. See, for example. New York American Republican, Sept. 7,1844. Reflecting the interests of its readers, the American Woman editorially supported Female Bible Societies and the Sunday Schoo! Union. See Jan. 25, Apr. 19, 1845. w

American Banner, Apr. 19, 26, 1851. Nicholas B. Wainwright (ed.), A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834-1871 (Philadelphia, 1967), 168; Louisville Daily Dime, May 13,1844 (forerunner of Courier)·, Ceneral Cadwallader, the commander of the militia troops sent to restore order in Southwark, recalled that "women were our greatest foes." Quoted in Tabachnik, "Origins of the Know-Nothing Party," 82; see also 28-34. American Woman, Feb. 15, 1845; see also Feb. 8 and Mar. issues, 1845.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES they advocated a panoply of reforms, including temperance, rigid observance of the Sabbath, and a tightening of the nation's immigration policy. Concurrently, they demanded that public officials crack down on juvenile crime, prostitution, gambling, and urban disorders.41 Significantly, interest in these same social problems and reforms already was turning numerous ante-bellum women into social activists. Nativists often linked their moral and political reform proposals to women of all social strata. New York City nativists in the 1840's, for example, advocated a campaign against juvenile gangs and taverns to make the streets safe for women. The nativist administration of Mayor James Harper instituted prison reforms to safeguard the purity of female inmates, and directed that prostitutes be sent to the Houses of Refuge operated by moral reformers instead of to jail.42 Nativist rhetoric suggests that many, particularly Native American partisans, believed that women were attracted to the movement because of its emphasis on moral reform. Conversely, male leaders welcomed female participation in part because they thought it would enhance the moralist, reformist image of the movement. The relationship between temperance and nativism illustrates the movement's appeal to reform-minded women. Male and female nativist societies required members to lead "strictly sober and moral" lives. Those who failed to do so were denied relief benefits, expelled from their chapter, or blacklisted. With much fanfare, nativists conducted their public and private gatherings according to "strict temperance principles" and often participated in temperance functions.43 Many individuals were active in both movements. Harriet Probasco, for instance, was an officer of the Female Temperance Union of the City and County of Philadelphia, while editing her nativist weekly, the American Woman. The paper reflected her dual commitments, and 41 American Woman, Jan. 18, Apr. 19, May 31, June 7,14,1845; American Banner, May 11, Nov. 9, D e c . 21, 1850, Apr. 30, May 7, 1853; Boston American Signal, J u n e 20,1848; Boston American Patriot, D e c . 30,1854, Jan. 13,1855; Baltimore Clipper, May 22, Aug. 20, Sept. 3,1844, Mar. 31,1845, Mar. 10,1858; Philadelphia Sun, Mar. 17, May 5,1849, Nov. 2, 1850; Tabachnik, O r i g i n s of the K n o w - N o t h i n g Party," 108-110, 113-116; Hales, "The Shaping of Nativist Sentiment," 147-164. T o halt the social a n d moral deterioration of society, nativists called for restrictions on the immigration of p a u p e r s and criminals. « New York American Republican, July 30, Aug. 3,5.6,7,9,10,12,16,26, Sept. 28,1844 Also, see American Woman, J u n e 7, July 19,1845; Boston Weekly American Eagle, Dec 6, 1845; Boston American Patriot, May 13, 1854, Mar. 29, 1856; Baltimore Clipper, Jan. 30, Feb. 10, 1855, Jan. 20, 1860.

° See, for example. Constitution and By-Laws of the Washington Female Native American Association of Southwark, 3, 9-11; Rhinebeck American Mechanic, Feb 15, 1851; Constitution, By-Laws, Rules of Order and Discipline of Fredonia Council, O.U.A.M.-, N e w York, American Republican, Aug. 13, 1844; American Woman, Mar. 8, 1845; Baltimore Clipper, Nov. 1, 4, 1853; Boston American Patriot, Dec. 30,1854, June 2, 1855; Louisville Courier, Nov. 19, 1844, Dec. 15,1854; William W. Campbell, An Oration by Hon. William W. Campbell, Judge of Superior Court of New York. February 23, J852, at Metropolitan Hall, New York City on anniversary of Washington's Birthday Celebration by the O.U.A. ( N e w York, 1852), 12.

WOMEN AND POLITICS those of her readers. Probasco and Lewis C. Levin, a temperance leader turned nativist, reportedly pulled many Philadelphia temperance women into the Native American Associations.44 Probasco and Levin were among the first nativists to identify women as a practically untapped source of potential supporters. More importantly, they proposed that women should shed their domestic cocoons and exert their moral influence beyond the family circle. Probasco, in particular, set forth an inspiring image of the new activist woman. Eloquently combining the traditional argument that women were morally superior with the feminist cry that women were responsible human beings, she proclaimed women's right to hold public meetings, operate newspapers, circulate petitions, and speak in public on behalf of peace, temperance and nativism. We We We We

have have have have

tongues, and shall we not speak? heads, and shall we not think? hearts, and shall we not feel? much responsibility, and shall w e not discharge our duties? 4 5

Undoubtedly, Probasco went farther than most of her colleagues, yet nativists generally accepted and helped to popularize the concept of woman as the moral guardian of society. In tum, they won the allegiance of many women whose religious and moral convictions were propelling them into reform activities. Nativists assigned women one additional task—to help rekindle patriotism. This, indeed, was the raison d'etre of the women's auxiliaries. Nativists contended that patriotism, like piety and purity, was central to woman's nature. It was particularly characteristic of the American woman whose Protestant, republican heritage had given her unparalleled freedom.''6 The r.ativists' concept of female patriotism was 41 Tabachnik, "Origins of the Know-Nothing Party," 81-82; Philadelphia Sun, Sept. 14, 1844; American Woman, Mar. 1, 1845. Every issue of the American Woman contains information on t e m p e r a n c e activities. Levin was a former temperance editor, the editor of the nativist Philadelphia Sun after 1845, a n d a Native American congressman. He initially backcd the American Woman in an effort to pull the estimated 16,000 Philadelphia temperance w o m e n into the party. A handsome, eloquent man. Levin was a favorite speaker at temperance and female Native American mass meetings. Nativist newspapers such as the Louisville Courier, Baltimore Clipper, and American Banner also supported temperance

'' American Woman, Nov. 23, 1844, For a sampling of Probasco's arguments, see Sept. 7. 14.28, Nov. 2,16,23,30,1844. Mar. 15,22, Apr. 5, May 10, June 21,1845. Probasco noted, Sept 28, 1844, that a Native American w o m a n never left home to engage in her r e f o r m work until her husband's stockings w e r e m e n d e d . See also letters in American Woman from "Catharine," Oct. 19, Dee. 7, 1844, and from Lucy Hamilton, Nov. 2,1844; Louisville Courier, Mar. 30, Apr. 7, 26, 1855. " 'Chancery of U.O.A. to Chancery of ().U.A."Republic, !11:268;"U.D. A."Republic, 11:189; Broom, An Address . . . . 1850, 17; Carroll, Great American Battle, 13,19,25-26, 31. 258; American Woman, Sept. 21, Dec. 7, 1844, Apr. 12, 1845; "Address of Vespasian • l i s , ' ' American Woman, Sept. 21, 1844; Louisville Courier, July 31, 1845; letter f r o m "America," Courier, Dec. 4, 1844; Charles D. Deshler, "The Great American Middle Clus.*." An Address Delivered before the Order of United Americans, of Newark, New Irrscy. in Library Hall, on the Anniversary of Washington s Birth-day, February 22,1855

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shaped b y a fascination with American history, notably the Revolutionary era. Their publications were filled with historical stories and poems, many of which dealt with women. Although some of this literature depicted the selfless devotion of wife and mother, much of it conveyed a surprisingly different message. Even in the darkest hours of the struggle for independence, women were steadfast and active patriots. T h e y raised money for the continental army, organized boycotts of British goods, nursed the wounded, and managed farms and businesses for absent men. Some even served as spies or fought beside their men. 47 With these precedents before them, male and female nativists issued a clarion call for women to emulate their Revolutionary mothers and join the "sons of the soil" in the second struggle for freedom."·8 Nativists' belief in the innate patriotism of American women had unforeseen repercussions. In many respects, the activist role of the patriotic women of 7 6 clashed with the passive mid-century concept of femininity. Predictably, therefore, nativists often vacillated between the two female models. Ultimately, however, many nativists were able to reconcile these discordant images. As they did, they came to tolerate, and even to accept as appropriate, an unusual degree of political activity by their female allies. The tension engendered by the historic-patriotic model surfaced when nativists tried to define women's role in the movement. On the one hand, women were to operate within their traditional sphere and, above all, they were not to engage in partisan politics. On the other hand, they were expected to be knowledgeable about American institutions and public affairs and to use their God-given intellect, piety, and morality for patriotic purposes. Women were to be "co-laborers" in the cause, yet, somehow, not quite full partners. 49 (New York. 1855), 14-15; "The Patriotism of Woman," American Banner, Mar. 13,1852. See also Toast to "Woman" in O.U.A. Scrapbook (Manuscript Division, New York Public Library), 150. 47 See historical vignettes in American Woman, American Banner; Republic, I-IV; WideAwake Cift. See also Weekly American Organ, Jan. 1,1855; Boston American Signal, July 1,1848; Carroll, Great American Battle, especially 13-17,20,26-27,259,339-340; American Banner, Mar. 13, 1852. 4* American Banner, Apr. 13, 1850; "Address, by Catharine Shurlock," American Woman, Sept. 7,1844; Carroll, Creat American Battle, xii,341;"U.O.A.,"Republic, 11:189; Republic, 111:160; Boston American Patriot, May 27, 1854; letter from "America," Louisville Courier, Dec. 4, 1844.

" A Word to the Ladies" and "Women's Rights," Republic, I, 86, 218-220; "U.D.A.," Republic, II, 189; "Chancery of U.D.A. to Chancery of O.U.A," Republic, III, 267-268; O.U.A. Chancery response to U.D.A. Chancery in Baldwin, American Papers, I, 91; "Address, by Catharine Shurlock," American Woman, Sept. 7,1844; American Woman, Oct. 12, Dcc. 28, 1844; American Banner, Mar. 5,1853; letters from "America," Louisville Courier, Dec. 4, 28, 1844; letter in response to "America." Courier, Dec. 23, 1844. For assertions that women should confine themselves to their traditional sphere and passive roles, s e t Republic, 11,37,233, IV, 215; Baltimore Clipper. Sept. 10,1853; Boston American Patriot, Nov. 25, 1854; Boston Know-Nothing: and American Crusader, May 13, June 10, 1854.

WOMEN AND POLITICS Nativists believed that women could engage in many patriotic activities without violating tradition. They could imbue their children and husbands with patriotic sentiments, and they could join in celebrations of national holidays. In addition, they could stimulate a spirit of national self-sacrifice and simultaneously protect American labor from foreign competition by boycotting European products as their mothers had done. 50 As a rule, women's auxiliaries engaged in activities considered appropriate to their gender. They disseminated patriotic tracts, sponsored meetings at which prominent male nativists delivered patriotic orations, and encouraged their brothers to greater efforts with prayers, exhortations, and symbolic gestures. In 1852, for example, the Patriotic Daughters of America suddenly appeared at a nativist meeting in Philadelphia. Marching to the front of the theater, the women stopped, turned to the crowd, and removed identical shawls to reveal their resplendent red, white and blue ceremonial regalia. One reporter enthusiastically observed that such encouragement by patriotic ladies was very important to the cause. sl Often, however, it was difficult to differentiate between acceptable patriotic work and unfeminine political action, and, inevitably, women's patriotic efforts spilled over into politics. The response of nativists when this occurred is revealing. It is evident that they were keenly sensitive to, and indeed shared, the cultural mores which dictated that politics was the exclusive domain of men. Yet, surprisingly, nativist partisans welcomed women's assistance. Moreover, they justified such Activities in ways obviously designed to overcome women's own inhibitions and to silence public criticism. Perhaps nativists engaged in a measure of self-deception as they sought to reconcile their own cultural biases with the needs of their cause. Contending that theirs was a reform movement and not a narrow partisan effort, nativists heralded women's involvement as a legitimate extension of their patriotic and moral influence to public affairs. M Broom, An Oration . . . 1850,17; letter from "America," Louisville Courier, Dec. 4, 1844; letters in response to "America," Courier, Dec. 5, 23, 1844; Sawtelle's reponse to "Toast to the ladies," Boston American Patriot, Dec. 30, 1854; American Patriot, May 13, 1854, Feb. 10, 1855; excerpt from New York Mirror in American Patriot, June 2, 1855; Judge Story, "What is to Become of Our Country," American Woman, Mar. 15, 1845; Carroll, Great American Battle, 258,340; Boston Know-Nothing: and American Crusader, June 16. 1855. '" American Banner, May 15,1853. See also June 15, July 13, Nov. 2, 1850, July 12,1851, May 8, 1852; principles of "American Daughters of Liberty" as reported in American Woman. Apr. 12, 1845; "United Daughters of America" in Baldwin, American Papers, I, 87-91; addresses by Mary B. Bethel, Mrs. Deiadamia Taylor, and Susan B. Little at banner presentation ceremonies, American Woman, Sept. 7, 1844; Louisville Courier, Nov. 27, 1844; Philadelphia Sun, Feb. 21,1850; Boston American Patriot, Dec. 20,1854; Republic, 1, 186, 111:107, 157; New York American Republican, July 9, 1844; Rhinebeck American Mechanic, Sept. 25,1851; Baltimore Clipper, Feb. 21,1852; NewOrleans Times-Picayune, June 20, 21, 1845.

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92

Significantly, even the creation of the Native American party auxiliaries elicited no dissent, although female political organizations were almost unheard of in 1844. Native American newspapers were delighted that large numbers of "intensely supportive" female patriots were imitating the women of 7 6 and working for the party. Editors believed their support would enhance the party's claim of disinterested idealism and attract additional converts. They also thought female partisans could persuade husbands and sons to vote for the party. Characteristically, the New York American Republican concluded: "With the ladies in our active service nothing can withstand us."52 Nativist women facilitated their entry into politics by abjuring any intentions of violating the canons of femininity and by engaging primarily in traditional activities. Anna Carroll, for example, prefaced her first book, The Great American Battle (1856), with this disclaimer: For the first time I appear before the public. As a woman, I shrink with timidity and distrust. I have no affiliations with any principles which place her in a sphere at variance with that refined delicacy to which she is assigned by Nature. 1 have no aspirations to extend her influence or position."

A decade earlier a Kentucky woman had gingerly proclaimed that woman will wish to promote the Native American cause in ways that "May comport with the proprieties of her sex, and the duties of her social position." But, she hastened to add, woman's voice should never be heard in the "din and turmoil of political strife. . . ," 54 Pennsylvania Native American Catherine Shurlock had similarly reassured her fraternal colleagues. We will "aid you in the struggle to protect America from popish foreigners" with prayers and moral support, she pledged, but "we cannot stand by you side by side, and shoulder to shoulder, in your councils and deliberations—this we ask not. This is not woman's sphere." 55 Even Harriet Probasco, editor of the American Woman, deferentially acknowledged that women should exert their influence within the domestic sphere, but should not "declaim from the pulpit, or harrangue at political meetings." 56 With appropriate fanfare and patriotic speeches, Native American auxiliaries presented elaborate banners to male associations to 52 New York American Republican, Sept. 27, 1844; American Woman, Sept. 21, 1844; Boston American Patriot, May31,1854; "Fanny B" letter to New York Times as reported in Louisville Journal, Feb. 14, 1855; Journal, Aug. 6, 1855; excerpt from Boston Ensign in Louisville Courier, Dec. 25, 1844; excerpt from Philadelphia Native Eagle in Courier, July 16, 1845; ex-mayor James Harper urged New York men to interest their wives in the Native American cause, arguing that the support of one good woman was worth more than twenty-five men. Courier, July 30,1845; Lewis C. Levin contended that one lady could win more converts than half a dozen orators. Tabachnik, "Origins of the Know-Nothing Party," 82.

American Battle, v; see also introduction to the book by Horace Calpen, ix. x. Letters from "America," Louisville Courier, Dec. 4, 1844 and Dec. 28, 1844. "Address, by Catharine Shurlock," American Woman, Sept. 7, 1844. American Woman, Dec. 7, 1844.

MGreat s< M M

WOMEN AND POLITICS demonstrate support for the party, and, after elections, awarded special flags to wards that produced the largest nativist vote.57 From Kentucky to New York, in the 1840's and 1850's, women participated in Native American and American party rallies and excursions, marched in processions, rode on floats, and illuminated their homes and gardens during parades. Their presence, leaders agreed, "gave much interest and echt" to party functions.58 Occasionally, however, nativist women did stand "side by side" with their male colleagues and insisted upon being equal partners or true "colaborers" in the crusade. In 1844, Philadelphia Female Native American Associations began to hold mass meetings to stimulate interest in the party. Apparently anticipating criticism of the unorthodox political gatherings, the sponsors usually asked men to officiate and to deliver the major addresses.59 In spite of such precautions, nativists were forced to defend the meetings. Often the American Woman clothed its defense of these and other instances of female activism in traditionalist rhetoric. Probasco argued, for example, that it was legitimate for women occasionally to exert their influence beyond the domestic sphere because "the affairs of the home can never be regarded as secure while the affairs of a nation are unsettled."60 Periodically, however, Probasco and her female correspondents boldly justified women's activities in purely feminist terms. Women, they argued, should fully develop and use their God-given talents, even if this process of self-realization took them into politics. "In truth," Probasco asserted, "women have always interfered in political affairs. . . . As constituent members of the body politic they cannot possibly avoid interference, either negative or positive, and this interference must inevitably be felt."61 Therefore, she concluded, Louisville Courier, Nov. 27, Dec. 25,1844; New York American Republican, Aug. 20, 1844; American Woman, Sept. 7,1844, Jan. 4, July 19,1845; Louisvillejoiirnai, Aug. 6,1855. New York American Republican, Sept. 12,7,1844: Louisville Courier, July 31, Sept. 1, 18, Oct. 21,1845, July 4,1855; excerpts from Philadelphia American Advocate in Courier, Oct. 7,1854; excerpt from Baltimore Patriot in Courier, Aug. 23,1854; American Banner, Nov. 2, 1850, Sept. 27, Nov. 2, 1856; Louisville Journal, Aug. β, 1855. Whig women had engaged in similar activities during the presidential campaigns of 1840 and 1844. See Hubert Gray Cunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington, 1957), 73, 118,135-39; Louisville Courier, July 15, Aug. 9, Oct. 7, Dec. 23,1844; letter from "America," Courier, Dec. 28, 1844. The political involvement of nativist women, however, apparently went beyοικΙ th;it of their Whig predecessors. Nativists defended their women by claiming that their activities were patriotic in character and intent, not partisan. v ' See American Woman, for example, Sept. 7, 14 , 21, 1844; New York American Republican, Sept. 27, 1844. Interestingly, the president, secretary, and treasurer of at least OIK· Female Native American Association were men, elected by the female members. Lesser offices were filled by women. Constitution and By-Laws of the Washington Female Native American Association of Southwark, 5, 18.

"" American Woman, Dec. 7,1844, also Sept. 14,21, Nov. 23,1844. See also speeches by William D. H;ikcr ami Lewis C. Levin at ladies mass meetings in American Woman, Sept. 14, 1844. "Women Intermeddling in Politics," American Woman, Dec. 28,1844. Also see "The

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES women have a responsibility to exert their influence in constructive ways. While espousing this expanded version of woman's sphere, Probasco was charting a new course for female journalists. By unabashedly discussing public affairs and partisan politics and, in particular, by daring to speak for a political party, Probasco made the American Woman a unique ante-bellum woman's newspaper. Indeed, because of its "unfeminine" political orientation, her remarkable paper was removed from public display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.62 Significantly, many male nativists evidently accepted Probasco's advanced views, for several editors praised the paper and Probasco's contribution to the party.63 In 1845, moreover, Native American leaders reserved a special ladies' gallery to enable "our fair Native American Countrywomen" to observe the proceedings of the party's first national convention. The gallery reportedly "was thronged at all times" with enthusiastic women.64 By 1850, in a further break with tradition, newspaper notices of Native American party meetings regularly advertised that seats would be provided for ladies, or included one of the following invitations: "Ladies are respectfully invited" or "The Ladies are particularly invited."es Although she too proclaimed that she did not seek to extend woman's influence or in any way alter her natural position in society, Anna Carroll ventured even further into the political arena. Eschewing women's organizations, Carroll waged a private battle to free herself from societal restraints. She used political contacts made through her father, a one-time governor of Maryland, to become an amateur politician as well Sphere of Females," Sept. 21, Oct. 5, Dec. 7; "Anglo-Saxon Women," Dec. 21; "Maternal Instruction," Dec. 28, 1844; excerpt from speech by J.Q. Adams, Sept. 28, 1844; "Red Curtain Lectures, by O. Wheelock, Lecture III—On the Political Rights of Woman," July 19, 1845; letters from Catharine, Oct. 12, 19, Dec. 7, 1844; letter from Mrs. S C. Loomis, Harrisburg, Nov. 9, 1844. 6i American Womon, Nov. 16, 1844. T h e Crystal Fount observed that, as the first political newspaper conducted by ladies, the American Woman opened a new era in history. Excerpt in American Woman, Jan. 4, 1845. 0 Items from the Philadelphia Sun and Philadelphia American Advocate in American Woman, Sept. 14, 1844; New York American Republican, Sept. 9,1844; Louisville Courier, July 16, 1845. H Excerpts from Philadelphia Native Eagle and the American Adoocatc in Louisville Courier, July 16, 1845. According to the American Advocate. Native American women took an active interest in floor proceedings. During a debate on assessments for convention expenses, their representative. Catharine Shurlock, called a convention leader to the foyer and asked him to inform delegates that the women's auxiliaries would provide the money for printing and miscellaneous expenses. T h e delegates disposed of the matter, however, before the offer reached the floor. 65 See, for example, American Banner, Aug. 31, 1850, and other summer issues of the paper; Louisville Courier, Aug. 6,1845. T h e American or Know-Nothing party apparently did not continue this practive. The Native American appeal to women appears to have been unique until mid-summer, 1856, when the New York City Republican party inaugurated a similar policy. New York Tribune, Aug. 12, 14, 21, 26, 28, 1856.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

as a professional publicist. Her books and pamphlets were frankly partisan; they delineated the virtues of the American party and its candidates and the defects of its Whig and Democratic rivals. She also dabbled in party strategy and tried, behind-the-scenes, to secure party nominations for such favored politicians as Millard Fillmore. 68 Moved by a fervent patriotism and a passion for politics, Carroll chafed under the cultural mores which excluded women from public affairs and dictated that a woman's views were not to be taken seriously. In the preface to her second campaign tract, which interestingly was published the same year as the Great American Battle, Carroll challenged critics who insisted that a woman should not assume the role of political analyst or "presume to discuss subjects which belong to the other sex." 67 This author, she wrote, knows of no rule to exclude females from society, or the discussion of any subject which has an immediate bearing on the social, moral, and political destiny of this nation . . . .The interests and destiny of mothers and daughters are common with those of their fathers and brothers.

Carroll continued her defense by turning the cult of womanhood to her own purposes: If the apothegm of our orators is true, that it is the "mothers who make the men in a nation,' then daughters and mothers should not be ignorant on subjects which relate to the manly development of the mind, and the moulding of the rising generation. . . .

T h e nation, she poignantly asserted, should welcome any who speak the truth and are concerned with the welfare of the country and its citizens. 68 Like Probasco, Carroll won the respect of many of her male colleagues. In 1857, a party newspaper printed a series of testimonial letters praising her work. A typical letter proclaimed that Carroll was the first American woman who, "in a public manner, stepped out of the ordinary line of female pursuits" to help save the country from the evils of party spirit and foreign influence. For her patriotism, the author

66 Sec particularly A Review of Pierce's Administration; The Star of the West; Which? Fillmore or Buchanan. Carroll corresponded with many Whig and American party leaders about American party strategy and wrote anonymous campaign pieces for newspapers such as the Louisville Journal and New York Express. In 1857, she worked to elect American candidate Thomas Hicks governor of Maryland, and unsuccessfully tried to marshal support for John Botts of Virginia as the 1860 presidential candidate of an American or Union party ticket. See letters to Carroll from Kenneth Rayner, Mar. 7,1856, Jacob Broom, Oct. 25, 1859, John M. Botts, May 11,1858-May 1,1860, in Anna EllaCan-oll Papers Sec also Charles McCool Snyder, "Anna Ella Carroll, Political Strategist and Gadfly of President Fillmore," Maryland Historical Magazine, LXVIII (Spring, 1973), 3663; Paul S. Boyer, "Anna Ella Carroll," in Edward and Janet James (eds.), Notable American Women, 1607-1950, I (Cambridge, 1974), 290; Marjorie Greenbie and Sidney Greenbie, Anna Ella Carroll and Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (Tampa, 1952), 141-158, 166-175. 67 6*

A Review of Pierce's Administration, Ibid., iii, iv.

iii.

95

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

concluded, she deserved "the richest wreath of native laurel" from her countrymen. 69 ο

ο

ο

Belying their conservative image, ante-bellum nativists sought to incorporate women into their movement. Convinced that the fate of republicanism and liberty hinged on the success of their non-partisan, moral, and patriotic crusade, nativists welcomed support from all quarters. In particular, they regarded women, whom they believed were innately virtuous, pious, and patriotic, as their natural allies. The movement's breadth and vitality enabled it to embrace women such as Anna Carroll and Harriet Probasco, as well as working women, moral reformers, and traditionalist homemakers. Nativists attracted this diverse female constituency by effectively blending liberal reformist views with conservative values. They cemented this coalition by articulating a patriotic ideology which appealed to persons from all segments of society. In the final analysis, ante-bellum nativists demonstrated, unconsciously for the most part, that the cult of true womanhood could be a liberating, not merely a repressive, value system. Their belief in popular notions of female superiority and their own concept of innate feminine patriotism impelled nativists to stretch woman's sphere to encompass religious, moral, and social reform, and ultimately even public affairs and partisan politics. Their use of traditionalist rhetoric enabled nativists to convince even their most conservative followers and many timid women of the legitimacy of this new definition of female responsibilities. Precisely because it projected a safe, conservative image, the nativist movement offered women who were seeking broader horizons a perfect means of escape from the confines of domesticity. Ironically, therefore, although both the nativist movement and the cult of true womanhood originated to preserve social stability, they ultimately served as twin catalysts for social change. Letter from J a c o b Broom in Washington Weekly American Organ, Jan. 8,1857. In a letter to Carroll, July 21, 1858, Broom again praised her patriotism and devotion to the nativist cause, concluding that her name "must go down in posterity as a remarkable instance of female patriotism." Anna Ella Carroll Papers. Carroll continued to work for the Union cause after 1860. She wrote two lengthy pamphlets denying the constitutionality of secession and justifying the exercise of Presidential power to end the rebellion: The War Powers of the General Government (1861); The Relation of the National Government to the Revolted Citizens Defined (1862). Unfortunately, Carroll's remarkable political career has been obscured by the notoriety she gained through her campaign to win government compensation for her purported authorship of the military strategy used in the Tennessee River campaign.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

97

"Moral Suasion Is Moral Balderdash": Women, Politics, and Social Activism in the 1850s Lori D. Ginzberg

"This is a utilitarian age," asserted a writer in the Amencan Temperance Magazine in 1852. "The speculative has in all things yielded to the practical. . . . In this sense, moral suasion is moral balderdash." "Isola," writing to woman's rights activist Paulina Wright Davis's newspaper, the Una, agreed: "Fanatical philanthropy is growing cooler, and the hairbrained are becoming more practical and matter of fact." In 1848 former moral reformer Sarah Smith Martyn, who in the tradition of benevolent reform still insisted that "virtue alone is indestructible and eternal," admitted, "The day of romantic dreams and visionary philanthropy has gone by. Every thing is now in motion, and he who would stamp his impress . . . on society, must be at least a practical utilitarian." 1 What had happened? H a d the fervor that characterized northern Protestant benevolence in the 1830s, the hope that "moral suasion" would redeem the world, vanished in a puff of partisan smoke? Many writers in the late 1840s and 1850s contended —either gloatingly or ruefully—that it had. The transformation of benevolent activism during the 1850s, a decade too often ignored by social and intellectual historians, signaled both new settings for reform activity and a changed context for the moral radicalism in which women had played a central role. As a result of the Second Great Awakening of the 1820s and early 1830s, a millennial spirit pervaded efforts at transforming United States society. Abolitionists, vegetarians, temperance activists, and crusaders against "male lust"—"ultraists" in nineteenth-century terms —sought not merely social change but spiritual transformation, the moral regeneration of the world. That evangelical impulse, as numerous historians have argued, provided the framework in which radical social change was articulated in the antebellum period. 2 American middle-class radicalism in the Lori D. Ginzberg is a leaurcr in history at the University of Rhode Island. Kingston, and is the 1986-1987 American Historical Association's J. Franklin Jameson fellow. The author wishes to thank Jeanne Boydston, Carol Karlscn, Teresa Murphy, Joel Steiker, and the referees and staff of the Journal of American History for their advice and support ' David Btion Davis. Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology (Lexington. Mass.. 1979). 408: Una. Nov 1854. p. 358: Mrs. S. T. Martyn. "The Spirit and Wants of the Age." Ladies Wreath: An lllussrated Annual /or MDCCCX1MII1-IX (New York. 1848-1849), 82. 81. ' A recent work by Nancy A. Hewitt divides Rochester, New York's activist women into three groups: benevolent, perfectionist, and ultraist. I do not make explicit use of those categories, but instead discuss the spectrum

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1830s and 1840s evolved in a religious context, one in which the regeneration of individuals would precede —and assure —the salvation of society. Women played a central role both in the ideology and in the means of the proposed national transformation. 5 Viewed as inherently moral, women were to instruct by example and to participate in movements for social, or moral, change. Moral suasion, the chosen means for those who sought nothing less than the transformation of the public soul, conformed both to women's supposed qualities and to the nature of their access to those in power. For a brief period in the 1830s, ultraist women called on men to adhere to a single—"female"—standard of behavior in the interest of social change. Being voteless and, in theory, nonpartisan was part of the radical vision, and votelessness was a choice made with pride.4 "Far be it from me to encourage women to vote," declared Lucretia Mott in an early speech asserting women's right to do so, "or to take an active part in politics in the present state of our government. . . . Would that man, too, would have no participation in a government recognizing the life-taking principle." "As to (women's] ever becoming partisans, i.e., sacrificing principles to power or interest," wrote Angelina Grimke, "I reprobate this under all circumstances, and in both sexes."5 Access to the political process itself—long assumed by relatively elite and conservative women who petitioned legislators for legal changes, state funds, and corporate status for their organizations—represented to more radical activists the privileges of class, the advocacy of a traditional cause, and narrowness of vision. For ultraists, the adoption of "practical" means for change represented a retreat from principle, from the ideal of an aggressively Christian and implicitly "female" identity that would be shared by all. To those who believed that governments were of activist style and thought, from uitraist to conservative, chat characterized pre-Civil War benevolent work. See Nancy A. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York. 1822-1872 (Ithaca, 1984). esp. 58-68. On the evangelical framework of antebellum social reform see. for example. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes. The Antisiavery Impulse. 1830-1844 (New York. 1964). esp. J-16: Carroll Smith Rosenberg. Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870 (Ithaca. 1971), 44-69; William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago. 1978), 98-140; and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 18U-1837 (New York, 1978). » For interpretations of women's role, see Whitney R. Cross. The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-18}0 (New York. 1950). 84-89; Barbara J. Berg. The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism: The Woman and the City, 1800-1860 (New York. 1978). esp. 145-75; Keith E. Melder. Beginnings of Sisterhood: The American Woman's Rights Movement, 1800-18)0 (New York, 1977), esp. 49-61; Anne M. Boylan, "Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women's Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston. 1797-1840," Journal of American History, 71 (Dec. 1984), 497-52}: and Mary P. Ryan. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-186) (New York. 1981), esp 83-98. 105-36. 4 The debate within the abolition movement about a "nonvoting'' stance has fascinated historians, although few have associated the nonvorers' call for radical social change either with women's enforced votelessness or wiih the growing importance of the vote itself. See esp. Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1854-1850 (New York. 1967), esp 39-77. 118-77; Ronald G. Walters. The Antisiavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore. 1976). esp. 3-18; and Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (New York. 1982). esp. 129-59. > Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. eas.. History of Woman Suffrage (3 vols., Rochester, N.Y.. 1889). 1. 372; Angelina GrimM, Letters to Catharine Beechcr, in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimke (Boston, 1838). 111.

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ineffective at implementing fundamental change, "moral" power was the only kind worth exerting. By the late 1840s, however, all but a few of the most "ultra" of reformers agreed that moral suasion had failed to transform society. Increasingly, reformers turned to electoral means and to institutional settings through which to consolidate the work of the previous decades. 6 For women, who had been at the heart of the earlier movements, the shifting context of reform was especially momentous. Two trends in the 1850s helped redefine both the rhetorical and the actual association of women with benevolent change. First, women reformers faced a narrowing definition of political action that emphasized electoral activity rather than the traditional forms of lobbying in which women had participated. As moral suasion became a less convincing call to action, ultraist women's influence in benevolent movements declined. Women became less prominent in a number of activities, such as petitioning, in which they had participated fully in the earlier decades. 7 Voteless, women discovered that benevolent work's growing dependence on electoral means had by the 1850s rendered "female" means for change less effective and thus less popular. At the same time, more conservative benevolent activists increasingly sought to alleviate social and moral conditions by founding benevolent institutions, often in close alliance with men. Earlier, women had refused male offers of organizational "assistance": W h e n an 1803 legislative committee suggested that the "ladies" of the Boston Female Asylum permit male trustees to control their funds, the female managers "firmly opposed" the attempt to limit their autonomy, and the suggestion was withdrawn, apparently with little dispute. But in 1849, for example, the American Female Guardian Society engaged an advisory board composed of men.® Conservative women's new reliance on male advisers suggests that they too were finding traditional female avenues to political and economic favors inadequate. Both trends affected reformers' commitment to broad social change, for the narrower focus on elections and on institutions corresponded to a declining faith in the moral transformation of American society. To many women in the "utilitarian" 1850s, who came to accept both the brick and stone of institutionalized benevolence

* Numerous historians have commented on the decline in religious fervor and the turning to electoral politics. Some have also noted that this may have displaced women from a central role in benevolence. See. for example. Ellen Carol DuBois. ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony. Correspondence. Writings, Speeches (New York. 1981), 16-17; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 142; Ruth Bordin. Vornan and Temperance: The Quest for Powerand Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), xvi; and Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana. 1984). 180-212, esp. 182. ' The percentage of New York's antislavery petition signers who were women, for example, dropped from 70 percent in 1838 to 2.3 percent in 1830 while the number of petitions doubled. Gerda Lerner, "Political Activities of Antislavery Women," in The Majority Finds Its Pan: Placing Women in History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York. 1979). 126. Thomas Dublin has calculated that women constituted two-thirds of signers of petitions for the tenhour day in Lowell. Massachusetts, in 1843; only six yean later they constituted fewer than 40 percent. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts. 1826-1860 (New York. 1979). 201. • Flora L Northrup, The Record of a Century, 1834-1934 (New York, 1934), 28; Boston Female Asylum. Reminiscences of the Boston Female Asylum (Boston, 1844), 14-16.

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and the new emphasis on electoral results, movements that called on slaveowners to free the slaves, drunkards to reject liquor, and seducers to protect the innocent had, quite simply, failed. Substantial changes in the work of activists across the benevolent spectrum signified a more limited, if perhaps more realistic, vision of the possibilities for social change, as benevolent activists sought to restrain the sins they had been unable to eradicate. The changing nature of politics itself made the commitment to a nonvoting position increasingly anachronistic. Political parties organized unprecedented numbers of voters in the antebellum decades, and voters behaved as if voting mattered. Interest in presidential politics in particular increased greatly. The growing prestige of the vote is seen in the rising percentage of eligible voters who actually bothered to cast ballots. Fewer than 30 percent of adult white males, an unusually Small percentage, voted in the presidential election of 1824; in 1828 more than 57 percent did. Voter turnout continued to rise dramatically. In 1840 more than 80 percent of eligible voters, which by then included virtually all white men, went to the polls. Only once more in the antebellum period did the percentage of voters casting ballots in a presidential election top 80 percent (81.2 percent in 1860), but only once did it fall below 70 percent (69.6 percent in 1852). Increased voter participation was even more pronounced in some northeastern states.» The editors of the History of Woman Suffrage recognized that a significant change in the popular perception of elections occurred in 1840, when women began to attend "political meetings, as with the introduction of moral questions into legislation, they had manifested an increasing interest in government." In keeping with the growing concern for electoral politics, activist movements increasingly framed their conception of social change in terms of electoral means and goals. The 1850s witnessed a burst of legislative activity on the part of women; hundreds and thousands demanded their civil and political rights and joined men in appealing for laws against alcohol, for removal of politicians and judges, and for corporate charters and funds for their organizations.10 Women's interest in legislation introduced them to a wider range of political issues. As one writer for the Lily commented sarcastically, "The women of Seneca Falls have so far dared to outstep their sphere as to go by scores and hundreds to the political meetings recently held to discuss the constitutionality of the Canal Bill, and to pass upon the conduct of the resigning Senators! And what is more strange still, the men consented to it. . . . Yes, our ladies have

' U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historicai Statistics of the Untied States from Colonial Times to 1970 (2 vols., Washington, 1975), II, 1067-8). The state breakdowns of voter turnout can be found in J. R. Pole. Political Representation in England and the Οπ gins of the American Republic (Berkeley, 1971), 545-64. For a discussion of the significance of the turnout in the election of 1840. see Richard P. McCormick. "New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics," in The Growth of American Politics: A Modem Reader, ed. Frank O t t o Gatell, Paul Goodman, and Allen Weinstein (2 vols.. New York, 1972). I. 244-45. 10 Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, eas.. History of Woman Suffrage. I. 474. On women's legislative activity, sec, for example. Uly, Feb. 1, April 15, May Ι,Νον. 16,1854. Corporate status and appropriations for their organizations had long been sought and achieved by elite women acting in traditional benevolent causes. See Lori D. Ginzberg, "Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality and Politics in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1885" (Ph.D diss., Yale University, 1985). 118-72.

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mingled at political meetings with the 'low rabble' who go to the polls." The Una published regular and varied reports from a correspondent in the visitors' gallery of the United States Senate. In 1854, for the benefit of its largely female readership, the paper added a column entitled "Acts of Legislatures."11 Gradually ultraists among both sexes, including the most unyielding of "nonvoters," shifted their enthusiasm to elections in the decade or so before the Civil War. "I am rejoiced to say that Henry is heart and soul in the Republican movement," wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony, adding that she herself had "attended all the Republican meetings." Such intense interest in electoral politics characterized the decade that Martha Coffin Wright feared for the attendance at the 1856 Woman's Rights Convention: "[The) engrossing subject of the coming elections," she wrote worriedly to Anthony, "will distract somewhat from the interest of anything not strictly political."12 Reformers' growing dependence on and interest in electoral politics underscored the powerlessness of a nonvoting position. The temperance movement provides perhaps the best example of the decidedly "partisan political turn" taken by reformers in the late 1840s and the 1850s. Ironically, the shift toward electoral politics coincided with the entrance of significant numbers of women into temperance work and with the beginning of a long history of viewing temperance as a woman's issue.15 Its timing suggests that temperance women might have early become convinced of their own growing need for the ballot. Those women most identified with antebellum temperance — Mary C. Vaughan, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony—turned quickly to the emerging woman's movement's demand for suffrage for a new source of authority. The Lily, Amelia Bloomer's paper, most self-consciously reflected the connection between the temperance movement of the 1850s and women's emerging recognition of the value of suffrage. "We have not much faith in moral suasion for the rumseller," the paper admitted in its third issue, as it advocated legislative solutions to problems associated with drunkenness. Over time, contributors — including the vociferous, although not typical, Elizabeth Cady Stanton —demanded that women have a share in the making of laws to restrict the sale of liquor and to permit wives to divorce intemperate men. The paper's tone broke sharply from that of the previous decade, when reformers had encouraged petitioning as a "moral" tool. "Why shall [women] be left only the poor resource of petition?" wondered one article. "For even petitions, when they are from women, without the elective franchise to give them backbone, are of but little consequence."14 Because of the temperance movement's outspokenness about the importance of " Uly. J u n e 1851. p. 45: Una, June 1854, p. 278. " Martha Coffin Wright to Susan B. Anthony. Aug. 30. 1856. fold« 921. bo* 35. Garrison Family Collection (Sophia Smith Archives. Smith College. Northampton. Mass.); Dubois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sutan B. Anthony, 59 Abolitionist reports were filled with news about the federal government. See. for example. National Bra. Jan. 7, 1847. p. 2; ibid., Jan. 14, 1847. p. 3; and ibid.,) an. 21. 1847. p. 3" Ernest H. Cherrington. Toe Evolution of Prohibition in the United States of America (Westerville. Ohio. 1920), 136-37; Bordin. Woman end Temperance, 5; D. C. Bloomer. Life and Whangs of Amelia Bloomer (Boston. 1895). 39-40. ' between 1900 and 1917 when a socialist woman did not

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p u b l i c l y c r i t i c i z e socialist m e n f o r t h e i r a t t i t u d e s t o w a r d s w o m e n . D e s p i t e s o m e n o t a b l e e x c e p t i o n s , t h e m a j o r i t y of men in t h e p a r t y p r o b a b l y never f u l l y a c c e p t e d t h e n e e d for a m o v e m e n t c o n c e r n e d w i t h t h e o p p r e s s i o n of w o m e n . A l t h o u g h t h e y w e r e w i l l i n g t o p e r m i t such a m o v e m e n t t o f u n c t i o n w i t h i n t h e i r r a n k s , t h e i r c o m m i t m e n t t o it w a s n o t c o m p l e t e . A l t h o u g h t h e r e w e r e e x t e n u a t i n g c i r c u m s t a n c e s b e h i n d the p a r t y ' s d e c i s i o n t o a b o l i s h t h e w o m e n ' s n a t i o n a l c o m m i t t e e in 1 9 1 5 , t h e r e is little d o u b t t h a t it r e p r e s e n t e d a s t e p b a c k w a r d s . Yet it is i m p o r t a n t t o r e m e m b e r t h e m a j o r a d v a n c e s t h a t w e r e m a d e in t h e S o c i a l i s t P a r t y d u r i n g t h e first t w o decades o f t h i s c e n t u r y . N o d o u b t t h i s w a s c a u s e d by t h e g r o w t h of an a u t o n o m o u s socialist w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t a n d t h e larger uprising of w o m e n in g e n e r a l , b u t it s h o w e d t h a t t h e p a r t y was n o t b l i n d t o c h a n g e s t h a t w e r e t a k i n g place in t h e s o c i e t y and w a s o p e n t o c r i t i c i z i n g a n d t r a n s f o r m i n g itself as a result. If t h e p o l i t i c a l a n d t h e o r e t i c a l r e s u l t s of t h e Socialist P a r t y ' s exp e r i e n c e are n o t s a t i s f a c t o r y to us t o d a y , it m u s t b e r e m e m b e r e d t h a t t h e p a r t y w a s f a r in a d v a n c e of a n y o t h e r c o n t e m p o r a r y p o l i t i c a l o r g a n i z a t i o n in its c o n c e r n w i t h t h e o p p r e s s i o n of w o m e n , a n d w a s g e n e r a l l y as a d v a n c e d as t h e w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t itself. T h e i d e a s o f t h e socialist m o v e m e n t w e r e a l w a y s f r a g m e n t a r y a n d d i v e r g e n t . Issues w e r e o f t e n t r e a t e d in i s o l a t i o n and a f u l l s y n t h e s i s of s o c i a l i s m a n d f e m i n i s m w a s never f o r t h c o m ing. Still, socialists, e s p e c i a l l y socialist w o m e n , w e r e developing a b r o a d e r c o n c e p t i o n of w h a t a new s o c i e t y c o u l d look like. A s o n e socialist c o m m e n t e d in 1 9 1 4 , socialist w o m e n had iearned that t h e c o m i n g of S o c i a l i s m is n o t p u r e l y m a t e r i a l . It does not m e a n simply a full s t o m a c h — t h a t was o f t e n attained u n d e r c h a t t e l s l a v e r y — b u t a f u l l life·, a n d while she looks f o r w a r d t o t h e S o c i a l i s t s o c i e t y she desires all t h e fullness of life th2t s h e c a n get n o w . 1 8 5 T h e f u l l life t h a t t h i s socialist w a s w r i t i n g a b o u t has, oi c o u r s e , n o t y e t b e e n s e c u r e d by e i t h e r socialists or feminists. W o r s e , its very c o n c e p t i o n h a s largely e l u d e d t w o generat i o n s of socialists w h o failed t o s u s t a i n socialism as an issue in A m e r i c a n life. O n l y n o w are t h e q u e s t i o n s raised b y the

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socialists of the early twentieth century being reconsidered. Although the difficulties facing the socialist m o v e m e n t today Are enormous, at least the vision is reappearing. After all, what could be worse than to be a visionary suffering from myopia? REFERENCES 1 The Forerunner, vol. 1, n o . 12 ( O c t o b e r 1 9 1 0 ) , p. 2 5 . 2 Carl D e g l e r , " R e v o l u t i o n w i t h o u t I d e o l o g y : T h e C h a n g i n g Place cf W o m e n in A m e r i c a , " in R o b e r t J a v L i f t o n , ed., The Woman in America ( B o s t o n : B e a c o n Press, 1 9 6 7 ) , p p . 1 9 4 - 9 6 ; R o b e r t S m u t s , Women and Work in America (New York: S c h o c k e n B o o k s , 1971), pp. 1-37. 3 Ibid.; Aileen K r a d i t o r , The Ideas oj the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1X90-1920 ( G a r d e n C i t y , N.Y.: A n c h o r B o o k s . 1 9 7 1 ) , p p . 2 1 5 - 1 6 ; Mari J o B u h l e , Ann G . G o r d o n , and N a n c y S c h r o m , " W o m e n in A m e r i c a n S o c i e t y : An H i s t o r i c a l C o n t r i b u t i o n , " Radical America, vol. 5, n o . 4 ( J u l y - A u g u s t 1 9 7 1 ) , p p . 3 8 - 4 2 ; Eli Z a r e t s k y , " C a p i t a l ism, t h e F a m i l y , and P e r s o n a l Life: P a r t 1," Socialist Revolution 1314 (vol. 3, n o s . 1 a n d 2 ; J a n u a r y - A p r i l 1 9 7 3 ) , p. 1 0 5 ; A n n e F. and A n d r e w M. S c o t t , One Half the People: The t ight for Woman Suffrage ( P h i l a d e l p h i a : J . B. I . i p p i n c o t t , 1 9 7 5 ) , p . 2 0 . 4 William O ' N e i l l , Everyone VV.is Brave ( C h i c a g o : Q u a d r a n g l e B o o k s , 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 1 4 9 ; F.leanor F l e x n e r , Century of Struggle ( N e w York: A t h e n e u m , 1971), pp. 2 1 6 - 2 0 ; 2 4 0 ^ 7 . 5 K a t e R i c h a r d s O ' H a r e , " H o w 1 B e c a m e a Socialist A g i t a t o r , " Socialist Woman ( h e r e a f t e r .S'W), vol. 2, n o . 18 ( N o v e m b e r 1 9 0 8 ) , p. 4; t l l a R e e v e B l o o r , We Are Many ( N e w Y o r k : I n t e r n a t i o n a l Publishers, 1 9 4 0 ) , p . 4 0 ; K e n t a n d G r e t c h e n K r e u t e r , An American Dissenter: The l.ife of Algie Martin Simons, 1870-1950 (Lexington, Ky.: U n i v e r s i t y of K e n t u c k y Press, 1 9 6 9 ) , p . 36-, u n t i t l e d clipping f r o m a C h i c a g o n e w s p a p e r , n . d . , S c r a p b o o k n o . 1, L e n a M o r r o w Lewis C o l l e c t i o n , T a m i m e n t L i b r a r y , N e w York U n i v e r s i t y ; " T h e r e s a M a l k i e l , " Progressive Woman ( h e r e a f t e r PW), vol. 2 , n o . 2 4 (May 1 9 0 9 ) , p. 2 . ή J a m e s W e i n s t e i n , The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 ( N e w Y o r k : Vintage B o o k s , 1 9 6 9 ) , p. 2 . 7 It is i m p o s s i b l e e x a c t l y t o d e f i n e t h e class c o m p o s i t i o n of t h e socialist w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t , i n s i d e or o u t s i d e t h e S o c i a l i s t P a r t y . Biog r a p h i c a l i n f o r m a t i o n o n r a n k - a n d - f i l e socialists is r a r e , as are m e m b e r s h i p lists of socialist w o m e n ' s o r g a n i z a t i o n s . M e e t i n g s of local g r o u p s a p p e a r t o have b e e n held m o s t l y in t h e e v e n i n g , w h i c h w o u l d have p e r m i t t e d t h e a t t e n d a n c e of w o m e n w a g e w o r k e r s . M u c h of t h e l i t e r a t u r e d i s t r i b u t e d b y socialist w o m e n c o n c e r n e d p r o b l e m s of w o r k i n g - c l a s s w o m e n . A n d it w o u l d be s u r p r i s i n g if t h e class c o m p o sition of t h e socialist w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t w a s s u b s t a n t i a l l y d i f f e r e n t f r o m t h a t of t h e socialist m o v e m e n t as a w h o l e ; J a m e s G r e e n has r e c e n t l y s h o w n t h a t r a n k - a n d - f i l e socialists w e r e p r e d o m i n a n t l y working-^lass. J a m e s G r e e n , " T h e ' S a l e s m e n S o l d i e r s ' of t h e 'Appeal

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

A r m y ' : A Profile of Rank-and-File Socialist Agitators," unpublished ms., 1972. 8 Flexner, p. 2 4 8 . 9 Man J o Buhle was t h e first person t o examine t h e socialist women's m o v e m e n t seriously: "Women and the Socialist Party, 1 9 0 1 - 1 9 1 4 , " Radical America, vol. 4, n o . 2 (February 1970), pp. 3 6 - 5 5 . Yet Buhle did n o t discuss the ideology of socialists on issues concerning w o m e n , n o r did she fully analyze the organizational questions relating to w o m e n ' s a u t o n o m y and working within t h e Socialist Party. Most other historians have n o t studied the activity of w o m e n socialists. A reader of t h e books of Daniel Bell o r David S h a n n o n on American socialism would n o t even know of t h e existence of a socialist w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t . Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952, 1972); S h a n n o n , The Socialist Parly of America (New York: Macmillan, 1955). Ira Kipnis's brief discussion of women in the Socialist Party simply criticizes t h e party for its shortcomings and does n o t explore t h e period a f t e r 1910, when m u c h of the i m p o r t a n t activity of w o m e n within t h e Socialist Party t o o k place. The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952, 1972), pp. 2 6 0 - 6 5 . James Weinstein's discussion is m o r e useful in t h a t he provides factual i n f o r m a t i o n about leading w o m e n in the party, b u t he examined neither w o m e n ' s organizations outside of t h e party nor the p e r f o r m a n c e of the w o m e n ' s national c o m m i t t e e within t h e party. Decline, pp. 5 3 - 6 2 . 10 F o r e x a m p l e , existing within t h e same party were Greenwich Village socialists w h o o p e n l y criticized m o n o g a m o u s relationships and tried t o live w h a t t o t h e m were consciously egalitarian life styles, and Christian socialists w h o provoked a m a j o r scandal in the p a r t y over t h e issue of " f r e e love" and w h o had conservative attitudes towards morality. This diversity can be seen in two articles in the s a m e issue of a socialist newspaper. In Noverpber 1901, t h e Los Angeles Socialist (hereafter LA Socialist) f e a t u r e d a report o n t h e first meeting of t h e W o m e n ' s Socialist League of t h a t city. The article was in n o way condescending in its reportage of a major historical event in the socialist w o m e n ' s m o v e m e n t . Immediately b e n e a t h this r e p o r t a small piece praised another socialist periodical which had been fighting political persecution. Noting that capitalism could not kill the magazine, t h e writer repeated a popular expression of t h e time: " L i k e 'the w o m a n , the spaniel and the hickory tree, the m o r e you beat it the better it will b e . ' " LA Socialist, 23 N o v e m b e r 1 9 0 1 . 11 Party Builder ( h e r e a f t e r PB), 31 May 1913. 12 Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 35. Emphasis was added by t h e editor of t h e anthology. 13 Eugene V. Debs, "Woman — C o m r a d e and Equal," PW, vol. 3, no. 30 (November 1909), p. 2. 14 This was also true in Europe. See Karl Kautskv, The Class Struggle, originally published in 1892 ( N e w York: W. W. N o r t o n , 1971), pp. 26-27. 15 See J o h n Spargo, Applied Socialism (New York: B. W. Huebsch,

WOMEN AND POLITICS 1912), pp. 2 3 7 - 4 1 , for a discussion of how this accusation had historically been made against socialists. 16 Austin Lewis, "What Is the Socialist Movement," Socialist Voice (Oakland), 10 June 1905. 17 Kate Richards O'Hare, The Sorrows of Cupid (St. Louis: Rip-Saw Publishing Co., 1912), p. 10. 18 John Spargo, Socialism and Motherhood (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1914), p. 80. 19 O'Hare, Sorrows, p. 29; Meta Stern Lilienthal, Women of the Future (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1916), p. 22; and Buhle, Gordon, and Schrom, p. 44. 20 Kiichi Kaneko, "Marriage as a Profession," SW, vol. 1, no. 6 (November 1907), p. 7. 21 Lida Parce Robinson, "Woman and Industrial Freedom" SW, vol. 2, no. 13 (June 1908), p. 7. 22 Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "Marriage and Divorce," SW, vol. 1, no. 2 (July 1907), p. 5. Emphasis in original. 23 Lida Parce, " S e x and 'Contractual Morality,'" PW, vol. 3, no. 32 (January 1910), p. 9. 24 Lida Parce, "The Marriage Contract," PW, vol. 3, no. 36 (May 1910), p. 9. 25 O'Hare, Sorrows, p. 11. 26 John M. Work, What's So and What Isn't (New York: Vanguard Press, 1905, 1927), p. 38. 27 This theme was widely repeated by socialists. See, for example, Theresa Malkiel, "The Free Woman," SW, vol. 2, no. 18 (November 1908), p. 7; Lilienthal, pp. 2 2 - 2 3 ; Charles H. Kerr, The Folly of Being "Good" (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1905), p. 25. 2K Lilienthal, pp. 2 4 - 2 5 . Emphasis in original. Lilienthal favored abolishing marriage ceremonies, while Spargo wanted to keep everything legal. Applied Socialism, p. 261. This hesitancy to move outside of the marriage bond between two people was also reflected in the fiction of socialist novelists. See Walter Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1966), p. 74. 29 Spargo, Applied Socialism, p. 2 6 7 ; Spargo, Socialism and Motherhood, p. 110. 30 O'Hare, Sorrows, p. 186. 31 Floyd Dell, "Feminism for Men," The Masses, vol. 5, no. 10 (July 1914), p. 19; William L. O'Neill, ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911-1917 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), p. 21. 32 Floyd Dell, "The Book of the Month," The Masses, vol. 9, no. 6 (April 1917), p. 26. Dell was reviewing The Sexual Crisis: A Critique of Our Sex Life by Grete Meisel-Hess. Also see Joseph Freeman, An American Testament (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936), p. 116. 33 Meta Stern Lilienthal, "From Fireside to Factory" (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1916), pp. 4 3 - 4 4 . Said Lilienthal, "Her mind grew and developed like the industries she performed." Also see Lilienthal, Women of the Future, p. 9; Josephine R . Cole in LA Socialist, 20 June 1903. 34 Common Sense (Los Angeles), 29 April, 4 March, 15 July 1905.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

35 May Wood Simons, Workers' Call (Chicago), 25 N o v e m b e r 1899. Simons was replying t o a speech of Gilman's. 36 Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "Capitalism and the W o m a n , " World (Oakland), 15 February 1913. 37 See Lida Parce Robinson, " ' W o r k ' and H o u s e w o r k , " SW, vol. 2, no. 15 (August 1908), p. 5; unsigned, u n t i t l e d paragraph (probablv Josephine Conger-Kaneko) in PW, vol. 3, n o . 36 (May 1 9 1 0 ) , p. 5. 38 Mary G a r b u t t , "Practica! Application of Socialism in t h e Home," LA Socialist, 19 March 1904. 39 Theresa Malkiel, " T h e Lowest Paid Workers," SW, vol. 2, no. 16 ( S e p t e m b e r 1908), p. 4. 4 0 " W o m a n ' s W o r k and Pay," Chicago Evening World, 11 J u n e 1912. 41 Ibid.; J o s e p h i n e Conger-Kaneko, " D o e s a Woman S u p p o r t Her Husband's E m p l o y e r ? " PW, vol. 7, n o . 74 (August 1913), p. 1. 42 Malkiel, " T h e Lowest Paid Workers," p. 4, also see Esther Dresden, " F e m i n i s m as a Working Force in the Making of Co-operative Comm o n w e a l t h , " World, 15 July 1 9 1 6 . 43 Walter L a n f e r s i e k , " H o w Shall Mothers Be R e c o m p e n s e d under Socialism?" PW, vol. 3, no. 34 (March 1910), p. 3; also see Helen U n t e r m a n n , " W h a t E n v i r o n m e n t Has to Do with W o m e n , " SW, vol. 1, no. 4 ( S e p t e m b e r 1907), p. 5; O'Hare, Sorrows, pp. 2 4 4 - 4 5 . 44 Spargo, Applied Socialism, p. 268. 45 Lilienthal, Women of the Future, pp. 1 9 - 2 0 . 4 6 J u n e S o c h e n , The New Woman. Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp. 4 8 - 5 2 . The a p a r t m e n t house was d e f e n d e d by The Masses' K. W. Baker, who wrote t h a t t h e present t r e a t m e n t of children by their natural m o t h e r s and f a t h e r s left a great deal t o be desired and t h a t a " f u t u r ist" m e t h o d might be as g o o d , if not even better. "Raising Babies," The Masses, vol. 8, n o . 4 ( F e b r u a r y 1916), p . 18. 47 O'Hare, Sorrows, pp. 17, 4 2 . 4 8 Theresa Malkiel, " T h e Vampire," PW, vol. 3, no. 35 (April 1910). p. 7. 4 9 Ibid.; also see Lida Parce, " T h e Marriage C o n t r a c t , " PW, vol. 4, no. 38 (July 1 9 1 0 ) , p. 9, and Mav Wood Simons, " W o m a n and the Social P r o b l e m " (Chicago; Charles H. Kerr & Co., n.d. (1899) (Pocket Library of Socialism n o . 1)), p p . 2 0 - 2 1 . 50 Q u o t e d in Carl Degler, " C h a r l o t t e Perkins Gilman and t h e Theory and Practice of Feminism," American Quarterly, vol. 8 (Spring 1956), p. 2 9 . 5 1 See. for e x a m p l e , Lida Parce, " T h e Marriage C o n t r a c t , " PW, vol. 4. no. 39 (August 1910). p. 9; O ' H a r e , Sorrows, p. 196; May Waiden. "Woman a n d Socialism" (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, n.d.), p. 2 2 . 5 2 Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (New York: Dover Publications, 1971 (first published 1 9 3 8 ) ) , pp. 8 8 - 9 2 . David M. K e n n e d y , Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger ( N e w Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press. 1970), p. 16. 53 World, 17 J u n e 1916." 54 Max E a s t m a n , " R e v o l u t i o n a r y Birth-Control," The Masses, vol. ύ. no. 10 (July 1915), p. 22. Emphasis in original. Also see B. C. !-·• "Birth C o n t r o l and D e m o c r a c y , " New Review, vol. 4, no. 4 (.April 1916). pp. 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 , for a similar view.

WOMEN AND POLITICS

5 5 See William J . R o b i n s o n , M . D . , " T h e P r e v e n t i o n of C o n c e p t i o n , " New Review, vol. 3, n o . 4 ( A p r i l 1 9 1 5 ) , p p . 1 9 6 - 9 8 . 56 F o r e x a m p l e , O ' H a r e ' s c o m m e n t s a b o u t v e n e r e a l disease a n d h e r defenses of S a n g e r a n d b i r t h c o n t r o l w e r e m o t i v a t e d b y a d e s i r e t o f r e e w o m e n " f r o m t h e c r i m e of b r i n g i n g u n w e l c o m e , s u b - n o r m a l , h u n g e r p i n c h e d c h i l d r e n i n t o this c a p i t a l i s t i c j u n g l e . " K a t e R i c h a r d s O ' H a r e , " B i r t h C o n t r o l and Pellagra," National Rip-Saw ( S t . L o u i s ) , vol. 12, no. 10 ( D e c e m b e r 1 9 1 5 ) , p. 6 . 57 K e n n e d y , p. 127. 5X Ibid., p p . 2 5 n , 130, 1 32. 59 Sanger's first articles w e r e p u b l i s h e d in p a m p h l e t f o r m . See S a n g e r , " W h a t Every M o t h e r S h o u l d K n o w , O r H o w Six Little C h i l d r e n Were 1'aught t h e T r u t h " ( N e w B o w e r y , N.Y.: R a b e l a i s Press, 1 9 1 4 ) ; also see M a r v S n o w d e n , " M o t h e r s , D o You Ever Talk t o Y o u r D a u g h t e r s ? " PW. vol. 7, n o . 7 4 ( A u g u s t 1 9 1 3 ) , p . 8 . 60 W o r k . p. 35. f>l See J a m e s l l e n l e , " N o b o d y ' s S i s t e r , " The Masses, vol. 6, n o . 4 ( J a n u ar) 1 9 1 5 ) , p. 10; T h e r e s a M a l k i e l , " O u r U n f o r t u n a t e S i s t e r s , " SW, vol. 2, n o . 18 ( N o v e m b e r 1 9 0 8 ) , p . 4 . C>2 Agnes D o w n i n g , " W h y S o c i a l i s t s S h o u l d E x p o s e t h e W h i t e Slave T r a f f i c . " PW. vol. 4 , n o . 38 ( J u l y 1 9 1 0 ) , p . 5; J o s e p h i n e C o n g e r K a n c k o , " The Traffic in Girl Slaves," ibid., p . 4 . (>3 Malkiel, " O u r U n f o r t u n a t e S i s t e r s , " p. 4 . «4 W o r k , p. 36. I n t e r e s t i n g l y , 1 failed t o f i n d a n y socialists w h o argued that t h e availability of c o n t r a c e p t i v e d e v i c e s a n d t h e resulting g r e a t e r c o n t r o l of p r e g n a n c y w o u l d r e d u c e t h e n u m b e r of m e n seeking p r o s t i t u t e s . 65 K r a d i t o r , p a s s i m . (> Ibid., pp. 5 8 n , 4 3 - 4 4 , 39. (»7 See, for e x a m p l e , J o s e p h i n e C o n g e r - K a n e k o , " W h a t Will W o m a n S u f f r a g e C o n v e n t i o n D o f o r t h e W o r k i n g W o m a n ? " SW, vol. 2, no. 18 ( N o v e m b e r 1 9 0 8 ) , p . 3. 6H Meta 1.. S t e r n , " V o t e s f o r W o r k i n g W o m e n " ; C a r o l i n e L o w e , " T h e Wage-Earning W o m a n and t h e B a l l o t . " B o t h w e r e l e a f l e t s issued in Chicago in 1 9 1 2 b v t h e w o m e n ' s n a t i o n a l c o m m i t t e e of t h e Socialist Party. "V Mila T u p p e r M a v n a r d , " W h y Socialists A r e S u f f r a g i s t s , " PW, vol. 4, no. 45 ( F e b r u a r y 1911), p . 13. 70 Kor t h e f o r m e r view, see the socialist J e s s i e A s h l e y ' s c o m m e n t s in Kraditor, p p . 1 2 4 - 2 6 . "1 Anna A. Maley, " O u r N a t i o n a l K i t c h e n " ( M i n n e a p o l i s : T h e P e o p l e s Press, 1 9 1 6 ) , p . 19. "1 Lena M o r r o w Lewis, " S u f f r a g e E x p e r i e n c e s and O b s e r v a t i o n s , " PW, vol. 5, n o . 5 2 ( S e p t e m b e r 1911), p. 6. Kraditor, p p . 5 9 , 8 6 - 8 7 . "4 J. R. Cole, " C a n W o m e n Be J u s t , " Common Sense, 10 J u n e 1 9 0 5 . E. J. R o u n s e v e l l , " W o m e n ' s D e p a r t m e n t , " World, 11 April 1 9 0 8 . " J o s e p h i n e C o n g e r - K a n e k o , " T h e M a t t e r of W o m e n ' s O r g a n i z a t i o n s , " SW, vol. 2, n o . 13 ( J u n e 1 9 0 8 ) , p . 6; C o n g e r - K a n e k o , " W o m e n and Socialism." PW, vol. 5, n o . 51 ( A u g u s t 1911), p. 8. ~~ See l.illie F o r b e r g , " W o m e n a n d S o c i a l i s m , " Chicago Socialist, 10 October 1903; Kate Richards O'Hare, "Wimmin Ain't Got N o Kick,"

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

88

89

90 91

92 93

94 95 96 97

98 99

(Chicago: WNC leaflet, n.d. [ 1 9 1 2 ] ) ; Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "Masculine Chivalry," PW, vol. 5, no. 6 0 (May 1912), p. 8. May Waiden Kerr, "Socialism and the H o m e " (Chicago: Charles H. Ken· & Co., 1901 [Pocket Library of Socialism no. 281), pp. 8 - 1 4 . See Dresden's article f o r o n e of the clearest expressions of this viewpoint. May Wood Simons, "Whv t h e Professional Woman Should Be a Socialist" (Chicago: WNC leaflet, n.d. [ 1 9 1 2 ] ) . " H e b e " (Meta L. Stern, later k n o w n as Meta Stern Lilienthal), "The Socialist Party and W o m e n , " SW, vol. 2, no. 14 (July 1908), p. 9. Louise Kneeland, " F e m i n i s m and Socialism," New Review, vol. 2, n o . 8 (August 1914), p. 4 4 2 . Mary White Ovington, "Socialism and the Feminist Movement," New Review, vol. 2, n o . 3 (March 1914), pp. 143-47. Maud T h o m p s o n , "Socialism and Feminism," in ibid., p p . 4 4 7 - 4 8 . Max Eastman, " K n o w l e d g e and Revolution," The Masses, January 1 9 1 3 , in O'Neill, Echoes of Revolt, p. 132. Workers' Call, 16 November 1 9 0 1 ; Caroline Lowe, "Work of Women in t h e Socialist Party," PW, vol. 5, no. 60 (May 1912), p. 3. Marion D u n h a m , " W o m a n ' s National Socialist U n i o n , " The Vanguard, vol. 2, no. 3 (November 1903), p. 19; LA Socialist, 21 December 1901, 15 and 22 March 1902. F o r details on the WSNL split, see The Worker (New York), 19 January and 16 February 1902; Workers' Call, & and 15 February 1902; LA Socialist, 2 8 December 1901, 11 January a n d 5 April 1902. L e t t e r f r o m Marion D u n h a m (WNSU corresponding secretary), LA Socialist, 25 O c t o b e r 1902. Aiso see ibid., 4 O c t o b e r 1902; San Francisco Chronicle, 9 S e p t e m b e r 1902. LA Socialist, 10 J a n u a r y 1903. Emphasis in original. Workers' Call, 11 J a n u a r y and 15 February 1902. T h e pamphlets referred to are Simons' " W o m a n and the Social P r o b l e m " and Kerr's "Socialism and t h e H o m e . " Workers' Call, 7 S e p t e m b e r and 2 November 1901. See, for example, The Worker, 19 January and 16 February 1902. Milwaukee's Social-Democratic Herald, one of the most p r o m i n e n t socialist newspapers in the United States, ignored t h e WNSU during the organization's entire existence. See Howard Quint, The Forging of American Socialism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p p . 319-74-, and Kipnis, p p . 6 - 1 0 6 . LA Socialist, 7 November 1903. Published by J . M. A. Spence, f r o m its beginning in late 1902 the journal supported equal suffrage for w o m e n . See, in particular, a special w o m e n ' s edition t h a ; featured articles by May Wood Simons on child labor, Anna Maley on w o m e n working outside the h o m e , Kate Richards O'Hare on the " r a c e suicide" menace, and A b b o t t on w o m e n under capitalism. The Vanguard, vol. 2, n o . 3 (November 1903), passim. The Vanguard, vol. 2, n o . 7 (March 1904), p. 20. L e t t e r f r o m Mary G a r b u t t of Los Angeles, f o r m e r head of the WNSU's d e p a r t m e n t on parliamentary usage, explaining the reasons for the organization's demise, Wilshire's Magazine, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1907). pp. 16-17.

WOMEN AND POLITICS 100 Josephine Conger-Kaneko, " T h e Activity of Socialist Women," SW, vol. 1, no. 8 (January 1908), p. 6. 101 Chicago Socialist, 25 July 1903. 102 Proceedings of the National Convention of the Socialist Party, 1904 (Chicago, n.d.); Socialist Party Official Bulletin (hereafter SPOB), September 1904. 103 SPOB. January, February, March 1905. 104 Among the new speakers on the party payroll were Lena Morrow Lewis and " M o t h e r " Jones. SPOB, May and August 1906. On the advances for women within the Socialist Party national committee, see ibid., February 1907, and Socialist Voice (Oakland), 27 May 1905. 105 SW. vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1907), p. 8; SW, vol. l , n o . 10 (March 1908), p. 12; SW, vol. 1, no. 11 (April 1908), p. 12. See SW throughout 1907 and 1908 for examples of the work done by socialist women's organizations in other areas. 106 Wilshire's was run by the self-styled millionaire socialist Gaylord Wilshire, Mary's husband, whose main claims to fame seem to have been the wide circulation of his magazine ( 2 0 0 , 0 0 0 by 1908), his continuous predictions of imminent capitalist economic collapse, his gold mine ventures of dubious virtue (offered as depression-proof investments), and the boulevard in Los Angeles named after him. See Kipnis, p. 2 5 1 , and Shannon, p. 58. 107 "Socialist Women Hold Meetings during Convention Week," SW, vol. 2, no. 13 (June 1908), p. 8; Mrs. Gaylord Wilshire, "An Appeal to Women," Wilshire's. vol. 11, no. 1 (January 1 9 0 7 ) , p. 5; Wilshire's, vol. 11, no. 4 (April 1907), p. 2 0 . :i)8 Wilshire's, vol. 11, no. 6 (June 1 9 0 7 ) , p. 18; Wilshire's, vol. 12, no. 7 (July 1908), p. 12; Wilshire's, vol. 11, no. 7 (July 1907), pp. 1819. 109 G. D. H. Cole, The Second International, 1889-1914 (vol. 3, part 1 of A History of Socialist Thought) (New York: St. Martin's Press, I 9 6 0 ) ; pp. 6 1 - 6 2 , 7 3 - 7 4 ; James Joll, The Second International, 1889-1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1 9 5 5 ) , pp. 1 3 3 - 4 0 . 110 May Wood Simons, "The Woman Movement," in Socialist Party, Socialist Campaign Book — 1908 (Chicago, 1908), pp. 8 9 - 9 0 ; SPOB, October 1907. 1 11 John Spargo, "Woman and the Socialist Movement," International Socialist Review, vol. 8 , no. 8 (February 1908), pp. 4 4 9 - 5 4 . Π2 SW, vol. 1, no. 12 (May 1908), p. 11. ' 1 3 "Socialist Women Hold Meetings during Convention Week," SW, vol. 2, no. 13 (June 1908), p. 9. 114 Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "Separate Organizations," SW, vol. 1, no. 11 (April 1908), p. 5. Emphasis in original. ' 1 5 "Socialist Women Hold Meetings," p. 10. ι 16 "Women Delegates at the National Convention," SW, vol. 2, no. 13 (June 1908), p. 12; Proceedings of the National Convention of the Socialist Party, 1908 (Chicago, 1908), pp. 10-11, 6 3 , 3 0 0 - 3 0 1 . 1 17 Ibid., pp. 3 0 3 - 4 , 306; SPOB, May 1908. 1 IK Josephine Conger-Kaneko, " T h e Matter of Women's Organizations," SW, vol. 2, no. 13 (June 1908), p. 6. ! · 9 On Debs' early support for women's suffrage, see Ray Ginger,

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

Eugene V. Debs: A Biography (New York: Collier Books, 1962 (first published 1 9 4 9 ] ) , p. 41. F o r Debs' writings, see " E n f r a n c h i s e m e n t of W o m a n h o o d , " PW, vol. 2, no. 22 (March 1909), p. 5; " W o m a n Comrade and Equal," PW. vol. 3, no. 30 ( N o v e m b e r 1909), p. 5; "Woman's Day Is Dawning," PW, vol. 4, no. 45 ( F e b r u a r y 1911), p. 6.

120 See Debs' speech in Los Angeles, Common Sense, 19 September 1908. 121 Simons, " T h e Woman M o v e m e n t , " pp. 8 9 - 9 5 . 122 World, 7 November 1908. 123 For activity a r o u n d the c o u n t r y , seeSW, 1908 and 1909; New York Call, 11 February 1910, Common Sense, 18 July 1909. 124 SPOB, December 1908, F e b r u a r y and March 1909. 125 "Plan for Local Work by W o m e n ' s National C o m m i t t e e , " SPOB, J u n e 1909. 126 Buhle, pp. 4 3 - 4 4 ; also see t h e report of t h e WNC organizer, Anna Maley,PW. vol. 3, no. 31 (December 1909), p. 14. 127 Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "A Word about t h e Progressive W o m a n , " PW, vol. 3, n o . 28 (September 1909), p. 8. 128 SPOB, December 1908. 129 SPOB, May and August 1909. 130 Proceedings of the National Congress of the Socialist Party, 1910 (Chicago, 1910), pp. 1 7 7 - 8 0 . 131 See Josephine R . Cole, " T h e International and Woman Suffrage," SW, vol. 1, no. 6 (November 1907), p. 3; Corinne Brown, "Votes for Women," SW, vol. 1, no. 9 ( F e b r u a r y 1908), p. 4. 132 See, for e x a m p l e , Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "What Will Woman Suffrage Convention Do f o r t h e Working W o m a n ? " .S W, vol. 2, no. 18 (November 1908), p. 3. 13 3 Kraditor, chapter 6. 134 Ibid., pp. 111-116; Ida Husted Harper, cd., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, 1900-1920 (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), p. 78. 135 T h e r e is no c o m p l e t e history of the strike yet written. But see Melvin Dubofsky, When Workers Organize: New York City in the Progressive Era ( A m h e r s t , Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968), pp. 5 0 - 5 8 ; Flexner, p p . 2 4 1 - 4 3 ; Susan Reverby, " T h e l.aboi and Suffrage Movements: A View of Working-Class W o m e n in the 2 0 t h C e n t u r y , " in Liberation Now: Writings from the Women's l.ibe rat ion Movement (New York: Dell Books, 1971), pp. 9 8 - 1 0 0 ; Moses Rischin, The Promised City. New York's Jews, 1X70-1914 (New York: Corinth Books, 1964), pp. 2 4 6 - 5 2 . 136 For a fascinating, fictionalized account of t h e strike by an important New York Socialist, see Theresa Malkiel, The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker (New York: Co-Operative Press, 1 9 1 0 ) ; a l s o see Theresa Malkiel, Meta Stern, and A n t o i n e t t e K o n i k o w , "Socialist Woman and the Shirtwaist Makers' Strike," New York Call, 8 February 1910. For t w o h u m a n interest articles sec William Mailly. "Mow Girls Can Strike," PW. vol. 3, no. 33 ( F e b r u a r y 1910), p. 6, and " T w o Little Heroines," PW, vol. 3, n o . 36 (May 1910), p. 2. 137 New York Call, 2 0 December 1909.

WOMEN AND POLITICS 138 Ibid.; PW, vol. 3, no. 34 (March 1 9 1 0 ) , p. 11; " O r t h o d o x y o f Socialist Women," The Citizen ( L o s Angeles), 11 February 1 9 1 0 . 139 PW, vol. 3, no. 34 (March 1 9 1 0 ) , p. 4. 140 Proceedings, 1910, pp. 6 8 , 1 9 6 - 2 0 9 . !-τ 1 Ibid.; Simons interpreted her own position as assuring that the Socialist Party itself do something on behalf of women's suffrage, not as barring Socialists from making alliances with suffrage organizations. 142 SPOB, November 1 9 1 0 ; see PW throughout 1911 for the monthly programs. 143 There was strike support activity in a number of areas, the Chicago garment workers' strike o f late 1910/earlv 1911 being the most notable, but this was secondary to the woman's suffrage campaigns. See "Socialist Women Who Helped the Garment Strikers," PW, vol. 4, no. 4 4 (January 1911), p. 2 ; Anna Maley, " T h e Chicago Garment Workers' S t r i k e , " ibid., p. 3. 144 Buhle, p. 5 0 ; Kipnis, p. 2 6 3 . The very definition of " r i g h t " and " l e f t " presents a problem when analyzing the Socialist Party, as was also the case with the party's position on American participation in World War 1 or on supporting the Russian Revolution. T h e definition has usually been based on militancy — that is, a group that worked for socialism primarily through the electoral process has been seen as reformist, or right-wing, while those who placed more emphasis on industrial struggles have been viewed as revolutionary, or ieft-wing. See Shannon, passim, for an example of this type of history. The problem is that outside of the small pro-IWW faction within the party, all Socialists supported both electoral campaigns and trade union struggles. T h e differences often came down to more subtle distinctions. 145 Mary Garbutt, a leader o f the Los Angeles women, once said: " I n the Socialist party the women stand on an equal footing with the men, they attend their business meetings, take part in the discussions, initiate resolutions on motions, act as chairman, serve upon committees, and vote upon all questions. No other party in America is so just to women in its declaration o f principles or in its practical policy as is the party o f the working people." LA Socialist, 6 August 1 9 0 4 . Despite these good relations, women in the party in Los Angeles still occasionally had to fight against unfriendly male members on the question o f the importance o f w o m e n ' s enfranchisement. See Common Sense, 2, 9 , and 30 March 1 9 0 7 , for such a public dispute. 146 See Bruce Dancis, " T h e Socialist Women's Movement in the United States, 1 9 0 1 - 1 9 1 7 , " senior thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1 9 7 3 , pp. 2 0 2 - 2 9 , for a fuller description of the California Socialist Party's relation to the issue o f w o m e n ' s suffrage. 147 California Social Democrat (hereafter CSD), 22 July 1 9 1 1 ; Ethel Whitehead, " T h e Socialists' Fight," Citizen, 17 September 1911; State Woman's Committee, "Suffrage Amendment Must Be Carried at Polls," CSD, 2 9 July 1 9 1 1 . 148 Agnes Downing, "Woman Suffrage in California," PW, vol. 5, no. 52 (September 1 9 1 1 ) , p. IXitizen, 2 9 S e p t e m b e r 1911; CSD, 5 August 1911.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

149 Citizen, 4 August 1911. 1 5 0 Ibid., 2 9 September 1911. 151 Mrs. C. A. Caswell, "An Anti-Suffrage Mosaic" (Los Angeles: Southern California Association Opposed to Woman S u f f r a g e , n.d.-[l 911)· p. 8. 152 T . W. Williams, "Dollars Declare War on the Women of California," CSD, 16 S e p t e m b e r 1911. 153 CSD, 15 J u n e 1912; May Wood Simons, "Socialism and Suffrage in Kansas," CSD, 11 January 1913 , Weinstein, Decline, p p . 6 0 - 6 1 . 154 SPOB, May 1911; Socialist Party Monthly Bulletin ( t h e successor ot the SP Official Bulletin, hereafter SPMB), S e p t e m b e r and October 1911; CSD, 30 December 1911; Proceedings of the National Conven tion of the Socialist Party, 1912 (Chicago, 1912), p. 206. I have been u n a b l e to f i n d out the actual n u m b e r of signatures obtained by the p a r t y on this petition. 155 Congressional Record, U.S. House of Representatives, 62nd Congress, 2nd Session, 16 January and 2 4 April 1912 (Washington, D.C.: G o v e r n m e n t Printing Office, 1912), p p . 1004, 5 2 9 6 ; Caroline Lowe. " T h e Wage-Earning Woman and t h e Ballot" (Chicago: WNC leaflet, n.d. ( 1 9 1 2 ) ) , and Elsie Cole Phillips, " W o m a n ' s Need of the Ballot," (Chicago-. WNC leaflet, n.d. ( 1 9 1 2 ) ) . These last were leaflets issued by t h e WNC, taken from the t e s t i m o n y of these two Socialists in f r o n t of a congressional c o m m i t t e e , March 13 and 14, 1912; "Statement on Woman Suffrage by Victor L. Berger, Socialist Member of Congress f r o m W i s c o n s i n — M a d e at t h e Hearing b e f o r e t h e Committee o n t h e Judiciary, House of Representatives, March 1 3, 1912," in Meta L. Stern, " V o t e s for Working W o m e n " (Chicago: WNC leaflet, n.d. | 1 9 1 2 ) ) , p. 4. Berger's activity indicates a change in his opin ions a b o u t w o m e n ' s suffrage. As late as 1909 he had publicly voiced misgivings a b o u t the attention d e v o t e d towards it. He had felt thai w o m e n w e r e m o r e conservative t h a n men and t h a t equal suffrage would m e a n "a great addition t o t h e forces of ignorance and reaction." Social-Democratic Herald (Milwaukee), 17 J u l y 1909. 156 SPMB, J a n u a r y 1 9 1 2 . All of the following leaflets were published 'ay the Socialist Party in 1911 and 1912: Kate Richards O ' H a r e , "Wimmin A i n ' t Got N o Kick"; Theresa Malkiel, " T o t h e Working Woman," M e t a L. Stern, " T o Wives of T o i l e r s " and "Votes f o r Working W o m e n " ; Caroline Lowe, " T h e T e a c h e r and Socialism"; May Wood Simons, " W h y t h e Professional W o m a n Should Be a Socialist"; and Mary G a r b u t t , "Poverty, the Cause of I n t e m p e r a n c e . " 157 See, f o r e x a m p l e , a series of articles by Lena Morrow Lewis, "Women Progressives Are Misleading t h e Voters," CSD, 19 O c t o b e r 1912; "Progressive Party and Its U n w a r r a n t e d Claims," World, 19 October 1912; " O p e n Letter to Jane A d d a m s , " World, 2 N o v e m b e r 1912. 158 " O u r C o n v e n t i o n " and "This Issue of the P.W.," PW, vol, 5, n o . 60 (May 1 9 1 2 ) , p. 8. Winnie Branstetter, "Woman S u f f r a g e b e f o r e a Socialist C o n v e n t i o n , " ibid., p. 4; May Wood Simons, " T h e Woman's National C o m m i t t e e — I t s Work," ibid., p. 3; J o s e p h i n e CongerKaneko, " W o m e n at t h e National Socialist C o n v e n t i o n , " PW, vol. 6, no. 61 (July 1912), p. 3. 159 As J a m e s Weinstein has pointed o u t , t h e debate has been subject to

WOMEN AND POLITICS

160 i 61

162 163

164

165 166 167 168

much distortion at t h e hands of later historians. Historians w h o favor t h e IWW, especially C o m m u n i s t historians, see t h e d e b a t e and the f o r t h c o m i n g defeat of t h e left faction as proof t h a t t h e Socialist Party opposed industrial unionism and direct action, and t h a t it was non-revolutionary. Liberal historians, on t h e o t h e r h a n d , have sided with t h e victorious side because it ostensibly opposed violence. Although violence was an i m p o r t a n t issue in that m a n y SP'ers did not want to scare off potential supporters unnecessarily, and the IWW was riding the crest of its popularity following its victory in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile workers' strike earlier in the year, the main reason for t h e dispute was the different a t t i t u d e s towards dual unionism. As Weinstein put it, it was " t h e fear t h a t Socialists would become isolated f r o m the main stream of organized labor." The recent election of Bill Haywood to t h e party's national executive c o m m i t t e e , at the s a m e time as he was a leading figure in the IWW, plus the events just mentioned, f o r c e d the p a r t y to c o n f r o n t these issues at the 1912 convention. J a m e s Weinstein, " T h e IWW and American Socialism," Socialist Revolution 5 (vol. 1, n o . 5; Sept e m b e r - O c t o b e r 1970), p p . 2 1 - 2 4 . It should be n o t e d t h a t many of those w h o opposed the a m e n d m e n t also stated their o p p o s i t i o n to sabotage and their s u p p o r t for political action. See, f o r e x a m p l e , the c o m m e n t s of Washington State's Kate Sadler, Proceedings, 1912, p. 123. Proceedings, 1912, passim. Philip S. Foner, The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-1917 (vol. 4 of History of the Labor Movement in the United States; New York: International Publishers, 1965), p p . 1 6 7 - 6 8 . "Our Convention," p. 8 . Party Builder (the national office's periodical published in Chicago; hereafter PB), 11 J a n u a r y , 31 May, and 14 J u n e 1 9 1 3 . On Oakland, see World from July to November 1 9 1 2 . Especially interesting is J. Stitt Wilson, " O p e n Letter to W o m e n of A l a m e d a C o u n t y , " World, 24 August 1912; Josephine Conger-Kaneko, " H o w t o Get a 50% Woman Membership," ΡW, vol. 6, no. 6 9 (March 1913), p. 8. SPMB, March, J u n e , O c t o b e r , and November 1912, J a n u a r y 1913; PW, vol. 6, no. 61 (July 1912), p. 2, PW, vol. 6 , n o . 62 (August 1912), p . 12; Josephine Conger-Kaneko, "A P a r t y - O w n e d Press," Coming Nation, vol. 1, n o . 8 (July 1914), pp. 4 - 6 ; Conger-Kaneko, "A Journalistic Tragedy," PW, vol. 7, nos. 72 and 73 ( J u n e and July 1913), p. 3; " T h e Progressive Woman to Change Its N a m e , " PW, vol. 7, no. 75 (October 1913), p. 5; PB, 21 February, 14 and 2 8 March, and 2 May 1914. Shannon, p p . 7 7 - 7 8 . PB, 11 O c t o b e r 1913, 23 May 1914; "National C o m m i t t e e Convention," Coming Nation, vol. 1, no. 7 (May and J u n e 1914), p . 10. PB, 13 September 1913, 6 J u n e 1914, World, 4 and 11 O c t o b e r 1913; Weinstein, Decline, p. 60. Ibid., p p . 119-21; Milton Cantor, " T h e Radical C o n f r o n t a t i o n with Foreign Policy: War and Revolution, 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 2 0 , " in Alfred Young, ed., Dissent. Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb, III.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1968), p. 223;

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNTIED STATES

169 170

171 172

173

174

175 176 177

178 179 180 181

182

183 184 185

American Socialist (the n e w official Socialist Party publication, hereafter AS), 5 S e p t e m b e r 1914. The WNC p u t out a special women's anti-war issue of the A merican Socialist on 26 September 1914. Weinstein, Decline, p. 1 2 0 M S , 26 D e c e m b e r 1 9 1 4 , 9 J a n u a r y 1915. /IS, 15 and 22 May and 28 August 1915; letter f r o m Florence Wattles, .15, 19 J u n e 1915; letter from J o s e p h i n e Conger-Kaneko, AS, 10 J u l y 1 9 1 5 ; letter f r o m Eugene V. D e b s , AS, 24 J u l y 1915. The B r o n x , New York, local called the p a r t y ' s action suicidal since it came at a t i m e when w o m e n were b e c o m i n g enfranchised in various states. AS, 2 6 J u n e 1915. /IS, 2 O c t o b e r 1915. New York Call, S e p t e m b e r to 21 November 1915; Kate Richards O ' H a r e , " T h r e e Weeks," National Rip-Saw ( S t . Louis), vol. 12, no. 10 ( D e c e m b e r 1915), p. 18: Floyd Dell, " A d v e n t u r e s in Anti-Land," The Masses, vol. 8, no. 1 ( O c t o b e r - N o v e m b e r 1915), pp. 5 - 6 ; Max E a s t m a n , " C o n f e s s i o n s of a S u f f r a g e O r a t o r , " ibid., pp. 7 - 9 . New York Call, 21 November 1915; Mary S. O p p e n h e i m e r , " T h e Suffrage M o v e m e n t and t h e Socialist Party," New Review, vol. 3, no. 1 9 ( 1 5 D e c e m b e r 1915), p. 3 6 0 . AS. 2 9 July, 23 S e p t e m b e r , 28 October, and 4 November 1916; " R e p o r t of Executive Secretary, Emergency National Convention, St. Louis, April 7, 1917," p . 17, ms. in H o o v e r Institution on War, R e v o l u t i o n , and Peace, S t a n f o r d University; Socialist Hand Bonk — 1916 (Chicago, 1916), pp. 8, 11, 5 5 - 5 8 . AS, 2 4 March 1917. Weinstein, Decline, pp. 1 1 9 - 7 6 . See New York Call, 24 S e p t e m b e r t o 8 N o v e m b e r 1917; Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Husy Life (New York: Rand School Press, 1924), p p . 2 0 8 - 1 0 . May Wood S i m o n s , " T h e W o m a n ' s National C o m m i t t e e — Its Work," PW, vol. 5, n o . 6 0 (Mav 1912), p. 3. Socialist Hand Hook -1916, p. 11. See Buhle, p p . 5 2 - 5 3. Max E a s t m a n , " I s the T r u t h Obscene," The Masses, vol. 6, n o . 6, (March 1915), p. 5, and s u b s e q u e n t issues; R o b i n s o n , "Prevention of C o n c e p t i o n " . See World, 17 April 1915, f o r an a n n o u n c e m e n t of a "Margaret Sanger Protest M e e t i n g " in San Francisco; World, 4 and 25 S e p t e m b e r 1915; Kennedy, p . 7 3 ; Eugene V. Debs, "Conviction of Margaret Sanger," National Rip-Saw, vol. 12, no. 9 (November 1915), p. 4 ; O ' H a r e , "Birth C o n t r o l and Pellagra," p. 6. For r e p o r t s of friendly responses to Sanger's speeches, see Kate Richards O ' H a r e , "Margaret Sanger," National Rip-Saw, vol. 13, no. 5 (July 1916), p. 5, and World, 27 May and 17 J u n e 1916. Also see World, 5 F e b r u a r y 1916, and Kennedy, p. 81. Anita Block, " T h e Sanger Case," New York Call, 19 S e p t e m b e r 1915. Weinstein, Decline, p. 58. Mary White Ovington, "Socialism and the F'eminisi Movement," New Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1914), p. i 4 5 .