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1. From Seneca Falls to Suffrage?
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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In recent years, historical studies have revealed the multifaceted movements that constituted woman’s rights campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet one narrative continues to dominate understandings of the period. First crafted in the late 1800s by advocates of women’s suffrage and embraced in the late 1960s by feminists who created themselves as the “second wave,” this narrative highlights voting rights as the singular goal and purpose of the “first wave.” Women’s seemingly universal exclusion from the right to vote before 1920 served as the linchpin of this tale, and the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848—where women first collectively demanded the right to vote—and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920—granting woman suffrage—were its touchstones. Despite vibrant scholarship since the turn of this century, the Seneca Falls–to-suffrage story continues to frame popular histories, political discourse, documentary films, and synthetic studies of U.S. feminism and women’s history. Reimagining the story is no simple task. Woman’s rights pioneers first identified 1848 and 1920 as the critical turning points in women’s struggle to achieve sex equality. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, coauthors of the multi-volume History of Woman Suffrage, were brilliant strategists who recognized the importance of documenting their version of events— including the Seneca Falls–to–suffrage story—and did so in compelling fashion . In the 1960s and 1970s, the story of a seventy-two-year battle that succeeded in advancing women’s rights through federal intervention resonated with feminists seeking a favorable Supreme Court ruling on abortion From Seneca Falls to Suffrage? Reimagining a “Master” Narrative in U.S. Women’s History NANCY A. HEWITT 15 1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb and a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. Journalists covering the movement reinforced activists’ assumptions, distinguishing this “Second Feminist Wave” from “the first,” which “ebbed after the glorious victory of suffrage.”1 Women’s historians, beginning with Eleanor Flexner in her 1959 classic Century of Struggle, also highlighted the centrality of suffrage to the early woman’s rights movement.2 The establishment of the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights National Historical Park in 1982 and Ken Burns’s 1999 PBS documentary, Not for Ourselves Alone, brought the Seneca Falls–to-suffrage narrative to even larger audiences. This version of the woman’s rights movement has not been immune to critique. Scholars of African American, immigrant, and working-class women have detailed the racist, nativist, and elitist tendencies of many white women suffragists. They have highlighted the exclusion of poor, black, and immigrant women from the political organizations and the agendas of more well-to-do activists and their inclusion in community-based efforts, often alongside men, to advance their own economic, social, and political interests.3 These challenges have tarnished the images of several pioneer figures and have added a few women of color to the pantheon of feminist foremothers . But they have generally left intact the standard chronology and the focus on suffrage as the primary goal of the early women’s movement. We can recast this narrative in several ways: by broadening our focus to include the emergence and meaning of women’s rights for African American, American Indian, Mexican American, immigrant, and white working-class women; by highlighting the entire range of issues addressed by early woman’s rights advocates, whatever their background; by recognizing the ways that international events—the Mexican-American War, revolutions in Europe, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and the Wars of 1898— shaped the early U.S. women’s movement; and by reframing the suffrage movement through the lens of racial, ethnic, class, regional, and ideological differences at the local and state as well as national level. This article will focus on the first and last approach in an effort to widen our view of woman’s rights and suggest the multiple stories yet to be told. As origin stories go, the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848 is compelling.4 Although both participants and scholars recognized earlier influences—particularly abolitionism and battles for married women’s property rights—Seneca Falls stands as the moment when disparate forces came together to provide the impetus, leadership, and program for a distinct NANCY A. HEWITT 16 [54.197.64.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:57 GMT) woman’s rights movement in the United States.5 Stanton told and retold...