Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights

5. The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women's Oppression (1978)

The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement and the Analysis of Women’s Oppression What is the political significance of studying the history of the feminist movement? Not, I think, to identify revolutionary ancestresses or petit-bourgeois leaders whose errors we can blame for our current oppression. We study the past to learn how to think about the present, to understand how change happens, to see how history creates and restrains the possibilities for people to intervene deliberately in it and change its course. We study the history of radicalism to understand why certain social movements take a particular character in particular periods, to learn how to locate political radicalism in history. Ultimately, we study history so that we can understand the history of which we are a part, and the changes we may be able to bring to it. This paper is a brief survey of the history of the woman suffrage movement from 1865 to 1875, the decade after the Civil War. There are two major points I want to make about the feminism of this movement. First, I want to assert the basic radicalism of its politics. Suffragists were led by the facts of women’s lives to begin to analyze and imagine radical changes in the two major systems that structured women’s oppression: 5 68 Originally published in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, edited by Zillah Eisenstein. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. capitalism and male supremacy. Second, I want to locate the limits of the radicalism of the woman suffrage movement in the particular social conditions of nineteenth-century women’s lives—specifically, the nature of the sexual division of labor and of women’s total dependence on marriage . My object is to situate the woman suffrage movement in its own historical context so that its radicalism can be appreciated and its failures understood. From one perspective, suffragism in the years immediately following the Civil War was a very radical movement. Its leaders—especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—cooperated with Victoria Woodhull and William Sylvis, free love advocates, with the labor movement, and even with the First International. In order to understand the nature of woman’s oppression and the possibility of her emancipation, suffragists found themselves drawn more and more toward the most advanced aspects of nineteenth-century political thought. They identified and criticized capitalism as a major source of woman’s oppression, addressed themselves to the position of working women, spoke out boldly against the sexual double standard and exploitation of women, and were beginning to identify marriage and the family—even more than political disfranchisement —as the basic source of woman’s oppression. Such a politics deserves to be called radical, because of both the breadth to which it aspired and the particular positions it took. The Reconstruction years were a very active period for reform in general . Even the boldest of abolitionists had not expected the abolition of slavery in their life times, and yet it had happened. This unleashed radical energies and radical visions. If a reform movement could help to liberate an entire race from slavery, then nothing was beyond political agitation , beyond deliberate social change. Particular postwar forces further encouraged suffragists in radical directions. Congressional battles over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments led them to dissolve their twenty-year alliance with the antislavery movement, which freed them from its domination and was followed by a tremendous explosion of theoretical energy. This rapid development can be seen in the pages of the independent feminist journal The Revolution, which Stanton and Anthony edited from 1868 to 1870. The Nineteenth-Century Woman Suffrage Movement | 69 At the same time, the suffragists began to acquire a constituency among American women. This is the period in which suffragism began to take on the character of a social movement—ultimately, although not until much later, to become a mass one. On the one hand, this process of organizing a constituency helped suffrage leaders develop theoretically by connecting the movement to the needs and concerns of nonpolitical American women. On the other hand, the acquisition of a constituency acted to restrain the sexual and economic radicalism to which suffragists were otherwise inclining. The objective social conditions of women’s lives in the mid-nineteenth century, their dependence on marriage and the sexually segregated nature of the labor force, constituted the basic framework within which...