Money Changes Everything

On May 12, 1869, a group of America's most prominent radical social reformers gathered for the third annual meeting of the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). Working since 1866 to enfranchise African American men and all women, disagreements had recently begun to emerge among this diverse group of activists about who should be given priority in the postwar quest for social and political equality—women or black men? These disagreements were exacerbated by AERA President Elizabeth Cady Stanton's recent adoption of racist arguments to defend white women's suffrage rights. In her May 12th presidential address, Stanton wielded this controversial rhetoric again, claiming that enfranchising black men without enfranchising white women would be "national suicide and woman's destruction," as the formerly enslaved men in the South viewed women solely as "the being[s] of man's lust." What would happen to the nation, she asked, "when clowns make laws for queens?" (p. 177). Her colleagues could take no more: one demanded that Stanton surrender her leadership role and accused her activist partner, Susan B. Anthony, of mishandling AERA funds. Others joined the group's two most prominent African American members, Frederick Douglass and Frances Watkins Harper, in declaring white women's claim to the ballot to be significantly less urgent than Southern black men's. By the end of the day's meeting, the AERA disbanded, and the woman suffrage movement split. Its two factions would not reunite for twenty-one years.

The story of the schism in the woman suffrage movement and the role that Stanton's racism played in exacerbating the split is well known to historians. However, "well known" does not always mean well understood, as Faye Dudden aptly demonstrates in her carefully researched and clearly written book, Fighting Chance. Bringing new insight to this controversial moment, Dudden challenges the most fundamental assumption historians have made about Stanton and Anthony in this period: that they were naive bunglers who dramatically misread the post-Civil War political situation and sundered an alliance among reformers that had persisted for decades. Dudden instead contends that these two pioneering women's rights reformers were savvy politicians accurately interpreting Reconstruction as the best "fighting chance" for women to gain the ballot. Their faith in this chance, Dudden argues, prompted Stanton and Anthony to seek women's enfranchisement in the postwar period by any means, regardless of personal or political costs. To demonstrate, Dudden tracks two main themes: the impact of funding (or lack thereof) on the women's rights movement, and the connection of the women's movement to the parallel nineteenth-century movement for racial equality. She finds that when money was flowing for equal rights activism, formerly distinct groups of reformers were able to unite despite their different priorities. But when Reconstruction lagged and abolitionists diverted their funding toward securing black men's suffrage alone, women's rights advocates' choices became severely constrained, pushing some (like Stanton) to rhetorical extremes and enabling internecine strife and personal enmities to overcome the two groups' newly forged postwar alliance.

Fighting Chance begins by tracing both the activities and the personnel of the antebellum women's rights and racial equality movements to show the evolution of the groups' connections.

Dudden finds that, contrary to earlier historians' assumptions, before the Civil War there were few connections between activist communities. Abolitionists, African American advocates of equality, and women's rights activists operated in autonomous, if occasionally overlapping, circles of influence, drawing on distinctly separate (and often limited) resources to fund conventions and single state "bellwether" campaigns (p. 14). While some individual reformers sustained friendships across activist lines, like that between Stanton and Douglass, Dudden argues that these few personal relationships hardly constituted a joint political movement for racial and gender equality. After the Civil War, however, with emancipation complete and American activists and politicians focused on expanding the franchise, it was good political strategy for all equal rights advocates to unite and...