Radical Imaginings: The View from Atop a Slippery Slope

What were they thinking? As we consider the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment, let us abandon for a moment what we call the wisdom of hindsight and ask what the earliest advocates of woman suffrage imagined would happen once women secured the vote. Most Americans decried the mere suggestion of women's political equality as a radical disruption of God's and nature's plan and warned that votes for women would set the nation on the road to ruin. But what did the first generation of suffragists—who did not, after all, live to see what the consequences of enfranchisement would be—believe woman suffrage would accomplish, and how shocked, pleased, or dismayed would they have been by the results?

Declaring women's right to full legal and political equality with men was breathtaking, reflecting a radical reimagining of political, religious, and marital hierarchies. Women's exclusion from the franchise, the earliest advocates of woman suffrage had concluded, was one of the foundations on which women's subordination to men rested; as such, it diminished their very humanity. They did not look to the vote for its practical, strategic, or legislative value. Indeed, as advocates of a moral transformation of society ("ultraists" in the terms of the day), they were deeply ambivalent about the compromises that seeking and using the vote would necessarily entail. "It is with reluctance that I make the demand for the political rights of women," Lucretia Mott asserted, even as she did so.¹ To these activists, the demand for woman suffrage was a profound, if largely symbolic, step toward acknowledging the depth of women's subordination and establishing their full membership in the nation itself. Amid the commemorations of the centennial of woman suffrage, we might focus not only on its consequences and results but also on that first generation's hopes and fears and the fraught and twisted paths claims for justice take on their way to legislative results.

It is worth recalling that the vote was but a fragment of what early women's rights activists demanded; few of them imagined that it would, or should, come to occupy center stage. If women's exclusion from the ballot was the most contested grievance expressed at Seneca Falls, it was in part because the abolitionists who attended the convention differed over the efficacy and morality of voting. Politics, many of them had long believed, offered little in the way of social transformation; it was best for the moral part of the community to refrain. In the late 1840s and 1850s, their commitment to moral suasion waned in the face of emerging electoral strategies for reform; some African American abolitionists, desperate for a practical strategy that would actually end slavery, had already rejected it. Clearly times were changing: "No man or woman can be regarded as an entity, as a power in society, who has not a direct agency in governing its results," a Wisconsin legislative committee on woman suffrage declared. "Without a direct voice in molding the spirit of the age, the age will disown us."² Not everyone, it should be noted, was on board with this shift. As late as 1856, while a Mr. Clark escorted the young African American activist Charlotte Forten home from a "very pleasant evening," she "vainly tried to persuade him that all political action was wrong."³ If it increasingly seemed obvious that lacking the vote was among the barriers to women "molding the spirit of the age"; for many radicals, electoral politics still offered more traps than solutions, compromises to the expansive moral vision that had long infused their approach to social change.

But early women's rights supporters recognized exclusion when they saw it. Being denied the vote was insulting. Even if you did not want to vote, even if you did not think that voting accomplished much, the affront confirmed that women were not full and independent citizens of the United States. Indeed, two years before the Seneca Falls convention, six women in Jefferson County, New York, had petitioned their state's constitutional convention to grant women...