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3. Finding the Cause (1881-1889)
- University of Illinois Press
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cHAPter 3 Finding the Cause (1881–1889) In every land the voice of woman is heard proclaiming the word which is given to her, and the wondering world which for a moment stopped its busy wheel of life that it might smite and jeer her has at least learned that wherever the intuitions of the human mind are called into special exercise, wherever the art of persuasive eloquence is demanded, wherever the heroic conduct is based upon duty rather than impulse, wherever her efforts in opening the sacred doors for the benefit of truth can avail—in one and all of these respects woman greatly excels man. Ordination, national coverage by the Woman’s Journal, two parishes , and financial independence—by 1880, Anna Howard Shaw had not only achieved her specific goals, but she had redefined herself.1 The 1870 unmarried, “at home” daughter of the Michigan frontier was now a thirtythree -year-old “clergyman,” in East Dennis, Massachusetts. Yet the changes recorded in the 1880 census don’t begin to capture the physical and figurative space Shaw had traversed. In those ten years, she had crossed state and national borders, but perhaps more importantly she had challenged the less tangible boundaries of gendered institutions and professions by attending college, graduating from seminary, and achieving ordination. She had entered the rarefied world of the nation’s leading intellectuals and activists in Boston and was serving as pastor to one of the country’s oldest communities. She had ministered to the poor, preached to Native Americans and lumbermen, and worked among the “women of the streets.” She was in the vanguard of establishing a new womanhood, one in which she could have professional status and economic autonomy along with deep friendships, love, and an extended community apart from the patriarchal and heterosexual arrangements recognized and sanctioned by the state.2 But Shaw had hit what we now call a “glass ceiling.” Her inspiration for twenty years had been her call to the ministry. Armored with the belief that God guided her life, she had pushed through all levels of hardship—family opposition, material deprivation, and the decrees of her church—to gain her education and win full membership as an elder. Now what? After all this, Shaw had concluded that there was no future for her within the institutional structures of the Methodist denominations. Nor did the life of a small-town pastor satisfy her aspirations. She was still young and expected to live a long life. Her world had become ever so much broader than the one she had known in Michigan, and consequently her sense of her possible place in that world reflected her new understanding. Unlike most women, she was in control of her life. Living only eighty miles from Boston, Shaw witnessed many of the changes that were creating a new United States. What was this world in which Shaw now felt she could play a role? Closing was the era dominated by the causes, realities, and aftermaths of the Civil War. The Progressive Era, a response to the excesses of capitalism, was beginning. In this supposed Gilded Age, shifts in class and race relations were taking place that would influence the women’s movement and Shaw. The emergence of a complexly racialized society came in 1877 as the end of Reconstruction heralded the start of a period when the constitutional guarantees of equal citizenship were abandoned in the name of states’ rights. Freedmen, freedwomen, and their allies were still struggling to respond to the post-Reconstruction efforts as white southern legislators began to put Jim Crow laws on the books. As class disparities grew and regional differences marked the country, race remained a defining factor in individual lives and political struggles. Shaw saw industrialization dominate the changes in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States. The South remained agricultural and dependent upon the labor of poor sharecroppers and tenant farmers, Black and White. Newspapers documented Chicago’s rise as the great city of the Midwest— receiving, processing, and shipping the products of the heartland. Beyond the Mississippi, in the sparsely settled territories, the U.S. government used military force and its economic power to subjugate Native Americans , forcing the numerous tribes onto reservations mostly on marginal lands. Easterners, claiming free land through homesteading, superimposed their transported lifestyles over people who had previously been part of the Spanish colonial empire and then independent Mexico. On the West Coast, railroads recruited Asian immigrants, and their cultures added to...