Virtue and Violence: Female Ultraists and the Politics of Non-Resistance

Virtue and Violence: Female Ultraists and the Politics of Non-Resistance Lori D. Ginzberg* Given what we know—or assume—about women and peace, a paper about female ultraists and the radical, no-government pacifism known as non-resistance seems almost too obvious. Ofcourse there was an association between antebellum women and peace. For weren't women far less prone than men to violence and all too often its victims? Didn't antebellum Protestants base their critique ofnorthern society in part on the assumption that female sensibilities were on a higher moral plane than men's? And hadn't Emerson written in 1838 that war was a juvenile state in men's development? (Emerson, "War," 156). Given the now-familiar antebellum ideology offemale moral superiority and ofan aggressive female activism on behalfofthose virtues, as well as the often remarked distaste ofwomen for warmaking, not to mention the role ofQuaker women as leaders in all forms of female activism, what could be more logical than to associate Christian women with efforts forpeace? This association seems even more self-evident when one observes that the New England Non-Resistance Society, like the Garrisonian movement generally, opened virtually all levels of organizational life to women. For women, apacifism that fits closely withpresumed feminine characteristics has at times justified activism on behalf ofnational and international change. The particular ideology about gender that gained prominence among the antebellum northern middle classes practically assured women's loyalty to peace. To the white, middle-class Protestants who dominated antebellum reform, peace itself suggested a feminization of power, a capitulation to or celebration of "female" standards for society. Women, after all, did not prove their "womanliness" through violence: quite the contrary. According to William Ladd, the leader ofthe American Peace Society, "Many a man has not the moral courage to plead for Peace, for fear he shall be accused of effeminacy and cowardice. Woman has no such fear" (Philanthropos, 4). Like many other abolitionists, Stephen Foster's pacifism was worn thinby events ofthe 1850s, butthe terms ofhis capitulation are most interesting, asheproclaimed, "I thinkJohnBrownhas shown himself a man, in comparison with the Non-Resistants!"(Ziegler, *Lori D. Ginzberg, Associate Professor ofHistory and Women's Studies at Penn State University, is author of Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Yale UP, 1990). She would like to thank J. William Frost and Lawrence J. Friedman for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. 18Quaker History 141). The nineteenth-century male might squirm at the command to "turn the other cheek," but women, activists insisted, were virtually formed to exercise Christian restraint. (A warning may be in order here that this was not always easy; the Quaker Sarah Grimké, whom her sister Angelina considered "certainly more fixed in her views [about non-resistance] than I am," nonetheless confessed, "This doctrine ofnon-resistance is the greatest test of our faith." [Angelina Grimké to Theodore Weld, Jan. 21, 1838, Barnes II: 520, Sarah Grimké to Gerrit Smith, Apr. 9, 1837, Barnes, 1: 377]) Peace was as much a female responsibility as were other forms of moral activism; indeed, Ladd noted that it was more appropriately a woman's topic "for the cause of Peace may be advocated in any company, without danger of offending the most sensitive delicacy" (Philanthropos, 32). Compelling Questions But there are other, more complicated and, I believe, more compelling questions concerning the relationship between non-resistance and its women adherents than questions ofgender identity and stereotypes. However small and isolated a group nonresistants were, even among abolitionists , they offer lessons for the intellectual history of women, gender identity, and the state. Women were not merely "foot soldiers" to the cause; the ideology ofnonresistance appealed to women who were grappling in a particular way to define their relationship to the state. For nonresistants did not simply reject violent means; they opposed, in fundamental ways and at a particularly intriguing historical moment (and for not much more than a moment, lifelong pacifists like Lucretia Mott aside), any allegiance to earthly governments which, they claimed, "are sustained by violence" (Oberlin, NR, Sept. 9, 1840, 65). As Quakers had long demonstrated, pacifism...