The mid-19th century proved a time of upheaval in women’s lives. Women—black and white—organized, declared rights, and struggled to participate in the public (especially political) sphere. By the late-19th century, they had voiced revolutionary goals but had not achieved equality.
The demand for women’s rights began before supporters organized any formal efforts. Initially, 19th-century white women achieved some success by taking their domestic responsibilities into the public sphere. They took active roles in voluntary and benevolent associations, including temperance, child labor, health reform, EDUCATION, and abolitionism, that drew upon traditionally domestic chores such as child rearing, household tasks, and family management.
The links between women’s rights and the abolition movement were drawn early. As abolitionists publicly demanded civil rights for African-American slaves, some women became aware of the similarities between their condition as women and that of slaves. They found it easy to draw parallels between their situation and that of African
Americans: Neither group could vote, and the law deemed both inferior to white men. Women’s commitment to antislavery led some to form their own abolitionist organizations, including the Women’s National Loyal League. These female-run abolitionist groups eventually led to the founding of women’s rights organizations, especially the American Equal Rights Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association.
The transition from reform movements to women’s rights seemed a natural one. Women, frustrated with the restrictions placed on them in many organizations, gladly took up the fight to secure themselves a recognized place in society. They were aided by the ability to transfer the skills they had gained in the various associations to their campaigns for women’s rights. In particular, women had learned the importance of organization, public speaking, persuasive writing, and argumentation. Many of the early leaders of the woman’s rights campaign, including Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had been prominent and outspoken abolitionists. Susan B. Anthony had been both a temperance and an antislavery activist.
The first formal meeting in the fight for women’s rights took place between July 19 and 21, 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York. At this convention a group of feminists, including Stanton, Mott, Jane Hunt, Mary McClintock, and Martha C. Wright, gathered together hundreds of supporters, male and female, and launched a national campaign for women’s rights.
The activists at Seneca Falls presented a Declaration of Rights for Women, also known as the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, which asserted a list of grievances and resolutions. Stanton, the declaration’s author, modeled her document on the Declaration of Independence, but her rendition put American men in the role of oppressor. The declaration’s list of grievances accused men of denying women the right to vote, to own property, and to access equal representation and education. It further berated men for taking away women’s rights at marriage and highlighted the dangers of women’s subordination to men, including their vulnerability to violence. It demanded the grievances be addressed and offered 12 resolutions. By the end of the convention, 100 people had signed the document, including 68 of the 300 women in attendance and 32 of the men. The Declaration of Rights became a rallying point for the women’s rights movement. Stanton, much to the dismay of some of the people involved, also used the convention as an opportunity to demand women’s suffrage.
Two weeks after the Seneca Falls Convention, an even larger women’s rights meeting was held in Rochester, New York, and other women’s rights conventions soon followed. The most well-known meetings took place in Salem, Ohio; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Akron, Ohio. At the convention in Akron in 1851, runaway slave and women’s rights activist SojouRNER Truth addressed the audience. In response to ideas about the natural delicacy of white women, she recounted some aspects of her life as a slave. Although white women were seen as too feminine and delicate to do any hard labor or even get into a carriage themselves, Truth asserted herself as a woman despite her work as an enslaved field laborer and mother of 13. As she listed her hardships, Truth continued to ask her audience, “A’n’t I a woman?” She and other free black women demonstrated that they, too, wanted equal rights.
Women continued to organize and lobby for their rights throughout the 1850s. In 1854 Stanton founded the New York Suffrage Society, which organized petition drives and gathered 10,000 signatures in favor of women’s suffrage and property rights. That year, both Anthony and Ernestine Rose spoke to various legislative committees. In addition, Stanton became the first woman to speak in the New York Senate when she stood to present the society’s petitions.
By 1860 women had gained access to public and private institutions that educated them for careers in teaching. Newly formed women’s medical hospitals also trained them to work in the medical profession as physicians and medical missionaries. It was initially assumed that female doctors would care only for other women and children.
The Civil War brought women into the public sphere in even greater numbers—raising money for soldiers, nursing the wounded, and providing other valuable services. American women founded more than 20,000 aid societies to supply the troops with food, clothing, and medical supplies. In the North, women soon filled the ranks of the United States Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization run by men but dependent on the efforts of women to get medical supplies and personnel to army hospitals. In addition, women also filled the jobs left empty by the soldiers on the battlefield, including those as plantation mistresses, factory workers, NURSES, and treasury employees. Both the U. S. and Confederate governments, for example, employed several hundred women to work in the treasury and at other government posts during the war. Women’s voluntary participation in various roles highlighted their desire to sustain the homefront, even if it meant assuming traditionally male roles. Some women hoped that their successful performance during the Civil War would assist them in their fight for suffrage and other rights of citizenship.
Women in the North and South also asserted their rights as citizens through wartime protests. In 1863 angry women participated in food riots in the South and draft riots in the North. In separate but similar incidents, Southern women, especially in Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina, took to the streets to demand fair food prices and government protection. Northern women similarly participated in antigovernment actions. Many lower-class women participated in the New York City draft riots in the summer of 1863 to protest the impressment of their husbands into military service and wartime policies designed to free slaves. During the lengthy and violent riots, several hundred women were arrested, convicted, and jailed.
As the Civil War came to a close and Congress discussed extending the vote to freed African Americans, feminists hoped that the expansion of the franchise would extend to female citizens. They were disappointed by the inclusion of the word male in the Fourteenth Amendment, the first time gender-specific language had been used in the Constitution. Such wording made clear the idea that Congress intended to extend voting rights only to men. To protest the exclusion of women’s suffrage in the Fourteenth Amendment, Stanton ran for Congress in August 1866. She gained only 24 votes.
After the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, female activists regrouped. On May 10, 1866, the National Women’s Rights Convention established the American Equal Rights Association to work for the rights of all women, regardless of race. The women involved hoped that a coordinated effort would ultimately result in woman suffrage. Republican men who felt threatened by the idea of woman suffrage often ridiculed the mostly Northern Republican women who were involved in this movement.
White feminists disagreed with the tactics of the American Equal Rights Association. Anthony and Stanton, for example, thought the biracial organization unfairly ranked African-American rights ahead of woman suffrage. Consequently, they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in May 1869. Stanton became the NWSA’s president and actively pursued a national campaign for white-woman suffrage. The NWSA attracted many working-class women and radicals and refused to support the Fifteenth Amendment unless it enfranchised women as well as African Americans.
The NWSA had many opponents, even among those working for women’s rights. Later that year, Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and other conservative feminists established the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). In contrast to the NWSA, the AWSA invited male as well as female members and pursued a state-by-state, instead of a nationwide, strategy for woman suffrage. The AWSA supported the Fifteenth Amendment and lobbied at the Republican convention. The membership of the AWSA was largely middle class. Not wanting to detract from any effort for woman suffrage, many women joined both organizations.
Some of the efforts for woman suffrage proved successful. In Wyoming, women received the right to vote on September 6, 1870. Few states followed suit, however, and it would be another 50 years before the right was given to women throughout the United States. The slow-moving results did not slow down radical feminists’ attempts to gain rights. In an effort to gain the franchise, Victoria Wood-hull presented a petition for woman suffrage to the House Judiciary Committee on January 11, 1871. Her address to the Judiciary Committee was the first one made directly by a woman.
Women continued to participate in reform movements in post-Civil War America. They primarily focused, as before, on issues seen as vital to the stability of the household. When the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was established on November 18, 1874, Annie Witten-myer became the organization’s first president. The WCTU would play an integral part in the fight against alcohol’s detrimental effects on fathers and families.
After EMANCIPATION, freedwomen worked to improve the legal and economic status of their families and communities. Like white women, they could not vote, but they participated in political activities. Black women attended rallies and parades and spoke at public meetings, encouraging their men to vote. They hoped that male African-American enfranchisement would give them a voice and the rights they had been denied as slaves. African-American leaders such as Ida B. Wells of Tennessee promoted education, civil rights, and campaigns against Southern violence. Black women also asserted themselves as women and mothers in the postwar years as they actively worked to reclaim their families and win legal recognition of their marriages. In addition, African-American women actively worked to gain voting rights as well as civil rights, even though they were often excluded from the larger, white-run women’s organizations fighting for suffrage and other women’s rights.
By the end of RECONSTRUCTION, the fight for women’s rights remained close to where it was at the Seneca
Falls Convention in 1848. For the U. S. Centennial Exposition of 1876, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage prepared a document, the Declaration of Rights of Women, that they hoped would alert the public to the difficulties and inequalities that women continued to face in postwar America. This document, much like the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments in 1848, mirrored the rhetoric and ideas of the Declaration of Independence but highlighted the contradictions between the official ideals and the realities of women’s lives. Members of the NWSA asked the centennial committee to allow them to present their document at the public celebration, but the committee denied this request. In protest, at the end of the official program, Anthony and Gage pushed their way to the speaker’s platform and presented a copy of their Declaration of Rights. They demanded equal civil and political rights for American women, including the right to serve on juries, no TAXATION without representation, and the removal of the word male from state constitutions and judicial codes. Taking things further than did the 1848 declaration, the centennial document demanded equal political rights for American women.
See also ABOLITION; LADIES AID SOCIETIES.
Further reading: Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999); Nancy F. Cott, ed., No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).
—Lisa Tendrich Frank
Yancey, William Lowndes (1814-1863) politician Diplomat, politician, and orator, William Lowndes Yancey was born in Warren County, Virginia, in 1814 to Benjamin Cuworth Yancey and Caroline Bird. Yancey’s father died when he was very young, and soon thereafter his mother married Presbyterian reverend Nathan S. S. Beman. In 1823 Beman decided to move the family to New York, where he became involved in the abolitionist movement. Beman’s dignified public persona as a reverend and social reformer was in marked contrast to his conduct in private, where he verbally and physically abused his wife. Young William grew to hate his stepfather’s hypocrisy, which he equated with his abolitionism.
In 1833 Yancey returned to the South. He dropped out of Williams College in Massachusetts and moved to Greenville, South Carolina. While in Greenville, Yancey tried his hand at a number of professions. He edited the Greenville Mountaineer, where he regularly attacked John C. Calhoun for his secessionist rhetoric. He read law under Benjamin
F. Perry and was admitted to the bar. He also became a PLANTATION owner after marrying Sarah Carolina Earle in 1835 and gaining control of her 35 slaves. The young couple settled in Alabama.
During the latter part of the 1830s Yancey suffered a number of misfortunes. He lost a great deal of money in the panic of 1837. In 1838 he was convicted of manslaughter after killing his wife’s uncle during an argument. In 1839, shortly after his release from prison, most of Yancey’s slaves died after an angry neighbor poisoned the well at his plantation. As a result, he was compelled to return to the practice of law to support himself and his wife.
In 1840 Yancey decided to become a candidate for political office. By this time, he had completely reversed his earlier position and was an ardent supporter of Calhoun and his STATES’ RIGHTS philosophy. Yancey served in Alabama’s legislature from 1841 to 1842 and in the state’s senate from 1843 to 1844. He was then elected to two terms in the U. S. House of Representatives. Yancey’s first speech as a congressman so enraged one of his colleagues that a duel was arranged, although no blood was shed. Yancey quickly grew weary of the need to constantly compromise his beliefs, and despite being reelected he resigned his seat in 1846.
Yancey did not return to politics before the CiViL WAR started. Instead, he became a devoted and forceful speaker on behalf of SECESSION. He wrote LETTERS and delivered hundreds of speeches on behalf of the cause, earning a name as the “prince of the FIRE-EATERS.” In 1860 Yancey led the group of Southern delegates who abandoned the Democratic convention in Charleston. In 1861, he led the convention that took Alabama out of the Union.
Despite Yancey’s prominence, he and other fire-eaters were not offered important positions in the Confederate government. JEFFERSON DAVIS needed to convince the states of the Upper South to join the Confederacy, and that goal was best served if moderates appeared to be in control. To keep Yancey quiet, Davis gave him responsibility for leading a delegation to England to try and secure recognition for the Confederacy. The mission failed, in part because the Confederacy had little leverage and in part because the hot-tempered Yancey was not a very good diplomat.
Yancey returned to the Confederacy in 1862 and was elected to a seat in the Confederate Congress. Convinced that Jefferson Davis had set him up to fail in England, he became one of the administration’s harshest critics. Yancey attacked the president for seizing too much power and for failing to promote enough Alabamians to generalships. Yancey never received satisfaction on either of these issues, although he was able to help stop the Confederacy from establishing a supreme court in 1863. Shortly after this victory, Yancey was reduced to invalidism by the kidney disease he had suffered from for many years. He died in Montgomery in July 1863, just before his 49th birthday.
Further reading: John DuBose, The Life and Ti-mes of William Lowndes Yancey (New York: P. Smith, 1942); Eric
H. Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
—Christopher Bates
World History
