Women’s rights at mid-century: an international movements

Women’s rights at mid-century: an international movements

The origins of the first international movement for women’s rights lay in the British Owenite and French Saint-Simonian movements of the 1820s and in the US and British anti-slavery movements of the 1830s. Irish socialist Anna Wheeler provided important links between radicals in Ireland, Owenites in England and Saint-Simonians and Fourierists in France. She worked with Irish radical William Thompson to compose their Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825). Responding to JAMES MILL’S argument against the enfranchisement of women, Thompson and Wheeler pointed out the considerable conflicts between the interests of women and the husbands and fathers who supposedly represented them. They also decried marriage as an unjust institution that enslaved women. Wheeler went on to publish numerous pieces in the Owenite press.

Anna Wheeler also recognized the importance of alliances among women as women. In 1829, she called for a women’s movement, and, in 1833, a group of women in London joined together in a cross-class alliance that they called the Practical Moral Union of Women of Great Britain and Ireland. When a group of Saint-Simonians styled themselves the ‘New Women’ and began to publish their own newspaper, the Free Woman, Wheeler translated their work for English audiences. The New Women assumed a critical attitude towards the Saint-Simonian movement and its presumption that women needed to be saved by men, eventually shifting away from Saint-Simonism and renaming their newspaper the Women’s Tribune.

Women from the USA entered the international network of women’s rights advocates through the anti-slavery movement in the 1840s. After the debates over the Grimke sisters’ lecture tour, the question of women’s proper role continued to be an issue in the anti-slavery movement both domestically and internationally. When Abby Kelley became

a member of the business committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840, many abolitionists walked out in protest, concerned that the issue of women’s public activism would divert the movement from its primary cause, the abolition of slavery. These dissidents formed their own organization, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, splitting the movement in the USA. The woman question also led to disputes at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London later that same year. Organized by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which itself excluded women from leadership positions, the convention seated women delegates in a separate ladies’ gallery rather than on the floor of the convention.

The World Anti-Slavery Convention brought women from the USA into contact with women who were part of the developing international women’s rights movement in Europe. US Quaker and Philadelphia anti-slavery activist Lucretia Mott met British Quaker and abolitionist Anne Knight, and Knight corresponded with the Grimke sisters

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about the events in London. Mott also met fellow US and future women’s rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the convention, and Stanton met members of the Bright and Priestman families, British Quakers and abolitionists whom she would visit on her return to England in the 1880s. In 1840, Stanton was in London on her honeymoon, having married abolitionist lecturer and politician Henry B.Stanton, who was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention. Sitting together in the ladies’ gallery, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed that women needed a movement in defence of their own rights.

It would be eight years before Mott and Stanton met again and acted on their resolve, and in the mean time Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller developed an argument for women’s rights that addressed the economic dependence and lack of opportunities women suffered under the political ideals and legal systems that prevailed in the USA, Britain, France and elsewhere. In Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Fuller argued for women’s opportunity to develop their full human potential, seeking for women a version of the self-reliance promoted by her fellow Transcendentalist, RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Fuller found support for her ideas in the Romantic literature of Goethe, the religious thought of Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg and the economic theories of Charles Fourier. She concluded that women could only achieve their full potential if they were economically autonomous, if they had the freedom to discover their own interests, if they had the opportunity to pursue whatever occupations suited them. Fuller’s essay influenced the issues discussed at the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Fuller did not attend the convention herself, but she did take advantage of international networks to meet socialists and revolutionaries when she travelled in Europe as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, and she stayed in Rome when the Italian Revolution began.

During the democratic revolutions that erupted in Europe in 1848, women participated as fully as they had in the French Revolution 60 years earlier. They marched in demonstrations, built and defended the barricades, died in the fighting. In Baden, such women as Amalie Struve and Mathilde Franziska Anneke rode beside their husbands in battle. In France, British abolitionist Anne Knight called for the elimination of all forms of privilege, including that based on sex, and she declared that only the full franchise would bring true social and political change. Pauline Roland, a former Saint-Simonian, tried to vote in municipal elections. Together the Society for the Emancipation of Women and the Committee for the Rights of Women called on the French government to bring about equality for women in all areas of life, including politics, work and the family. And in 1849, former Saint-Simonian JEANNE DEROIN ran for a seat in the Legislative Assembly, even though her action was unconstitutional.

When Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met again in Western New York in the summer of 1848, they once more discussed the need for an independent movement for women’s rights. Mott, Stanton and several other women decided to send out a call for

a women’s rights convention, to be held on 19 and 20 July at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York. Only women were admitted on the first day; men were allowed to attend on the second. The convention drew about 300 participants, both women and men.

A Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Stanton and the organizing committee followed the format of a revolutionary document, the Declaration of Independence

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(1776). The Seneca Falls declaration replicated the original text’s format: an introductory statement of principles followed by a list of grievances and a proposal for action. The first paragraph repeated that of the original word for word, changing only the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ to ‘all men and women are created equal’. The new text replaced the original’s grievances against the King with woman’s grievances against man. He had usurped her citizenship rights, taxing her without allowing her to vote, and there was much more. He had prevented her training for and practice of the professions, kept her from the pulpit, limited her educational opportunities, restricted her property rights and denied her rights to divorce and to custody of her children. The convention voted on eleven resolutions based on these grievances, and ten were approved unanimously. Only the suffrage resolution encountered resistance, with Lucretia Mott warning that people would ridicule the convention for claiming the franchise for women. Even this resolution was eventually approved by a majority of those attending the convention.

A second local women’s rights convention was held in Rochester, New York, two weeks later, and the first national women’s rights convention assembled on 23 and 24 October 1850, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Local and national women’s rights conventions continued to be held in the northeastern and midwestern USA throughout the 1850s, and the regularity of these events contributed to the strength of the international women’s rights movement. News of the conventions in the USA spread to Europe, and women who had participated in the revolutions of 1848 claimed sisterhood with women’s rights advocates in the USA.

Women in Europe could also look to Britain for inspiration in the 1850s. Harriet Taylor published her call for ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ in the Westminster Review in 1851, and a group of women led by Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) lobbied Parliament for a married women’s property bill in 1855. Smith also participated in the formation of the Association for the Promotion of the Employment of Women in 1857, and British women established their contribution to the international women’s press in 1858. The English Women’s Journal became the focus of an expanding network of British women campaigning for higher education, entry into the professions, married women’s property rights and the vote.

In contrast to women in the USA and Great Britain, many European women encountered repression and censorship when their revolutionary governments collapsed. Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, for example, sent a letter of solidarity to the women of the Worcester convention from a prison cell in Paris. As they combated official prohibitions on their political activities, German and French women relied on the international ties that they had developed over the preceding decades. Their network of support and information included numerous newspapers edited by women, and in these newspapers they could read reports of continuing women’s rights activism throughout North America and Europe. Repressed at home, they could take comfort in the fact that their allies kept up the struggle for women’s rights abroad.

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